The Secret Lives of People in Love: Stories by Simon Van Booy

Author:Simon Van Booy
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 0061766127
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Published: 2007-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

When Magda first arrived from Poland and could only communicate with her eyes, we would take long walks together through the village and always stop at the same place to sit and watch old people lawn bowl. Later, when she could speak English, she told me her name for the bench beside the bowling green—niebo. Heaven.

On summer nights when the lingering light blushed and then disappeared, I often mused on how objects kept up with us. How lucky, what magical synchronicity, that soulless things should not only occupy the instant, but travel through time with us at the same speed, as though everything were perched high on the crest of a wave surging forward into the unwritten.

Later, on that same bench before the bowling green, when we were both eighteen years old, I told Magda about the mystery of soulless things keeping up with us, moving through time at the same speed. She laughed intelligently and told me that sometimes it is we who get left behind, anchored to memory. That is why she said she liked watching the old people in white play bowls, because they had slipped from time and hovered above the past.

We were on the verge of separation.

As we sat on the bench, as we often had for twelve years, I knew something was being taken from us. We were on the boundary of adulthood: I was leaving for America—a surfing scholarship to a college in California—and she to a prestigious university in Warsaw.

I still imagine Poland through descriptions in her letters she wrote from her university—storks nestling on rooftops, the grassy, minty dullness of marjoram, and the heavy pungency of caraway blowing through the Carpathian Mountains.

It was in silence on the bench beside the bowling green that I knew I would never see Magda again, or that if I did, we would have evolved beyond reconciliation. Without words, we mutually allowed experience to swallow us whole. It was the only way forward. But her absence would haunt me in the same way my mother’s absence haunted my father, and the missing part of Magda’s arm haunted her.

Now that I’m married and living in California with my wife, I think living with the absence of someone we love is like living in front of a mountain from which a person—a speck in the distance, on some distant ridge—is perpetually waving.

In youth we wave back to the figure on the cliff.

I remember us on the bench together drinking warm Coke from the same bottle, two beings about to plunge into their own lives. How soon would we reach the bottom? While at the university in California my class read The Odyssey. It interested me because it’s not only about the sea but about love and recognition. My father is like Odysseus, but so is my mother. Odysseus is Everyman. All seas lead to one home or another. Every path is the right one. And Magda has disappeared from the earth.

Now, in America, where I have made a home for myself, it is fall, the season of memory.

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