On Leavetaking

She admires the elegance of onscreen villains departing: the quick, haughty tap of a cane, the swoosh of a velvet cape. Sydney Greenstreet tipping his bowler hat to Bogart at the end of The Maltese Falcon, saying well sir, the shortest farewells are the best. Adieu. Her eyes tend to fall first on the last line of any page, especially if it is a handwritten letter; the few handwritten letters she has kept over the years are each no more than a page long. She underlines, in blue ink, a passage from Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book: “Indeed, one’s attachment to a man depends largely on the elegance of his leave-taking. When he jumps out of bed, scurries about the room, tightly fastens his trouser-sash… one really begins to hate him.” She thinks that if the souls of Sydney Greenstreet and Sei Shōnagon could voyage through space and time to meet, they would surely obliterate one another with the tender wit and beauty of their respective farewells. Or else die all over again from the anticipation. She pictures Greenstreet in his rumpled creme linen suit, giving Shōnagon a little salute before dissolving back into the cosmos. The men in her life have all had flashes of such elegance, but in the end they always scurried, they fastened their trouser-sashes and bungled their adieus. One, not so long ago, wore a fine wallet chain hooked around the belt loop of his trousers—to all appearances more Bogart than Greenstreet, though he had a secret paunch. He bought her two scoops of gelato, she smiled at him with a piece of rum-soaked raisin in her teeth. They stood on a bridge and shyly kissed. The temptation to take something new and lovely and degrade it a little is great. It’s true that the degradation can even be lovely, in the same way she imagines acting in a noir film would be lovely, the giving yourself over to the continuous dream of it, but she finds it hard, impossible really, to stay inside the continuous dream of anything. At some point, he came up with a joke referring to her avid appreciation of gelato, and it was probably around this time that she started to hate him. The joke soon became a recurring one that she tolerated for as long as her attachment to him was still stronger, or at least more compelling, than the hate. Truth be told, she tolerated it even longer than that, until her disgust began to feel necessary and invigorating, and finally one night when, having already tired of her sullenness and her demands, he caddishly proffered one last gelato, for nostalgia’s sake, she loathed him so ravenously that she had to give him what he wanted in order to go on loathing him. Even now, when she sits out in the sun with a dripping cone, she sometimes shudders to imagine she can hear the faint tinkling of that silver chain, which at this very moment might be catching someone’s eye.