I Cannot Get You Close Enough by Ellen Gilchrist Read Free Book Online Page B

asked questions. We were in woods five days and nights. Sleeping on the forest floor like Hansel and Gretel. I kept trying to wipe off her face and brush leaves from her sweater. I wanted her to be clean when we arrived in the free countries so they would be kind to us.”
    â€œAdrian,” I said. “Would you mind if I fell in love with you?”
    Man attains enlightenment only in flashes. If I hadn’t liked him so much perhaps I would have fallen in love with him. He would have welcomed it, I think. There were moments when we almost came near enough to admit that we desired each other, but something held me back. I think now it was a lack of courage. I was too old by then to plunge myself into a world where I would have to meet Dubravka, to be involved with the lost intellectuals of Eastern Europe. For all his gaiety and art, all the brilliance of his costumes, all his exuberance and life, the other thing was always there, waiting to cross his face at the strangest moments, a Poland he could not return to, parents he had not seen grow old and die. A stillness would come over him and I would think, He is truly disinherited. What could I offer this man to make up for that?
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    It made the problems my mother conveyed to me by phone from Charlotte seem like celluloid illusions. Little Putty didn’t get into Tri-Delt or DeDe was still throwing up in Memphis or Young James was stuffing cocaine up his nose at the University of Virginia and don’t send him a cent of money no matter what he says it’s for. These may have seemed like huge problems in Charlotte but they were still the free choices of free men. At any moment our children could change their minds, decide to be ambitious and useful. They could repent, go to law school, study biology, resolve to save the environment, get married, have babies, settle down.
    Adrian became my new best friend. He would drop by in the afternoons for tea or a drink. He disdained coffee and laughed at me for drinking it. He said it would stain my brain cells and make them weak. He said it would lead me to wear black. He wore the most beautiful colors of any man I had ever known. I remember a pair of khaki slacks and a khaki-and-white tweed sweater he would wear with a windbreaker lined with dark fir green. It sounds ordinary but there was a way the dark green lining lit up his blue eyes and the white in the tweed reflected the white in his hair. I don’t think any of this was studied. I think colors made sense to him the way words do to me. We went sometimes in the afternoons to see revivals of movies he had done and he would complain about how the prints had faded and the colors bled from his costumes. Anyway, we liked each other and he fell into the habit of staying at my apartment when we had been out late to dinner or a play. We would walk in the mornings to museums or sit at a cafe on Madison Avenue and admire the costumes young people wear. Adrian would laugh with delight at a scarf tied around a young girl’s forehead or the way a boy had laced his shoes with colored laces.
    He pursued the matter of Sheila diligently but no one could remember the names of the Turks. He called David Marchman a dozen times, usually in the early morning from my phone.
    â€œTry to find someone who remembers,” he kept asking. “It’s bloody important to these people. Little girl about to be taken off to bloody Cyprus or Turkey. Well, thank you. Keep trying, David. Anyone you can think to ask.”
    â€œNothing?” I asked, when he had hung up.
    â€œEveryone who was there agrees they were communists. She was going to marry one of them. That’s what she said. They were going to Istanbul to live. David has friends all over. He’s an environmentalist, you know. Has a house full of computers he runs for Greenpeace. Toting up evidence from around the world. He’s quite a nice fellow. You must meet him someday.”
    â€œLet’s have