The Fugitivities, стр. 31

key chain with a little note on top of one of Jonah’s bags. He didn’t touch it, and eventually she came by and picked it up again. His mother noticed that he was quiet and asked how he was, if he had everything he needed. He said he was fine. She asked if he was still friends with Arna. He said they were still close, that they were staying in touch. She told him a story about when he was a boy, one they both knew and that she always retold whenever they were about to part. Her eyes were very clear and light. There were deep wrinkles between her eyebrows. He could feel the exact length and depth of those ridges because he frowned in exactly the same place. Suddenly she had a coughing fit, and he frantically got a water bottle from his backpack. Her lungs weren’t what they used to be. She’s growing old, he thought. He couldn’t sleep on his flight.

Laura Petrossian had not ruined Nathaniel Archimbald’s life, but she had come close. She had overthrown his sense of himself, given of herself to him and taken from him in ways he had not recognized, and then vanished, leaving behind a gap like a vacant lot. He never entirely believed that her intentions were bad, though to the end they remained inscrutable. Still, he had to concede that even the pain she had caused had been a kind of good fortune. She had helped him to see what was worth saving in the world and forced him to think seriously about what he could do about it.

He had started thinking of Laura as Jonah described his relationship with Arna. Of their paradoxical combination of openness and elusiveness. Nathaniel thought of that openness now, of how happy it would have made Laura to know he had gotten this lost young man out of his fix. He thought of the face she would make if he told her the story. And it reminded him of her other face, the one she made when she was sleeping. The unvarying coolness of her voice when they were naked a long time in her bed. Of midafternoons in the little apartment on the rue des Cinq-Diamants.

Nathaniel leaned back in his chair, stretching out the red and green of his tracksuit with his albatross wingspan. He regarded Jonah intently now, appealing to the grown man in him.

“And you haven’t spoken to this woman since?”

“We write to each other. She’s always traveling. I get letters and postcards from the cities she’s visiting on account of her government job, you know, collecting research about economic development, that kind of thing. We try to do mail the old-fashioned way, and it means that we have this slow-motion conversation over time. I think about her a lot, but then I’ll save the thought and write it down, and then when I have some time it turns into something more, it grows into a letter, and then I send it.”

“Now hold on, that’s the word right there. This sending. Because I got to ask myself who sent you. See, I’ve been sitting here listening to you, and it’s like this weird thing I’ve been running in my mind. The way I make sense of it is, maybe I saved you. Maybe something even worse was about to happen to you last night and we’ll never know it. You don’t realize how lucky you are. Only reason I was even downtown was to support a buddy of mine who is trying to get clean and has this meeting he goes to in Chinatown. I heard some stuff in the meeting that was so hard, I had to walk it off and ended up way over off East Broadway. I come round a corner, find you lying on the ground, down for the count and still acting all belligerent, and I seen the cops rolling up, and well, shit, I just acted on it. And I don’t even know you. So why did I do that? Had to be a reason. And I been sitting here listening to you and I’m thinking I see what it was. I’ll be damned if you aren’t some kind of messenger. Universe trying to tell me something. You just might be a sign I got to revisit some shit I’ve been trying to put behind me for years.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, I’ll bet you would never guess I was in a situation just like yours. Long time ago. My Paris days. Damn. You know, I haven’t been back since. Don’t plan to neither, to be honest. Feels like it was another life. It was another life, a whole other world. My first life was hoops. I guess you could say my second life was this love story that didn’t pan out. I figure I’m in my third now. At least I’m happy where I’m at. I thought I put that whole Paris thing behind me; now you show up, and it brings it all back. Man, she had me wide open. Had me learning my words all over again, and in French. What a crazy time that was. Brings back memories, man, even after all these years.”

“What was her name?”

“Laura.”

Saying it aloud was like a conjuring. Nathaniel gave himself a few moments to recollect as he struggled to find the right words to describe her. There was the way she looked at a man. The defiantly brash eyeballing of a woman who had ceased to be a girl early in life. Like so many sisters he had known coming up. She had this toughness; she frowned more than she smiled, but when she did, she lit up the room.

“Tell me about her,” Jonah said.

“I will. I’m thinking on it now. I have to get in rhythm when I’m storying. I’m not usually the talking type like you. But don’t be thinking that means I ain’t got a