Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth by Edeet Ravel Page A

taken on a fugitive existence. I’d wanted to be a sparse person; I was hoping to keep my balance by shedding perspectives.
    But Anthony’s faith in me had left me with an addict’s yearning for more. If I were part of the hustle and bustle, if I let myself loose among the crowds—the possibilities stretched out like a beanstalk to the clouds. My mother would wait below, anxious but hopeful, as I climbed up. And each branch of the beanstalk would lead me to another chattery group of people. I would have friends.
    Friday, late. It’s been two weeks now since I began this incursion into the distant past. The days, like all my days, passedmysteriously in a sea of trivia that demanded my attention. I prepared for class, met with students, bought food, cooked it, ate it, cleaned up, walked Sailor, did laundry. There were memos, emails, even a semi-love letter from a small city in Peru. Someone I met last year, through one of those wild coincidences that but for the flap of a butterfly’s wings might never have occurred at all.
    It was February, the middle of the night, and I woke from a recurring dream I’ve been having for decades, a dream about searching for a place to live, perhaps temporarily, and then moving into or considering strange, rundown rooms and houses and wondering how to fix them up. Sometimes I can only reach the rooms by hoisting myself up through the narrowest of tunnels or funnels, with nothing to hold on to—a dreadful ordeal, but in the dream I have no choice.
    What if I’d not had that dream, not turned on the light at that moment? But I did, I turned it on. Sailor, who’d been snoring at the foot of my bed, wagged his tail; it’s always a treat for him, company at night. It was warm under my duvet and cold in the flat, but I was hungry, so I dragged myself out of bed, turned up the heat, and plodded to the kitchen. I made myself a lettuce and tomato sandwich and strolled over to the front window, as one does in winter—partly to ward off cabin fever, partly to check out the snow situation. It was very cold out, close to minus ten with the wind chill, and yet there on the sidewalk, next to a car, was a young woman shouting at a man who was shouting back at her.
    The man held on to the hood of his car. The engine was running, the door was open, and the man was trying to persuade the woman, or girl, to go with him. I could see by the sweeping movements of his arms that logic was on his side, but she refused to budge. Exasperated, protective, foiled, he grabbed her jacket and pulled. She tried to kick him and missed—the cold makes us all a little klutzy. That was the last straw for the man. He threw himself into the car in disgust and drove off, leaving hiscompanion alone on the street. She clasped herself and frantically looked around for some place to duck into. No hat, no gloves, an inadequate jacket—like my students, who even in the midst of blizzards dress as if they lived in California.
    I hurried downstairs, opened my front door, and called out to her, but the wind swallowed the sound of my voice. I called again, urgently, because I was in my bathrobe and in precisely two seconds I’d be dead of hypothermia. She heard me this time, looked up. It didn’t immediately occur to her that I was inviting her in, because when, in real life, do fairy godmothers actually show up when you need them? “Do you want to come in?” I yelled in English, then in French. “You must be cold!”
    She nodded vigorously and climbed the icy helical stairs, grasping the rail so as not to slip, then followed me up the stairwell to the flat, then to the kitchen, and then to wherever I moved in the kitchen, as if she were attached to me by a short cord. When I walked to the sink, she walked with me; when I went to the cupboard to fetch two mugs or to the fridge to take out a lemon meringue pie, she stayed close behind. She kept her coat on, and I had a fleeting image of one of those cartoon sleuths shadowing a