Night Scene

In the hour before she falls asleep she is thinking about her first film, where she played a struggling Greenwich Village poet in the years before the war. The second war, that is, which had come so soon after the first that the man she loved—in real life, not onscreen—fought in both of them, but survived only the first. She was already nearly forty by the time she’d made the transition from theater, and in those early days of shooting she kept speaking too loudly because she couldn’t help but imagine there were people in the balcony who otherwise would be unable to hear her.

Nevertheless she adjusted soon enough, and by the end of the shoot she couldn’t have imagined returning to the stage. She liked the slowness of the process; the endless fittings and re-fittings; the sense that the production was a kind of circus minus the railcars and animals.

The picture, whose name escapes her at the moment, was enough of a hit to justify the studio immediately placing her in another one, and another one after that. How many were there in that first decade alone? Twenty? Twenty-five? Alcoholics, can-can girls, seamstresses and schoolteachers, Army nurses and hitchhikers, housewives and bookstore clerks and policewomen and acrobats. She played anything the script demanded, including one where she was an astronaut, even though it would be another thirty years before we landed on the moon.

Not that any of this matters, exactly. I merely wanted to mention that she was already in a mood of reflection before she fell asleep. Before, exactly halfway through her fourth dream of the night, there was a knock on her front door that was loud enough to awaken her, but quiet enough to keep the ghosts who occupied the entire eastern wing of the house from hearing.

The knocking continued at a steady, though gentle, pace as she wrapped herself in her favorite silk robe and descended the staircase that resembled a lavishly reproduced exoskeleton of an extinct variety of whale. Moonlight filtered through the windows, even though, in a matter of minutes, a rain would begin to fall that would not relent for the next several days.

Upon reaching the landing she was surprised at how unsurprised she was to have a visitor at such a late hour. Yet what was old age, after all, but a series of surprises that arrived under the cover of darkness, and at hours when youth was too busy having fun to pay any attention?

Therefore, once she had opened the door and found that the visitor was, in fact, the man she loved, otherwise known as her husband, who had, before shipping out for the beaches of Western Europe, been that rarest of things: a rather famous poet, so far as those things went.

“Why didn’t you use the key?” she asked, even though, halfway through her question, she realized it was a rather silly thing to say.

“I lost it,” he said, patting his invisible pockets.

“Well, you’d better come in then,” she said. “There’s supposed to be a storm coming.”

They walked silently into the kitchen, the woman hoping that the ghosts on the eastern wing, many of whom often raided the refrigerator when they were certain she was so fast asleep she wouldn’t hear their footsteps, had not chosen this night for one of their first-floor excursions.

“You must be hungry,” she said.

“Not exactly,” he said. “Tired, yes, hungry, no.”

They looked at one another across decades, and continents.

“But I wouldn’t pass up a drink,” he added.

She crossed to the cabinet, and pulled from the highest shelf a bottle of champagne the two of them had promised not to open until the end of the war.

“You kept your promise,” he said.

“So did you,” she said.

She popped the cork and filled two glasses. She lifted hers; he pretended to lift his.

An hour later, with him having departed and her back upstairs asleep, she would be unable to remember which of them had proposed a toast, and what it was that had been said.

But at this moment, there is simply a scene of the two of them standing alone in a dimly-lit kitchen, each looking at the other, and us looking at them.

Kareem Tayyar’s most recent collection, Keats in San Francisco & Other Poems, was published in 2022 by Lily Poetry Review Books.