Problem Solving

Short Stories

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a short story. I’m playing around also with recording audio for these.

Best,

Sam

PROBLEM SOLVING

1

The confederacy of dog-walking. The confederacy of coffee-drinking.

She has a sweet little dog — a Frenchie that, he feels, is not at all like her. He has a difficult mix. The two of them size each other up when they pass, his mix with back arched, hopping around, the Frenchie in defensive crouch, paw up, ready to swat.

The impulse is to comment wryly on what one’s dogs are doing — but, in this case, neither of them completely understands it. Are they friends? Is his dog the aggressor? Hard to know.

It’s interesting the way status works — the way you sort of know it before you know anything else. He has never learned brands of anything — this has been his amulet against a whole side of life that he wishes to quietly protest. Her white earrings could be real, could be knock-off — he would be the last to know. Her long coat could be a hand-me-down, something picked up from vintage — who knows. But, of course, it is not, he knows that, the assorted regulars at the coffee shop, which is the haunt for both of them, know it as well.

She could not be more self-effacing. The way that she holds the door open for long seconds for someone halfway down the block to enter the coffee shop. The way she stands puzzling to one side trying to work out her order — although she is here almost every day — graciously letting everyone else in line pass her. And yet — and he is pretty sure he is not imagining it — a deference when her order is called out, a little spring in the step of everybody working there every time she comes in.

“Maybe they all know brands and I don’t,” he says to Rosalyn when they’re discussing this question.

“No,” she says very firmly. “She has it. They all know when someone has it.”

***

He objects as a matter of policy to this whole discourse and frame of reference. He’s in a phase of reading a lot of Deleuze and Gramsci. When she spots him in the coffee shop — he’s usually there before she is, the great performance of her entrance and order — she asks him what he’s reading today and, like someone told to put their hands up, he flashes the cover, and she nods along, an elaborate pantomime, he thinks, of somebody pretending to have of course read the book, and then a flicker later, pretending to be too cool to have read it. The trick with her is that maybe she has read it, maybe she’s too cool to have read it — impossible to know. “Yeah, missed that one,” she says, her deadpan. “Anyway, how ‘bout dem Yanks?”

Rosalyn was of course the first one to cross the line. That was her way. Whenever she watched movies, she admired ice queens — Isabelle Huppert, Lena Olin, these kinds of people. “What I wouldn’t give to be like them,” she’d say. But, in practice, she was too hot-blooded for that. “Can I just tell you,” she says, passing by her, “that I have the biggest crush on you. I don’t know how you do it — I bet you’re like a crush machine for everybody who meets you.”

Rosalyn is hovering. Olga — her name turns out to be Olga — is tapping away with one finger on an oversized phone. She seems completely nonplussed, unfazed by what Rosalyn is telling her.

“Great!” she says. “It’s good to tell people when you have crushes on them. I have a crush on you too! Check you out every time you pass by.”

Taking this as an invitation Rosalyn sits down, pats the head of Bull the Frenchie, who rouses himself to inspect the intruder. Olga looking at her a bit wide-eyed, big smile like painted on her features. “Well,” she says, “how can you follow up to that?”

“I don’t know,” Rosalyn admits. “I just want to know who you are, where you come from, what makes you tick.”

“Well,” Olga says, “I come from a very tiny town in Germany that nobody, yet, has ever heard of. And wet weather makes me tick.” She leans across, so graciously, so generously, says, “You. But what is it that makes you you?”

***

Noah, who walks the dog most often, had been the first one to establish rapport with her, but once Rosalyn, as is typical of her, has made her move, crossed lines, he finds himself in a familiar role — the man keeping just slightly to the background, paying for their coffees and pastries, bringing them around to Rosalyn, who is happily chatting away with her new friend.

“Shoot,” Rosalyn will say, with the reminder of the coffees and bags, “we were going to go back to the apartment today. We need to walk the dog too. But you — I don’t know — it just really brightens up my morning to see you.”

“The pleasure is all mine,” trills Olga.

Noah nodding gravely — his role apparently to ground things. Coffee cups in his hands, pushes open the door with his elbows.

***

This feels like peak time with Rosalyn. A similar introduction to her actually — her in coffee shop, him standing, but the weakness in his voice, the real terror about it: in earnest. And now the halcyon age of playing house. The apartment that they can’t really afford in the Village. Airbnb sometimes and spend that time at his mother’s. The insanity of what they’re doing. “Trying to fly,” as she puts it. The times they’ve been in expensive furniture stores in the Village — “an investment,” she says — and they get to the register and he can’t remember exactly how much is in his account, just sort of leaves it up to chance if the transaction will go through, if he’ll have any money left. The way she’ll suggest these different things. “Let’s get a dog.” “Maybe let’s try an open relationship.” Each one contradictory — each one pointing to a very different life path — but it has an inner coherence for her. She wants all the things; wants the fullest possible life.

When she leaves him, there’s a certain consistency to that. She’s changed up so many different things — changed her hair, changed her style, fallen in love with the dog and fallen back out of love with him, and eventually the only thing left to change, really, is Noah.

The guy she leaves him for is adamant that he’s not going to be monogamous — that it’s not going to be a relationship relationship. She’s petting Toto the dog, who seems to know that something is up — has suddenly gotten resistant to her. “I can’t believe I’m asking you this, but can I still be here?” she says. “Since we agreed to be in an open relationship. Since this is part of it — ”

Voice trailing off. Toto sniffing at her finger like he doesn’t recognize her smell.

“I can’t believe you’re asking me that either,” Noah says.

The way the silence falls. They’re so used to talking — talking about everything, everything leading to something else. Just on sort of a conversational basis, they don’t know what to do when a chasm falls, when they’ve suddenly reached something irreparable.

“Well,” she says, and it’s so light that he can’t tell if she’s deliberately hurting him or just thinking out loud, “I can ask if he doesn’t mind putting me up for a bit — since I have nowhere else to go.”

2

It’s very important for Noah to maintain routine — routine feels like some sort of guardrail that he reaches out frantically for. Toto gets his two walks a day, and frequently a third. Coffee acquires an outsize importance. He lies in the deserted bed with the sun coming through and finds himself monologuing out things that used to just be reflexive for him. “Time to get coffee?” he’ll say to himself. And answering back, like from deep space, another voice, also his, saying, “Yes, time for coffee.”

The Village is a surprisingly destitute neighborhood. Lots of lawyer types in the dog park wanting to talk about Russia collusion. Lots of conversations with these hippie-era survivors about what breed Toto is. That’s part of why Olga is so anomalous. That’s reinforced for him when, one day in the coffee shop, there’s Olga, there’s Bull, and then there’s a man with shiny  black shoes and cufflinks. The way that the seats in the coffee shop are contoured wrong for his body, the way that he hunches over his coffee. What does he expect from the world? Noah asks himself. That all chairs have a plush back? That all chairs swivel? In any case, the noblesse oblige of it obvious — Olga waving to everybody she recognizes. And this accompaniment of hers, in his own way playing a grounding role, duly nodding his head, with the slightest of gestures lifting his hand.

When he’s back, Olga by herself, she’s willing to have a conversation with him. The Frenchie sniffing his finger — probably sniffs Toto on him — slobbers on him in the way that he secretly finds disgusting. “Where’s Toto?!” she exclaims. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen him.”

“He’s been bad,” says Noah. “He barks and he bites. His coffee shops days are over.”

“And where’s uh — ”

“She’s been bad too,” he says. “Excluded as well.”

Olga nods at that. She really doesn’t fit in very well at all, he reflects, like a royal in a very poor disguise. Even he can tell that there’s something special about the material in her jacket — what it is, who knows, but the lightweight-ness of it, the way it hugs the skin. And the rings that seem so much a part of the body, how she pulls on them as she’s sitting the way some people pick at their cuticles.

A born diplomat as well — the way that comes with the territory. How quickly she recalibrates allegiances. Rosalyn the one she’d always chit-chatted with.

“Well, you’re young,” she says, a bit vaguely. “Relationships are supposed to be rocky when you’re young.”

“I think it’s not a relationship,” he says primly. “I think it’s an ex — ”

The way her features shift. How she realigns towards sympathy. According to Rosalyn, she’s been everything — been an actor, been a model of course, also done things like drive race cars, carry secret messages between rival governments. The thread through everything — remembering that it’s the person in front of her, the task in front of her, that’s the most important thing.

“You must be hurting,” she says.

How her accent is perfectly American and yet not — the clear feeling, probably everywhere she’s ever been, that she’s from somewhere else. A phrase like that — probably something she picked up from an acting class or a shrink once. Another of her unsuccessful efforts to be incognito.

“I didn’t know it was possible to feel like this,” Noah says honestly.

Another flickering in the diplomat’s brain of hers. Not just sympathy called for, something else — maybe compassion?

She puts her hand on the back of his forearm. “A girl like that,” she says, “I’m sure you did everything you could — but a girl like that needs to lose herself a bit.”

***

This begins a new phase between the two of them. Bull is too skittish for the dog run, but she takes him on long languorous walks around the perimeter of Washington Square Park and then winding through the Village. There seems to be no sense of time constraints in her life at all. Noah a good and loyal dog dad, but, even in his underemployed state, the pull of messages going off in his pocket, of times when he should be back in the apartment in front of the laptop. He’ll maybe reach her townhouse overlooking the park, prepare to say his goodbyes, and she’ll consult with Bull, say, based on the pleading in his eyes, “Well, maybe one more loop around the park.”

He sometimes joins her and sometimes doesn’t. She has this really admirable quality of seeming not to notice when people come up to her and when they fall away. He’s careful always, every time he bumps into her, of providing a little exposition, giving just enough information that, out of, who knows, all the similar conversations she’s having with different people in the neighborhood, she can recall the particulars of his case. And when the penny seems to rattle down to the source, she always produces something that, as far as he can tell, is wise and pithy. “I think the thing to do in your situation is to go wild, be really free,” she says. She jerks at Bull, who is sniffing at something particularly indigestible. “The trick is that you don’t want to do it out of revenge — she won’t respect that,” Olga continues, “what she will respect is the feeling that you have your own life on your terms and that she can’t access that.” Bull is getting out of hand, she pulls him close to her. With all the care she puts into him, her dog training is really haphazard. “It may take a while,” she says. “But the thing is that if she forgets about you, and you resolve not to think too much about her, then — if you’re not meant to be together — then you’ll forget about her too.”

There is the sense — although maybe he’s superstitious in talking to everybody over 40 — that she’s telling him something real, something drawn from experience. “And if we are meant to be together?” he says — the attempt, compulsive with him these days, to try to draw people into deeper conversation.

“Well, if you are meant to be together,” she says, like it’s a scenario that hadn’t quite occurred to her. She frowns at Bull. She raises her eyebrows towards the sky for guidance. “If you are meant to be together,” she says, and she fixes him with her wide, wide smile, “then things get really complicated,” she says.

3

For a long time, as they chat on dog walks, as he sidles into the table next to her at the coffee shop, the conversation is all about him, Rosalyn, the dogs, city life. But Rosalyn seemed to discover things about her, and, if she never volunteers anything, it occurs to him eventually that he can ask. “What about you?” he says when passing by the piano player on the Washington Square lap. “Have you had something like this happen to you?”

As sometimes happens with her, she seems to flicker back from some faraway realm. “Which part?”

“Have you been left like this?”

“Oh sure,” she says, like a student cramming for an exam who’d been expecting some tougher question. “I mean, I guess it depends on what you mean by leave. Do you mean like note on the pillow? Or do you mean like the person tells you they’re leaving and takes steps to leave and actually does leave — but in fact really just wants to hurt you and see how you’ll react?”

“Um,” Noah says. “I guess the second one. Whichever question you want to field.”

She takes her time, like, he thinks, the incognito royal deciding whether or not to take the locals into their confidence. Her tone is a little different when she speaks again, higher-pitched, more girlish. “I get left all the time,” she says. “All, all the time. Trust me, it’s not the worst thing in the world, but — trust me again — it never gets easier.”

And this surprising confession — of which he can make nothing — opens the door to the discussion of her love life. They seem, whether deliberately or not, to have fallen into parallel paths for the dog-walking, both consistently looking for each other at 9 in the morning and again at 9 at night, and the morning walk leading naturally enough to the coffeeshop, Noah and skittish Toto waiting outside while Olga fetches him his coffee. The conversation, with pauses for logistics, for bits of news and city living, is all about Olga and her black-shoed, cufflinked man.

His name is Hugo. When she met him in Berlin in the early 1990s he was a sort of club promoter — or, really, doing club mergers and acquisitions. He was trying to pool together a consortium of places, so he really did — which was his aura — have important meetings in back rooms, but unlike other people doing business he also partied and did lots of coke and slept with as many of the models there as possible. “And I was one of them,” Olga says.

Clubs, in Berlin in the ‘90s, turned out to be a good business, but so were the electronics he was getting into and so was the metals trade that he found, honestly, more fascinating than Berlin night clubs. This sounded to her always like some kind of board game, the way he might be dashing off to the Congo for cobalt or Afghanistan for copper or Kyrgyzstan for nickel, but for him, he claimed, it couldn’t have been more interesting. “You need a man in a suit,” he said, “it’s really an amazing thing what a man in a suit can do.” A few meetings, a few handshakes, some actuarial tables, and sooner or later an absolutely innate knowledge of the price of any commodity in any part of the world, and then his own trucks and eventually his own ships to move it all around.

He was secretive about it. All she ever saw really were the little numbers he huddled over — all the stock prices, all the data on deposits, the way that some mine halfway around the world aligned with the shares of a company in Brussels or Berlin or New York — and then based on something or other in those numbers he’d be on the phone with his travel agent, and then the shoes out and the cufflinks and the briefcase and Hugo kissing her on the forehead and then off to catch his flight.

He was great at the business and he made a marvelous life for her and he really did work astonishingly hard, really traveled everywhere — it was just that, every so often, he and his travel agent added an extra stop, a model at the old club who had moved to Stuttgart, a mistress in Antwerp, a baby in Budapest, who turned eventually into a small child living in the suburbs of Dresden.

How it all spun around — what a whirlwind of information he had to keep straight in his mind, not just prices of nickel, cobalt, copper, silicon in different markets and different currencies, not just the endless connecting flights, the endless languages and contacts, but also all the birthdays and anniversaries, which women liked what kind of dress and in what size and style, who was getting unhappy with the arrangement and needed a bit of extra care, who was getting possessive and needed to be cut out completely.

And spun around for Olga too, although at a slower rate. The abrupt moves to Antwerp, to Paris, for a few inexplicable months to Dresden. The paltry explanations supplied to her and then, eventually, the evening with all other plans canceled, the four-course dinner he made, the excellent wine he bought, the music on their surround sound, and then after everything had been put away, the dishes in the sink, although not washed, the pause, the throat-clearing cough, Hugo saying, “There are a few things I have to tell you.”

How did she take it really? What had she thought was going on in her life? What shifted for her once she realized the extent of what was happening behind her back — why Dresden, why the sudden uprooting to and from Antwerp? Well, not as much as one might expect.

“I must have known,” she says to Noah. “I’m not as complete an idiot as you probably think. I’m smart in a lot of ways and I pay attention to a lot of things, and Hugo who was secretive about everything — I must have known that that was one of the secrets. It was just the number that caught me by surprise.”

So, now, for once, she was the one to orchestrate an uprooting. “I feel like everywhere I go in Europe I’m going to bump into one of your mistresses,” she said. So, New York suggested itself. They had markets in New York, and planes, and the theory was that he wouldn’t find American women attractive.

But, of course, that theory didn’t really hold, and, as she discovered with time, she didn’t mind as much as she might have thought.

“You should have pictures out of your children,” she said once, soon after she’d turned forty. “People have pictures of their children, it’s a nice thing to have.”

“You mean at my desk?” he asked her.

“Yes, at your desk, in your wallet, that kind of thing.”

A long pause. The checking for ambushes and snares.

“And if somebody sees it?” he said.

“Then somebody sees it,” Olga told him. “I don’t think there’s anything to hide.”

***

She and Noah take their loops around the park. The dogs, still a bit wary of each other, have become to some extent friends, at least exploring together. In her way, she seems to have forgotten whatever it was they talked about the last time and Noah finds himself prompting her.

“Why — ?” he says. He knows by this time that she won’t be offended by any question but somehow this is difficult to formulate.

“Why did you stay with him?” he says. “Given everything you’ve described, why not move on, start fresh?”

She shrugs. He thinks maybe he actually has offended her. A certain flush in her high cheeks, a flaring of her nostrils. But when she speaks it’s contemplative, considerate. “I don’t know what a fresh start is,” she says. “Maybe this is a very American concept.”

Her turn to pause, her turn to think through things, and when she does it’s in the girlish voice that so catches him off-guard. “I mean, this is my life,” she says, “what’s the fresh start I could possibly have?”

She seems to think that she owes him a fuller explanation. She says, “When I met Hugo — when I was 17 and I met him — he had a lot of problems, really. He made money, yes, he always knew how to do that, but he went out with ridiculous women and he did a frightening amount of cocaine and he was reckless — yes, that was the easy thing to miss about him, because he was so Belgian, but he got bored very easily, too easily, and it was only risk that made him interested in anything.

“I remember, I was sitting with a model — we were both sleeping with him, but she more so. It was the morning, we were having coffee with cream and she was going on about how she couldn’t handle him. They would be up all night, he would be cutting cocaine, and they would be fucking, and in between he would be talking — I guess he liked her better than me, shared more with her — about all these different businesses he wanted to run, this club merged with that club, this club opened here, some coffeeshop paired with it. ‘It’s exhausting,’ she was saying, ‘I don’t know about him, but I need sleep. I can’t do that much coke, I can’t have that much sex.’ She was laughing as she was talking, I was agreeing with her, we were good friends, but what I was thinking was, ‘this is a weak person, this is a person who sees what life can be and pulls up short.’

“So, why Hugo?” Olga continues. “I have no real idea. I was 17 or 18 then and he seemed very special. Now that I’ve met other businesspeople, I can see that there’s like a mold that they’re all taken out of — all dress the same, all think the same, Hugo one of so many taking his international flights, working out his extra stops with his travel agent — but, what can I say, he was the one I met first. And if the problem was that he was doing too much coke, then I, 18 years old, never worked a job in my life, I was going to take care of that for him. Evening after evening hanging out with him, lots of parties, lots of sex, lots of coke, the bits of blood from my nose, the blues I had when I crashed that Hugo somehow never did, but outlasting my friend, outlasting all his other girlfriends. ‘You,’ I guess I was saying to him, ‘I’m here to the end of it with you.’ Hated the stuff, to be honest, hated listening to anybody else on it, after a while hated the way it made me feel, but keep up, that was the point, had to keep up, and then one day, late morning, and Hugo, for once with the blues, turning to him, hand on wrist and saying, ‘Hugo, let’s cut back. You’ll think better. You’ll do your business better. You’ll make me happier. Just let’s do it, let’s cut back.’

“And Hugo also with his red nostrils, the way he looked at me like he was stunned, like the thought had never occurred to him. ‘You know how I am,’ he said, ‘I can’t do anything by half. If I’m going to do less, I need to do none at all.’ ‘Alright,’ I said, perfectly ready for this. ‘I don’t need any of this shit either. Let’s never touch it again. From now on, let’s just make it all about you and me. That’s what’s driving us — that’s what we’re living for.’

“And I can’t tell you the kind of feeling that is, this proud, crazy man, the way he seemed to take it all in, the very slight nod he gave when he’d thought about it. ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘You and me. Going forward, that’s all that matters.’

“I knew,” Olga says, “that unwavering fidelity was too much to ask for, but that wasn’t really what I was asking for. I wanted to be one another’s person, that’s what I wanted. Who the person was, what they were really about — I don’t think that mattered much actually — but when I realized that I had him, that he was someone I respected and I had him, I think that that was everything I needed.

“And it might sound strange saying it to anyone else, but that family in Dresden, and then the other family he added in Washington D.C., and then the pictures in his wallet and on his desk and his screensaver — these beautiful kids beautifully growing — and all the other beautiful women, some of whom I found out about, many of whom I’m sure I never will, all of it was just a part of our life together, all of it contained between the two of us. He was my Hugo, my love — he always would be. When I thought about it in the right way, I could be proud of it.”

Noah has of course only recently been single. He’s in the terrible world of apps, of trying to catch strangers’ eyes at cafes and bars. And here she is, this woman, who used to appear in magazines and, once, a billboard — even more elegant, he feels, as she’s gotten older. The way all the coats she wears just cling to her. The way, if it’s Bull’s birthday — or just because — she’ll order free coffees for the entire shop. It would be a lie if he wasn’t thinking about it. If every time they passed by the townhouse on the park’s outskirts he didn’t pause meaningly as she fumbled for her key, if a whole trajectory between the two of them didn’t formulate itself in his imagination. Hugo apparently was never there — was very preoccupied at the moment with the new baby in D.C. She must have her own desires, her own licenses, her own vindictiveness, but something, some subtle, certain knowledge, kept Noah from saying anything out loud. She was out of his league — that’s all it was really. He was somebody she talked to when she felt lonely; when Hugo was out of town.

She and Hugo had passed through something, clinched something between them. And why was that? Who knows. She’d wanted to compete with her model friend who was cooler and smarter than she. She saw something in him — in the way that women were forever talent scouting. He and Rosalyn had just never done it. Call it what you will — call it Rosalyn’s perfidy, Rosalyn’s ambition, call it something deficient in himself that everybody else spotted before he did. In any case, good guy, sweet guy; as crazy as he had been about her, they had never gotten to that place. If that doesn’t happen, it’s a mercy by a woman to leave when she does. It’s a mercy letting him work it out on his own.