The Leaning Tower of Pisa

The Beaver Street Café is where Tom Lemon ate his lunch nearly every afternoon, Monday through Friday, for the past 12 years — since 1974. It was the highlight of his otherwise dreary day. Not that all days were bad, but some were worse than others, and lately, well, it all seemed to be going to hell because buying and selling fortunes, dealing in the misery of money and greed, was wearing him thin. 

Tom was a money man, but he couldn't care less for money. He was a stockbroker on Wall Street and it was fair to say he picked the wrong career. The Beaver Street Café was his hiatus and was just two blocks away and far less busy than the places nearby. There was something he liked about it. The ambience, perhaps, he might say. The humbleness of the building. The smiling neon beaver on the sign. The giant glass picture window that was always decorated for the nearest holiday. Or the more casual crowd that it drew. People that reminded him of back home. Or maybe it was the white and gold uniforms of the waitresses that made them look like hash-slinging angels. Waitresses that were actually friendly which — in New York — was quite the anomaly. 

Tom was a good man. He was also a very depressed man. He was depressed about homelessness and acid rain and space shuttles exploding, on and on. Good people are often depressed because the world is full of pain and filth through which it is very difficult to live, or even to see good, unless one has managed the art of dulling their perceptions or by focusing only on particular things like horses with blinders on. Happiness is the artificial sweetener they put in soda. It will rot your teeth.

Chasing happiness is like looking for gold at the end of a rainbow. It is why alcohol and drugs are prevalent. It is why prostitution is the oldest profession, and thriving still. It is why there are chainsmoking neurotics on antidepressants on practically ever street corner and pharmacies full of new pills that makes billions of dollars. It is why people visit porno theaters and jerk off, or engage in casual sex in sleazy motels, or see shrinks in Greenwhich Village. It is why TV sucks the life out of people who worship at its alter. People will do just about anything to feel good, even for just a little while. 

Tom didn't engage in any of that. But he didn't want to be a stockbroker anymore, for certain. He didn't know what he wanted to do or be, though he was 37 years into life. Maybe he wanted to die. Most nights of the week he thought of hanging himself in his apartment, but the thought of him hanging there for days until someone finally noticed, made him sick. He could practically smell himself rotting. It would probably be the smell that gave him away. There'd likely be rats piggybacking on top of each other until one reached his dangling foot and crawled up his body to eat whatever parts of a person a rat would favor. Perhaps, it was this thought more than any other that saved him. Altough he had never seen a rat in his apartment, he knew they weren't far and they would be attracted by the smell. He didn't want to be eaten by rats. 

One night he tied a noose and it still hangs between his kitchen and his dining room. He never bothered to take it down. He often hangs his next day's suits from it. On the nights he didn't think of hanging himself, he found something decent on TV to watch. An old movie that made him believe in love for a little while. On some Sundays he went to church and began to believe in something more until they passed the collection plate around, and then he believed, once more, that the world was all about money and that everyone was all about how to get it or take it from someone else and horde it for themselves. Everyday there was a collection for something. There was some athlete signing a contract for 100 million dollars. There were taxes on everything. Expected tips for everyone. Money. Money. Money. Money. On a daily basis he watched rich men get richer and poor men lose what little they had. If a man is not getting panhandled, he is surely getting taxed or nickle-and-dimed to death. It is the way of the world. C'est la vie.

Valentine's Day was never anything special to Tom. He was married once, but he would hardly call it a marriage. They went to college together and when she became pregnant, they got married as they were supposed to do. It was a script written by millions of miserable people before them. The child, the sole fruit of their union, however, died before birth and so for a couple years they carried on in their grief until they had it with each other and each other's misery. His ex-wife lives in Connecticut somehwere and is married to a podiatrist, he heard from someone once. She is an architect designing sterile buildings that are cost-efficient because there is no artistry in architecture anymore. They only build lifeless things. Anything worth looking at, worth taking a picture of, hadn't been built for at least forty or fifty years.

But it was Valentine's Day of all days and as he was having lunch as normal, he saw the most beautiful woman he had ever seen sitting just twenty feet from him, or four tables over. She wore Chuck Taylor sneakers. She had a ankle bracelet on her left ankle and wore faded jeans and an oversized striped sweater. She had black hair that was pulled in a pony tail and she sat at the booth by the window and ate an omlette and sipped on a cup of coffee. Occasionally, she drew sketches in a sketch book. Sketches he could not see, but that he imagined.

Tom was by himself, as always, in that nearby table. It was his usual table. His tie hung lose around his neck. He could use a haircut and shave, he thought, catching a glimpse of himself in the silver side of a napkin holder. What a terrible day to meet someone, in the way that he looked, he considered. He couldn't help but to look at her, in fact, he could hardly look away at all. He might use the excuse that he was looking out the window that she happened to be sitting in front of, if questioned by someone, but not one would question it. He had no interest in anything out that window. He had no interest in anything at all except her in that moment. She consumed his attention so entirely there was nothing left for anything or anyone else in the world. 

He wanted to say something to her, despite his disheveled appearance. Something simple and ordinary, yet meaningful and witty. Give her some compliment that didn't sound terribly clichéd or come on too strong. But though he sat only twenty feet from her, he may as well have been twenty miles. He froze and couldn't say a word. He ordered his usual tuna fish on toast with a cup of French onion soup and ginger ale — a pickle on the side, of course. He had never been more captivated by a woman in all his life. Yet, there he sat waiting for his food as she finished her meal, paid her tab, and then abruptly left. It was as though she got up and walked straight out of his heart, leaving a gaping and incurable wound.

She had made eye contact with him once and it came with a complimentary smile. But it was the ordinary sort of smile she might offer anyone. The doorman at her apartment. The cabbie. The waitress when she brought her food and took the empty plate. The man in the street who begged her pardon for nearly running into her. Tom followed her out, telling himself that he would catch up and say something to her, but when he got outside she was gone — lost in a bustling sea of 12 million people or however many it is that walk these streets. How quickly it all had happened is what astounded him the most. 

He didn't stop thinking of the woman. He hadn't seen a more beautiful person in all his life. He heard her speak to the waitress and the sound of her voice, her laugh, her cough, her mannerisms, everything about her matched some ideal he had in his mind that no other woman he had known before her seemed to meet. She was the kind of person one could feel being near, even if you could not see her. One you could smell, even if she wore no perfume. One you could taste, even if your lips never came near her. 

A month or so passed and he religiously came for both breakfast and lunch just in case she was here for either (they weren't open for dinner.) He was always well-groomed and nicely dressed. Never unshaved. He made a special effort to be prepared. He became the most regular of all regulars. He learned the names of all the waitresses, the names of their kids, and even the cooks. Ernie was the owner. He lived in Queens. He was Catholic. Had four kids and a wife named Susan. Her maiden named was DiMaggio, though no relation. Sometimes Tom would miss an afternoon of work just to wait for her. Or he'd call in sick and sit at the café reading a newspaper. Waiting. He reluctantly asked the waitress who had waited on her if she knew her name, or if she had ever seen her before, but the waitress couldn't recall her — even with Tom's detailed description of her down to that anklet  He was amazed that someone could ever see her yet forget her. 

It could have gone on that she never came back and eventually the hope that she would would fizzle and leave Tom even more despondent than ever before and to the fate of that noose — despite those lurking rats. It would be easy to imagine that she was a tourist from Oklahoma, or England. Maybe she was 10,000 miles away and never to return. Maybe she was happily married and had six kids and lived in The Hamptons. New York City is full of such interesting people. Or maybe this was just a one off. An excursion out of her ordinary routine. It could have been any of those things, but as much as fate didn't favor Tom Lemon in so many other things before, those ominous clouds parted for just a moment and fate favored him suddenly like it was an old friend. 

It was a rainy September afternoon when he saw her again. There she suddenly appeared as though she rose up from a puddle in a sidewalk. Not in the Beaver Street Café, but walking a block or so away. He saw her from a cab and yelled for the cabbie to stop. He threw him a crumpled twenty bucks and jumped out before the cab stopped and tried to catch up to her. She just crossed the street and he got caught at a red light so he practiced what he would say as he impatiently waited. The old lady next to him must have thought he was crazy. He knew it might be now or never so he had to say something even if he had to yell it across the street. His hands were clammy and his stomach hurt waiting at that long light to turn. Watching her fade away. She was a fast walker and walked with a sense of purpose. As quickly as she strode into his life, she was walking out of it even faster. Erasing herself from him. It cannot be this way, he told himself. All his life he waited for her and here she was. 

Then that "walk" sign mercifully appeared like a gift from God and he darted across that busy street like a race horse out of the gate. A taxi running the red light nearly clipped him, but he avoided it like OJ Simpson in that Hertz commercial, hopping over luggage racks, sliding up and over its fender. He followed her bobbing black ponytail and saw her disappear into a building. It was a brick four-story building that looked like an old firehouse converted to offices. He ran to catch up and saw her walking up a flight of narrow stairs. He thought to call out for her to wait, but that seemed too terribly desperate. He had the perfect words, he felt, prepared to say to her and he repeated them to himself as he once had repeated the Gettysburg Address to hismelf as a nervous fourth grader once upon a time. But they were falling out of his mouth. He was swallowing them. He was choking on them, letter by letter. 

Maybe she was late for an appointment and him interrupting her would be an annoyance. That wasn't the way to start things out. So he just followed her. She went into a room on the fourth floor. Perhaps it was a doctor's office. A million thoughts ran through his mind. Maybe he could pretend he had a doctor's appointment as well. But what if it was a gynecologist? Or an abortionist? He would pretend he was waiting for his sister. To give her a ride home. Her name was Lydia. He would have to think of something.

But then he got to the door she had entered and there was a heart on it. A simple red paper heart. It was like a sign from God — a promising omen. He cleared his throat as he walked in, nervous as he was. Like he was on the first day of kindergarten all them years ago. The room looked somewhat like an elementary school classroom from his youth with things hanging on the walls and the lights the way they were, absent desks, with folding chairs in a crude sort of circle. There was a table where a coffee pot steamed, populated by a platter of cookies and little sandwiches and red paper napkins folded into triangles. Several people mingled there and casually grabbed something to eat, giving Tom a sympathetic look as he came into the room. There were more women than men. In fact, there were only two men to fourteen, no, fifteen women. There were crate paper streamers hanging in the rafters. Hearts dangling from the flourecent lights from twirly sort of strings. It looked like Valentine's Day, but it was September and the rain began to pour and thunder crashed. Tom looked out the window and down below in the street there was a swarm of colorful umbrellas that looked like walking mushrooms. 

There she was sitting and talking to a woman who held her purse on her lap and who wore big eyeglasses. He didn't know what it was. He assumed it was AA or NA, or something like that. Maybe Love Addicts Anonymous. He had heard that was a thing. There were no signs to indicate, but it looked like some sort of support group so he took his seat across from her in the circle that wasn't much of a circle at all. He quickly realized it was shaped like a heart. Several people said hello to him and shook his hand. A lady gave him a name tag sticker and a marker to write his name. 

Hello, my name is — Tom.

He could have been anyone, but he knew he had to be himself. If ever there was going to be anything between him and her, there couldn't be the slightest hint of dishonesty unless it was absolutely necessary. He looked across the heart to see if he could read her name tag, but it was not clear, or his eyesight from reading numbers all day long at work made it blurry. He didn't want to squint and stare for fear she would think he was looking at her boobs, though he didn't care about boobs. He was no Benny Hill. He'd have to be patient a little while longer. He developed a long game. 

An older lady took charge of the group and smiled obsessively, which was rather grim because it is unnatural to smile so much unless you're trying to bury some harsh emotions. Maybe it was some sort of group for people with bad hearts. Like congestive heart failure anonymous, if there is such a thing, thus, all the hearts in the room. The heart-shaped iced sugar cookies. The red crate paper streamers. The gloomy yet trying to be optimistic looks upon everyone's otherwise dour faces. Or maybe it was some sort of broken heart's club. He zealously thought if so, how perfect it would be. What a perfect setting to meet someone. He could cure her of a broken heart. He could fix her. Whoever it was that broke her heart never deserved her. He could love him out of her. Woo her to the point that whoever he was, he would become a bad memory until he was hardly a memory at all. He smiled, sitting there, thinking it was so. 

But then it was announced by the older woman with the mousey hair and pointy nose who sort of looked like an oversexed librarian, who wore a pink sweater, or was it a shaw? But she opened her mouth as though to nibble on the air and offered the group a big yet emphatic sad smile and said, "Welcome to the HIV/AIDS support group. I am — happy — to see we have a new member." Happy wasn't the word she wanted to use, but it was the one that came to mind. It was all there was. 

She looked at Tom and grinned. Her face was hollow and frozen. Her eyes looked transparent. Then everyone else in the group looked at Tom and in varying degrees of happiness and sadness, smiled and some applauded as though he had walked on the moon. Some left their seats to go shake his hand and to give him a pat on the back for having the courage to come, but Tom sunk in his chair as he had in kindergarten that time he shit his pants and had to tell the teacher to call his mom. Then he looked at his beautiful lady and his heart broke. My God. She has AIDS. 

He didn't have to say anything at the first meeting. He sat and listened. He didn't know anything about AIDS other than what he read in Newsweek, once, or what he heard on 60 Minutes before he turned it over to football. A Denver Broncos game, he recalled. He heard crude jokes in bars. He heard many things. He heard they created AIDS to get rid of the rats. To get rid of fags. That it came from African monkeys and experiments. No one ever talked about the blood transfusions. Those kids that got it. Or the old people. It was always some gay celebrity or someone in a bathhouse somehwere. None of that matters when you know someone who has it. None of that salacious gossip of how, imagining the worst story possible. Occasionally, they talked about people who were not there. There were empty seats where people sat last week or the week before. Some people sighed. Tom sunk further in his chair. He felt like a trespasser. 

There were no signs on the door so to protect the anonymity of the members, he found out. There were groups of people who might accost them. Some rock star on MTV wore a vulgar shirt dehumanizing those who had it. Some religious fanatics say it was God getting rid of gays for living in sin. But despite Tom feeling like a trespasser, he sat there. He drank coffee and ate those little heart cookies. And he listened. 

"Eat your heart out," one of those cookies read.

"We are glad you found us, Tom!" Gloria proclaimed, sort of desperately because of the empty chairs where once sat people. Gloria was a nurse who got AIDS in the line of work. A simple needle stick. She stopped short of asking Tom how he got it because self-disclosure was voluntary. No one had to talk about it if they didn't want to. You could disclose or not disclose anything you wanted, or nothing at all. Not everyone was infected because of some sort of hedonistic behavior. Life happens. Shit happens — just as the bumper stickers say. 

Her name was Mary. A very simple and yet beautiful Mary. "Mother Mary," an older gentleman playfully called her. Tom sat there and admired her. He was no less infatuated because this was her life. In fact, the sadness of her obvious condition only endeared her more to him. It didn't matter to him what she had. She could have the bubonic plague and still he would pursue her. He would lick the fleas off her neck. Kiss the rosie. He would nurse her to health, or comfort her in death. He would follow her. Never revealing that he never had it. He could make up a story of how he got it. She would neber know. She could be dying tomorrow and still he would chase her down to tell her that he loves her — as he knows that he does. Without having a single conversation. Without there being one intentional word spoken from her lips to his ear, or his to hers. Sometimes, it is that way. When you abandon all cynicism in being human and allow yourself to simply feel — it is that way. 

He knew then sitting in that plastic seat in the crude heart of red plastic chairs that he was in love and there was no reprieve from it. Mary didn't share her story, either. But she wept. She sobbed very hard and her face was lost in her white tender hands for a while as others shared their stories. She cried for everyone, maybe a little for herself. And so there he sat, watching her crumble. Watching her be completely human. He realized then that he had never seen anyone be so completely human before. People were always human in part. But never so wholly. Not even his ex-wife when the baby died. When he went into the hospital room and saw her lying there by herself in a stream of cold sunlight. 

He got to speak to her during a break. He managed, after all the pretty things he had rehearsed to say, "Hello." Nothing more. She casually smiled again at him as she had before and said, "Hello," in return. There was something in that hello, though, simplistic as it was, that promised him more. And when the break was over and they resumed the group, she realized that he was looking at her in a way she has always longed to be looked at, but never had been. There is so much in a look. And often there is more in silence than there is in spoken words. Words sometimes get in the way of feelings. There is a universe of possibility in the lulls of conversation that beg to continue. Things to be learned and discovered. Things yet to be that will be and things not to be that will not. There are a million potential outcomes but one inevitability that Tom could not escape, that was the fact that if he pursued her, and she accepted, he would contract the virus that would kill them both. 

So be it, he resolved. He was in love. More than in love — he was madly in love. As they were leaving that evening he asked her to have coffee with him and she said yes. To be more precise, she said, "Yes, sure." So they walked to a place nearby that promised the world's greatest cup of coffee and had a cup. He had a piece of pecan pie and she ate apple a la mode. They sat there in that diner for hours talkng about life. Omitting only the worst of things, the most obvious of which was the virus that brought them together. Tom hoped she wouldn't ask him about it. When he got it. How he got it. He hoped she would just assume he had it so they could be together and he didn't have to lie. 

He never asked her about that day at the Beaver Street Café when he saw her for the first time. He never asked her how she got AIDS. Nor did she ask him. They simply were content in each other and every evening after group they'd go have that coffee and pie. And then it became more. They started seeing each other on weekends and Mary grew to love Tom for the person he was, for the heart he had, and the soul he possessed. What sadness there was in him dissipated and left no trace that it had ever been at all. It is a strange thing, but there was no doubt, without question, it was love. 

They had dinner at an Italian restaurant that neither had been to before the night they made love. The table was covered in a red-checkered cloth and the old wood of the restaurant was lacquered green. On the wall at the table where they sat was a picture in a silver frame of the leaning tower of Pisa. Mary smiled at it heartfully. Her face aglow with the light of a flickering table candle that was nearly burned out. Tom regarded the candle and thought of the metaphor of it. If he was to physically make love to her, his life would be the way of that candle. That candle would be replaced by another. As their chairs would be replaced by others just as they had replaced others who came before them. 

"Do you suppose it will ever fall?"

Tom smiled, startled awake from his trance, staring at that ever-dwindling candle. If there was any doubt in him at that moment it was quickly obliterated by the look in her eyes as she gazed at that photograph. 

"I don't suppose it ever will," he smiled. 

They made love that night with the passion that they were the last two people on Earth, or that they were starved of love for many years. It had, in fact, been that way for them both. Tom because of a lack of interest. Mary because of her overwhelming grief and distrust of others. Neither had been with anyone for years and that dearth of passion was obvious. He couldn't get enough of her, nor she of him and they repeated several times until the orange of morning shone through the blinds that were closed the night before without the forethought of the agape. They lied there naked, twisted up in the sheets that were like shrouds, and he held her in his arms as though that he might fix her if he held her long enough. Or fix himself. He didn't give thought to HIV or AIDS or whatever they wanted to call it. They were just letters to him. They were just a payment he had to make to be with her. It was a payment happily made. 

The next several months passed, each day was a gift. It is a splendid sort of way to live your life, looking forward to seeing someone each day. Being thankful for every day. His job was less dreary as it afforded him the opportunities to take her places. On camping trips. To Vermont at Christmas to see her family. Back to Ohio to see his. They flew to Las Vegas and New Orleans. Whatever it is that she mentioned she wanted to do, they did. He somehow made it happen. After all, her days were waning. There would be a day, who knows when, that she would fall ill and he would have to comfort her. 

Tom himself didn't feel any different. In fact, he was more invigorated than ever. He felt as healthy as he had ever, which he attested to the purity of his love for Mary. He hadn't a sideways thought. No scurrilous desire for anyone but her. There wasn't a temptation in this world that would alter in the least his love and loyalty to her. He asked her to marry him in that Italian restaurant where they had their first date. A man played the violin. The waiter was a happy co-conspirator, planting the ring carefully in the wine glass. She gave him an emphatic yes. 

They honeymooned in Italy. Tom took Mary to Pisa where at night she got to see the famous Leaning Tower firsthand, which was stunning in the lights — 183 feet tall. They were given a pamphlet of the history. How it was built in 1148. That Pisa meant "marshy land" in Italian and how the original architects failed to consider it. How Benito Mussolini was ashamed of it and tried to level it, unsuccessfully. They sat there on a bench and looked at it, hand in hand. It had been five months since they sat in that Italian restaurant and she asked him if he ever thought it would fall. She put her head on his shoulder content and a man on a bicycle passed, his chain humming along, then other tourists walked by, hand in hand. A boy on a puttering Vespa. Then again, as when they met, the silence was brilliant and offered more than words ever could. She turned to him and thanked him. 

"You needn't thank me," he sighed. "You've given me life. It is me who should thank you, darling."

She turned and smiled and then kissed him. "I wanted to be with you from the moment I saw you. I was meant to meet you. I feel that very strongly."

"I feel the same. From when I saw you in the café."

"The café?" she questioned. 

He realized his blunder immediately and that his secret was up. He had never told her he saw her before the time in the support group. He didn't want to tell her. He didn't want her to know that he wasn't infected before they met. He worried she would not forgive him, though he knew he ought to be honest. It was too late for secrets. So he confessed as though the bench was a confessional and she would be as non-judgmental as a priest. 

"I — uh. Well, I saw you in the Beaver Street Café on Valentine's Day last year. I went back to it every day for breakfast and lunch hoping to run into you again. But I didn't see you. I was taking a cab uptown for a job interview when I saw you walking not far from the café, so I hopped out and I followed you. You went into that building and there was a heart on the door. There were hearts everywhere. It was like a sign, you know. A remarkable and beautiful sign — that, at last, I'd found you. And then I found out what the group was for, and, well, I couldn't just leave. It didn't matter. I didn't want to leave. I was already in love with you. You have to understand..."

Mary began to cry. She cried as he had seen her cry in the group. He offered her a handkerchief and she accepted, bawling into it fiercely. She stopped to speak. He took her in his arms to console her and was happy she let him. That she didn't push away. He was happy she wasn't seemingly angry with him as he feared she might be. 

"So you — you aren't HIV positive?" she cried. 

"Well, I woukd assume I am now. As you are. As it ought to be."

She shook her head. "But you weren't HIV positive when you came to the group that day? That rainy September day, as I recall it."

"No, but I —"

"But Tom — I am not HIV positive, either. I thought that you were! But it didn't matter to me, either! I went there because my sister died of AIDS the Christmas before and I went to that group with her before she did. It helped me get through and I felt that I helped other people, too, by being there. When I met you, I fell in love and I didn't care that I would get it."

"We fell in love," Tom smiled. 

Mary began to sob again. Tom leaned back on the bench and took a deep breath. There were no words to say at the moment. They both understood that they had each given their life to be with each other — or so they had thought. But neither was sick and before them they had a full and uncharted life to live together so long as fate favored them as it so obviously had. 

Mary cried on his shoulder. "You think it will ever fall?"

"No. It will never fall. But if you don't stop crying and making the ground more marshy than it already is, surely, it might."

They sat there for a while without saying a word. Watching that tower lean just as it was in that picture. It was beautiful and imperfect. Someone laughed in Italian behind them. And they embraced, in the dark that was suddenly more comforting than it had ever been anything else. 

"I am so happy," she confessed. 

"Anche io, mia bella," he replied.