Heart of the City (13 page)

AT FIRST Matt had chafed at the callous things that flew out of her mouth. “I’m not warm and fuzzy,” she’d blurted out the other day. “Don’t expect me to cuddle with you.” The way she stormed off sometimes, without any provocation, it was like she
was trying to pick a fight. But after that kiss on their third date—when Sofia totally made the first move—he stopped getting his feelings hurt. “The jig is up,” he told himself. She can be mean. She can make fun of me. She can laugh at me. But she shows up.

Her sharp edges, her neuroses, he began to see, were part of her character, and part of the city’s. He decided to take them no more personally than he did the guff from the sandwich guy at the deli, the one who was always telling him he didn’t have all day to wait for his order.

“I love you,” Matt told Sofia over dinner one night that December.

Sofia stared at him for a long time, but said nothing.

“I think you love me, too, Sofia,” Matt said after the silence, reaching for her hand. “You’d tell me if you didn’t.”

SOFIA HAD begun applying to medical school that fall. Matt felt certain he’d dodged a bullet in the spring of 2005, when Sofia was accepted at New York University’s School of Medicine. When he’d asked about the prospects for their relationship if she didn’t get into any New York schools, she had been noncommittal.

“The long-distance thing rarely works,” she’d replied, with characteristic bluntness.

But now that she’d made it into NYU, Matt had other questions. Will medical school change her? Will she be too busy for me? He thought about his father, a family doctor, who worked from six in the morning until ten at night, seldom seeing the family. Do I want to marry someone whose life may soon look like that? And if they did get married, she’d be in school and training for maybe ten years. Could he earn enough to support them both, let alone, possibly, a child?

The first year of medical school was difficult. Now five years out of college, Sofia wrestled with the volume of schoolwork and struggled to adapt to the rigors of academic life. She was older than most of her classmates, and because she lived off campus—she’d moved into Matt’s apartment that summer—she felt cut off from them. When she came home at the end of the day, she needed solitude. Often she wanted nothing more than to lock herself in the bedroom for a half hour with a crossword puzzle, walling out the world. But no sooner would she walk in than Matt would pelt her with demands for attention. “Can I at least get a hug?” he’d say. In those first few months of school, she sometimes denied him even that. Why couldn’t Matt understand that she needed a buffer between school and home? Why couldn’t he see that she needed a half hour to decompress, to become herself again?

Matt, for his part, saw those first few months as confirmation of all his fears. Why didn’t Sofia understand that he’d already had
his
quiet time? He spent his days in front of a computer. Then he was home, alone, for two hours before she returned from school. He wanted only to talk or cuddle or watch a movie. But Sofia no sooner came home than disappeared into the bedroom. He would accuse her of “going into crossword mode” and stew on the couch until she reappeared. After a half year of seeing each other all the time and staying out late at restaurants and concerts and bars, her sudden unavailability stung.

It was a long and trying year. Matt wanted signals that she was in the relationship to stay—“in it to win it,” as he put it—but the signals were sometimes hard to see. He consoled himself with memories of their chance meeting in front of Carnegie Hall. Something maybe we don’t understand brought us together, he told himself. We can’t just walk away from that.

Then, by the spring of 2006, a thaw. Sofia grew more confident about school, and Matt began to accept that when Sofia needed time alone, it was about her, not him. They’d set up ten-minute
dates to talk or a half hour for TV, and they treated that time as inviolable. Matt also learned that he had a secret weapon against “crossword mode.” If he offered her a back scratch—she loved to be scratched—he could get her to break away from just about anything. These small changes were like the microscopic tweak of a television antenna that snaps a blurry image into focus.

Matt and Sofia had done what Matt had failed to do with Amanda, his onetime fiancée: they acknowledged to each other that they were going through a difficult stretch. Then they groped, together, for firmer ground.

Sofia came to see that Matt wouldn’t hurt her. She came to see that he wasn’t going away, that he was—what was his goofy phrase?—“in it to win it.”

When Matt said, “I love you, Sofia,” there was no longer silence. Now there was, “I feel the same way,” and soon, “And I, you.”

By the middle of 2006, Matt felt ready to marry her. He knew that the way Sofia threw herself into things—the way her minute-to-minute stress levels influenced even major decisions—the first years of med school were a risky time to ask. At the back of his mind, too, was his failed engagement to Amanda. He had rushed into it before either was ready, only to see it shatter.

So he waited and waited. Then, in February 2008, they were watching TV when an ad came on for laundry detergent. In one scene, a smiling mother cuddles a cooing newborn, swaddled in white.

“I want babies.” It took a moment for Matt to realize he’d spoken the words, not just thought them.

“Excuse me?” Sofia looked at him sideways, her long curls falling across her eyes.

“Babies.”

“Um, we can’t have babies until we’re married, Catholic Boy.”

“Then, Sofia, let’s get married. I’ve wanted to, but with med school and everything ...”

Matt waited for the usual retort. But this time, none came. Sofia brushed the back of her hand against her eyelids and cleared her throat. She composed herself, but her voice had an unfamiliar softness. “You’ve wanted to marry me?”

“For two years now. It wasn’t obvious?”

“Matt?”

“Yes?”

“I love you.”

MATT STILL had the ring he had given Amanda. She had returned it when he broke off the engagement four years earlier. Now he took it to the jeweler for an appraisal. He hoped to trade it in, to unburden himself of it. He would need the money for a new ring, for Sofia.

“Sorry to say, my friend, but you overpaid,” the jeweler said.

“But look how big the diamond is.”

“Big, yes, but flawed.”

The jeweler slid the microscope across the table, and Matt stared at the blaze of facets, which he thought looked like a dandelion head under glass. “Those specks, the lines,” the jeweler said. “See? They’re called inclusions. They cloud the stone. Some kinds of imperfection, you see only under a scope.”

Matt nodded, feeling certain he’d understood. He thanked the man and walked out into the cool, gray-gold sunlight.

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GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL

From every corner of Grand Central Terminal, they came. Hundreds of sailors in dress whites careering across the concourse like caged doves bursting into flight.

Jean Westrum, tall, nineteen, and blond, tugged on her friends’ sleeves, grinning. “What’s happening?” she asked. “Someone declare war?”

“Oh, my goodness.” Evelyn fanned her face with her ticket. “Just look at them.”

The others giggled. “A Navy parade,” Margaret said.

“Dear me,” said Barbara, looking suddenly serious. “I wonder if it’s our train.”

Jean looked up at the display board and saw that Barbara, always the responsible one, was right: the 12:45 a.m. train to Boston, the Narragansett, was boarding.

“Run, girls,” Jean said. “Run. Run!”

They would never have come were it not for that ad in one of the Boston papers: a spring special of $5.75 for weekend round trips, including tax, so long as you took the overnight train. No sooner had Jean clipped it from the paper than the five girls decided on a weekend in New York City. They had grown up together in Somerville, a working-class suburb of double-decker homes north of Boston. None had moved far after high school. It was 1951, and Jean, an only child, was working now as an auto-loan clerk at the Shawmut Bank near Fenway Park. Her friends had found similar office jobs around Boston. Like Jean, they lived with their parents. Manhattan was two hundred miles—and light-years—away.

“What will we tell our parents?” Mary had asked. New York, after all, was not the sort of place everyone approved of.

“Tell them we’re going to Macy’s,” Jean said. “That’s something they can’t tell us we’ve already got in Boston.”

“What ever will we buy?”

“Bathing suits,” Jean declared, though the thought had only then occurred to her. And so it was agreed: with Memorial
Day fast approaching, they were going to New York for new swimsuits.

The weekend had been dizzy. The Rockettes at Radio City. Lunch at Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe. A snack at the Horn & Hardart automat, where for a quarter a machine would dispense a fully made sandwich. The tiny room the five shared at the Taft Hotel on Fifty-first Street. The drunks falling out of honky-tonk bars in Times Square. You saw every extreme in New York, Jean thought, and she was grateful for the steadier ways of her hometown.

But to get back—all five had work the next morning—they’d have to make this train.

THE WEEKEND with his family had gone by too quickly, and now Danny Lynch, nineteen, was back at Grand Central Terminal. More than an hour remained before his 12:45 a.m. train north. It was a Sunday evening, and the terminal was empty enough to hear the tap of individual heels against marble. He dropped his Navy duffel against a wall near the ticket booths and flumped to the floor. Drawing his knees to his chest, he looked up at the massive vaulted ceiling. It sparkled, he saw now, with hundreds of gold stars. He had been here before but must have been too hurried to notice. Now the outlines of the fish, the twins, and the hunter seemed darkly alive.

Were these figures really the faces of fortune? Was fate etched in the patterns of faraway suns, cold and unknowable?

It was his first weekend liberty since boot camp. Instead of sticking around Newport with his shipmates, he had traveled nine hours home to Long Island. He couldn’t stay near base, not after the accident. After those sailors drowned, Danny needed to be around people he knew: his parents, friends from Mineola High, his four younger siblings. He never thought he’d admit it, but he even missed his sister Alice, the one who was always calling him Fatso.