Orfe Read online

  Yuri did most of the talking. Orfe mostly listened. He figured out almost immediately that the most of what went on in her, what was most important to her or cut her most deeply, got told about in her music. So he didn’t ask her to tell him all that much, and he didn’t feel bad about doing so much talking.

  It was a weekend, Yuri said, and that was lucky because he finally keeled over around Sunday evening. Orfe had a practice session and he knew better than to ask if he could listen in. “I always knew better,” he said, “and I could always do better. With her. It wasn’t even a choice, I just did it, it was what I wanted to do, there wasn’t anything else I wanted to do, except better. There isn’t. Never will be. It’s so great. . . .”

  Yuri never pressed the word love on Orfe. Telling her his feelings didn’t matter, telling her his desires or her attractions. He didn’t even kiss her until he knew that was what she wanted to do, which he knew without her asking. Kissing her, he said, wasn’t like the first move to get her to bed; in itself it was enough. Not that he didn’t want her in bed, but—everything about Orfe was enough, and more than enough, in itself. There didn’t need to be more. There was more, but that wasn’t what mattered. What mattered was what was there, at the time, at any given time.

  * * * * *

  Yuri had dark hair, tightly curled and worn longish. The curls hung like the tendrils of grape vines. His eyelashes were thick and dark. Yuri had a way of looking right at you, right into your eyes, when he talked to you, as if he didn’t want to miss anything about you. He moved tall, loose. Sitting, he relaxed into curves. His clothes smelled faintly of tobacco, and he was always lighting up, blowing smoke, a habit he picked up in rehab. “Otherwise you might go nuts,” he said, “or I thought I might, which is about the same thing.” Yuri danced tirelessly, alone or with a partner or in a circle. He played soccer in the park—a swooping wing. He liked ocean swimming and cooking—Chinese was his specialty, and soups.

  Yuri was the kind of guy who, when he’d made you a dinner and the two of you had washed dishes afterward and dried them and put them away, would remember to scour out the sink and sweep the floor. He liked to work and talk. If you wanted to stay on at the store after it closed Saturday noon and sort the sales slips and pass them to Yuri so he could enter totals into a calculator, that was great with him, or if you wanted to sit and watch him play in a pickup soccer game, that was fine too. But he’d call out French vocabulary words for you too, or help you sort out index cards for a research paper or talk about the effects of different corporate structures on middle management morale.

  The only thing Yuri wasn’t was ambitious, and, as he said, Orfe was ambitious enough for both of them and all their children too. “I plan to be able to be self-sufficient,” Yuri said to me, “but that doesn’t mean I have to be that. It’s enough for me that I don’t have to be dependent. If you get me. Yeah, you get me, you know exactly what I mean, you’re good at knowing what people mean—however badly they might say it. Aren’t you? C’mon, Enny, you can admit to me what you really know about yourself.”

  If Yuri chose you to love, you knew he could love you more than anybody else would. To win his love would be the best thing that could happen to you. You would love him more than you could anyone else, and better, the best. Yuri would never leave in your mouth the stale taste other old loves had left, going bad, drying up, giving way.

  Yuri could have had anybody, and he picked Orfe. Once he picked her, there was nobody else for him. “It’s the only thing that makes sense in the world, she is. Y’know? I mean, if there isn’t Orfe—for me to love—then I can’t handle the world, or anything, and I don’t even want to. But there is and I do and I do, so everything’s okay. In fact, everything’s great. Can you stand it? Yeah, you’re tough enough for happiness.”

  Of course I wanted Yuri. I named my desire what it was, right from the first. But I never wanted to take Yuri away from Orfe, I would never have wished Orfe the grief of losing Yuri. So that, while I wanted him, I didn’t hope he would want me. I learned about love from Yuri.

  * * * * *

  It took a while for Orfe to understand, to figure out the truth, as she put it. At first she thought Yuri was a friend. A better friend than most, a really good friend, the kind of friend who—when they were together both of them were more able to be who they really were, each was more able. “Like you, Enny,” she told me.

  It took her a while to figure out the truth about Yuri.

  He was different from every other friend she had ever had, she learned that. She didn’t know if he started out different or got that way, growing slowly into it hour by hour of the time they spent together.

  They did what friends do, either just the two of them or in a group. They hung around together. They told the stories of things that happened that day, explained ideas, argued, asked questions, found out the kinds of things you have to hang around together to find out. Who always crosses with the lights, for example. Who finds and gives presents. Who likes peanut butter cups. Who worries about dolphins. Who worries about the Middle East.

  They spent hours in the living room of Yuri’s boardinghouse, watching old horror movies on late night TV, eating popcorn, and drinking apple juice. Orfe hung around while Yuri gradually cut down on cigarettes—down to two packs a day, a pack and a half, a pack; down to ten, nine, eight—until he’d broken the habit. She liked it that he wouldn’t deny that he liked the taste of tobacco. And she liked his way of mismatching his high-topped sneakers, pairing red and black, purple and green, black and purple, red and green. She liked the way he ended up eating three quarters of a pizza they had ordered to split between the two of them, picking the olives off when he moved over onto her half. Yuri almost never said anything about her music, but when she played he always listened. Intently.

  It was her songs that told Orfe what she should, she said, have known all along. When she started writing Yuri’s Dreams, she said, she started to suspect what the truth had been all along. What the truth had to have been all along, or she could never have written those songs.

  She didn’t know if she could ask him to kiss her (and she wrote a song). She thought that if she didn’t find out, she would waste away with wondering (and she wrote a song). She thought that if she found out what she didn’t want to know, she would drown in grief (and she wrote a song). Until finally she asked him, “What do you think it means that there’s nothing that doesn’t get turned into a song, into music, inside me?” and he told her, “You do love me, if that’s what’s worrying you. And I love you, if you’re wondering—there’s no question about that.”

  Once she knew she loved him, Orfe said, she felt that she knew what was going on. It made sense. So that was that.

  For a while. For a while they went on in the old way, just with new knowledge. For a while they continued hanging around together, just the two of them or in a group, whenever they could. Orfe couldn’t go to work with Yuri, he couldn’t go onstage with her; unless she slept on the living room sofa at his rooming house (which she did more and more often, it being more and more often too much trouble to return to my donnitory), they were apart for the sleeping hours. Otherwise they were together. They were as close as any lovers except that, for a while, they weren’t lovers.

  “What do you mean, ‘for a while’?” I asked her.

  She shrugged, she wasn’t sure, it didn’t matter.

  “No, I mean, days? a week? a month? seven years?”

  “Do you want to hear what he did, after a while, or not?” she aksed. “You were there, you already know how long, if it matters. I was right there with you.”

  “Orfe, you were so much in love, nothing anybody said or did could penetrate the—glow. It was great, seriously, but you weren’t exactly in communication. If you don’t believe me, ask the Graces.”

  “Do you want to hear?”

  I did.

  Hungry was Orfe’s word for how she felt, at that time, about Yuri, hungry for the tastes of him.
But she didn’t dare, because Yuri seemed to talk a lot about what a high love could be, even without sex, without the sensual stuff, an incredible high. “First the spirit,” he said to her, “then the flesh. There’s a sequence.” Orfe nodded her head and poured herself another glass of juice or popped herself another bowl of popcorn; she didn’t want to rush at him, and she didn’t want to take any part of it away from him, and besides, he knew more about love than she did. “I wouldn’t want him telling me to hurry up with music,” she said. “So listen to what he did.”

  What Yuri did was save up enough money to take the two of them away to the beach for a week together, alone. He rented a little house; he asked Orfe to take the week away from her work and she agreed; they took the train out together, a single suitcase between them. What Yuri did was give Orfe a week at the ocean’s edge, just the two of them alone together, with nothing but loving to do.

  * * * * *

  When they found an apartment they liked and could afford, they rented it—a one-room-with-sleeping-alcove apartment, across from the park. They furnished it with a mattress, pillows to sit on, a small kitchen table and two stools, a couple of lamps, a couple of Indian madras bedspreads for curtains, a few posters for the walls. They were lovers, living together. Yuri went to work and came home, sometimes to cook and clean, sometimes just to change shoes before going out to watch a rehearsal or a performance. Orfe wrote her songs and rehearsed them at the studio, played gigs, played the streets when they needed money, and came home, sometimes to cook and clean, sometimes just to wait for Yuri to get home.

  One night we were all sitting around the apartment, eating Chinese takeout on plastic plates from the Goodwill store, with Vivaldi on the boom box. We all used chopsticks, with varying degrees of skill—except for my boyfriend of the time, whose name was Tommy. Tommy ate with a fork. He probably got more to eat than the rest of us, because we were pretty clumsy with chopsticks, except for Yuri, who handled them adeptly. Yuri was the one who had taught us how to hold the two narrow pieces of wood and how to manipulate them so we could pick up chunks of food.

  The dinner was set out on the floor in its carryout boxes: fried dumplings with dipping sauce, spareribs, rice, chicken with cashews, tofu sautéed with vegetables, pork with broccoli. We spooned food onto our plates and then sat on the floor to eat, hunched over, plate in one hand and chopsticks in the other—except for Tommy, who had a fork in one hand. We talked—about Dylan and Morrison, about Charlie Chaplin and Charlie Chan and “Charlie’s Angels,” about one thing and another, until Yuri said, “I want to marry Orfe.”

  Orfe didn’t say anything.

  “Well, hey, congratulations, Orfe,” Tommy said.

  Orfe was watching her chopsticks as they chased down a cashew. Her face was hidden.

  “What does Orfe want?” Grace Phildon asked.

  “Dunno. I just asked her,” Yuri said.

  “You mean, just now?” Raygrace demanded. “You mean, what we heard, that just now, is you asking her to marry you? That’s your proposal? What kind of a nut are you?”

  “I just thought of it, because this feels so right,” Yuri said. His brown eyes were surprised. “Was this the wrong time, Orfe?”

  Orfe looked up then and you could see how much she loved him. “It’s not bad timing,” she said.

  “Why would you want to get married?” Tommy asked. “Unless she’s pregnant?”

  Willie Grace rolled her eyes at me. I laughed. Tommy glared at me. I glared right back at him.

  “I didn’t say I wanted to get married,” Yuri said. He reached out his chopsticks and picked up a dumpling, as easily as if the chopsticks were his fingers. He dipped it into the sauce and then ate half in a single bite. He dipped, then ate the second half. “I said I want to marry Orfe.”

  “Big difference,” Tommy said, sarcastic.

  “Yes, it is,” Yuri agreed. “Don’t you want to get married?”

  “Of course not,” Tommy said. He turned to me as if I had accused him of something. “You knew that,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes at Willie Grace.

  “You plan to get married eventually, don’t you?” Yuri asked.

  “Well, sure. Have kids, a family, all that. When the time’s right. Later.”

  “Later?”

  “Yeah, when I’m settled into the right job, the right life-style, the right woman.”

  “That’s how I feel, except simpler,” Yuri said. “All I want is the right woman, and Orfe’s her.”

  “But you’re too young. You can’t be much over twenty-one—or maybe closer to twenty-five? How old are you, eighteen? Never mind, that doesn’t matter, the point is that you’re young, you’re going to change.” Tommy jabbed his fork at Yuri to underline his point. “And who you love is going to change too.”

  There was a silence in the room.

  “Sorry, Orfe,” Tommy said. “I didn’t mean it personally.”

  She kept her head bent down, hiding her face.

  “But it’s true. Everybody knows how unreliable love is, you see somebody and you like her looks and boom—what we call chemistry. Freud called it the sex drive, you know, the drive to reproduce. Reproduce the species, that’s what he meant. That’s all love is.”

  Across from Tommy, Orfe and Yuri sat on the floor. They weren’t even touching except barely their knees, and they weren’t even looking at each other; but they proved that everything that Tommy was saying was inadequate.

  “I think,” I said, figuring that since I’d introduced Tommy to the occasion I ought to see that he didn’t ruin it for everyone else, “people fall in love because they don’t want to be alone. I don’t think it’s about reproductive urges. I think it’s about loneliness.”

  Grace Phildon said, “Except, love can be about the loneliest place to be.”

  “But that’s not what you think about when you fall in love, is it?” I pointed out.

  “I don’t recall thinking about anything,” she said, smiling. “I recall a real shortage of thinking. Lots of kissing.”

  “Followed by morning sickness,” Willie Grace said, “followed by a baby that could cry all by itself and dirty its diapers all by itself, followed by—surprise, surprise—the other half of the bed being empty. Non ocupado, he having vamoosed.”

  “That’s better than having him stick around getting uglier and uglier on account of his life being ruined and it all being my fault,” Grace Phildon answered.

  “Better than being married,” Tommy echoed, his point proven.

  “I sometimes wonder,” Raygrace said and then, “Oops, sorry,” as a piece of tofu fell onto the floor. He picked it up, still with chopsticks, and scuffed on his knees over to the wastebasket. He dropped it into the wastebasket and returned to the circle, still on his knees. He smiled around at everyone.

  “Well? Wonder what? What is it you sometimes wonder?” Willie Grace demanded. “You started to say something.”

  “Oh. Just that there are different kinds of love. Platonic love, romantic love, erotic love.”

  “Can you add marital love to that? From Mars, god of offensive warfare,” Willie Grace said. “A joke,” she explained. When she and Raygrace had combined households, he had brought a couple of boxes of books with him. She was reading away like crazy, she said; they couldn’t afford a TV, and with her rehearsal schedule she couldn’t manage a relationship, and he was studying all the time he wasn’t playing music. So what else was there for her to do but read his books?

  “Since it’s power that women look for in a man,” Tommy said, “getting married young is dumb. Young men have no power, nothing real—not even star athletes, with futures in the professionals.” Tommy played football. “Everyone knows power’s what women want. What turns them on.”

  “And here I thought it was money I was after,” Grace Phildon laughed.

  “Money’s power,” Tommy said impatiently.

  “Everybody’s full of crap, as usual,” Willie Grace said, looking at me and
Tommy. “You don’t have any power, so why does she love you?”

  “I don’t,” I said. “You knew that,” I told him. He was looking tight around the mouth and harried around the eyes. I knew part of what was bothering him. He’d been looking forward to a once-only evening, with rockers or punks or Deadheads; probably he’d hoped for an orgy. Something he could impress his friends with. “Nobody knows anything about love,” I decided.

  “I do,” Raygrace said. When we stopped laughing at him, he kept on insisting, “I do. Love is when you really want to give to someone else, give feelings and thoughts, help, pleasure, all of it, everything you can,” he said. His round cheeks flushed, but he held his ground.

  “What does that have to do with marriage?” Tommy demanded.

  “Giving is as selfish as any other pleasure,” Willie Grace argued, ignoring Tommy’s question. “You give to make yourself feel good. The point is that love is selfish, and if you don’t know that, you don’t know anything.”

  “Everything gets easier when you love someone,” Grace Phildon said.

  “No, everything gets harder, because you care so much,” Raygrace argued.

  “That still doesn’t prove what love has to do with marriage,” Tommy insisted.

  “I want to marry Orfe,” Yuri said, “and that’s what love has to do with marriage for me. It doesn’t matter, though, if you don’t want to,” he said to Orfe.