13.

Sometimes I’d walk down there, all the way from Squirrel Hill, the walk as long as the lunch, along Forbes Avenue into Oakland, and even on this grey, misty autumn day there was vivid color, the yellow and orange leaves spread on the sidewalks and lawns, blown against the wet bushes, scattered among the boughs of the occasional pine tree or weeping willow, a brave few still fluttering from the branches above, as below the scattered brown gaze of fallen buckeyes met my eyes. I hurried past them to the Vito’s, that dark spot where Virginia would make her weekly manifestation, appearing not often as a goddess or even the Virginia I remembered but (much) more frequently as a specific human woman with specific human concerns. But by manifesting herself as this painfully specific woman, she, of course, only made me love her more, or at least in an additional way. With a goddess the physicality can’t be that important, can it? The sound of her voice, the light brush of her hand, the press of her breasts as we hugged good-bye, all these things should have been sufficient, shouldn’t they, for the Platonic lover.

She was almost without exception late, and often there was under her apologies an irritation that some part of her had been able to drag the rest away from the endless complications of her life. But I was always able to make her come around — when she allowed herself to be there it was the way it used to be. Despite everything we’d never minded each other’s company , and we were somehow able to resume the same long conversation. With Brad missing and the twins being twins and the lawyers being lawyers , she had a lot of complicated stories, but it had been easy for me to listen to her, to sympathize with her. Leaning forward, her long just crooked nose under the round crown of her head, she was my noon wife, our marriage only here and only for this hour. I almost wished that her husband was still alive so we could plot to kill him in this dimly lit bar.

In a way it was like jazz, our spontaneous improvisations on familiar themes within loose time constraints, and we always seemed to have something to say to each other. Of course, feeling the way I did, I quite often wanted to break out of our restraints, but I was also afraid of losing the original and mutual relationship that we’d already achieved, the what ever it was that we both seemed to need. At least it was better than the nothing we’d had — I hadn’t known her for a while and, however much I’d told myself I was over her, hadn’t been able to stand it very well. I knew better than to try her at any time other than our proscribed hour, she was always busy, and I also knew she’d never consider calling me up long enough to decide not to. It seemed we were as close as we could comfortably be — in a way very close — we had the intimacy of a long married couple, but a long married couple having lunch in a bar. Outside we soon we far apart, as far apart as ever.

But then she always seemed to know how to keep our relationship sane a lot better than I did. I realized that in a maybe even uncalculating way she was prescient in keeping the bar and its boundaries around us, that maybe this controlled starvation was the only way our relationship could survive without becoming strong enough to be uncontrollable.