Walking Together - Darcy Vebber

The satellite view is grey and green. On the ground, it is the red brown of bricks, sidewalk grey, tarmac and shadow. There are trees, set singly, in holes in the sidewalk, and there are awnings on some of the street level stores that are green. Summer, stillness. A man is sleeping on the sidewalk, pressed up against one of the newer buildings, with his possessions in black plastic bags beside his head. When Lisa pans the computer control up and over, she can see the window of the apartment Bobby is calling her from.

Once, when he was first in New York and she was in LA, she followed him while they talked, down this street, past the sleeping man, around the corner, all the way to the Village. He bought cheese Danish and described it to her while he ate.

This might be the first time she has ever seen his name on her caller ID and not picked up. For one thing, it is late where he is - it's ten in Hollywood, one in New York. She's sitting up with baby Franny in her lap, at a window trying to catch a breeze from the canyon and Franny has just drifted off. Lisa's husband Will is still at work. It's pilot season and he is shooting, someplace out in the dark, something about detectives and vampires. (There is a little seasonal burst of filming everywhere in the city At the bottom of her street, there are motor homes and trucks. She can hear the generators humming even from her window.)

Bobby wants to talk to her about his book. His novel. He comes home from his lab and he writes. She suspects he drinks while he writes but that may not be true. Even in the days when they all took drugs together, when the purpose of a weekend was to get high on something that would help them figure out the meaning of life, he was reluctant.

He is physically frail. She knows that. He always has been. He is frail and he is small. She sees him at his computer screen, where she has in fact never seen him. She has never been in the apartment that is behind the window he has located for her, counting three up, two over. One room and a kitchenette, which is all he says he needs.

The one time she was actually in New York while he was there, they met at the Second Avenue Deli and talked awkwardly while Will was in a meeting up town. She was pregnant but hadn't told anyone (even him, that was strange) and the smells were oppressive.

She just didn't want to talk to him about this writing project. He was a scientist and that was fine, that was the sweet, clear world he belonged in. (That would make him mad, she knew. Saying that science was clear.) She looked down at the baby who pursed her cherub lips and burped. Franny eyes opened for a moment, round and blue and surprised, apparently by the burp, the body, being alive, then she closed them again. I am supposed to be the writer, Lisa said to her little girl. Me. The light on the phone stopped flashing. He was leaving a message, she knew. It would be long and complex and specific. At first, the details would overwhelm her.

When they were in school together, he was always the one who saw the pattern in the text, who made the perfect connection. It always made her doubt her self, her prized ability to understand. The old question, who is smart and who is smarter, that she had kind of learned to live with, would roll through her -- belly, heart, the place at the base of the throat, the lips, pressed together. Silent. She heard a siren down on the boulevard. .