In the Night Café by Joyce Johnson

“This is too fast for you, isn’t it? We can’t slow it down, though.”
    I never did make it to Rome.
    My son Nicky passed through there last summer. His wallet was stolen on the Spanish Steps, and he spent a couple of days sitting up in cafés, walking the streets hungry, waiting for me to wire him some money. It wasn’t too bad, he said. Actually it was interesting—being down to nothing in a foreign country.
    You would approve of that attitude. And when I think of Rome, I think of you there too at Nicky’s age, but that was during the war and so you seem much older. It’s as if you never had any adolescence at all. You came into Rome with the troops and everyone was starving and you took everything out of your pockets and gave it away to little kids and drank wine with beggars in the ruins of the Colosseum in the moonlight. You told me you’d been on a minesweeper, and I said, that first night we talked, “But how did a sailor get to Rome?” “Hitched a ride on a tank,” you said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
    I keep sorting through the leftover shards, stories with missing pieces that can never be filled in. The route you took from Anzio to Rome and what happened to you along the way—I knew it for one evening but didn’t listen nearly closely enough. It all got drowned in the onrush of love. We were going down the waterfall, and I didn’t eat much of the hamburger either. We can’t slow it down, you said. And there it was—the declaration. But now you seem to have been saying something else—how little time there was going to be.

7
    I WOKE UP with you the next morning, and I thought, Found. I remember it, Found —as if a string had been plucked in the midst of great silence. I heard the note, then the overtones washed over us, not dying but continuing out there in space. I’ve never heard it that way again with anyone, though God knows I’ve listened for it. The sun was in the window and there was an odd, white film over everything, a fine dust, you could see our footprints in it. I lay there astonished with your arms around me.
    And later we were having breakfast at the kitchen table. I’d somehow made eggs and we were drinking coffee as if we’d been together a million ordinary mornings. Out of the blue you said, “Look, I can’t marry you yet. But I’m going to marry you.”
    That seemed so wildly extravagant that I trusted it. I’d never met anyone so rashly serious, although in the circles I moved in, speed was of the essence, an entire way of being. Men and women came together so quickly they could be said to have collided the way colors collided on canvases, running into each other, merging. Lucky and unlucky convergences.
    Then you told me what I’d guessed. You were still married. You’d left a wife in Florida, a woman you’d stopped loving, Caroline. Who’d been with you in Mexico City in a tiny pink house, where you used to paint on the roof under an awning you’d rigged up and the yard was full of bedsprings and the landlord’s chickens and an avocado tree. You said someday you’d go back to Mexico because you’d been happy there, though there’d been times you and Caroline were so broke you’d actually lived on avocados.
    I heard other things. The story of a car you’d left behind in Palm Beach—an old, white, custom-made MG. You’d traded a large painting for it—you’d never have a car that great again. “I was dying down there in the palms,” you said. You’d kept having accidents, so you knew how it would happen—your death in the MG, skidding off the road one night with too much booze in you and the gas pedal all the way down. “But I never drove like that with the kids,” you told me. “I always looked out for my little babies.”
    All this I took in—the pieces of your