Say Emily

A short story.

It’s raining. It’s always raining. The cobblestone path through the central park in town is slick. It’s still light out, but the day is almost done. The one streetlamp in town, on the corner of Meridian and Main, has just turned on. The light coming off of it makes the minerals and crystals embedded within the cobblestones shimmer like pennies falling from heaven. 

There’s a large evergreen fir at the far end of the park in town. The tree is flanked by stout, healthy coastal oaks. The bark of the oaks is shockingly white in the dusk. But the fir is dark and getting darker with each moment. 

I’m walking on the shining path, closer and closer to the fir. Directly behind the fir, there’s a bar on Meridian avenue. I can hear conversation and laughter pouring out of the open door. Warm, orange light from within the bar floods the sidewalk.

The wind begins to blow. I’m not here to go to a bar. Lately, I haven’t been that thirsty. It’s November 7, 2014, and I am searching for a cigarette butt in an ashtray just outside the front door of the bar. 

I walk around for hours in this small town. I see the same people working at the tchotchke shops and cafes. I know some of them by name. Some of them used to call me names in school. But we know each other now. 

During the day, even when it rains, it’s incredibly pleasant in town. But when the sun gets low, and the one street lamp flickers on at the corner of Meridian and Main, just outside the boundary of the central park, something changes. The air gets thick. People have a slight panic in their eyes. Everyone, with reserved haste so as not to alarm each other, moves towards the light. Towards the bar. Towards home. If you’re lucky enough to be in the light, you get to watch your space fill with relieved faces. You stay warm.

After hours of walking around this small town, I’m approaching the ashtray. It’s a small, metal can with a clean logo-stamped sandpit at the top. I walk past to see if there’s a good cigarette in the mix — the kind a young woman would light and upon misjudging how long she had to wait for a driver, might extinguish.

I see a potential candidate, but I’ve passed the ashtray. To try to inspect the cigarette, I’d have to double back — which would look suspicious, especially to the two men in pastel polo shirts, dock shoes, and khakis sitting right next to the window. 

I cross the street, away from the bar, and back into the central square. I’m walking towards the streetlamp on Meridan and Main. That is when it hits me: a bold and gentle piano plays a few notes. Emily...Emily.

I forget about cigarettes and the men sitting in the window. I stare up at the lamp, bathing in its light, listening to this mysterious and subtle song playing from nearby. I feel rainfall on my face. There are hundreds of rainbows in the halo of the lamp.

I am forever stuck in that sequence whenever I hear the song. No matter how many years I put in between that moment and the present, I can snap into that early twilight if I just hear her name: Emily...Emily. 

You would think that time would and should wash away the clarity and sharpness of the moment. If anything time has focused the moment. Had you asked me five years ago what “Emily” makes me think of, I’d have not included the walking or the shameful bit of searching for discarded cigarettes. But the distance between me, now, and me, then, has squeezed out my ego like a sponge-bearing soap; I have used the suds to polish the memory and bring out its true nature. 

But what needs to happen to make a memory stop? What thin line separates the memory from the rest of your life? If a memory is so powerful and clear, what happens to make the slack of it run into darkness and obscurity? If I could live life diving into memories without ever creating new ones, I’d surely go mad. 

It’s not that anything bad happens, but even when I extend a memory beyond its moment by really plunging the depths my memory changes. When I extend the moment beyond the halo of the lamp, the story I tell myself contorts. 

Whether the song came from a car or the open double doors of a second-story flat just above the old dairy building off of Meridian, I cannot tell you or even myself—truthfully.

But here’s how I like to imagine the memory.

I feel rainfall on my face. Out of the corner of my eye, there’s a light that flickers on in a second-story window. It’s the old dairy building across Meridian. Its walls are adobe plaster, white and pristine. The window on the second floor is barred with a dark wrought iron cross. 

At the moment that my eye catches the light in the window, the silhouette of a man appears. The shadow hangs in the window. I turn away from the lamp, and suddenly the music gets louder. He opens the window inward, then pushes the cross outwards. The sounds of the jazz trio are flying across the street now. The man rests his elbows on the window sill.  His head just barely peeks out in the cold rain. He looks up and down Meridian, but he doesn’t see me under the light of the streetlamp.

His face looks familiar. I can see the wrinkles of a man who has watched his whole life, squinting. His short white beard is well-groomed. I see his lips moving, a smile creeping on his face and exposing more dramatic wrinkles in his eyes and forehead. He turns away from the window and disappears from sight. 

My face is wet from staring at him, and I feel colder than I ever have.

I cross the street. I’ve never done anything like this before. I’ve bummed. I’ve hitchhiked. I’ve borrowed money and skipped town like a cartoonish noir character, but I’ve never knocked on a stranger’s door after watching them watch the town.

I’m not sure where the front door is to the apartment. I think it’s this door. It’s an oak gate with a wrought iron design of leaves and thorny branches. The metal roses carved and set into the wood are in bloom. The longer I look at each petal, each thorn, the desire to open the door grows.

I am nervous, almost aroused at the possibility that anything could happen — not in any sexual way, but in a way that makes me feel cinematic. That I could be so moved by a piano motif as to knock on a stranger’s door, nostalgic madness in my eye. It’s the stuff of the big screen, of devilishly handsome men twice my age looking for their lover of yesteryear. 

It’s simple enough if I leave it there. There’s some distortion, but there’s still clarity. Through it all, of course, I hear “Emily.” That’s the clearest part. But was I actually aroused? What a curious way to recall the memory of standing in front of a stranger’s door. As a young man who moments ago was going to pluck a spent cigarette out of an ashtray and hang around the entrance to a bar, being aroused by standing on the precipice of an introduction is, quite frankly, a terrifying prospect. Was I so depraved at the time, so longing for something else, that the excitement of meeting someone new was sexually stimulating? 

I have another memory. This one’s from school. 

There’s no music, but I’m sitting in a plastic chair, slumping down under the weight of my awkward teenage body. The will to carry myself is low. It’s French II Honors. The instructor, a beautiful academic who dyes her hair a dark shade of auburn but not frequently enough to hide her mature grey roots, peers out over the class. Her voice is low. I can hear the wetness of her mouth and lips when she pronounces the words. But as I’m looking at her mouth, she zeroes in on me. Her stare, her undivided attention for those few moments is terrifying. Exciting. Arousing, even. For the first time, I am aroused from feeling the burn of eyes, the analysis of my body—entirely asexual but still an analysis. Jacques, she said. Ça va? And in my adolescent arousal and fear, I say, “Je suis excité.”

The french language is not as simple as adding an accent to the end of an English word, as much as I’d like to believe. The instructor’s mouth goes sideways. She shakes her head. Her eyes grow hard. Class, be sure not to use excité unless you are trying to communicate, well, that you’re horny. The class erupts in laughter. Or is it a subdued breathy chuckle? Alors, Jacques, she says over the din of the class. ‘Tu n’es pas vraiment excitée.  Tu es ravi. Tu es ravi. Non?’

I knock on the gate. No one answers. I wait for a minute or two in the rain. The streets are empty, but I still hear “Emily” playing. Every time I think the song is going to end, it just starts again. And at the top of the piano’s solo, I open the gate. The hinges squeak when it first moves, but it gives way. As I push the gate wider and wider “Emily” begins to play louder. I peek my head past the threshold, half expecting someone to do the same. But there is no one at the gate. Beyond the threshold is a cold, damp corridor that opens up to a courtyard garden. A small fountain bubbles with rain in the center. I move down the corridor towards the courtyard, the bouncing piano solo reverberating and echoing in the passageway. As I come closer to the courtyard, it grows and grows. How could such a large courtyard exist in the town I’ve known my whole life, the town I’ve scoured as a boy and skulked in as a young man? 

All along the walls, great succulents and orchids hang from heavy planters and sheets of soil held tight by wire and burlap. String lights with great glass bulbs the size of pomegranates hang from the walls, too. There’s a wooden balcony that overlooks the courtyard. Two sets of stairs on either side. Two doors, impossibly symmetrical, on the balcony. Each door holds a bronze rose blossom knocker, glistening in warm light. The wood is dark, faded. The salmon-colored tiles below my feet are slick. I realize the fountain is overflowing.

I am in a world unknown. The air is still and I’m afraid to move forward. I lurk in the shadow of the passageway. The excitement of lurking on the precipice of the courtyard, so sacred and separated from the rest of life, is intoxicating. But perhaps more scintillating is entering — to no longer hide and watch, but to be in it.

I step one foot from across the passageway. I can feel the warmth of light wash over my foot as it crosses the threshold. The water is warm. It seeps through my shoe. I transfer my weight to the forward foot, and I hear a slight squish sound, bubbles leaking out the seams of my shoe. 

The two doors fly open. “Emily” is in full swing, the piano gliding and flying through the chord changes. The air is electric. Men and women, paired off arm-in-arm walk down the staircases on either side, first one couple on each side, then another, and another, and another — each more dazzling and elegant than the last. Modish, tight hair for the women. Even tighter, slicked with pomade for the men. Black tie. Ball gowns. Timeless, flowing, floating down the stairs. Raindrops stain the pink and red dresses.  They arrive in the flooded courtyard, the men on one side and the women on the other. All smiles, blushes, and teeth. The women curtsey, the men bow. Then, they dance.

Like automatons of a different life, the couples waltz around the courtyard to “Emily” — precise and unaffected by the rain. Perfectly in time, even hitting the drummer’s accents when he whacks his brush on the tight snare drum, they move around like they’ve done this a million times. Water splashes all around their feet and ankles as they dance, sparkling in the light for just a brief moment before falling to the tile. Two men, both donned in three-piece wool suits, one grey and one brown, spin their partners simultaneously. The women’s dresses unravel like blossoming flowers opening and closing with the passing of days. 

I hear the melody played for the last time. The song is ending, and I know introductions are due. But I am a trespasser in this courtyard. How can I explain what I’m doing, especially if I reveal myself after they haven’t noticed me? Perhaps it is worse that I didn’t come forth. I step one foot back. I remain in the shadow of the passageway.

The song is winding down, the drums are simmering and the piano climbing up and down an altered scale to provide just enough dissonance, just enough conclusion, to satisfy the listening.

The couples bow again, the men holding the women in their eyes like nothing else in the world has ever mattered. 

The music stops. Just the fountain and the trickle of rain on the flooded courtyard.

The men move back up the stairs. Their heavy Florsheims clip-clop in the shallow water like horse hooves. The women remain standing, moving to either side of the central fountain. 

I believe, depending on the night, that I turn around at that moment. That something overtakes me at that moment. A gut feeling creeps slowly over my whole body — that this is not right. “Emily” is irrefutably tied with that memory. As the song ends, so too does the memory. I don’t remember walking, introducing myself to the women, drinking muddy drinks with cobbled ice served by men in wool suits, running up to the doors in a drunken stupor, and slamming the bronze rose on the door to demand what the name of the song I heard was. I can’t remember any of it. 

I leave the courtyard, slinking away into the shadows. My sneakers are waterlogged. I move silently through the threshold. It’s November 7, and I am searching for a cigarette butt in an ashtray just outside the front door of the bar. That’s all.