The Gallery

It's a strange gathering, here in the subway train taking me along the west side of the island going "downtown." The different conversations that are happening, both loud and internal, between people and within someone's head, and I am sure someone is talking to himself loudly. Or herself. The humming of the train in the dimly lit tunnel is the harmony that accompanies the melodious cacophony in which I am submerged. The rhythm of it all pumps my heart more than anything else now. Am I feeling good or uncomfortable? I am not sure.

Wait, maybe it's the internal rhythm in my heart that's causing the humming of the train, of the people, of their stories.

Probably not.

Next to me is an old couple. Old as they are both past retirement age, not that they've been together for a long time. He is taller than her, much taller. He looks down at her with a very wrinkly but loving smile. His face is full of light even though the fluorescent lamps above him casts a shadow on his face. He gently strokes the hair of the very short woman facing him, and by facing him I can't see her entire face. I can see that her right side of the face is even more wrinkly. The way he caresses her head and strokes her stiff, ultra-hairsprayed hair is extremely tender; and for a moment I thought they are actually teenagers wearing the masks and donning the clothes of people sixty years older. If she would put her head on his chest (approximately right below where his hear is), I would have started crying. There is nothing more beautiful than having a woman rest her head on a man's chest. I am macho, maybe, but if you think so, you don't know how to be a woman or a man.

He starts to whisper a language that catches me off guard. He is a very white man with silver hair sticking out of one of those old people's hats, flat, green checker pattern. His eyes are small, even slitted, but he is definitely an old, white man. But he is speaking, or rather, whispering tendering, Japanese words to her. I don't know any more Japanese than the guys around me, but I can tell when someone is speaking Japanese. She whispers back but so inaudible that I can't hear a single sound. I wonder how he got to know Japanese so well to carry a conversation. Have they been together for ages? Maybe he met her in Japan while stationing there? Or even better, while winning "the war" sixty years ago? My fantasy starts to go in chaotic places, tripping over all sorts of ridiculous stones. Or maybe they had met recently. He is a widower or a divorcé, and she is too in one of those two categories. And after being along for so long, they found each other.

There I am again, letting my imagination ride my heart as if it were a sleepy stallion and now we are racing through the marshes of the Camargue. But let me enjoy looking at them one more moment before the next stop where I am to get off. How can old people be so gentle and loving to each other? Haven't they gotten sick of love? Of being with someone they have been stuck with for decades? When I thnk of old man, especially old white men, and love, I think mostly of those I saw in Thailand, and they were never with an Asian woman of their age; usually someone even younger than me, maybe even younger than my twenty-one year old sister. Here no. Here is a gentle smile and a loving hand. Please don't let her rest her head on his chest. New York Subway is no place for a grown man like me to wet his eyes. I've seen people wet their pants in all the years growing up in New York, but never their eyes.

I get off at 14th Street, and like just about every train station at rush hour in Manhattan, the place is packed. I become a droplet in this human river flowing up against an opposite current that is flowing next to us, sometimes through us, or maybe we are flowing through them. This city is so big, so anonymous. You can have all the excitement you want, all the quick joy from even the deepest cultures and discussions, but your heart is simply spread to a thin layer like what I do with butter every morning on my English muffin. You can taste the energy, but then you forget it later because any thing thin simply evaporates quickly under the heat of life.

Speaking of heat, it's damn cold outside. I am in the middle of Chelsea now. Or the end of Chelsea. Here is where the shops and fancy restaurants start. More people, and not just people, but moving people. I don't know anyone. Unlike in New Haven, I have no risk of running into anyone here. Even in Florence, I once bumped into a colleague from college. Granted, I was on that postcard perfect Ponte Vecchio, so the chance of meeting someone you know slightly increases. Here I am at the blurry border between the hip Greenwich Village and the nearly-as-hip Chelsea. Who knows me here? All I have is memories if I want to meet someone. I meet my ex-girlfriend from college. That's my memory talking so now I use the past tense. We went to this super-secretous sushi place that doesn't even have a sign outside and the only way you would know about it was if you knew someone who knew about it. Of course, word eventually got out to various food critics and it's no longer a secret.

We went there and we had sushi.

That's my memory; that's the only person I meet now, a memory. I don't remember anything good, and I have superimposed all the bad experience with her on that specific piece of memory, and so I can't promise anything accurate if I were to recount that uneventful evening. As I pass by this unnamed Japanese restaurant that has plenty of shivering and forelorn white people standing outside, I just remember how lonely I felt last time I was here with her. These people all seemed to be giggling and trying to keep warm. I see one person not talking. He's Asian, not sure if Japanese. He's just standing there among the crowd of merry people waiting with great anticipation for some really expensive raw fish. I notice him, and his image supersedes the memory of my own loneliness many years ago here.

I turn right into the heart of Chelsea. I pass by another restaurant, a hole-in-the-wall but really beautiful inside. It's a tapas bar that a woman introduced me to. What woman? What is her name? I can't remember. Someone I met randomly. I can't even remember how. I remember my lips were all burgundy after the glass of wine I was nursing the whole two hours we were there. I am careful about drinking alcohol in front of strangers, especially women, just in case I need to be in control afterwards.

I turn left into a street that has no clusters of restaurants. I think I have the street right. And here I am, in front of this brownstone. Maybe it's a brownstone. I call anything old looking in Manhattan a brownstone. It doesn't matter what it really is; it looks very old and imposing even in this dimly lit street. It's certainly safe here in this long gentrified neighborhood where you have to be at some upper echelon of wealth to be able to afford even a studio here. The sound, I realize, has disappeared. It's quiet here. Not even barking of dogs. No one in some distant sidewalk yapping on the cellphone.

It is very quiet. Is that classical music I hear, faintly in the distance? It seems like a neighborhood where people play classical music. Probably just my imagination again, my brain trying to fill this emptiness, this soundlessness, this ferocious silence with at least imaginary stories, music, rhythm.

I climb up to the first floor (brownstones always have lofty, narrow stone steps in the front) and gently twists the bronze knob. The door is old and the creaking sound becomes like a thunder in this quiet neighborhood of doglessness and cellphonelessness. Silence inside too. No classical music. But it is definitely the right place. I see her name on the brochures on the lit table. I slid off my gloves and put them in my left pocket, and then I take off my hat and squeeze it in my right pocket. I unzip slowly my jacket, trying not to make too much noise, but the small noise just lingers ever longer. I don't know why I am aware of all these little movements I am making. Perhaps it's because of the atmosphere of this apartment? This gallery. Where is the receptionist? What if I go into the exhibition room and run off with a painting or two? Such are the silly thoughts of a person raised poor and lonely in a country infinitely poorer than this neighborhood where I am in the process of hanging my coat.

I walk into the first bright room with the door open that doesn't say "Authorized Personnel Only". It's not the exhibition room. It's a private library of some sort. Lots of dusty old books, ones that you think would turn to dust if you so much as stare at them. I draw closer to them and looked at the titles, careful not to stare too long. I have no idea what these books are. I was expecting famous stuff like Shakespeare or, more suited for this kind of room and atmosphere, Edgar Allen Poe. Where's "The Raven"?

These books, all about the same color now, sit neatly next to one another and decorate the walls like skulls decorate that underground osssuary in one of Paris's catacombs. So old and forgotten, yet someone wrote each of those books; someone wrote with passion, or maybe not, but at least put energy into writing each one. Someone printed them, someone bound them together, someone put them somewhere for storage, then someone sold them, and eventually someone put them here. I doubt all of them have been read, at least not from start to finish. But all of them have a history that no one cares. And if the books have a soul, then each is a lonely one that doesn't care about any of its neighbors touching him, touching him for probably decades now, from what I gather by looking at the dust that blankets them.

The smell is starting to get to me. Perhaps it's the dust allergy cranking its wheels. I am here. Alone with all these lonesome books whose history not even books care about. And the image of that old white man with the old people's cap standing in front of his Japanese woman starts to piece itself together in my head.

Then it evaporates instantly when I hear a creaking sound behind me followed immediately by a voice. A familiar voice. Even though it's a voice that's been unheard by these ears for more than a decade. For the first time the entire day a smile forms on my expressionless, Asiatic face. I turn around and see the keeper of the name I found on those brochures outside. The artist whose work is in some room nearby. She looks miraculously the same as the last time I remember her. I thought women are supposed to age quickly before they even turn thirty, and especially if they have had children.

The words her voice carried are, "If you enjoy sneezing among these dusty books than I can bring two chairs in."

Such unabashed sarcasm! And we haven't really connected yet beyond a few e-mails. My heart is immediately warmed, from the cold outside, the lack of breathing, the lack of life.

Ten years of silence and going about our own lives. Now I walk up to her saying, "You're so mean!" and then we embrace. No tragedies have happened to us, so we don't cry. I let her go first, just because I can't stand being accused of being too sentimental. She leads me to another room where there are photographs, which means it's not her exhibition room because she's a painter.

"This is the only room with nice chairs," she comments as she invites me to sit down.

"So? At last, we meet," is her second opening line.

So are we going to start catching up now? I am shaking, I realize. I am so nervous. I am not sure why. Maybe because of this house. It's so old, everything is so old. It's not only the books, but the tables, the lights, even the walls. I do realize that the heating system is upgraded because there isn't the usual clanging sound of the old steam radiator. I know a lot of about radiators because I've been to so many different hotels and hostels in my life that if I weren't a computer geek I would be selling radiators or fixing them or something.

"Is it expensive to rent the gallery here?" is my first word. I am not sure if I said the usual "How are you?" and the like. She seems a bit taken aback, and thinks for a moment before saying, "Yes, but it's the cheapest I could find because it is not really in the gallery area of Chelsea."

"First time in New York?" I asked. That banal question leads finally to a conversation of other banal questions and answers, sort of the lead to our "catching-up." But we don't get very far. We never cared much about details when we last talked, a decade ago. We always delved into our thoughts, our dissections of life. Perhaps that is the reason I started shaking just now.

"So your daughters are really young. Though older than my nephew," I comment after she releases information about her daughters.

There is silence, the first awkward one. Then she asks, "So you traveled a lot? Name the places you've been to," she requests.

I don't know really what to say. Should I start recounting every city and country? OK, that's what I do. I do it chronologically, in a very plain, boring way, the only way a nervous mind can do. At some point around Panama, she comments softly, "Wow, you've been to so many places." I stop and observe her. She takes off her gaze from my eyes for a little bit and then looks at me again to say, "I always get jealous of people who can travel a lot. Oh, forget a lot, just travel. My husband travels a lot, mostly for trips. All very exotic, many dangerous."

"Why can't you travel?" I asked. "You just have to do it, no?"

"With my daughters in tow?" she smiles, "That's very expensive and. Well. There is no choice."

I look around and then ask, "Where are they now?"

"They are with Richard. At home," she answers with a bit of smile.

"Richard," I thought. I guess that name never stuck enough to bring any emotion in me. It should.

"It's the first time he is taking care of the kids; he is usually too busy or too tired, " she mutters. Then she adds, "He's quite supportive of my artistic initiatives."

"Supportive"; that word for some reason stings me a little, like that bee I never forget when it stung me while me, the little innocent seven-year old, was walking down the school road all by myself.

"I am glad your husband is supportive," I say, then I wonder if there is any perceived tone of sarcasm in it.

"So you met a lot of women these years?" she asks.

This time I am the one who feels taken aback. "Why do you ask?" I finally ask. She tells me that by being part of my Facebook network she can see the majority of my more than 100 "friends" I have.

"And girlfriends?" she fires another round.

"What is a girlfriend?" I ask, the same question I've asked and been asked so many times.

Is my life really so strange and tangled up that I end up asking such a seemingly stupid question so many times in the past ten years?

"I think it's great that you're married. My sister is married. One of them. I think it's great to be married. You have a 'supportive' husband, two lovely and loving daughters (I am assuming), and a house out in a big, green lot (probably all white now in the depth of winter). That's the American dream!" I, an immigrant like her, exclaim. But we both know that those words are laced with sadness, though not necessarily the same sadness for both people and not connected either.

She doesn't answer immediately, but I see no sadness in her eyes either until she sighs and says, "I think it's great that you've gotten to travel so much. And .... met so many people."

"I suppose. But ten years of these adventures, I am not sure if I need more. When I see my nephew I just want one like him. My sister and her husband aren't lovy-dubby sort of couple, but at least they don't fight. And I can't imagine they would ever cheat on each other. They are stable. She's expecting a daughter soon. They also have a nice house in the middle of the woods with lots of land." I pause a little to see if she has anything to add. She fixes her gaze on me, but not studying, just listening. I continue, "I walked past this hole-in-the-wall just now. I was there not too long ago to go on a third date with a woman whose name I can't recall. I just remembered that she was wonderful and interesting and full of energy to save the world. But there was something about her smile or the way she talks or the gaze in her eyes that didn't spark a light for me. That was the last time I saw her. And walking past that hole-in-the-wall made me feel extremely lonely, extremely sad.

"I wondered why my life in these ten years have gotten so complicated. Why unlike everyone else in the world I didn't just find some average girl and gotten myself in an average marriage and an average family. Why so complicated that I didn't even have more than one true girlfriend with whom I wasn't so happy, while I had plenty of encounters with different women that had each a 'unique' experience with me. I don't need unique experiences. I am tired of them and I certainly never asked for them. I am not some playboy who wants to play with people's hearts. I just want to fall in love with a woman who loves me. Maybe that's too much to ask if all I want is an average life of an average family in an average suburb on an average sized green lot with an average house you find in any random suburb of America.

"Passing by that hole-in-the-wall I also thought for a moment my nephew, whom I saw just yesterday. He's definitely not average in my eyes. Why can't I have a family with a special little half-half boy running around making trouble and that I have to discipline with love? You know the first time I saw him I danced tango with him? I mean, he couldn't even stand right."

I realize my voice has gotten louder, my breath has become shorter, and the mentioning of tango perhaps will invite her to talk about something else. I am embarrassed.

She says, "What about tango? Does that make you feel the same as when you walked past the hole-in-the-wall?"

At first I can't understand the connection. Then I answer, "Sometimes. Sometimes I feel lost in a sea of people most of whom seem just as lost and frustrated as I am. That's when I throw in the towel, or rather, my dancing shoes, and go home." I force out a smile at this joke. She smiles too.

There's a pause, just long enough for us to collect our thoughts in our own ways. She then begins, "You asked me after we started our 'catching-up' part of the conversation, what we, the family do." She pauses and then continues, "You didn't ask me how often we did those things, going to visit our respective parents, or vacationing at Disney World, or all those things that seem fun and stuff families do. But we don't do them that often. I haven't seen you for ten years, haven't told you anything for ten years, and what I just listed as the things we have done are the only things we have done for those ten years. All the many other days during those ten years we didn't do much at all. Before the little girls came to this world, I had to work hard and for long hours and had to get adjusted to this new country. Richard was hardly around because of reasons I told you, with his work and everything. And finally when we did see more of each other there were other struggles too. Not the least having a first child."

"But, " I add, surprised at the urgency of this interruption, "You get to struggle together. You get to help each other out. That's why we get married, so that the strength of a couple is infinitely greater than the sum of the strength of the individuals." I almost made that a question, but that same urgency turns it into a statement, a declaration.

She looks away for a bit and then, having returned her gaze on me, replies, "Is it so simple?" Then after another pause she says, "I wonder why I feel so lonely when I hear about other people's travels. I wonder why I felt so lonely when you asked repeatedly what I do on weekends, where I must have gone with my family. Even about what sort of movies I went to see in the theater if not children movies. I don't know why I felt so lonely suddenly." Now searching in my eyes, she asks, "Do you know?"

I freeze for a while. I suddenly notice how quiet it is again in this old brownstone house. Then I remember the exhibit. I say, clearing my throat first, "It seems that you get to realize your dream of becoming an artist." Before I can say, "Shall we go and you show me your work?", she says, "I had to fight for that. It's not easy for Richard to take time off to take care of the kids. It's not easy for him to see me go off alone to this big city. He wanted to come with the kids, but it would have been so expensive to stay here and...." She looks away and says, "And I insisted to come alone. For some reason, after some surprising success in my town, and by luck a gallery owner was at one of my exhibitions, and he insisted on putting my work here in New York. I've been anchored to my family for the past five years, and before that I was anchored to a life I was struggling to get used to. Now when that man said I could put my work here for a discount, I, I don't know, I felt a strange sense of joy, not just being recognized. But. I felt like a boat whose tether to the harbor finally broke and is now allowed, if it wishes, to go into the open sea."

"No," she corrects herself, "I don't mean the open sea. I just mean to turn around, to the other parts of the bay, to see that there are other things in life. Sorry for this bad metaphor; I am not a poet like you, but this is what I feel now after using the word anchor. I asked Richard not to come and let me be this long weekend. He was against it, probably still is. He has been away for longer, sometimes much longer. Sometimes, like I told you, I wasn't sure if he would make it back. I was all alone. But now I have a family, and it was was hard to leave, even for a weekend; almost as hard as when I left my country ten years ago. It was so new, to be away from my daughters, and I cried in the plane even though I was going to see them again in a few days. We may hate where we are sometimes.... We may question and have to struggle with where we are sometimes, but we are also conservative creatures who dislike change."

"But I welcome change," I affirm, "I don't want to walk past another place of bad memory that reminds me that I am still alone, still no one loves me."

She looks at me intently all of a sudden and asks, "Do you think everyone who's married loves their spouse?" And quickly, before opening up the obviously intrusive question I could pose, she asks the second question, "You really think that no one loves you? None of those more than a hundred 'friends' love you?"

I refuse to answer, but let her continue instead. "That university professor I told you was also my best friend when I was still living in the old country. She told me once that people always are looking for what they can't have. I know what you mean when you said you wish things to be different and someone to love you. I was lonely like you before I met Richard. But unlike you I didn't get to meet hundreds of women of whom I couldn't decide which was a girlfriend. Well, you know what I mean. I was just lonely and like all the girls my age wished I could find a man who would love me and take care of me, not in some cheesy ways of a princess and prince charming on a white horse. Just a man in my life who would love me. Not a friend or family. But a man. Do you remember that I told you all this?"

I admit that I can't remember any of this but I give a sloppy nod. She continues, acknowledging the truth of my forgetfulness without being bothered by it, "You felt the same way. You told me the same thing. You told me the details of your life that helped me understand your loneliness. That's why after ten years I wonder how many women you've met, and I wonder how many different varieties of relationships you've developed. Because whatever treasures you've found in those ten years, have led you to maintain this freedom of yours, this freedom to go travel, to meet whomever you wish, to be whomever you want to be without living in the shadow of anyone else or be responsible for anyone living in your shadow."

I want to ask if this is her verdict on marriage, but instead I say, "Then this freedom never freed me from loneliness. When I found out that you were engaged, I felt the world fell apart. Not because I was secretly in love with you, though God knows, my feelings for women are always so messy. But putting that aside, when I found out you were going to come to America and be with someone else to start a new life, I was hurt and jealous precisely because I thought you were on my team of lonely people, you understood me, and yet, you went over to the other team, the team of couples, of no-longer-lonelies." Barely containing my tears of utter self-pity, I continue, "I don't mean to sound accusatory."

"You are not," she interrupts gently.

"In fact, I want to apologize for not being a true friend and congratulating you for having gone to the other team. I am more like one of those people in the old country who were hateful of us because we were going to America to find wealth and fortune while they were left behind to rot under Communism's failed ideals," I say, almost in a monotonous way now.

"But was it really like this? Did your family come to America and find wealth and happiness and everything while those left behind rotted? I remember your telling me that your parents, at least, had to work much harder than they had before and for a lot less happiness in return. You said that. And you had to face a lot of problems growing up in this city of so much pressure and racism and other problems," she says in the most gentle and beautiful way.

I quickly add, "Yeah. Wow, you remember a lot of things! And I went back finally to my old village a few years ago. Almost everyone we knew were very well off since the economic boom started around the time we had left. Sure, you read about how so many people got left behind and the divide between the rich and poor has become bigger and bigger. But at least these old grumblers of jealousy, they were much better off than my Dad, their peer, and their children are millionaires."

Then I understand what she is trying to tell me. I look at her, realizing that all this time I mostly have not been looking at her while I was talking, and say, "At the same time, I hope you realize that my so-called freedom is never really free, never really true, as long as I feel a need to find someone.... A need to have a little half-half boy running around."

I pause and repeat, "I am sorry again I wasn't the true friend I should have been for you. I can only imagine how difficult those first few years were for you, and then the ones afterwards. I know you tried to write to me, telling me that life was difficult. I must confess that I didn't care; that I scoffed quietly at you for .... For deserving your fate because, because you left me. We were a team, I thought. But I guess, it was really me who left the team."

Thank God the light is so dim here that I can't betray too many emotions.

She asks, "Are you always this hard on yourself?" She asks with a smile, not with disconcertion.

I smile too and admit, "Yes, it's part of my inheritance from my Dad and my culture. But it's my way of justifying all that has gone wrong with my life. I've hated life for a long time, especially when I was young. But all the anger has been internalized and turned against myself. I accuse myself of being an introvert, no self-confidence, deceitful, selfish, and incapable of truly loving anyone. But I know that it's probably not that true if I actually have a family that still wants me and looks up to me, that I have some great friends who have stood by me regardless of how ridiculous the actions I have take have been."

"And that you haven't lost me despite everything, that we are here talking, too?" she asks with that smile I remember seeing in the photos that she had sent me while we were corresponding ten years ago.

"I still envy your freedom that you feel is a symbol of your failures and unfulfilled hopes. I am sorry. And I hope really you will find someone with whom you will get what you now desire. But you deserve more than average anything," she says before biting her lower lip a little, losing for a moment her gaze at me. Then she continues, with a renewed smile, "We are still in the same team. I guess being free to meet so many people have have such a colorful life doesn't save you from loneliness. Just as having loving children and a supportive husband doesn't parole me from a life sentence of loneliness either. If your teammate's qualification is loneliness like I had before, you still got me. But you can be whoever you wish and end up being whatever fate has led you to, and you will still be my teammate!"

She has no tears, just a smile. After a seemingly long pause, she moves towards me and gives me a long, tight, and loving embrace. I feel suddenly all my defense mechanisms tumble down and crumble to dust, at least for now. How does someone materialize from a ghost to flesh after ten years? For the first time I can feel this human being, I can smell her hair, I can listen to the rhythm of her body, the music that resonates from the inside. Her warmth, her very existence, is an aria that manages to undermine, bypass, and leap over all my protective defenses, and with history as its soulful melody and this present hug as its truest lyrics, it delivers a slowly blooming orchid of hope in my jaded and tired jungle of self-hate and abject loneliness. After her exhibit perhaps she will return and never come back again. Maybe another ten years will pass before I will see her again. She is, after all, married, a voice softly reminds me. But it doesn't matter, at least not while these defenses are temporarily knocked down. I feel loved; I feel we understand each other's loneliness sharpened by deluded expectations of life. I feel connected.