claire and i are going to koreatown for dinner tonight. because we know you spent the last week going to arkansas restaurants, just to be with us.
we’ll raise a toast,
peter
8/20/02
okay, we’ve exchanged at least thirteen thousand emails without coming out and saying it, and since i’m leaving tomorrow, i’m going to come right out and say it.
it’s about time for our second date, isn’t it?
have a safe flight tomorrow,
peter
ANNIVERSARY
Claire
I think I’ll retrace my steps—but there’s too much that’s happened in the year. There is no way to do it. I’m in college now, still in the city, but part of a lifetime away from Mrs. Otis’s classroom. There’s no way to be standing where I’d been standing, no way to go to Mrs. Lawson’s classroom and stay with her and Sammy. We think that time is the only thing that passes, but it also changes our relationship to places.
So I narrow it down to a spot. I tell my lit professor I’m going to miss my nine a.m. class—she understands—and go down to the apartment I still think of as home and take Sammy to school. It seemed unusual at first to decide to live in the dorms, but I petitioned to be in an international dorm, and the fact that I’m surrounded by people from all over the world seems to make up for the fact that I’m still twenty blocks from home. I only moved out three weeks ago, so I don’t think Sammy’s even missing me yet.
He’s quiet as we walk from the subway to the school—aware of the anniversary, I think, but not of its full meaning. I wonder what’s going to happen when he’s older, what parts of 9/11 he’s going to remember.
After he’s safely inside his classroom, I leave the building and stand outside, in that gap on Sixth Avenue between the lower school and the upper school. As the time nears, a few more people stop and hover, regathering. I wonder about Marisol, and where she is. I wonder if some of the other people here were also here a year ago. I find I can’t remember them, I was so caught up in getting to Sammy and finding my mother.
A year ago, I wouldn’t let myself turn around, look back. Now I join everyone else in looking at the space. Silent, we look at what isn’t there. We are doing our own acts of retracing, so much more complicated than the retracing of steps. We are retracing the lines and windows that are no longer there. We are rebuilding from our memory, trying to do with our eyes open what we usually do with our eyes closed.
At 8:46, bells ring out. And I think, This is the moment I wasn’t here. This is the moment of what I didn’t see. And then, when the time comes, This was when I came out here. I stood over there. This was when.
I still cannot hear a siren without fearing the monumental. I cannot help noticing the airplanes over the city, which I never paid attention to before. Most of the time I manage to forget to be afraid. But sometimes I think, This could be it, and I move forward anyway.
It crosses my mind every day. Sometimes it will be a story I hear on the radio. Sometimes I’ll be walking and will look downtown. And other times it will be like I am seeing it out of the corner of my eye.
I feel emptier this morning. That empty space goes inside. It is not the whole story, but it is a part of it. And the rest of the story is: We love and we feel and we try and we hope.
I can’t help it—I find Sammy’s new third-grade classroom and peek in through the window. I see him at his desk, doing something with pipe cleaners. He isn’t smiling—instead he’s concentrating in that complete, unembarrassed way that kids have. I stay there for a minute or two, watching.
This has to be part of the day, too.
ANNIVERSARY
Peter
I said, “Are you sure September 11th is an appropriate day for a second date?”
And he said, “I’ll see you on Wednesday.”
But the conversation didn’t end there, as it once might have. He paused and said, “Who else would you want to spend it with?”
And he’s right. Probably Claire, but she’s in New York right now. So, yes, Jasper.
I pointed out that it wasn’t even our real anniversary—only the anniversary of the night we were supposed to go out. He laughed into the phone and told me that was great, because now he didn’t have to bring flowers. I pressed the phone to my ear, heard his breathing after the sentence was over. I waited for him to say something else, because if I wait long enough, he always does. He’s like Claire in that way. Whereas I can stay in silences for hours.
We decided that he’d come to visit me in Boston, so I’m waiting for him at South Station. I spent most of the morning—the time I wasn’t in classes—reading the papers, reading all of the takes on what 9/11 means, one year later. I still feel like I should be at home. Maybe standing outside Tower Records. Or with my family.
I haven’t seen Jasper since Claire’s party in May, but it feels like I have. When I find him in the terminal, we hug, not kiss. And before we do anything else, we call Claire, who picks up on the first ring and tells us she was hoping we’d call. She says she’s been looking at the photos of the lights, creating her own little remembrance ceremony. She wishes she were with us, and we wish she were with us, too. Not that we don’t want to be alone with each other. But today, now, we’d also love to be with her.
“So,” Jasper says once we’ve hung up, “what should we do?”
I’ve only been here a few weeks; all I know are cheap restaurants and record stores. I take him to Newbury Comics and buy him the Now It’s Overhead CD because he says he’s never heard of them. I launch into this whole history of Saddle Creek records, then cut myself off, because it’s not really something he would be interested in.
“I don’t really have sophisticated musical taste,” he tells me. “But I’d like to.”
That’s good enough for me.
Next stop is Bertucci’s for dinner. It’s a little too crowded, a little too loud. And even though the papers and newscasts have been full of it, everyday life doesn’t seem to have stopped much to remember a year ago. Not in Boston, at least. I’m worried that we’re not talking, that we haven’t had a chance to talk, and that maybe we’re going to end up much better at emailing than being with each other in person.
“This is strange,” he says, and I don’t know whether he’s talking about us or the restaurant or the day. I wait, and he goes on. “I saw Amanda on my way to class this morning—you know, the girl I tried to give blood with? I don’t think I’ve seen her in at least half a year, but today of all days, I bump into her. And she tells me she was just thinking about me—she’s been thinking about me a lot lately, because I was a part of that day for her. And I understood what she was saying, but the weird thing was that I hadn’t really thought of her at all. I think of you, and Claire, and even Mitchell and his party. It’s like, for most people, that day is about what happened on that specific day, but for me it’s become about what happened right after. It’s not what I saw, but it’s about who I shared it with. Is it like that for you?”
“The truth?” I ask.
He smiles. “Yeah, the truth.”
“The truth is that I don’t know. Because you were a part of that day for me. I was so excited that morning when I woke up, about going out with you. I mean, I was excited about the Dylan album, too, but mostly about you. I was thinking about you when I picked out what to wear, and I was thinking about you when I got on the subway, and I was probably thinking about you while I was waiting for Tower to open. And even after it all happened, I remember thinking that I had to email you, that I had to make sure you were okay, that it meant something that such a big event got in our way.”
“And then, of course, I was a complete a**hole to you,” Jasper says.
“No,” I say. “You weren’t. That’s how you’re remembering it, but you weren’t. When you say things like that—” I stop.
“What?”
“When you say things like that, I wonder if we’re here now because you feel bad. You know, about the first date. That you’re only doing this to be nice.”
That gets a laugh. “I think that’s the first time anyone’s accused me of doing something just to be nice.” He moves forward so that his knees are touching my knees under the table. “I promise you, this isn’t about then. It’s about now.”
I press my knees back into his. “Fine, then.”
“We have an understanding?”
“I believe we do.”
We talk about how strange it is to be away from New York. We both called our parents this morning, as if it were Mother’s Day or a birthday. There wasn’t much to say, except to acknowledge what we should already know.
“I remember on that day,” I say, “one of the city officials—it wasn’t Giuliani, but someone else—anyway, when he was asked what people should do, he said that everyone should go home and give their kids a hug. And while I understood why he was saying that, part of me wanted to say, dude, you should always go home and give your kids a hug. It shouldn’t take the World Trade Center falling to inspire that.”
Jasper shakes his head. “I’m not sure my dad would’ve gotten the message anyway. But you know what? I’m okay with that.”
I know I should be planning the next thing to say—I know I should be trying to tap into all the relationship politics, the signs and signals, that could be at the table. But instead I just talk and listen. And he just talks and listens. Maybe in the end that’s all we need. Talking and listening.
At the end of the meal I say, “Hey, do you want to come back to my dorm room and watch Cabaret?”
He pushes back his chair in surprise and says, “Whoa, this is so Sliding Doors.”
“I actually think it’s more like Groundhog Day,” I reply. And then I explain: In Sliding Doors, the whole idea is that every choice you make, and every single thing that happens to you, changes the trajectory of your life, and once you are put on that trajectory, there is no way back. But Groundhog Day—which, I tell him, also happens to be a much better movie—says the opposite. It says if you mess up or make the wrong choice, you just have to keep at it until you do it right.
“So we’ve been stuck in the same day for a year?” Jasper says. And I know what he’s thinking—that the day in question is September 11th, which would be somewhat lunatic, because that day is about much, much more than our date going right.
So I shake my head. “No. The fact that it all happens in one day in Groundhog Day is a comedic conceit.”
“Oh, sorry. Silly me.”
I swat at him with my napkin. He fends me off with his water glass. Water spills everywhere.
“What I’m saying,” I continue, “is that the trajectory can loop around. If we want it to.”
He leans into the table and presses his knees against mine again.
“Do we want it to?” he asks.
And I say, “Hey, do you want to come back to my dorm room and watch Cabaret?”