Pale Trilogy

The first one was named Brigitte and she had hair the color of a crow's wing, so black it turned blue where the bar light hit it. She sat two stools down from me at a place called El Toro Rojo, which was not red and had no bull, just a neon sign shaped like one that buzzed like a trapped fly. I was drinking rum because the beer was warm and the bartender, a kid with a face like a closed fist, didn't care either way.

She ordered a gin and tonic and didn't look at me when she said, in Spanish that had gravel in it, "You're staring."

"I'm not," I said. "I'm looking at the bottles behind your head."

"You're a bad liar."

That was true. I've always been a bad liar, which is a strange thing for a man who has spent most of his life telling stories. You'd think the two would go together. They don't. The best liars I've known were accountants and priests.

She turned then. Her face was long and pale, the kind of white that burns instead of tans, and her eyes were the same dark as her hair, so you couldn't tell where the pupil ended and the rest began. She had a small scar on her chin, old, silvered. I noticed it because I notice things like that. It's a habit I can't shake, cataloging the damage on people.

"You're not from here," she said.

"Nobody's from here."

She laughed at that, a short sound, more breath than voice. "I am. Born six blocks from this stool."

"Then you know the beer's warm."

"I know everything about this place." She lifted her glass. "That's why I drink gin."

We talked for an hour. Maybe two. The bar emptied out around us and the kid with the fist face wiped down the counter and pretended not to watch us. She told me she taught piano to children who didn't want to learn and that she could hear a wrong note from across the house. She told me her mother was German and her father was from here and that she had never been to Germany, never wanted to go, that the cold there was a different cold, a cold that got into your bones and stayed.

"You've never been," I said. "How do you know?"

"My mother tells me. Every winter. She says the cold here is a joke. She says we don't know what cold is."

"And do you believe her?"

"I believe she's cold." She finished her drink. "That's not the same thing."

I walked her home because she let me. The streets were wet from rain that had already stopped, and the lights from the windows made long yellow shapes on the pavement. She lived above a bakery that was closed, and the smell of bread hung around the doorway like something waiting.

"You can come up," she said. "But I'm not going to sleep with you."

"I didn't ask."

"You were going to."

She was right. I was. I went up anyway.

Her apartment had a piano against one wall and books stacked on the floor because the shelves were full. She made tea and we sat on opposite ends of a couch that sagged in the middle, and she talked about her students, about a boy who could play Chopin but couldn't read music, who learned everything by ear and couldn't explain how. "It's like he's translating from a language he doesn't know he knows," she said. I remember that line. I remember it because I wrote it down the next morning in a notebook I keep for things I don't want to forget, and I still have the notebook.

I left before dawn. She was asleep on the couch, curled toward the back like a comma, and I put a blanket over her and let myself out. The bakery below was starting up. I could smell the ovens, and a man in a white apron was pulling a metal shutter up, and he looked at me the way men look at other men leaving buildings before sunrise. Not judgment. Recognition.

I didn't see her again for three months.

The second one was named Kirsten and her hair was the color of wheat left too long in the field, that pale gold that looks almost white in the sun. She was Danish, or her grandparents were, and she worked at a gallery near the port, selling paintings to tourists who wanted something to hang above a couch they'd forget they owned. I met her at a party I hadn't been invited to, in a house with too many rooms and a host I never found.

She was standing by a window, holding a glass of wine she wasn't drinking, watching the street below like it was a movie she'd seen before.

"You look bored," I said.

"I'm not bored. I'm waiting."

"For what?"

"For the party to end so I can leave without being rude."

"That's not waiting. That's hiding."

She looked at me then, and her eyes were the color of the sea on a cloudy day, gray-green, nothing you could name. "You're one of those," she said.

"One of what?"

"Men who think they're clever."

"I don't think I'm clever."

"That's worse."

But she smiled when she said it, and we spent the rest of the night on a balcony that overlooked a courtyard with a dead fountain, and she told me about Denmark, about the flatness of it, the way you could see for miles and miles and never see anything different. "It's beautiful," she said. "And it's boring. Both things are true."

"You miss it."

"I miss the light. It's different there. Softer. Here the sun is like something with teeth."

She asked about me and I gave her the short version, the one I give everyone, the one that's true but not complete. I was between things. I was always between things. I wrote for a living, which meant I wrote for money, which meant I wrote things I didn't care about and cared about things I didn't write. She listened without nodding, which I appreciated. Most people nod. She just looked at me with those sea-colored eyes and let the silence do its work.

"You're sad," she said.

"I'm not."

"You are. It's fine. I like sad men. They're more honest."

We went to her place that night. She had a bed with too many pillows and a window that faced east, and in the morning the light came in and turned everything gold, her hair, her shoulders, the sheets twisted around us. She made coffee in a French press and we drank it sitting on the floor because her table was covered in canvases she'd brought home from the gallery, things she was supposed to be cataloging.

"I don't want you to think this is something," she said.

"I don't."

"Good." She sipped her coffee. "Because I'm leaving in the spring."

"Where?"

"Back. Home. I don't know. Somewhere that isn't here."

She left in April. She didn't tell me she was going. I found out from a friend of a friend, someone who knew someone at the gallery, and I went there and the girl at the desk said Kirsten had gone back to Copenhagen, or maybe Aarhus, she wasn't sure. I stood in front of a painting of a field and looked at it for a long time. It was the kind of painting that was trying to say something about emptiness, and it failed, but I liked it anyway.

The third one was named Marisol, and her hair was the color of coffee with too much milk, that light brown that isn't quite anything, that changes depending on the light. She was Mexican, from the north, from a town she described as "a place where the wind doesn't stop and nobody asks why." She had a laugh that came from her whole body, that shook her shoulders and made strangers turn around.

I met her at a bus station, of all places. I was waiting for a bus to take me to a city I had no reason to visit, and she was sitting on a bench with a suitcase at her feet and a book in her hands, and she was crying. Not loudly. Not the way people cry in movies. Just tears running down her face while she kept reading, turning the pages like nothing was happening.

I sat down next to her. I didn't say anything. I just sat.

After a while she closed the book and wiped her face with the back of her hand and said, "You're not going to ask me what's wrong?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because you're reading. People who read while they cry don't want to be asked."

She looked at me then, and her eyes were brown, warm, the kind of brown that makes you think of kitchens and afternoon light. "You're strange," she said.

"So I've been told."

We talked for two hours. The bus came and went. Neither of us got on it. She told me she'd left her husband, that she'd been driving for three days, that she'd stopped at this station because she couldn't remember why she was running or where she was running to. She told me she had a sister in the capital and that she was going to stay with her until she figured it out. She told me she didn't love her husband anymore, hadn't for years, but that leaving still felt like cutting off a hand.

"You don't have to explain," I said.

"I know. I want to."

We walked to a café near the station and drank coffee until the sun went down, and she asked me about my life and I told her more than I meant to. I told her about Brigitte and Kirsten, not by name, but the shapes of them, the way they'd come and gone. She listened and didn't judge. She just nodded and stirred her coffee and said, "You collect people."

"I don't collect them."

"You do. You find them and you hold them for a while and then you let them go. Like stones. Like you're checking if they'll float."

"And do they?"

"No." She smiled, and it was sad, and it was real. "But you keep picking them up anyway."

She stayed with her sister for a month and then got her own place, a small apartment with a balcony that faced a courtyard with a fountain that worked. We saw each other sometimes. Not often. We were both careful, both aware of something we didn't name. She got a job at a school, teaching history to kids who didn't care about history, and she said it was the best thing she'd ever done.

One night she called me, late, and said, "I'm not like the others."

"I know."

"You don't know. You think you do, but you don't." She paused. I could hear her breathing. "I'm not going to leave."

"You don't have to promise that."

"I'm not promising. I'm telling you." Another pause. "But you have to decide if you're staying."

I didn't answer. I didn't know how. The silence stretched between us, and I could feel her waiting, and I could feel myself wanting to say something true, something that would make her stay on the line, something that would make her believe me.

But I've always been a bad liar.

"Marisol," I said.

"Yes."

"I don't know how to stay."

She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, "I know," and hung up, and the phone went dead in my hand, and I sat there in the dark of my apartment, listening to the silence, thinking about all the women I'd known, all the ones who'd come and gone, all the ones who'd left before I could leave them.

And I thought about the notebook, the one where I wrote things down, the one where I'd written Brigitte's line about the boy who could play Chopin but couldn't read music, and I wondered if I'd write this down too, this moment, this silence, this woman who'd told me she wasn't going to leave and then hung up the phone.

I didn't write it down. I didn't need to. Some things stay without being written.