It was snowing when I saw her.

I didn't know her.

She was standing, almost half-kneeling really with her long brown coat, almost worn through in places, wrapped about her and her child.

Ten oclock at night.

Late.

Her face was an alabaster white. Her eyes tired and shadowed pools.

Her dark hair spilled out over her shoulder and arm. Trailing to almost her waist. Velvet dark.

She held her child to her breast.

Enclosed in the wrappings of the coat, the shawl, the spill of her hair and breath, her lips brushed the edges of the sleeping childs small puffy cheeks.

She looked like a tattered pieta, modeled in flesh along the streets of NY for a modernistic take on the showing of Michaelangelo's works at the Metropolitan Museum.

Until she raised her face and I looked into her eyes......

She raised her face, and as our eyes met, I felt the world slip slightly away.

I had been going somewhere, I knew I had. But where? 

I couldn't remember.

Somewhere.......

Hadn't Claire told me, "a loaf of bread, a half-gallon of milk. Some formula for the baby." ? Her dark eyes soft, pleading. Her dark hair spilling out of her coat.

I remember her voice. 

She was tired, but there was still a softness in her voice.

Not yet the harshness, the hopelessness.

Not yet the things that would come as our life slipped down the edges of that place that middle income people all call poverty.

She had stood there in the snow, clutching the child to her and looked at me. Had smiled as I had walked slowly away. Trying as I was to convince myself that I could find a store, somewhere, and get the bread and the milk and not be robbed before I managed to find my way back to the alley and the small shelter of the dumpster beside the heated vent of the all night laundry.

She had spoken quickly in words that were poetic syllables that my American ears could not properly untangle in the rush of Hungarian sounds.

"I love you."

She had said and then turned back to the child and I had walked away and glanced back over my shoulder.

Walked further on down to the end of the block to the corner and turned again and told myself I could still see her standing at the edge of the alley. But that is not really true.

I was only pretending that I could still see her.

We had met in 1990.

In a discotech off 80th and Garland.

I had been a bartender. It was good money as long as you could hold on to it long enough to pay your rent and get groceries. If someone else didn't get it first, take it away first.

She had showed on a friday night. It had been after ten. The chic crowd didn't often show until almost midnight. Late enough to show up and have a few drinks or drugs on the patio beyond the rush of music and heat of the club for a few precious moments.

The moon had been full.

She had had purple hair.

Deep purple.

Almost black.

Her eyes shadowed pools of mascara and eye shadow. Her cheeks rouged, with lipstick slid over her lips like something red and bright and slick and shiny.

Claire.......

  We had danced. Gyrated and pumped our arms and legs into adrenalized shock. Our hearts beating hard in our chests. I watched her lips curl up into a smile and knew I was lost in her.

She asked me something in Hungarian that escaped me.

I stood looking at her and watching her lips move and her tongue touch the edge of her lips as she spoke and didn't understand a single word. But I loved to listen to her speak.

She laughed.

"Do you want to carry me home? Carry, yes? No. Drive. Yes. Do you want to drive me home?"

And she laughed again and I laughed too. Because I thought it was funny. 

Because suddenly anything in the world could have been funny.

I drove her home and kissed her cheek when I walked her to her door.

I felt like an adolescent.

Like a tongue-tied-tired-untried-and-true-teenager.

I held her hand and let her fingers slip slowly out of my grasp as we stood on the porch and the cars moved somewhere off in the night. The cars made sounds and lights turned red and yellow and green.

Her lips moved and she said something I didn't understand.

" 'Night."

And she smiled and turned away and went inside the house and the door closed behind her.

I stood on the street a moment, watching as the porch light went out. As the lights in the hallway stairwell clicked on and then upstairs clicked on. And a few minutes later when they both went out.

We dated for almost a month before I proposed.

And close to a year before she accepted.

We were married in the Fall as the leaves began to turn and life and vegatation began a new cycle.

It was later that I started the drugs.

It had been a way to escape the pressures I told myself. And then later a way to make a living. Later it was a way to keep the monkey off my back and some sense of calm in my head.

I stood outside the house in the dark. Stood in the driveway and watched my hands shake. Tried to let it get itself done and over with before I went in the house where Claire could see.

Stood in the dark and let my hands shake and waited for them to stop. 

But they didn't stop.

Banged my head slow on the concrete wall of the garage and wished they would stop.

It was two years later that she divorced me.

I had cried and told her I would change, but of course I was lying. I loved her. But I wasn't giving up the stuff for anybody or anything.

She had left me then.

Moving in with Greco and his family.

Greco had been a friend but I never talked to him after that.

It wasn't his fault that he was decent. Couldn't blame him for that. But I did anyway.

  I wound up losing her and the baby. 

She left the country went back to Hungary and so it didn't matter then if I ever pulled myself back together and dried out. But I did. 

I don't really know why.

I told myself I didn't have any reasons anymore to keep going on.

Except I opened my eyes every morning and got up and put on my shoes anyway.

I ate stale cereal for breakfast and caught a bus to work with a cup of coffee that I balanced in my hand as the traffic swerved in and out as the streets filled up and the day began.

I worked.

Did clerical work in the Metropolitan Museum and ate egg sandwiches for lunch and looked at the displays, the sculptures, the paintings. Watched the faces of people that came into the cool buildings and saw wonder in their eyes and ignorance, disgust and disdain.

I never saw Claire again.

Sundays I sit in front of the sculpture of Michaelangelo's Pieta, and look at her face........

  ..........But he turned his face away. For just a moment, he looked like someone I knew.

But I don't know him.

But he looked like Roberto. His eyes, the turn of his face as he pulled up the collar of his jacket and turned back into the flurry of snow.

For a moment he turned and I looked into his eyes and I could see him. And I remembered a life I had once had.......

Roberto had been an artist. And we had lived in Spain. It had been glorious when we had first met at the Colloseum in Madrid........

But the baby stirs and I hold my baby closer to me. Wrapping his small body in the folds of my coat. Kiss his cheek and whisper Spanish in his ear....... and my hair falls over his face.

I look up again and see the man as he walks away from me as I stand, kneel, holding my child.

Snow flurries swirl.

But he goes on. As if he doesn't know me.

As if we were memories of other lives caught for a moment.

And then slid past.

//

fade to black
goto credits
end