drawing instrument in years.
These days, Ari takes pleasure in art by looking rather than producing, a shift of mind dating back to sophomore year of college, and a required survey class, Art of the Western World Part I: The Ancient World to the Late Middle Ages. While cramming for finals, he’d stare at textbook images of stained glass windows and manuscript illuminations, with their broad panes of flat colors. He wanted to know about the people who made these. What were their lives like?
He felt especially drawn to the concept of courtly love. In the early days of Ari’s relationship with M, M would quote bits he’d memorized from love poems by Audre Lorde or Thom Gunn while Ari read from Andreas Capellanus’s twelfth-century treatise The Book of the Art of Loving Nobly and the Reproving of Dishonourable Love:
He who is not jealous is not in love.
The lover regularly turns pale before his beloved. His heart pulses.
He rarely eats, sleeps little.
A love easily won is of little value; difficulty makes it valuable.
A true lover thinks of nothing but that which will please the beloved.
When attained, love disappears, like a piece of ice in the fist.
When made public, love fails to endure.
He’s taught these verses so often he knows them by heart. Sadly, they seem especially quaint and amusing in the age of social media, in particular the idea that “When made public, love fails to endure.”
Is that why any exchange of genuine emotion seems so rare now, so hard won? Because so much of our lives are lived in public?
Ari’s convinced that Orwell was right about Big Brother, but wrong about how such an arrangement would be achieved. No one forces us to live our lives under constant surveillance; we happily give away our privacy without coercion or reward. He used to warn M about this. “Every time you stream something, you’re giving up your information to Big Data, to be tracked.”
“Oh, Pooh-bear,”—that was one of M’s favorite ironic nicknames for Ari—“you’re as addicted to paranoia as I am to online amateur porn.”
His neighbor, a single mother with two teenage girls, is tying pink balloons to her porch. She’s hosting a Valentine’s Day party. Her windows are decorated with cardboard hearts printed with messages like “Be Mine,” “Real Love,” and the odd “Not Tonite.” She waves to Ari, asks when M is coming home. Ari’s been spreading the story that M has taken an artist’s fellowship at a colony in upstate in New York for the semester.
“Hard to say,” Ari pants, pretending he’s too out of breath from jogging to talk for long. “He’s having a great time up there. Later!”
It’s an especially chilly morning for February in suburban DC, and the weather makes Ari lonely. Had he accepted his parents’ invitation to visit them this weekend in Florida, he could be running in shorts and a T-shirt. Afterward he’d have to fight for bathroom time with his brother and his wife and their gaggle of chatty children. And at meals, he’d be the odd “plus one,” stuck in wherever there was an extra chair. Maybe his parents had only invited him in the faint hope that M might come too.
Also, if he were in Florida, he’d miss the basketball game.
Still puffing his way down the sidewalk, Ari decides to rouse himself from his usual amiably melancholy state of mind. Today isn’t a day for doldrums. Today he’s going to a basketball game, so rahrah. And today, at this basketball game, he’ll see Justin for the first time in twenty years. Rah-rah indeed.
He’d taken up running in college, when he needed to do something for exercise, and the business of trying to find a partner to play tennis was too tedious. He didn’t particularly like running, but it had its advantages. No racquet strings to snap on you without warning, no balls to chase, no club memberships or court time to pay for, no partners to let you down by failing to show up, just you against the pavement, running as fast and as hard as you could, as if your life depended on it.
One time, while in grad school at Columbia, he’d been running in Riverside Park, and it had seemed to him his life really had depended on it. He’d stopped to catch his breath, near Grant’s Tomb, and caught eyes with a man standing in the trees. A white man in a black denim jacket. Not moving, not even seeming to breathe, staring fiercely at Ari as if he wanted something.
Ari began running again and the man followed, staying in the cover of the trees, but following. So Ari ran faster, and the man ran faster too, weaving in and out of the trees, his sneakers crunching leaves.
What do you want? What the hell do you want from me?
His breath short, his throat closing up, his chest tight, his fingers clenched, Ari cut across an open lawn and under a bridge toward the river. The man still followed. All around them were parents pushing strollers, other joggers, bicyclists, but no one could help Ari, none of them could stop this man from taking what he wanted, if he were bold enough to reach out and take it.
Ari continued running, panicking, unsure of where to go, what to do. He turned haphazardly, zigzagging in different directions, tripped up by a divot in his path, his legs scarred by errant thorny branches, his lungs filling up with the humid air that came off the Hudson River, bearing a strangely cool, metallic scent.
And then he turned around and the man was gone.
He told this story to M, who said, “He was probably just cruising you.”
“Or trying to beat me up and grab my wallet,” said Ari.
M sighed. “There are men out there who just want to get laid, not to hurt you. They’re horny, not criminals. Do you get the difference?”
“Of course,” Ari lied. He has never told M about what happened with Mark. So why does M seem to know about it anyway?
ARI TURNS DOWN HIS FAVORITE STREET, a sheltered cul-de-sac of identical homes, all built in the 1920s from a Sears Roebuck kit. There’s been talk of landmarking them, but the owners are against the move, which would make the renovation process a pain in the neck.
Does Justin still play tennis? He used to have such a graceful forehand.
Some people run listening to music or podcasts, but Ari prefers his ears naked as it were, to be alone with his own thoughts. And to be alert, in case someone’s sneaking up on him. Their area is safe, but he’s read reports of crimes on the neighborhood list-serve, and in that free local newspaper that most people throw away but he reads every Thursday, always turning first to the “crime blotter,” to learn of the odd burglary, a good many instances of car theft, and the occasional gun sighting. One young woman living alone had witnessed a young man bang her front door open holding a gun. The man, stunned, asked, “What are you doing here?” Then he smacked her across the face. She fell down, blacked out. He took a laptop and some cheap jewelry.
Now, when Ari leaves his house, he turns on the burglar alarm, a few lights, and the television. He bought several signs and nailed them up on the fence around his backyard: “Beware of Dog” and “Warning: this area under video surveillance.” But he has no dog. He has no cameras.
HE’D LOOKED UP MARK ONLINE. THE trail has mostly gone cold, but Ari has learned that for many years, Mark lived in New York City,
