*Author’s note – This was written when I was in college and inspired by Chekhov. The Lady with the dog. It has been lightly rewritten in the intervening decades.

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He ordered a cappuccino. Out in the streets the office workers were just beginning to file out of their hutches, stopping by the hot dog stand to get sustenance before boarding the trains and buses which would rattle them home. He sat there and watched. He was early, which made a change for him, and he luxuriated in the feeling of indolence it afforded. The women walking by swung their hips and showed off their legs, for it would soon be too cold to be without an overcoat. The summer was over, but the fall was being unusually kind, and the denizens of Stockholm paraded the remnants of their Aegean tans and smiled at each other.

So he sat, and drank his cappuccino, and didn’t even read the book by Chester Himes he’d bought to assuage the dripping nostalgia for the rotting, pulsating homeland. She came in on a breeze, and he sensed that if he hadn’t pulled her down to Earth, and to him, with a wave of his hand she might have floated off into the clouds, adding her radiance to the warmth of the sun. They kissed each other, and he looked around for the waiter. They didn’t say anything until the man came, each feigning slight boredom. He ordered her tea for her, and she nodded her approval regally, an extra raised to the starring role. They sat still and watched the passing crowds.

“It’s ironic, isn’t it, that happiness comes from the smallest things… the ones with no price.”

She raised her eyebrows at him, “Really? Ironic? I think it’s perfectly natural. After all, what can you do with money other than burn it? Things without a price tag are valuable precisely because they cannot be bought.” She said this in a tone of reproach, but couldn’t prevent a smile from playing around her lips. He grinned at her and raised his coffee cup in mock salute. They laughed, as idle rich can do at unassuming passions.

The Note

I’m seeing Theresa. I’m sorry, but there’s no other way of explaining it other than to say that we’re in love. I feel terrible about deceiving you, but I simply couldn’t bring myself to tell you we were together. That night. In a strange way, it was hard to say anything simply because I care so much about you. I hope you’ll understand, but I don’t expect it. If you wish to call me, or talk to me, I’ll be back from Italy in two weeks. If it would be at all possible, despite the idiocy of the cliché, I would still like us to be friends.

She crumpled up the piece of paper. She took it to the ashtray which lay on the living room table and carefully set fire to it. She felt quite calm. The paper burned gladly, flames cheerfully licking away the embarrassment, and excusing itself in a thin wisp of smoke. She walked over to the mirror which hung in the hallway. The face of a beauty looked back at her, calm and cold, a face seen in small photos of happenings in certain magazines, a face glossy in the manuals of how to do good that occasionally thumped through the mailbox of those parts of town where things simply are or aren’t done, my dear.

She neared the mirror. Carefully studied her eyes. No. No sign of tears, no hint of redness in those perfectly made-up blue walls. So, she thought to herself. So, it had turned out to be Theresa. Well, he’d written a nice note at least, she thought inconsequentially. She felt a welling inside her, and she went to the window, closed against the greying skies, prepared to surrender to her feelings. But the wave subsided, and she found herself not crying, but thinking quite analytically about whether and why she should feel bad just because he’d left her. Had he really meant that much? Well, yes, she admitted to herself, he had meant a great deal. But they had never cemented their relationship, never fallen into what he’d turned one night the trap of impossible expectations. So why did she now feel so empty? Why did it hurt her to think of him in Theresa’s arms? She sat down on the sofa and stared blankly at the walls. She could still feel the way they’d touched, the way he’d stroked her hair, the way he’d moved inside her. And also the way they had laughed, had shared their disdain of the ordinary, cultivated their own little fringe of two. Laughed at the neighbor who kept saying the Russians were coming, the KGB had microphones in the walls, and it was time for revolution. Why had she thought of that of a sudden, that one memory? Now she thought of him, sitting at the table, urging the neighbor on with one more drink and glinting at her with his serious eyes, and she felt wetness on her cheeks.

He was tired. The flitting trees of Northern Italy were sucked back through the window of the rocking train. Theresa’s head lay against his shoulder, and he sighed. From contentment, he told himself. A fly buzzed miserably against the window. He felt a certain sympathy for its plight. The best laid plans of mice and men, and a’ that. He watched its meaningless struggle, but the sound it made bothered him not at all. Silly fly, he thought, why on Earth would you want to get on board a train in the first place?

Theresa’s perfume was intoxicating, and the combination of perfume and the fly’s buzzing made him drowsy. He day-dreamed of clouds and blue skies, and suddenly he was flying free, lightly drifting on the breezes; far below he could she someone signaling him to come down, but he ignored the shape in a dress. The figure ran underneath him for a time, but eventually he pulled away, and could delight in the coolness of air, the call of the heavens above.

When the train pulled into the small fishing village they disembarked like two children, skipping off the train, he pulling her off the platform, hands around her supple waist, she grabbing his arm and swinging her suitcase in the other. A worn-out conductor watched them leave from underneath hooded eyes and grunted. Probably in displeasure. They ignored him. They walked out of the station and the full strength of the Southern light struck their faces, stunning them into a placid silence. They recovered during their brief walk, getting lost twice in the narrow streets, and laughing with mock relief when they found the pensione. He wiped his brow exaggeratedly, she flung herself on her suitcase in front of the door theatrically.

When the concierge was gone and the door locked, they made love in the slanting sun, to the sound of two hissing cats outside.

He lit a cigarette. Checked his watch. Three in the morning. He carefully swung his legs over the side of the bed and shuffled into his pants. Taking care not to make noise, he pulled on a sweater against the salty chill and walked out. Once on the street he let his feet lead him. The smoke from his cigarette trailed behind like an anxious ghost as he wandered. A short while, and he could distinguish the sound of surf. He followed the sound came to the beach, smoothed stones stretching to the lapping waves, stars reflecting in the wrinkled ocean. The waves poured phosperescence over the stones as if baptizing their inkiness. The sound was hypnotic, and he felt himself drawn to this wordless mantra. He shook his head at himself. Stood quietly. He decided there was a beat to the waves, a rhythm beyond music. Or perhaps a word. After a while, he tried to make that sound himself. If it was a word, it was a word that did not change, that had never changed and could never change, even if the inflection might bend with the power of this or that wave. A soft word… perhaps? A word which connoted something very specific. It was a name, he realized with a shock. A name he recognized.

When he returned to bed, Theresa awoke. She held out her hands against him and pulled him towards her, warmth and heat, scent and sense. He lay down, into her softness, and slept.

The next day he was cheerful, but somehow distant. She noticed how he trailed off when telling a joke about his failed business, how it’d turned to his new success. His eyes had something hollow in the sun. She said nothing, for she believed with the passion and hope of love that he’d tell her if anything needed to be said.

It went away. That night, they had a meal under flickering candles, and afterwards he showed her the beach, and they watched and listened to the waves. They stayed there for two weeks, and she was happy.

When the morning came of the day before their return home, he was gone. She found a note, and read it on the pensione’s hard bed, still damp from their sweat, while a fly buzzed miserably against the window.

So he returned to the beauty. He made the contrite sounds, faked the strength of will he didn’t need to keep back tears which weren’t there, and in the end she took him back. He was happy. They were happy. But happiness and depression both can become overly familiar, boring. Unsatisfying.

He fooled around. And believing his life, believing the little half-truths he told, and the lies he left unspoken, he didn’t notice the glow on her cheeks after seeing some old acquaintances. Acquaintances he never met.

One night he returned abruptly, unexpectedly, from an argument with a woman he thought could be a lover. As he entered the apartment he heard moans. They reminded him of the sounds she had made when they had been infatuated with their ideas of each other. He walked quietly to the doorway of the bedroom. She was on her hand and knees, facing him. Behind her an acquaintance was grunting with each thrust, eyes shut. Her head was raised and she looked into his eyes; not afraid, not brazen, but with a curiosity and distance that made any reaction he might have null and void.

And he felt nothing. Not anger, not betrayal, not sadness. They held each other’s gaze for a moment, then he turned and walked away, out of the apartment, out of that life. The met the next day, agreed to part, and both moved out. He didn’t want to keep the apartment. Instead, he found, after crashing the hospitality of old school friends, a place in Stockholm’s old city, with a view of the square rigger af Chapman across the narrow water. The bright lights of the amusement park on the island further off would liven up the nights in the summer. But not now.

There, for a while he was able to paint. It was, after all, what he did. Critics forgot to mention his family name when critiquing his work, which was worth more to him than what this or that canvas fetched. And of course he fell in love again. Madly, passionately and infatuatedly. With the girl whom with he argued on that night of realization and reckoning. He bought her baubles, and she cooed over images she didn’t understand.

If he’d died there and then he might have said that his life had been full and complete. But every breath we take holds the threat and promise of another corner to turn.

With the inevitability of December’s sleet he grew moody. Love scratched at the new lovers, and she left him after a few months. Even the sex wasn’t fun anymore she declared, before slamming the door with what she felt was deep meaning.

He drowned himself in imagined suffering. He probed his past, uncovering scabs of sharpness to let his animal gnaw on, seeing hints in false memories and truths in injustice. He wondered what creature roamed his subconscious and plucked at the strings that supported his life. In cafes and bars there was only noise, and in the apartment only the sheeting of the winter, storming against the panes.

So he painted. Furiously. Melodramatically forming the scenes, the colors rising and falling against each other, flailing at his tormentor, trying to pin the beast, to throw it upon the canvas, to pin it to the light and with madness in his eye burn it out of existence.

Yet when he believed he had finally won a battle, had transfixed his past with the brilliance of insight and could finally stand triumphant, he would sense the rumbling of laughter, goading him, pricking him with scorn. And so wars continue. These paintings were ugly. As all ego which is not controlled decides, he decided that life was ugly. And if ugliness was truth, then his truth was art.

On the day before New Year’s Eve he was coming back from a brooding walk along the quay. A shape ahead of him lured his eyes, the familiarity calling. He stopped. She walked on towards him, glanced as she neared, and stopped as well. It was Theresa. She looked at him uncertainly, a smile flitting across before disappearing, her eyes smoked with memory. He looked through her as if she were a stranger. Her hand fluttered by her side, then died. She took a step past him, then another. Then she was gone. He inexplicably snarled with pleasure. When he realized that, he felt suddenly ashamed, and the unfamiliarity of the sensation made him uneasy.

That night he woke early, the night dark and cloying. He lay in bed for a moment, trying to grab at the fleeting shards of a dream. He sat on the side of the bed, fumbled for a pack, and lit a cigarette. He felt the urge to paint, so he threw on his old bathrobe and walked to the easel in the next room. He placed a fresh canvas on it, and picked up his brush.

Dawn broke, and he still stood there. The canvas mocked him.

Pure, unblemished.

A POSTSCRIPT

“I used to be famous, you know,” he said, and stroked his unkempt chin. “I sed to make paintings, and everyone thought they were so very beautiful.” He stared down into his glass. Else didn’t say anything, just looked at him from under perfectly arched eyebrows. He snorted into his drink, the amber liquid sloshing sympathetically as he coughed. He leaned back and eyed her. She was young. Nineteen. He felt old next to a girl like this.

The clouds were pregnant in their whiteness as they fitfully scampered across the sky. On the bay fishing boats, not so many this year, less than the year before, and less than the year before that, puttered in, rolling with waves, rust streaking off ancient steel rigging, salt-streaked gunwales glinting with the reflections of thousands of fish scales. A leaden sun poured heat down on the Turkish coast. He could have done something with this on a canvas, he thought. Before.

“Why did you stop painting if you were so good?”

He laughed. “Who said I was good? I was famous, I didn’t say I was any good. There’s a world of difference.” He took a strong gulp and felt the whiskey bite at his throat. It was expensive, an indulgence, but worth it. If he’d taken to drinking the cheap ouzo and raki like the other expatriate drunks, he wouldn’t have had a voice after a couple months. He debated whether or not to have a cigarette. He knew without checking that there were six left in the pack, and they would have to last him until morning. As always, it ended up a rhetorical debate, and he lit up. Else sniffed.

That was how they had met, just two days before. She had sat down at the table next to him in the midafternoon heat, the aura of an unrequited meeting hanging around her sharp and small features. They had simply sat there, while nothing moved; two infidels. He’d lit up, and she had told him with a cool gaze that smoking was bad. So they introduced themselves, and after each had debated internally whether or not to actually converse with the other, they had begun the dance.

She was from Buxtehude in the North of Germany, and had come to Turkey to escape civilization for a while. The unknown, unseen, and changed heart of the unmentioned travel companion sat beside her as she said this, mocking her. Probably on a neon-lit island nearby, downing shots at a bar of shrilling tan bodies who couldn’t imagine a better existence. Anyway, she’d wanted to escape civilization. He told her that was a rather arrogant statement to make, considering civilization had arisen right here, or close enough, only ten millennia before. She gazed at him coolly again. The look made him reconsider speaking at all. Perhaps if he’d been that age he too would have preferred thumping music and a mindless drunk. Perhaps. No, he decided, even back then… no. He smiled at her to show his teasing. She dropped her gaze and looked into her glass of tonic, sweating in the heat. He offered to show her the sights, and found her a willing audience for the Story of His Life which he found himself creating even as they scrabbled in the dry dust over rocks hewn from some epochal hand. He especially enjoyed his description of how he’d lost his art; he made sure to tell her only enough to pique her curiosity.

That night they went to the cliffs to see the waves crash. As they did.

It was lunchtime, some days later. She was still there, sitting with him. He shook himself, looked blinking into the clear sky. A heaviness. He’d run out of fascinations with which to intrigue her. The horizon stretched beyond infinity, the heat lay and coaxed, swam over one’s skin and blanched the world, making only daydreams seem real. “Else,” he said, pleased with this sudden, new, turn of phrase, “don’t you think this heat, well, it blanches the world away, leaving only our dreams real?”

She looked at him seriously. “Perhaps. It depends what you are dreaming of. Sometimes I think I can never dream again, then it is very nice just to sit and let the sun warm me.” She shrugged. “I have to say that for me, only the present is real.”

He took a drag from his cigarette to hide his irritation. It was a new pack, and he’d had four already. It was the heat, he decided, the heat which rasped over one’s skin like an overly friendly snake.

She looked at him. “Tell me again, why did you stop painting? Why stop? Why come here?”

He looked at her and debated whether or not to be honest. But did he know the reason himself? What did honesty mean, if only that he’d run out of stories. He felt there was nothing to hide.

“I came here because there was nothing left for me back home.” A swig from the glass. A look of resignation, untinged, he hoped, by any artifice. “I realized I was not worthy of the art, and decided there was nothing else I was suited for. I also… I hurt people, and wanted to get away, to protect as much as myself.” He finished. Sighed in a suitably tragic yet noble manner.

“Yes. I expected you to say that. Something like that. But you know, it doesn’t sound so much tragic as self-pitying. You know, people can protect themselves. No, I think you ran away because one day looked in the mirror and saw what was there. And you sought to get to a place with no mirrors.”

She stopped. Alex felt a vague sense of unease. She had been accurate, of course. Unnervingly so, and he realized that because she didn’t speak much, and because of her youth, he had badly underestimated her sophistication. His unease was leavened by excitement. There was more to be discovered with this girl than he’d thought.

“I think you don’t give me enough credit.” He said with an aggrieved air.

“On the contrary,” and here, for the first time since he’d met her, her smile broke the sharpness of her features, softened her face. Suddenly she seemed to glow, as from a heat generated from within. “I think I give you all the credit you deserve.”

He stared out at the sea. He tried to empty his mind; there was something he could almost, but not quite, hear. He realized what it was.

“And tell me Else, why did you come here. Really?”

She smiled as if he’d told a sly joke. The sun burned slowly down into the water. She looked into his eyes, as if a decision had been made. “I think you should begin to paint again.”

He looked at her carefully. Her hair glinted in the setting sun. A stray wisp played about her eyes. Her outline clear, silhouetted against a backdrop of blue, pretty as a picture. Something stirred inside him, but he couldn’t name it.

They sat in silence as the dark symphony of light settled in the West, sparking the clouds with the burning umber of a medieval battlefield. Mustafa, the owner, came out and ostentatiously polished a glass slowly. It was late, but the tourists were rare now, and it wouldn’t do to speak. Particularly as the man spent his money freely on the imported drink. Mustafa sighed quietly, thought of his wife waiting for him.

The two antagonists ignored him, as each measured the other.

“You know,” Else finally began, “I think perhaps you do not read enough. You seem to judge the book by its cover. There is maybe something you know you should do, that you will not admit. You will not do this thing because you wish to play a role you believe you are suited for.”

He grinned at her. “No, my dear, I read too much, don’t you see? Things which are simple become complicated, and I become paralyzed by the enormity of any decision. Like, for example, a small town. It can be very quiet, very calm on the outside, but behind the little curtains there are things… things which can be hard to deal with, and then what can you do, eh? What can one do?” He let the question hang. A challenge.

“Well, whatever is the course one chooses, one should never abandon the one’s soul…” Suddenly she started giggling. She tried to stop, but couldn’t help herself. He stared helplessly at her.

“I am sorry,” she continued, “it is just that I remember reading a book and thinking to myself that there were no people who spoke like that, and here I find myself. Speaking of souls. Ach!” She smiled again, and for the first time since they’d met he completely forgot that she was nineteen.

He smiled back. His thoughts uncoiled, and he sensed a promise in the air, of something without, and within himself. “Come,” he said.

He dropped too much money on the table. Mustafa’s smile lite their way as they wandered off. When he put his arm around her shoulders and she leaned against him, he felt like bursting in song.

They came to the beach, walking barefoot at the breach where the waves searched their way up the shore. For a long time they walked like that. He looked out into the distance, lost. She kept her eyes fixed before her, as if feeling for a chasm. The waves curled under their toes, dragging at the sand beneath them.

“There was a boy, very sweet. He wanted to take care of me, he said. To protect me. But not macho, not like that, just sweet. He was very much in love with me, I think. But, I did not love him, although I tried. For a time. He said it didn’t matter, my love or not. All he wanted was for me to let him love me… I grew to hate him. That is why I came here. Also, I did some bad things, things I should not have done. I thought I could convince him not to love me.”

Else fell silent, and he let the words die, swim and form in his mind. He could see the scene. Very clearly.

“And then,” she continued, “when I met you I thought: ‘Oh, he is just a man who wants to sleep with me,’ and all the time you were talking it seemed that way. But then you talked of painting, and there was… something. I thought, well, he is a man who wants to sleep with me, but there is something there. And then…” She looked up at him briefly. “You have wonderful hands. You do not give yourself credit in the right places. You are more clever than you look, but not as clever as you think. But you have hands that can paint. I am sure.”

The waves tapped at their feet, the sand sloughed away and back. The moon shone down. They stopped walking.

And they faced each other.