Ragged Man

The moment attention’s seed-pearl strand snaps between eye and mind, I’m looking out when reading, not down and through, as I did in Virginia, one March day, the letters of Woolf open on my lap, afternoon wind high in branches of old oaks, cold in gusts among leaves palely sheathed—and there you were—skin vivid, deep brown, your stride the gliding bounce of a virile man, moving between two rows of trees that lead up the rise to the Italianate mansion that was the Big House.

One tangle of synapses blurted the distinctness of your shirt tails, flapping, another your frayed-below-the-knee dark trousers, and then the mind said, Why are his feet bare? They were moving you fast over winter-hammered grass when, behind one broad trunk, you were gone, vanished into watery light. Seconds had passed. In the zero of not knowing, I arrived at the door, stepped on the porch, walked down the path. Life had carried you through a seam in air.

Twenty-seven years later, ex-husband, I typed your name into Google. We hadn’t talked in that long, but I’d seen you, as happens, on a corner in New York outside a Japanese place, and you saw me. My last image of you—dun overcoat, hair a shade too long, your eyes blinking hard, as I tipped my umbrella down. I clicked on a page, gone now, devoted to Maria Callas, in resplendent grief, singing an aria from Butterfly, I think, out of tinny speakers and there, clear as notes on a score, your dates, 1948–2007, “always in my heart.” You had been gone already for five years. I hadn’t known, though someone did. Who? Though I can clearly recall that late August-Maine-2007 moon, full and silver-tipping black ocean waves, a coloratura evening, I felt no signal from you in Miami, then, why should I, as the fist in your chest broke open.

I found your brother online, offered my need for details. Yes, periodic rages. A final, lost job. Time with your sister. Homelessness. Notice of your death had reached the family only weeks before me. He wanted to know how I knew. He was retrieving the certificate that would say, months later, you’d been found in an apartment, dead of alcoholism, yes, but not on dirty asphalt. Like the moment after reading, I hadn’t known. I’d been taught not to recognize what’s familiar, moments of weird surprise. Stay in touch, we say, when we’re afraid someone will travel great distances through what separates us, and they do.