She pulled up to the sidewalk in the early evening. It was almost dark, the year approaching winter solstice. A lamp from inside his window shone through the threadbare curtains highlighting the cacti and weeds that grew up along the edge of his triplex.
Old clapboard houses lined the streets, and bits of trash gathered along the chain link fences. She was used to suburbs or dorm rooms. She had never visited another student who lived alone in the heart of a city.
He had asked her if she wanted to study for the final in their Intro to World Literature class. He wasn’t the boy she had been flirting with the whole semester. He wasn’t a boy. He was older, quiet. In small groups, he listened to the other students talk about Petrarch and Hafiz, nodding.
He once asked what she had written about for her in-class essay when he saw that she had received a perfect score. “Guest-host relationships in the Odyssey,” she replied. She did not know what grade he received, but she was sure it was good by the way the teacher responded to his few concise but pointed comments in class.
As she approached the door, she heard the sound of jazz playing, maybe Ella Fitzgerald, she wasn’t sure. When she knocked, the music stopped. He welcomed her in. He wore sweatpants, a loose grey t-shirt. His house was sparsely furnished, painted white from ceiling to floor. Under the paint she could tell the floor was damaged hardwood.
He gestured to a folding table by the window between the kitchen and main room. On the wall between the two rooms, she saw a black and white picture of a man and woman before a window of light. The man stood, leaning over, with a shiny trumpet in his hand. The woman sat, resting her head on his arm.
She thought about her high school boyfriend whom she had dumped but recently started to miss – the way he would put his forehead against hers and talk low. He was in love with her, but she was not with him. She had tried, but couldn’t.
“Tea?” he asked. She nodded. He looked at the picture. “Chet Baker and his wife.”
“It’s so romantic,” she said.
When the water boiled, he got up from his chair across from her and prepared two cups. Their notebooks and large anthologies lay across the table. They had been discussing Dante and Beatrice in Purgatory.
She hadn’t realized that she had been doing most of the talking until he got up and silence filled the room again. It was as though he wanted her to teach him what he already knew.
As he set her cup of chamomile down, she noticed that his ring finger had a slight indent.
“Are you married?” she asked.
“Was,” he said, and said no more. She didn’t want to pry. But suddenly, the bright, bare interior of his place seemed strange, filled with an absence she did not understand, like the hint of words in a notebook erased.
Later, when they finished studying, he played his trumpet for her against the emptiness. She sat half-turned, holding the back of the wooden chair, watching him. He stood in the middle of the large room, not quite facing her. Long, low notes poured from his instrument like dark secrets until she felt compelled to look towards the window that held only a blurred reflection of herself against the night. When he finished, she clapped silently. He shrugged and put his horn back in its case.
“Well, that’s that,” he said.
But for her, nothing was what it was, not even her own heart.