The Stranger Game. Peter Gadol

cardboard sculpture.

      The taller and older man solicited the younger man’s reaction: What did he see? A landscape, the younger one said. Hills rising in the distance, like when one looked north in the city—do you see it? Hills spackled with low-lying homes. He speculated about how it was made, and the older one recalled something useful about decoupage, then chuckled. He said he didn’t know what he was talking about, he was talking out of his ass, which (I noticed when I looked over my shoulder) prompted the younger one to pat the taller man’s behind. They were new lovers, I decided, and it was the younger one’s idea to spend a day off at the museum because the older one had written in his dating profile that he felt equally at home in museums and sports arenas, and the younger one had said, Well, let’s see about that. Should we start with an exhibit or go to a basketball game?

      They continued holding hands as they shifted left toward the next work. I slipped in front of the collage. The younger man had a way of tipping back his head in laughter no matter what the older man said. The older man—older by fifteen years?—gestured with his free hand, making ever-wider enthusiastic circles and then, suddenly, pointing at one corner of a photograph. The younger man was looking first at his new boyfriend, then the sleepy portrait of a teenager slouching back on a bike seat. These roles were fine for now, mentor and acolyte, but what would the younger man teach the older one to keep things even? Here, listen to this song, I love this band. Hey, let’s go camping in the desert next weekend, you did say you’d go camping.

      The men were quiet when it was only the three of us in the elevator, me staring the whole time at my shoes, and I wondered if with this proximity I was breaking the no-contact rule, even though I said nothing, never met their glance, and preserved a safe distance following them out of the building and into the courtyard. I waited one stoplight cycle before crossing the street after them and assumed I’d lose them, but they were easy to find checking out the food trucks, settling on the one selling healthy salads. I didn’t actually want the sesame noodles I bought one truck over.

      There wasn’t anywhere to sit, so the two men crossed back to the museum plaza and perched at the edge of a planter. For now they were protected in new romance, but maybe the older one had been single so long, he’d become set in his ways, and he was annoyed by a flaw he’d observed lately in the younger man, that he refused to acknowledge when he didn’t know enough about a topic (especially politics), because he probably thought expressing a strong opinion was better than offering no opinion. All of our lives were chaptered, which the older man knew well enough; maybe the younger man did, too. But if the older man was writing his fourth or fifth chapter, and the younger only his second, would they last together?

      Memories now: Ezra and I making out in an apple orchard when we were twenty-four. Napping in the afternoon in a hotel abroad, a late plate of pasta, red wine, willfully getting lost in the canal city at night. Ezra the easily distracted sous chef unevenly dicing shallots, more interested in amusing me with an account of his day, the crazies who had come into the store, how he’d write them into the novel he’d never finish because there was always so much to add. Ezra coaxing James the Cat down from our one tall tree in front (James was first my cat, then our cat)—Ezra cradling James toward the end, knowing we’d have to put the poor guy down. Ezra the troubled sleeper, slipping back into bed after a four a.m. neighborhood walk, thinking I wouldn’t notice, but how could I not notice? I’d pull his right arm over me and hold it and say, You’re not going anywhere now—

      My phone vibrated in my pocket, our studio assistant reminding me about the conference call with contractors that I was now late for. And then I noticed the older man staring over at me. I was playing the game all wrong. I had neglected my subjects. I hadn’t observed them closely enough to forge a connection. They remained elusive, and instead of trying to achieve greater empathy, I had waded into my own reverie.

      As I headed toward the street, I looked back one more time: the two men were standing now, giggling about something, the younger one tipping back his head, the older one with his right hand pressed flat against the younger man’s stomach, then patting his abdomen. You, you’re impossible, come on, let’s get you something else to eat, and I could use a glass of chardonnay—what? It is not too early. Let’s get you a sandwich and both of us some wine and we can sit and watch everyone go by—now, how does that sound?

      THE ESSAY I FOUND ON EZRA’S DESK HAD RUN EIGHTEEN months earlier in an online journal known for its literary travel writing, much of which was posted by guest contributors. It immediately went viral. Usually the articles were accounts of glacier hikes or reef dives; there were columns about what to see when you only had three days in a river city, that sort of thing. This particular essay—the author’s bio stated only “A. Craig is a pseudonym”—read unlike any other filed under the rubric Road Trips. It was titled “Perro Perdido.”

      Late in the autumn of my life, I came to the realization that I did not like myself very much. I had been teaching literature at the same college for thirty years and not written a new lecture in half that time, my disengagement only surpassed by that of my students. For many years my research sustained me, but the midcentury realist authors whom I once cherished and to whom I was forever linked as a scholar had become odious tenants whom I seemed unable to evict. My romantic life was likewise jejune. My very last affair ended unceremoniously while driving home from a party. I was doing what I always did, which was to run through all of the new people whom we’d met, issuing an acerbic group critique. The too-tight skirts, the pop politics, the overall idiocy and decline of serious reading. I was especially good (I thought) at mimicking voices and was mocking someone’s recitation of her weekly cleansing routine when my girlfriend said, Stop it, please. Why do you always have to be so mean about everyone? But I’m only trying to amuse you, I said. Well, stop it, my girlfriend said, it’s getting old. But I pushed it and said, Oh, come on, you love it when I— No, she said. I don’t know why I ever encouraged you. Stop, please, she yelled again. I said stop! By which she meant stop the car. I’m suffocating, she said, I need air. She got out and walked off into the darkness. I never saw her again.

      So I found no fulfillment in my work, experienced increasingly briefer runs at dating, and also diagnosed myself as the kind of snob I’d loathed as a younger man. Jogging in the park in the morning, I became inordinately irked by the women who nattered away on their cell phones while speed-walking, by the men who wore sunglasses even when it was cloudy; I found myself interrupting colleagues during meetings to correct their pronunciation of ex officio (It’s Latin—with a hard C, please); I looked down on the drivers of luxury sedans and mothers in parks with sloppy toddlers and overweight people eating ice cream.

      The truth was I was achingly lonesome. I would come home to the house I’d once upon a time hoped to share with a lifelong lover and keep as few lights on as possible to avoid feeling overwhelmed by the rooms that needed repainting and the warped cabinets and the general lack of wall art. How lonely and alone I was, drinking, masturbating, drinking more until I fell asleep in front of cooking shows. At least in the morning I had my routine, somewhere I needed to be, a position of some respect. Then the worst possible thing happened: I came up for a sabbatical, and because I was entitled to it, I took it.

      I winced when I read about Craig’s relationship to his house. It was easy enough to picture him padding around empty rooms, with too many hours he couldn’t fill, with no plan for his time away from his college. He wrote that he slept in later and later each day. He started going to neighborhoods in the city where he wouldn’t run into anyone he knew and where he could sit in cafés for hours and solve crosswords. He noticed he wasn’t the only one in any given coffee shop staring at a book without turning the pages. When he stopped off at the grocery store on the way home, he stood in silent confederacy with the other people purchasing single portions of lasagna from the deli. This, too, sounded familiar.

      One evening, Craig continued, he realized that besides ordering his coffee from a barista, his only interaction of the day was helping a woman retrieve a box of chocolate chip cookies from a top shelf, and it occurred to him, given how chatty she was, that quite possibly it was also one of the few interactions she’d had, as well.

      It made no sense. A city full of people: Why was there loneliness everywhere I looked?

      The