Two Years in New York (Michael Mohr's "fictional memoir" chapter 10, part 2)

NYC Covid memoir ch. 10 part 2

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Chapter 10 is longer so I broke it into two parts. This is part 2, the final segment.

She hugged me. We didn’t kiss. We never did until the very end. I was never quite comfortable enough to kiss her right off. Somehow that seemed wrong, like some tantalizing but scary violation; something too direct in our little game.

We held the hug a good few seconds. She smelled like some sort of peppermint perfume. My lips touched her neck. I wanted to kiss it. That animal instinct within.

Then we detached and naturally started strolling slowly south along the uneven cobblestone sidewalk along CPW.

After a minute she broke the silence. “I’ve been painting in Central Park a lot lately. Mostly The Ramble. Sometimes Strawberry Fields. Bethesda Fountain. The Mall, by the Shakespeare statue. Sheep Meadow. The Great Lawn. I love it. I walk there carrying one or two big canvasses, my easel and my backpack loaded with my paint. People always stare at me. It’s humorous.”

I glanced at her. I grabbed her hand and held it. We walked close to each other. In my Romantic, California writers’ mind I suddenly imagined being in Paris, or New York, say in the Plaza, in the twenties or thirties, in The Great Gatsby. That feeling of literary romance was so strong in me. I’d always had—like my writer mother—a theatrical, dramatic, gossipy, highly charged imaginative nature. It was inside of me like a beating heart. Part of my emotional anatomy. Again, that thought, followed by the potent feeling: Here I am. In New York City.

“I can picture you painting in The Ramble,” I said. “It’s a very romantic image. Le Artiste, doing her thing. What have you mostly been painting?”

I tickled her cool palm with my fingers a little.

“Mostly just the fields and the trees and the people. The environment. The surroundings. I love the boulders and the naked twisting trees. The fallen red and brown leaves. It’s often empty if I go there really early in the morning. It feels desolate. There’s something gorgeous about that feeling. Something sublime. I can’t help but think of Seurat, the 19th century Parisian post-impressionist painter. His painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatt, specifically. New York, especially the park, has so much to see. That is the thing about being an artist, a painter especially. You have this extrasensory vision. Part of your job is to see things that others don’t see, or simply dismiss. The lurid little details.”

I grinned. Squeezing her hand I said, “The lurid little details. I like that turn of phrase. I’d love to see the new material soon. Artists are such freaks, aren’t they? Aren’t we?”

She laughed, pulling her hair off her shoulder. We caught each other’s eyes once more. “Yeah. I guess you’re right. Artists are different for sure. A separate breed. Born alcoholics in a way. Highly sensitive, sort of lost souls, deeply wounded, intelligent; basically people who view the world through a very different screen that regular people. Or maybe there’s no screen at all for artists, maybe that’s the difference. Like everyone else has this screen and we don’t.”

“That feels right. I dunno. For me, I’ve always written to understand myself. Haha. That sounds overly precious, pretentious. But it’s true, I think. When I write things down—fiction or not—it somehow takes on its own life and shifts something deep down inside of me in a fundamental way. It’s like it melts my soul or something.”

We both chuckled. She gripped my hand tighter.

“It’s crazy,” she said, “But I always want to paint everything I see. It’s like literally everything is raw material. And there’s so much of that in Manhattan. Can I confess something?”

I nodded, looking past her into the darkness of the park, mysterious from the light glare of passing lamps, shining down on the chipped green benches as we passed. Cars moved north and south along Central Park West. In the distance someone stepped on their horn for far too long. A siren from a mile away hissed in the background.

“When my mom tried to kill herself? I was fourteen. This is back in Pittsburgh. I’d just come home from school. I was a freshman in high school. Dad was gone, I don’t remember where anymore. Anyway, I’d never been close with my mom. She had always seemed distant to me, like we were solely connected by genetics but that was all. As if life had chosen her randomly as my mother and given us the same DNA but besides that we had nothing in common. She was such a histrionic person. So dramatic. She was an off-Broadway stage actress, so what do you expect, right? She and my father would fight like fire-spitting dragons for hours, days even sometimes. He drank too much. She slept around. My sister and I were caught in the middle. It was awful.

“So anyway I walk home from school that day. I’d been painting on and off since fourth grade, by the way. I’d always felt attracted to painting. Well, drawing originally. And then painting. It always made sense to me; it always somehow connected the dots in my scattered brain. Like writing for you, I guess. When you write you start to understand yourself, you said. Well, same for me with painting. Only it was more like grasping the impermanence of everything, facing Death, when I painted. I could suddenly accept the fact that life is brief and temporary. As long as I could paint, I could survive until death. I don’t know if that even makes sense.”

“It does. I completely relate to that.”

I felt riveted by her story. It was so intoxicating and luxurious to bathe in the waters of another intense, alive artist. All my life I’d felt like The Freak, the one intense, sensitive, dramatic person in the friend group. It sounds corny and cliché, but it seemed like I’d been waiting for Sophia all my life. For this one woman. This walk right here and now. Her cold hand. Her warm breath. Her words. Her stories. Her art. Her life.

“So,” she continued. “That day I walked into the house and it was brutally silent. I felt immediately like something was wrong. There was a tension in the silence, something you could feel but not hear. I called my mother’s name, Lydia. Then I said, Mom several times. Of course there was no response. Strangely, even though I knew my father was out of town, I called his name, too, Leon. I don’t know why I used their first names. Distance. It was that distance I felt around them both.

“I was hungry and considered making a sandwich in the kitchen but I decided to investigate instead. I felt scared. I walked slowly up the winding staircase to the second floor. I wore my Catholic skirt and the white uniform blouse. Walking up the stairs very slowly and quietly I recall feeling my heart beating very hard. I was nervous. I reached the hallway and walked down it. There was my mother’s tall, wide black door. Still no sound. I realized I’d left the front door of the house wide open. I glanced back, even though I couldn’t see the front door from where I stood. I felt that pull to go back down and close it. Mom would yell at me.

“But instead I opened the tall black door, the door of my youth which had scared the shit out of me since I was a little kid. It had always seemed so imposing. There seemed to be an invisible glowing sign that said, CAREFUL: DO NOT ENTER. But I opened it. It was unlocked. Just a few inches. That was when I heard just the very slightest noise. Like a moan. Not sexual. That prompted me to open the door all the way. And there was my mother, on her stomach, half naked, sprawled out on the floor, her eyes three-quarters closed, hundreds of pills strewn all around her on the scratched hardwood floor, bubbling vomit, yellow, slowly dripping out of her mouth. She looked mostly dead.

“I remember I didn’t scream. I was silent. I felt nothing. There was a long, deep abyss in my soul. I didn’t even pity her. Not then. That came later. But you know what my first thought was?”

“No. What?” I was intrigued. She was a stellar storyteller. Could she write her story, maybe?

Her hand dropped from mine, two chains disconnected. She stopped and faced me in the semi-darkness. “I wanted to paint her. That was my honest, true first thought. Like, Wow, look at that angle, look at her drooping, desperate eyes, look at her twisted-up body, the pills, the floor. I saw all the details. I was an objective artist in that second. I swear to God. It would have been a powerful painting. The way her body laid there made me think of a Flaubert or a Balzac novel. Precious artistry. Gross, pathetic human misery, but good art.”

“So what did you do?”

She shrugged. She clasped my hand again in hers. She seemed happier now, more upbeat, as if she’d finally gotten something profound and disturbing off her chest. “I walked into her room, snatched her phone, and called 911. They saved her of course. She stayed in the hospital for a week. Psych ward. Meds. All of that jazz.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s a Hell of a tale. You know my mom had somewhat of a similar story, right?”

“Yes. You told me. Sociopathic grandmother. Emotionally vacant grandfather. Your mom’s teenage suicide attempt. Clinical depression. Psych ward for two years. Teenage marriage and divorce. All that.”

“Right. All that. Jesus. Look what we come from. No wonder we became alcoholics.”

“And artists,” she smiled.

There was a half-minute or so of total, beauteous silence.

“So, are you ready for your trip? Coming up in two weeks,” I said.

She gazed away from me, into the darkening park. We passed 81st and were soon upon the American Museum of Natural History. Across the street was the statue in front of the museum of Theodore Roosevelt on his horse with a Native American Indian walking on one side of him and a slave on the other. A bronze sculpture by James Earle Fraser from 1939. Due to the political climate I was shocked the thing still stood. The gleam of a street lamp glinted off Roosevelt’s arm.

“I dunno,” Sophia said. “I guess as ready as I can be.”

The backs of our hands slightly bumped into each other and I took the chance and held her hand. She looked at me and seemed embarrassed. I held on. We kept walking slowly. We had no real destination.

“Still disappointed that Chad isn’t coming?”

“We broke up.”

I stopped. I squeezed her hand harder. We gazed into each other’s eyes. We stood halfway down West 80th Street on the cobblestone sidewalk paralleling the park. It was empty around us.

“What made you decide to finally do that?”

She looked sad and serious. Her lips were flat. She averted her eyes. “I dunno. I guess he just doesn’t know how to love me. Or women. Or people. Like, anyone. I probably chose him, like we’ve discussed, because my dad was so angry and critical and detached. We choose our fathers and mothers in relationships, you know? He confuses the hell out of me. I don’t understand how his mind works. And yet…” Here she hesitated. She sounded slightly emotional. “I still want him in a way. I love him. I mean, I once did. Maybe I still do. I don’t even know anymore. Isn’t that sick? That I so badly want a man who so clearly doesn’t want me? His lack of desire for me turns me on, makes me want to chase him even more, makes me desperate for a love he will not or cannot give.”

I was compassionate, yet irritated. What I wanted her to say was that she’d left him because of me. Me. Michael. But, oh how painful it is, I’d learned too many times, when we expect people to act the way we think they “should.” Besides, did any of us really, truly have free will? Could any of us actually change ourselves? Or were we all hardwired genetically with boundaries and capacities which could not be transcended? Did nature and childhood nurture decide our fates more than we liked to admit? Could we actually escape our psychological and mental and emotional wiring and conditioning? It seemed doubtful. Even though I completely grasped why Sophia chased Chad—and I’d done the same thing my whole sexual life, trying desperately to find a New Mother with every woman I dated—I was annoyed. I wanted her (selfishly) to forget about Chad and lean right into me.

But therein lied the problem, which seemed more and more to be an unsolvable Gordian Knot of epic proportions: She was lost, confused, tortured by her own insecurities, torn between two men, torn between self-love and self-reproach, self-acceptance and self-hate, fear and love, desire and repulsion. At least that was how I saw it. Of course I couldn’t get inside of her mind. I wished I could. But we make assumptions, don’t we? We tell ourselves stories about the people we care for. We imagine reality. And then we’re so often shocked when the external world crashes brutally into this shaky vision we created out of nothing but wish-fulfillment.

She must have seen me deep in anxious thought. She placed her palm on my neck. “Michael. Get out of your head. You are a part of this decision, too. I do like you, you know that. A lot. But. I’m just not sure about…us. You’re so much younger. What if you decide to have kids at some point?”

My irritation broke and I said—stupidly—“What does that matter, Sophia? I like you. I mean more than like. When we talk I feel it deep inside. When we kiss it’s like the world disappears. When we’re together I’m only with you. I forget about Manhattan and AA and the seasons and even my writing. It’s just me and you. The two of us.”

She looked up at me, that nighttime sparkle in her eyes. I leaned down and kissed her and soon we were enthralled with each other.

A few minutes later we detached and started walking again, holding hands once more.

“I just don’t know about it,” Sophia said. “Me and you. We met while I was still dating Chad. How do I know you wouldn’t do that with me?”

“I’m not sure that’s totally fair, given the fact that you made the decision to see me as well. It takes two to tango. I had let it go. You emailed me, remember? And canceled on me, twice, before we finally met. What if you were to cheat on me?”

She frowned. “I wouldn’t do that. This whole scenario is totally unlike me. Incredibly unusual. I’ve never done this before. Have you?”

My cheeks flushed. A cool breeze rushed through us and I heard the leaves of the trees by us in Central Park rustle. It reminded me of that same sound when backpacking in Ojai years ago. “I wouldn’t,” I said. “I’ve never cheated. Not sober anyway. I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“But in the past you cheated?”

I shrugged. “A few times. In my twenties.”

“Did you ever pursue taken women?”

I swallowed, unsure how much to reveal. “A few times. One was married. But that’s all in the deep past. I was young. Drunk. Wild.”

“What about the timing? I’m about to leave for two months.”

“We’ll stay in touch. My guess is you’ll be traveling and painting and meeting tons of new people. You won’t have tons of time to talk.”

“Maybe. I kinda doubt it. I’m taking this trip really seriously. It’s an art trip, not a vacation. I’m going to be isolated and concentrating most of the time. They granted me a lot of money. I owe them an art show based on my experience after I return. So I think I’ll largely be alone. Just me, painting in Italy.”

I was silent for a minute. We were passing 77th. I didn’t quite know what to say. From the beginning she had never been all-in. She’d been with Chad. She was used to dating taller, more conventionally handsome and conventionally (and well) employed men. New Yorker men. I was an outlier. But I was used to that. I’d been the black sheep of my family all my life. The bitter rebel. The recluse. The intellectual. The guy who was a weird mix of traditionally masculine with sensitive feminine. The experimenter. The wild alcoholic. The hitchhiker; the freight-train hopper. The wannabe tough guy. The weirdo. The creep. The stranger. The freak. I was “me.” As my father once proclaimed, I “walked to the beat of my own drum.” I think what made me the most strange in my family was that I wanted to know—needed, demanded to know—Reality on its own terms; I had to know the painful truth at all times. My parents, my sister, my uncle: They all shoved the bad stuff under the rug. I wanted to see; face; look.

Just past 75th I said, “It’ll be whatever it’s supposed to be.”

Sophia, in true form, laughed. “What does that even mean?”

I laughed with her. “Valid point. It just means, Who the Fuck Knows, right?”

“I guess.”

I walked her the ten blocks home, back to her apartment on 66th. After our discussion, we said little. Standing outside of her apartment complex—she was on the 12th floor—we stopped and hugged again. We hugged tightly and held it like before. A voice in my mind wanted to tell her I loved her. Did I love her? It sure seemed that way. I was close with her. I felt understood by her in some foundational way. She was so soft and open. She listened to me. She didn’t judge my political rants. (She had a similar critique of the far left.) She understood that Dark Abyss of The Artist, what it was like to be a working artist in New York City. And yet she was slippery, slick, like feet running along wet concrete around a pool; if you weren’t careful you might slip and fall, cracking your skull.

There was the thick smear of narcissism and pain we both shared, as well as a kindness and a deep love and passion for what we did—painting and writing—as well as for life. Yes, she was forty-eight, but she acted and seemed more like my age. It never bothered me. I knew what her childhood had been like, and she knew mine. Unstable; emotionally violent; confusing; mixed with an outer image that provoked strangers to say, Wow, what a lovely family. Neither of us trusted externals though we both got caught up in them like most people did. We shared an understanding that we were both completely half-ruined and totally flawed and imperfect and so human and yet also full of love and light and freedom. We connected, in that rare real way that two humans only can when they both have a flashlight in the dark tunnel called Life.

“Do you want to come up?” she said, gazing into my eyes.

I hesitated. I didn’t want to use her. In two weeks she’d be off to Europe for two months. Was this the right time? Only older age and sobriety had given me the ability to even have and then acknowledge this kind of thought. It was not in my normal selfish male nature. More and more over the years, I’d noticed little changes. Evolution. Growth. Selflessness here and there. True kindness. Humility. Maturity. Of course: I’d also pursued her as a taken woman. I was no saint. I was a slick hypocrite. But who amongst us wasn’t?

We held hands again and the doorman—wearing a suit—opened the door for us. She explained who I was. We took the elevator to the 12th floor. All the way up we made out. I gently pushed her against the wall and kissed her lips and then her neck. I palmed her breasts over her blouse, her coat unzipped and open.

The elevator stopped and the doors opened. We walked out onto red carpet. I followed behind her. We stopped at her apartment. She fumbled in her purse for her keys, found them, and opened the door. We entered. It was a small studio with a spectacularly small kitchen, an absurdly narrow hallway, and one 350 square foot open space. There was a little bathroom by the bed in the corner. Paintings and canvass frames and paint-tubes and other art equipment were everywhere. The whole place reeked of paint. There was a massive floor-to-ceiling bookshelf full of books. That excited me. I spied a few spines: The Brothers Karamazov; War and Peace; Swann’s Way. A set of large windows across the room opposite the bed showed the city below, north of 66th. How cliché, how tantalizing, how sexy this little artist’s studio, this space, the view, I thought. I again—in my romanticism—imagined I were in some 1970s Woody Allen movie, probably Manhattan or Annie Hall.

She offered me water. I demurred. She peed. I sat on a small orange couch by the windows with the view. The couch reminded me of the one at my first place in New York, the place on 2nd. God—that seemed like a decade ago, and yet it was only six months. Time passed quickly in The Big Apple.

When she came back from the bathroom and walked over and sat next to me on the couch. We started kissing again. She’d magically changed into a skirt. One of her short ones. Dressing provocatively had always been her forte. I rubbed her thighs going higher and higher. Then her panties were off. She moaned a little. I was hard as brick. She removed her blouse and bra. We made out hungrily.

She pulled my jacket and shirt off. I ripped my boots off, quickly tearing the laces across and unknotting them.

She slid her skirt down around her ankles then easily stepped out of it entirely. She wore nothing; she stood before me naked. Physically she was a work of ancient Greek sculpture; the powerful, seductive Aphrodite. I had solely my pants on, my erection raging. I remembered her that first time in the meeting in Stuyvesant Town. Her kindness. How we whispered our names after the meeting had started. Her long blond hair, wet from the June rain. Her story about carrying the painting along East 13th. Her AA share about Chad.

But then, last second, she said, “Do you think we should do this?”

“What? What do you mean?” I said, nearly panting.

She sat away from me a few inches on the couch. “I dunno. I just mean. Sex. Now. The timing. I’m leaving in two weeks. I just don’t want to make a commitment if we’re not sure.”

A mix of shame, fear, resentment and desire surged through me. She was right. I knew it exactly as she said it. This was too fast. Not too fast in the sense that we’d been seeing each other for a while now, several months. But too fast in the sense that we respected each other and liked each other and owed it to each other to do this right. What was the rush? I knew what my biology wanted. But that didn’t mean it was the right thing to do. But neither was dating a woman with a boyfriend. I guess I picked and chose which ethics to follow.

I sighed. Goddamn it. “Yeah. Ok. You’re right. Who knows what’ll happen while you’re in Europe. You might meet some men.”

“I doubt it. Maybe.” She paused and then said, “You might meet some women. Two months is a long time. Winter is around the corner. Women get desperate and lonely here in winter.”

I chuckled. “Who knows.”

But I resented her comment. How she so casually suggested giving me up. Then again: Was I even hers to begin with? One foot in, one foot out. I felt simultaneously loved and rejected. It was my mother all over again. Maybe Sophia had been right: We choose our parents in relationships.

“It’ll be what it’ll be.”

“Shut up,” I said, shaking my head, laughing, but embarrassed.

So we re-dressed. I chugged a glass of water. She walked me to her red front door. We kissed goodnight. I knew I wouldn’t see her again before she left. I missed her already. Once more that yearning to tell her I loved her flooded my brain. But the moment came and passed. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t yet know what was totally true. I wanted it to be true. And it very well could have been. But I couldn’t yet say for sure. I thought for the first time of she and I living in California together. The Bay Area, maybe. Her painting in the silence of sunny mornings, me writing for hours alone in my office. Sort of how things had been with Adinah but…somehow different. Happy. Would she move to California?

“I care about you a lot, Sophia.”

“I know. I care a lot about you, too. Thanks for waiting.”

“Of course.”

“Most men would be angry.”

I was a bit annoyed. Frustrated, in a general sense. Not at her. Just at reality. “Don’t worry about it. I totally understand.”

We hugged one final time, long and hard.

“Goodnight, Sophia.”

“Night,” she said, her cheeks glowing.

We kissed, slow and deep, and once more I sensed that profound pool of longing within my soul for her. She felt like the missing code. The key that unlocked the mysterious door. I love you. It was right on the tip of my tongue.

I turned and headed back to the elevator, partially feeling like dancing, part crying.