The Distance Between Things

The grocery store was the worst part of Sunday.

Not because of the crowds — Marcus actually liked crowds, the ambient noise of other people living their lives, the way a busy aisle could make you feel like you were part of something without requiring you to actually be part of something. No, the grocery store was the worst part of Sunday because of the checkout lines, and specifically because of what the cashiers always said.

"Did you find everything okay?"

And Marcus would say yes, and the cashier would say great, and that would be the entirety of the human interaction he could count on for the day.

He drove home with two paper bags in the passenger seat, the crackling of the grocery bags serving as a kind of company. He had stopped putting them in the back seat eight months ago, around the time he realized he was doing the mental math on how many words he spoke in a given week. The number had been lower than he expected.

His apartment was on the fourth floor of a building in a city of four million people. He had lived there for two years. He knew the couple below him only by the rhythm of their arguments — a low, tired cadence that always seemed to resolve by morning — and the woman across the hall only by the smell of her cooking, something rich with cumin and bay leaf that sometimes drifted under his door like a question he didn't know how to answer.

He unpacked the groceries. Pasta. Olive oil. A rotisserie chicken in its plastic dome, already cooked, already cooling. He had told himself he was buying it for efficiency. He was a busy person. This was a practical choice.

The chicken fed him for three days.

Marcus had not always been like this. There was a version of himself, not even that many years ago, who had been the kind of person other people called easy to be around. He had friends who showed up without calling. He had a girlfriend who left a toothbrush at his place and then, gradually, a drawer, and then most of a closet. He had a job at a mid-size firm where he ate lunch with the same four people every day and felt, in that small repeated ritual, something solid beneath his feet.

Then the firm downsized. Then the girlfriend — her name was Priya, and he still thought of her with a specific tenderness that had nowhere to go — took a job in another city, and they had tried the distance thing for five months before admitting what they both already knew. Then the friends, who had mostly been friends of the workplace or friends of the relationship, dissolved back into their own lives the way people do, not out of cruelty, just out of the gravitational pull of their own orbits.

He found a new job. He moved to the new city because the cost of living made sense and a recruiter had called and the timing had seemed, at the time, like a sign. He told himself he would build something new. He told himself it would take six months to feel at home anywhere.

That had been two years ago.

He was not unhappy, exactly. That was the thing he couldn't explain to the therapist he had seen briefly, the one who kept using the word isolated in a way that made Marcus feel like a case study. He functioned. He exercised. He cooked — sometimes — and read good books and had opinions about things and did his job well and by most external measures was a man living an ordinary, complete life. But there was a quality to his days that he could only describe as muffled. Like hearing music from the next room. Like watching a movie with the subtitles on but the sound turned off.

He knew the words. He just couldn't feel the warmth of them.

On a Tuesday in November, his downstairs neighbor knocked on his door.

Her name was Claudette. He knew this because her name was on her mailbox. She was in her sixties, with short silver hair and paint on her wrists — the permanent kind, the kind that lives in the creases of knuckles — and she was holding a casserole dish covered in foil.

"My daughter was supposed to come for dinner," she said. "She canceled. I made too much food."

Marcus stood in the doorway in his socks, momentarily unable to process what was being offered. A whole casserole dish. Of food. By a human being. On a Tuesday.

"I don't want you to go to any trouble," he said, which was a stupid thing to say because she had already gone to the trouble.

"It's chicken and rice," she said. "Do you like chicken and rice?"

He thought of the rotisserie chicken. "Yes," he said.

She handed him the dish and he thanked her and she said it was nothing and turned to go and then, because something in him understood that this was a moment and moments didn't last, he said: "Would you want to eat with me? If you don't have plans."

Claudette turned back. She looked at him for a moment in a way that wasn't quite a smile — more like recognition, the way you recognize a word in a language you thought you'd forgotten.

"Let me get the wine," she said.

They ate at his table by the window, where the city spread below them in its indifferent and glittering sprawl. Claudette was a painter — watercolors, mostly landscapes, a few portraits that she said never quite looked like the person but always looked like something true about them. She had a daughter in Portland and a son she didn't speak to and an ex-husband she spoke of without bitterness, which Marcus found remarkable. She had lived in the building for eleven years. She told him that the couple below her argued every Saturday but had been together for twenty-three years, which she found, on balance, hopeful.

"You've been here two years," she said. "I should have knocked sooner."

"I should have knocked," Marcus said.

Outside, the city went on being a city — loud, indifferent, full of people in small apartments eating alone or not alone, loving each other or failing at it, building lives out of whatever materials were at hand. Marcus felt something shift, not dramatically, not like a door blown open, but like a window cracked just enough to let in the sound.

He poured more wine.

Claudette told him about the portrait she was working on — her own face, seen from memory, which she said was a different face than the mirror showed.

Marcus thought he understood what she meant.

They talked until the casserole was gone and the bottle was empty and the city outside had gone quiet in that particular way cities go quiet around midnight, when even the noise seems to pause and breathe. And when Claudette finally gathered her dish and said goodnight, and the door clicked closed behind her, the apartment was the same apartment it had always been.

But the muffled feeling was a little less.

And that, Marcus thought, was enough to begin with.