The folio method:
Ironically, it was on the anniversary of Guy Fawkes' Gunpowder Plot, on Nov. 5, that I extinguished my last cigarette in 1984, exactly 14 years ago, one evening by Grand Central on my way to the subway. I had planned to light up again while waiting to cross 42nd Street, but the streetlight turned green sooner than I planned, and I was forced to postpone the cigarette till I was out of the subway at 86th Street, as I headed to the 92nd Street Y. Would I still be smoking today had the streetlight not changed so soon that evening?
But it changed my life. 1984 and 1998. Or was it '42, '86, '92? Something about these dates, these numbers, reminds me of Italo Svevo, the Jewish-Italian author, whose protagonist tried to quit smoking on what he felt were momentous dates. I do the same thing when I divide my life in equal though arbitrary segments, with a B.C. and an A.D. and a cusp in between. Thus if in 1998 I look back, say, eight years ago to 1990 and think of what I was doing eight years before that, in 1982, uncanny correspondences crop up: I was beginning to write the same book in each of those three years. This is the folio method: when you fold the years, like a sheet of paper, in two. There is also a quarto method, when you split the years in units of four: Thus, for example, my heart was broken every five years--1969, 1974, 1979, 1984. There's probably an octavo method of reading one's life as well. All of them a nonbeliever's way of alleging a pattern, a hidden script, a meaning in life.
Which is how I came to think of her today. I am 48. In 1974 I was 24. Exactly 24 years ago. She--I don't remember her name--used to sit in the front of the class, by the left wall, almost in the wings sometimes, her chair always facing our professor. I would sit at a "respectable" distance, never letting her or the professor out of my sight. I'm sure she must have known. I still remember the thump in my chest on walking in the classroom each time and finding she hadn't cut class. I arrived earlier than usual one day and found her waiting outside. We stood there and held each other's gaze awhile. She smiled, as though that was perfectly ordinary among classmates, or among people who'd been aware of each other for far too long to pretend they were strangers. My roommate, who had met her through other friends, had told me she had spoken about me, told him there was someone in class who liked me. One day the professor walked in and after lecturing awhile said he wasn't feeling well and ended class earlier than usual. I would gladly have spent the remainder of the day glued to my seat talking to her, moving nothing, not my bag, my books, or my legs for fear of putting an end to the interlude. I threw in something about coffee, hardly expecting she'd take me up on it. She didn't. Then, minutes later, she blurted it out. Would I like us to study together that afternoon. It felt odd: studying with a stranger; both of us seated in her bedroom in the afternoon, light streaming in through a window overlooking the Charles. What if she'd meant just that, nothing more? Or what if she meant much more? I made up something about having to work in the library that day. Silence. "I didn't think you would," she added, putting on her coat, never quite explaining what she'd meant by that, though I understood exactly. To some, human contact comes naturally; to others it is learned--like an acquired language, which you speak with an accent.
She never spoke to me again. About two years later I saw her waitressing in one of the coffee shops around Harvard Square. Not a glance, not a word, though we could easily have affected the hilarity of people who meet in an unlikely place and feign a comradeship they never had. She hated me. Hated me the way we hate someone who makes all sorts of overtures and then fails to follow up.
I haven't thought of her in years. I thought of her because I was tinkering with multiples of 12, dividing my life in all kinds of patterns, like someone trying to break a code. And yet, now that I think of it, as insignificant as this incident was, had I only resisted making up that tiny, silly, shallow, timid lie about the library that afternoon, perhaps my life would have taken an entirely different turn, and I would have become someone else.
Perhaps life is what happens not before, but after we miss the boat. What comes before is a shuffling of cards--learning to say yes instead of no, learning to ask when, in fact, it's hiding that comes naturally. No one's supposed to pick the right card the first time. Some miss more than one boat. Others miss a fleet. And some keep missing the point. Perhaps "learning to live" is not just learning to promise never to make the same mistake twice but learning to understand that the boats we missed are boats we never really wished to sail in and wouldn't board given the same chance again.
That is what the numbers said to me today. Tomorrow they'll say something completely different: for example, that human contact--in love, a matter of life and death--is perhaps, I dread to say it, expendable.