table and holding the acceptance letter from Silverwood Music Festival in my hand, I was grateful to be back in Oakland. At least, I would always have my music. It was my consolation, my only hope, the answer to what I didn’t understand and what I couldn’t change.
I helped Margo pack up and move to Fremont and, because I couldn’t face the prospect of more change, stayed in the apartment alone. I woke up in a devastatingly empty place every morning, and every morning I tried to convince myself that I had been right to return to the city. Often I caught myself thinking about the tenderness with which Jeremy held me, how he had made me feel less alone, but each time I forced myself to push these memories aside. It was better to make a clean cut now, try to put my life back together the way it had been before.
My piano piece came as a relief in those early days. Something about those twelve acrobats in Marrakesh had so moved me that I was still thinking about them years later and a continent away. They each performed a solitary act, and yet the effect would only be achieved when viewed in unison. I had never belonged to any tribe, and perhaps I would never be able to, but I could try to put that feeling in my music. I worked for hours on end, sometimes coming out into the dining room to find that night had fallen, and the breakfast dishes were still on the table. I’d reheat a frozen pizza, eat it standing at the sink, and return to the piano.
* * *
—
One morning in August, just before I had to leave for Silverwood, I went to the post office to fill out a hold-mail form. The walk was less than a mile, but along the way I noticed that the little store that sold Ethiopian coffee was expanding into a café, the Korean restaurant my friend Anissa and I had gone to for her birthday had been turned into a sushi bar, and the yoga studio had moved. As I waited for the light at the intersection, I thought about what else had changed over the summer: I didn’t have to fill in applications for teaching jobs in the fall, I was featured in a major music festival, I lived by myself.
Then the light turned red, but instead of crossing, I continued another three blocks toward La Coccinelle. I’m just going to walk past it, I told myself. Nothing more. It would be good to take a longer morning stroll, get a little exercise before the next day’s flight to Boston. But as I got closer to the coffee shop, the terms and conditions of that promise began to shift. If Max Bloemhof is there, I said as silently as I might a prayer, I will go in and talk to him.
When I arrived at the café, I spotted my neighbor Andrew sitting with his laptop by the window. He was working on a dissertation about the upper-class Victorian gentleman’s attempt at constructing masculinity through fashion—a topic that had sounded legitimate, even interesting, when he’d told me about it, but that would seem completely preposterous to anyone back home in the Mojave. In the cozy armchair was Lena, working on her food blog while her blueberry scone sat untouched. And next to her was a kid whose name I had never learned because he always wore headphones and never looked up from his drafting notebook. I stood behind the window, my eyes traveling from table to table, looking for Max. Finally, I spotted his jacket at an empty table under the gilded wall clock. He always liked that spot, because it was farthest from the bustle of the ordering line. In a few quick steps, I went through the front door and was standing at his table. The clinking of a cup behind me made me turn, but instead of Max coming to the table, along came his wife, Evelyn.
They had been married seventeen years. Their oldest son’s age, plus eight months. The marriage had been a mistake, Max had often told me, something he’d been forced into when he realized Evelyn was pregnant. They were both Dutch, both visiting professors in a small college in