Free Landscape With Traveler by Barry Gifford

solitude. He was puzzled, but there was no making him understand. There was no need to place any blame.
    Back in New York, I saw him only rarely for the first few months, but saw no reason for discontinuing what could very loosely be called a friendship, and we have continued to see each other. The role he has given me, vis-à-vis his boys of the moment, is that of partner in past adventure, which is an easy and even a pleasant one to play. He is at an age now when verisimilitude profits from a support which I am happy to provide. I’ve grown rather fond of him over the years. He was, after all, my companion—perhaps even the catalyst—in one of the happiest and ultimately most enlightening periods of my life.

 
    30
    As
    To
    Ada
    As to Ada, Ilya not infrequently would sing the praises of America to her and tell her she should pull up stakes and move to that country of opportunity. When she would ask him, as she always did on these occasions, why, if it was such a wonderful place, he was so stubbornly eking out a bare existence in Europe, his replies were evasive and inadequate. However, by the time I had decided to give up my hopes (by then mere wishes) of conjugal bliss and return to New York, Ada also began seriously to consider America as a possibility.
    So I returned to New York. It was time, and the breakup with Ilya was not the only—not even the main—reason. Being a foreigner forever is not my idea of life as it should be lived. The people were all perfectly nice and charming, but in the end I kept having the urge to stand up and yell, “I’m Francis! Not just an American, but this American!” One does tend to think in groups—Italians, Greeks, Parisians—but not face-to-face (well, maybe with Parisians, but still . . .). I thought of my friends in Greece as Vienoula, Vangeli, Nicola, et al., not as Greeks, and I didn’t see why to them I was an American first and only secondarily me. Besides which, I like America.
    I found an apartment in the Village, a fifth-floor walk-up on Hudson Street. Since I lived in the rear, it was quiet, or would have been but for the family that lived above me. Down the airshaft I could hear everything that went on in their apartment. Actually, most of the time it was quite amusing. One afternoon I heard the two kids, Marie and Anthony, who were about eight and seven, teasing their mother, who was always after them about foul language. “F!” shouted Anthony from the bedroom. “U!” shouted Marie from the living room. “C!” shouted Anthony. “Marie!” shouted their mother from the kitchen between them, “if you say ‘K’ I’ll beat the shit out of you!”
    I got a job as a secretary in a hospital (all dancers should know how to type) and settled into a routine. It was good to be working. I had determined as always never to have another love affair—though I didn’t then suppose I’d really stick to that decision, and that I’d come to enjoy it—and so had wished Ilya well (he, too, had by this time returned to New York and was living not far from me). We were friends, Ilya and I. It was much better that way. All this I wrote to Ada.
    That sounds more clean and sudden than it was, as though I woke up one morning and said that’s it, no more, I am giving up sex. It happened, of course, simply as a progressive diminution of interest—the only way it could happen to someone as self-indulgent as I who satisfy even the vaguest of my desires. I go along full tilt until I notice that whatever it is doesn’t give me pleasure any longer, or that what pleasure I’m getting from it doesn’t outweigh the effort of doing it. So with school, piano, dance, guitar, and much, much more. “Dr. Schweitzer, we do not play with the same toys all our lives,” said Galli-Curci. So with sex. I’m no less interested in it than I ever was, but I’m not willing