At one point I became aware of a man to my left: of you, Elijah, of the way you tapped your hand against your knee, the frayed material of your jeans where your fingers rested, your sandalled feet and the canvas bag that sat under your chair.
Though I turned to look at you a few times, you didn’t glance back. Aside from your hand, the rest of you was very still. I wondered at your stillness. I followed your eyes that were fixed on the tight pool of light around the instrument, on the float and hammer of the woman’s fingers, and as you gazed so seriously, you compelled me to do the same, to really listen to the music.
At the end of No. 4, I felt the fraction of an earthquake open in my chest, and after No. 5, which was tender, then triumphant, the tremor rose, so that when the music stopped, I felt it making its way up towards my neck. And that is when the memory returned to me: the birthday party, the confession, sleeping between my parents that night, their anxious breaths mingling over my face. Before I knew it, my cheeks were wet with tears, and it was all I could do to stop myself from sobbing out loud as the next piece began.
I held my arms tight around myself, attempting to contain whatever it was that was erupting, and finally you turned around and saw that I was crying, and, though it was dark, I could see from the outline of your face that you were perfectly solemn and had registered no alarm.
You put your palm against the sleeve of my shirt, the warmth of your touch radiating from my arm all the way across my shoulders. At your touch, I felt calmed at first, and then, when the music ended and you lifted your hand away, I experienced a piercing loneliness, the loneliness of being the sole inhabitant of my body.
We had our first exchange, which, looking back, is an odd thing for two people to say to one another as introduction, but which at the time felt perfectly natural. Your voice was deep and mellow in the quiet. You took my hand, and the blood rushed to that hand, leaping beneath my skin as if to leap out and mingle with yours, and this is how we sat for the rest of the first half, my heart hammering in my chest as the hour came to its end and the lights went on in the auditorium.
In the sudden brightness I noticed you were very pale, with blue eyes and a beard that was neither messy nor particularly trimmed. I rubbed my face, willing the evidence of my tears to disappear. I pulled my hand away, seeing the people file out for intermission and wondering if anyone had recognised me. You asked me if I would like a glass of water, and I would have said yes, but I worried you would disappear and I would never see you again. Finally, the lights went down and the second half began.
This time the audience seemed restive, people shifting on the shallow wooden benches that angled around the stage. I thought again about the matter of origins. Not so much about where I was from, but of the fact that, in my twenty-five years, I had lingered so little on the matter. How few questions I had asked – none, really, possibly because of the fierce love of my parents, which I had reciprocated without question until that very moment.
While all of this was cycling through my mind, the concert came to an end with an energetic blur of the pianist’s fingers and a triumphant hand-stretching series of chords. The crowd rose to its feet, a meadow of standing figures, and the applause went on for a long time, but there was no encore, so the lights came on eventually and the concert ended.
As the auditorium emptied again we both rose, and you stepped towards me and leaned in, letting other people pass on their way to the exit.
I inhaled your scent: wood shavings and trees that survived snow. A cold-weather smell on this, the hottest and closest of evenings. We considered one another. You fixed your eyes on me as if we were the last two people left in the world. I had never seen a gaze like that, so direct, so unambivalent. Most people like to be in at least two places at once, but you – you were standing there as if roots had grown around your feet. I could hardly bear it, so I said, “All right, then. Goodbye.”
You laughed at this, and, relieved, I laughed with you. We made our way to the exit, and I thought for a moment about inviting you to stay the night with me, but instead I suggested we go to the Korean café for a cup of tea. I hadn’t eaten dinner but I wasn’t hungry, and you didn’t mention food either. We walked up Mass Ave and ordered iced tea, and I asked for tapioca pearls in mine and you looked at me with a question in your eyes, and I explained that I had been introduced to bubble tea in Bangkok, which was a short distance from Dhaka, Bangladesh, where I was from. “A snack at the bottom of your drink,” I said. “Try it.”
You told me things about you, things that seemed irrelevant at the time, but that I recalled later in order to make better sense of our meeting. You said you had once built a fountain out of used water bottles and that, a few years ago, you had participated in a staged reading of Ulysses that had lasted one hundred and seventy-six hours.
I found myself attempting to match the eccentricities of your stories and only coming up a little short, beginning with the story of my parents’ confession, and how afterwards they never mentioned it again, and that I had never asked, because, in the way of children, I knew the subject had simultaneously been opened and closed.
You had recently dropped out of a doctoral programme in Philosophy. Why, I asked, and you told me, as if you were realising something only at that very moment, that it was no longer important to you. What would you do? You weren’t sure. You might travel, see something of the world. Or you might practise the piano for a few years.
You seemed very sure of yourself, in the way you held yourself and carefully paused before you spoke, and yet the things you told me betrayed a man with little ambition or certainty, a man with nothing to push against and hence adrift in a sea of infinite choices.
When I looked around, I saw that we were the only two people left.
I was about to suggest we go somewhere else and decided instead that we should wait until the café closed and we were forced to leave. Your gaze was still fixed on me and I shifted in my seat.
You seemed comfortable with pauses in the conversation but I needed to fill the silence, so I told you about the dig. “I’m going to Pakistan next week,” I said. “I’m going to dig out a whale fossil.” I told you that I was joining an expedition to find the bones of Ambulocetus natans, the walking whale. “We’re hoping to bring an entire skeleton back. The pelvis will tell us a lot.” I matched my pace to yours. Every word came out slow and deliberate. The word “pelvis” sent a charge through me.
I asked about your family, and you told me the kind of story I had never heard before, that is, the story of perfect American people. Parents both professors at Harvard, now divorced but still great friends, three brothers and a younger sister, a house in Porter Square, a grand piano in the living room, lemonade in the refrigerator, a kitchen that smelled of wood and chamomile (the last details made up, but close to reality, as I would soon discover).
No wonder you were lost. With nothing to resist, you floated like a fallen leaf. Then you said, “My grandmother died last month. Every night I go to Sanders and I listen to the music. When there isn’t anything at Sanders, I go to the Boston Philharmonic, and, sometimes, to the movies or to Shakespeare in the Park or to the Hatch Shell.”
I reached out to touch your knuckle with my tea-cold hand. You seemed pleased by my touch, yet you didn’t return the gesture. I told you that I had never been close to anyone who had died. Then I said: “I know this will sound strange. But when I remembered my parents telling me I was adopted, it felt like a death. Like there’s a person I’ve been my whole life and she’s a fake, a ghost.”
“It must be hard, not knowing.”
“I’m afraid of what it means. And I feel alone in the world.”
“Loneliness is just part of being a person. We long for togetherness, for connection, and yet we’re trapped in our own bodies. We want know the other fully, but we can’t, we can only stretch out our hands and reach.”
It was so close to what I had felt an hour or two ago, when you had touched me and then untouched me, that I said, “I think that’s the best thing anyone has ever said to me,” and you smiled, your lips disappearing into your beard.
Excerpted with permission from The Bones of Grace, Tahmima Anam, Penguin Books.
