Young Widower

Young Widower by John W. Evans Page A

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Authors: John W. Evans
Tags: Biography And Autobiography
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evenings we spent in the apartment, Katie wore fleece sweatpants and made tea. She curled herself onto the ridiculous yellow-leather loveseat we inherited from previous tenants, to read books and magazines. I put my head in her lap, or we lay on the bed with the windows open, the cat teetering on the sill as we listened to the traffic, turning our pages. When it was hot in the city, we pulled the mattress under the window or set up the laptop to watch hours of television into the afternoon and evening. We liked to argue about whether the cat’s indifference to the traffic below meant she was charmed or incredibly stupid. I defended the cat vigorously. Survival of the fittest , Katie liked to say, when her time is up, her time is up .
    4.
    It is a warm June evening in Bucharest. The beer gardens and pizza shops around Bucharest’s enormous Lake Herastrau, which one side of our apartment building overlooks, are just open for the season. Someone is selling flowers from an umbrella stand: neon carnations mixed with weeds and grasses.
    We walk the loop again and again around the lake.
    Bucharest is by far our favorite city yet, and like every other city in which we have lived together, we intend to leave it with a sense that we have only just begun our explorations. We are excellent planners, even when we have no goal. Katie is starting yoga classes again and going with her friend to the gym. She is exercising to manage work-related stress. Membership in a private gym is a status symbol among the city’s elite. Bucharest is filled with families that have profited wildly and handsomely after Communism, privatizing industry, franchising corporations, dumping WesternEurope’s toxic waste in parts unknown of the Carpathian Mountains. Much of Katie’s work puts her in daily contact with terrible people who have real power and speak fluent English. Katie swims laps with their charming families in the morning and then walks past their offices on her way to work.
    Katie will die in six weeks, but of course we cannot know this. We do not plan for it. We walk nearly every night around Lake Herastrau, complaining that we are bored, restless, and eager to explore still more beer gardens, park benches, trees, dams, and apartment buildings on either side with the avenues and the traffic circles between them. What else can we do until it is time, finally, to leave? We entertain ourselves. We people-watch. Romanians out walking, mostly kids, intermix family with youthful, libertarian élan. We have neither community nor zeal. It doesn’t really matter. We find the end of one conversation and begin the next. We repeat our conversations as we circle the lake. Every few hundred yards we pass a restaurant blaring British rock music: the Rolling Stones and Queen, Sid Vicious singing “My Way” and David Bowie singing “Young Americans.” It is the music of liberation and exhaustion, and we are lost.
    5.
    I stand in a small field at our Peace Corps training site. The coordinator has chalked an outline of Bangladesh onto the grass. As we each receive our assignment, we take the placard on which it is written and straddle our city. I get “Tangail,” a city the travel guide calls “the singularly least attractive place in Bangladesh.” It is a transportation hub across which the local crime syndicate taxes buses and cars as they make their way north from and south to the capital. Tangail’s de facto leader is recently imprisoned for beating a police officer to death with the leg of a stool, at the police station, while in police custody. He is reputed to have a violent temper. After his release, at his request, I teach his wife English.
    The afternoon I receive my assignment, I smile like everyone else as we take a group photograph. Katie is fifteen, maybe twenty feet away, with five volunteers stationed in the cities between our cities. In the photograph I can just make out her dark hair and blue head scarf in the middle of the group. The

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