Marianne Szlyk is a professor of English and Reading at Montgomery College. Her poems have appeared in of/with, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, the Sligo Journal, Verse-Virtual, the Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Sheila-na-gig, and Bold + italic,  as well as a few anthologies such as Green Elephant, The Forgotten River and Resurrection of a Sunflower. Her flash fiction has appeared in Mad Swirl and Visual Verse. Her books Why We Never Visited the Elms, On the Other Side of the Window, and Poetry en Plein Air are available from Amazon and Bookshop.   

The Room with a Marvelous View

After Sun on South Street by Anna Lee Hafer

The afternoon light in the apartment blinds Mary as she tries to look out at the marvelous view. Anyway when his parents offered their Airbnb to her and David for free for the weekend, they said that the view was marvelous. All she can see is sunlight. Funny. David is saying that he always remembers that apartment as dim, despite the vast windows and white walls without family photos or prints. Perhaps back then drapes hid the light. Or perhaps it had been a cloudy year, the year he was sixteen, the year he and his father lived alone in that apartment.

Mary realizes that it was the same year she had gone to the university twenty or thirty blocks to the north. She doesn’t think that she ever wandered past that building, but she is not sure. It was so long ago, almost thirty years now. The glassed-in building just didn’t stand out for her, not the way that MOMA did or the subway stations where she and Frankie sang or the brownstone where the old man sketched her. This building – if she had passed it by on some caffeinated walk to see the river and the cliffs on the other side—meant nothing to her. Not until this point, she corrected herself, turning away from the painful view to watch her friend, David, pace from the kitchen to the door and back.

Back then, she might have passed by David and his father, two tall, ungainly men in parkas, their own shadows on the winter-brilliant streets. Maybe not. From what David says, the two men spent the long weekends doing math problems alone together. The son sat on the floor, his bony back against the glossy wall, as he scribbled numbers and Greek letters in his notebook. The father sat upright in the beige armchair, scribbling the steps to some proof on a legal pad. Something about higher mathematics made him sit up straight, not sprawl as he usually did in living rooms. There was a TV, but the building’s satellite showed only strange channels. There was no stereo or radio in the apartment. In the evening they would have recycled the answers to the day’s math problems.

Perhaps once the weak sun went down father and son would have slunk out to the diner that used to be on the corner, the one she had gone to with Frankie once in awhile, the one where they had talked and talked and talked about music and life, devouring food their parents didn’t approve of. Cheeseburgers with bacon, onion rings in ketchup, meat loaf, rice pudding with whipped cream, lime Jello, milkshakes in fluted glasses, washed down with coffee or Coke. Not all at once, though. 

As the kettle on the induction stove shrills, she wonders what she could tell David about her time in this neighborhood. She wonders how she could lie to him or at least tell him partial truths. About how she and Frankie butchered “Wake Up Little Susie” the first time they played it. About how she saw Braque’s The Man with a Guitar for the first time at MOMA.  About how she found peace at St. John the Unfinished even though she wasn’t religious anymore. Not about how the old man liked to sketch her in his room with the skylight.  Or how he convinced her to pose for him. Not about how he took her to Paris where they did not see the paintings she had intended to see. Not about how the airline lost her guitar. Not about why she was at St. John’s in the first place.

But David is still talking about the year he and his father spent in New York, the year his parents almost divorced. She is perturbed to receive his confidences this way, at this length. Even though she’d known him far longer than she’d known Frankie. Who had told her so much more on the day that they met in the subway station. She tucks a strand of gray hair behind her ear, tells herself to focus, even if it’s on her flat boots that keep her standing on this light oak parquet floor. Her boots that should be on the sisal mat next to the front door. Per his mother’s instructions.

David is still talking as he pours her a thimbleful of green tea. She knew that he had lived for a time in Manhattan. She has never heard him talk this much about his year stumbling through this piece of the city, feeling dwarfed by the buildings and the flat gray sky, avoiding everyone, especially those who reached out to him. He rarely talks about himself in depth. Not when they are driving. Not when they are eating at home or when they are in bed with her head on his nearly-hairless chest. She takes the tea from him and nurses it, tries to make each sip last twice as long as it ought to.

Finished, she sets the empty cup onto the counter, on David’s mother’s endless instructions for her Airbnb guests. She has lost the thread. She wants to leave this place that smells of green tea and brown rice, of upscale, lavender cleaning fluids, of guests’ elbow grease. She needs a tumbler full of water, wants to escape to one of the chi-chi restaurants that line the street below. There he would be talking about something else, not his past. Not about how he never spoke for long stretches of his time here. Not about how he never knew about Central Park or the Bronx Zoo or even the river five or six blocks to the west. Once, around the time she left New York, he wandered alone up to the university, the place he feared going. Anywhere would have been better. Anywhere, he repeated. She had never wanted their affair to be serious. And she didn’t want to lose him or his attention anyway. Relationships with deep, troubled men were thrilling when you were young, and she wasn’t young anymore. She was looking for kindness, and David could be kind…kind of kind.

Instead, she smiles sweetly, then perches on the fake leather couch to listen as long as she has to. She is waiting for the words to stop, for the pacing to stop, for the marvelous view to steep itself in darkness the color of Earl Grey or Oolong, the kind of teas she drinks on her own.