say, “Would you please take our picture?”
Abby kept searching through the top layer of objects and papers. She found the letter that Claire had written to him his first day at college. The handwriting was just as she’d imagined it: careful, curved, identifiably feminine. Abby lifted the piece of paper to her nose, and she could have sworn that, after all this time, she still smelled the very last traces of the citrussoap that had scented everything Claire touched. She set the paper aside, with the photos, and next lifted out of the briefcase several ancient pink carbon–copy slips: receipts for motel rooms at the Lookout, signed in 1949, 1950, 1951, and 1952 by a Mr. and Mrs. John and Alice Harrison of Saratoga Springs, New York. The motel was gone now. Abby remembered when it had been razed some years ago and replaced by condominiums. Then Abby found the telegram from Martin to Claire, dated May 27, 1952, its edges frayed, the paper as delicate as an old doily.
And there, right beneath the telegram, she found two faded gray tickets—halves of tickets, really. Stubs. The printing on the stubs was very faint, and Abby had to squint to make out some of the words.
Idlewild
she saw, and
Orly
, and
May 28, 1952
. So they’d gotten to Europe after all. And only then did Abby realize how much she’d been hoping they had. They’d boarded an airplane and gone to Europe, eager, thrilled, terrified.
Abby remembered this same mix of sensations, this feeling of starting something entirely new. It had happened to her once, andshe hadn’t had to travel to another continent to experience it. Nine years earlier at a jammed art opening in New York City, she had seen a tall man leaning against a wall, perilously close to an ugly painting of a screaming monkey. He held a plastic cup of the type of bad wine you find at art openings, and he was talking easily to a cluster of people. She noticed him—his deep brown hair and eyes, the way he was making the others laugh—and then he noticed her noticing him, and soon he was slipping through the crowd to Abby’s side of the room. For a few seconds they stood in silence, pretending to look at the paintings.
“So,” he finally said, “do you like screaming monkeys?”
He was an art dealer in from Los Angeles, she was an editorial assistant on the rise, and Abby had thought, quite reasonably,
This is it
. And Sam Bachman
was
it, for a while anyway. They had never had to struggle with the idea of “love.” It had come early, and easily, and often. They said it giddily to each other several times a day on the phone, and then they said it in person almost every evening they were in the same city together, and even when theycouldn’t say it, they said it anyway. “I love you” said the note in the candy bowl, “I love you” said the note in the soap dish, “I love you” said the note in her change purse, and when Abby looked back on their two years together and strained to figure out what had gone wrong—why she’d believed everything she’d believed—she wondered what else she could have done, in the face of so much evidence.
But that’s just what it was in the end: so much evidence, a paper trail that would have been persuasive if all she needed to appeal to was reason. For one mad moment, sitting on the couch with Sam in the living room of her one–bedroom apartment on the fourteenth floor of an anonymous building on the West Side of an anxious city, she actually had thought of producing the notes—of disappearing into the next room and grabbing the seemingly bottomless shoe box full of all the testaments to his love for her that she’d saved and overturning it in a snowfall of folded white paper as if to say,
See? See? See?
As if the sheer volume of the evidence was all it would take to change his mind, to make himwant to stay with Abby and raise the baby she was going to have in eight months.
Instead, she sat in silence and let him have his say. “If you choose
Abby kept searching through the top layer of objects and papers. She found the letter that Claire had written to him his first day at college. The handwriting was just as she’d imagined it: careful, curved, identifiably feminine. Abby lifted the piece of paper to her nose, and she could have sworn that, after all this time, she still smelled the very last traces of the citrussoap that had scented everything Claire touched. She set the paper aside, with the photos, and next lifted out of the briefcase several ancient pink carbon–copy slips: receipts for motel rooms at the Lookout, signed in 1949, 1950, 1951, and 1952 by a Mr. and Mrs. John and Alice Harrison of Saratoga Springs, New York. The motel was gone now. Abby remembered when it had been razed some years ago and replaced by condominiums. Then Abby found the telegram from Martin to Claire, dated May 27, 1952, its edges frayed, the paper as delicate as an old doily.
And there, right beneath the telegram, she found two faded gray tickets—halves of tickets, really. Stubs. The printing on the stubs was very faint, and Abby had to squint to make out some of the words.
Idlewild
she saw, and
Orly
, and
May 28, 1952
. So they’d gotten to Europe after all. And only then did Abby realize how much she’d been hoping they had. They’d boarded an airplane and gone to Europe, eager, thrilled, terrified.
Abby remembered this same mix of sensations, this feeling of starting something entirely new. It had happened to her once, andshe hadn’t had to travel to another continent to experience it. Nine years earlier at a jammed art opening in New York City, she had seen a tall man leaning against a wall, perilously close to an ugly painting of a screaming monkey. He held a plastic cup of the type of bad wine you find at art openings, and he was talking easily to a cluster of people. She noticed him—his deep brown hair and eyes, the way he was making the others laugh—and then he noticed her noticing him, and soon he was slipping through the crowd to Abby’s side of the room. For a few seconds they stood in silence, pretending to look at the paintings.
“So,” he finally said, “do you like screaming monkeys?”
He was an art dealer in from Los Angeles, she was an editorial assistant on the rise, and Abby had thought, quite reasonably,
This is it
. And Sam Bachman
was
it, for a while anyway. They had never had to struggle with the idea of “love.” It had come early, and easily, and often. They said it giddily to each other several times a day on the phone, and then they said it in person almost every evening they were in the same city together, and even when theycouldn’t say it, they said it anyway. “I love you” said the note in the candy bowl, “I love you” said the note in the soap dish, “I love you” said the note in her change purse, and when Abby looked back on their two years together and strained to figure out what had gone wrong—why she’d believed everything she’d believed—she wondered what else she could have done, in the face of so much evidence.
But that’s just what it was in the end: so much evidence, a paper trail that would have been persuasive if all she needed to appeal to was reason. For one mad moment, sitting on the couch with Sam in the living room of her one–bedroom apartment on the fourteenth floor of an anonymous building on the West Side of an anxious city, she actually had thought of producing the notes—of disappearing into the next room and grabbing the seemingly bottomless shoe box full of all the testaments to his love for her that she’d saved and overturning it in a snowfall of folded white paper as if to say,
See? See? See?
As if the sheer volume of the evidence was all it would take to change his mind, to make himwant to stay with Abby and raise the baby she was going to have in eight months.
Instead, she sat in silence and let him have his say. “If you choose
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