What I can tell you is I moved back in with my brother
and sister-in-law to cut expenses while I finished my graduate degree at the
city university. Each college was housed in separate buildings, and each
building was built around an open square enclosing benches and live oaks and
crape myrtles, and magnolias that towered to the upper reaches of the second
story.
That day I sat on one of the benches in the square of the
liberal arts building, idly thumbing through the textbook for my Into to Romanticism
course, hoping to find a poem easily translated into Spanish for Doctor Munoz,
who insisted on such exercises to strengthen both of our word-brains as he
called them.
Anissa, who as it turns out was there on a cultural exchange
from Perpignan, sat down at the other end of the bench and stacked her books
between us. My first glance took in her
red espadrilles. What her first glance assessed, I cannot say, but when we did
make eye contact, her smile was slight and her eyes were green and her hair
pulled back into a loose ponytail that stuck out more to the side than behind
her head. I placed my thumb at Keats’ ”When I have fears that I may cease to
be” and asked for her name.
The following week we met at the oyster bar just beyond
the university’s main gate, and she insisted in mostly sure English that I
should—I must—read Triestes Tropiques.
Tuesdays at The Deck oysters on the half shell and beer in small plastic cups
were a nickel apiece. I had two dollars.
If we were not in love, we at least yearned in a way that
obliged us to hold hands when walking across the parade ground, or to sit with
our knees touching when on barstools, or hug each other from behind when the
other was seated and concentrated on the text open on the desk. And when the
lights were turned off and the stars were out, we would allow ourselves to
forget all of our words.
Together by plane at the end of the spring semester we
travelled to Montreal so that Anissa could visit the library at College
Jean-de-Brebeuf because a Professor Hansen maintained several rare monographs
on the Piraha tribe. The pregnancy she
announced to me with tears in her eyes.
We were sharing a large bowl of steamed mussels, but she
kept pushing them back to my side of our little sidewalk table. Her green eyes
filled with tears. “I don’t understand” is the phrase that I chose to repeat. “I
must go home” was her answer each and every time.
Now I stand, shifting my weight, in the lobby of a hotel
on Wentworth Street, waiting for my daughter who is in the city with the Ministere
de l’Education Nationale to finish meeting with local officials. Ladson 2014
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