Threnody:

          Standing at the corner of 71st and Lex, he felt like Robert Frost. The little white man on the traffic light seemed to stare at him, daring him to cross, but he continued to stand statue still, impervious to the grumblings and gripings of the New Yorkers shoving past him: the last of the rush hour crowd scrambling home to crying children, unsatisfied spouses or even empty apartments, while the night-shifters crawled out to start their days. The snow fell in flurries, dusting the tweed jacket that hung two sizes too big over his slight frame, and burying itself into the folds of his plaid scarf still stained with leftover marinara sauce that he didn’t know how to wash out. The solemn gold face of his watch read ten to eight—he was running embarrassingly late— but the words inscribed on its back, My Dearest Jonathan, “Where both deliberate, the love is slight; Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?” Forever yours, Elisa, preoccupied his thoughts more than the trivialities of time.   

            The restaurant was a couple blocks up the avenue, a quaint Italian place that served “authentic Sicilian cuisine in a clubby circa 1977 town home.” He had no idea what any of those words meant, undoubtedly a glaring marker of how out of touch he was with the city’s trends, and the description had’t give him much to work with when he was getting ready. Dahlia had chosen the place, or “Dee,” as called herself when she smiled coyly at him, and extended her dainty painter’s hand marred only by her chewed up nail beds into his own surgeon steady, calloused one between the book stacks. He’d been perusing the 16th century classics section at one of the vintage bookstores downtown frequented by hipsters and self-diagnosed pedagogues trying to track down the first manuscripts of Milton and Dante when he’d sidled by her to thumb the stern leather spine of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and slid it off the shelf.

            “ Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris,” she had quoted, tiptoeing up to his shoulder. It’s a comfort to the wretched to have companions in misery. She laughed as he started, and fumbled with the book in his hands. That was what got him: her laugh. He was no poet, but her laugh was like the tinkling of wind chimes, and the clement fluttering of foliage heralding an impending storm. She plowed ahead through his awkwardness, completely scrapping the small talk etiquette, and launching into her theories of the metaphysics of hell. It wasn’t until after she’d asked what he thought of the Marlowe murder conspiracy that they’d exchanged names, and she was shepherding him and their conversation to the bookstore’s coffee shop that sold chalkboard specials jazzed up with the names of exotic locales in handwritten Helvetica, but which were, in reality, just banal grocery store blends whizzed out of a spruced up Keurig. He didn’t take caffeine—he hadn’t been sleeping much anyway, and it gave him tremors— but he offered to pay for her by habit.

            Up close, she was even more fascinating than he expected, and his fixation caught him off guard. Short, brown-haired, with a slightly off-set nose; she looked like she had walked out of a Jane Austen novel, but she had the mouth of a sailor. She seemed to smile with her whole body, with her pixie ears perking up like a kitten’s, and her petite shoulders falling back blithely, like melting chocolate. She worshipped Bell Hooks, and could recite the first of Dante’s cantos, but couldn’t’t ride a bike. She had a cat. Everything about her was so unapologetic and sincere, from the way she talked about the volunteer work she did at a women’s shelter in the Bronx to her recount of how she knew she wanted to be an artist when she saw her first Disney movie. At some point she’d scrawled her name and number on a recycled brown napkin, and slipped it into his coat with a wink. “So we’ll be even,” she said. She ordered a chai tea latte. Its acrid, burnt toast smell made him crinkle his nose. He thought chai smelt like armpits. Elisa had laughed when he’d told her. Elisa had hated chai too. Dahlia was not Elisa, but Dahlia was there.

            Dahlia was there to answer the phone, with her voice smooth like a speakeasy lounge singer’s, and her spring morning of a laugh after he finally keyed in the right number, and stumbled over flirtations clumsy and dusty after years of nonuse to ask her out. Somewhere between her raving about the new Italian place she’d been dying to try, and him telling her about the bypass he’d done that afternoon, he felt a ball of panic rising up that he’d run out of interesting conversation before their first dinner, so he apologized a goodbye. It took him almost half an hour to realize she’d said yes. It took him even longer to realize that the corners of his mouth had been frozen unfamiliarly upwards, until he bumped into the elderly widow next door while getting the mail, and she told him it was so good to see him smile again.

            The stoplight turned red before him, and the stark glare of its fluorescent eye staring him down made him rethink how silly the bunch of roses hanging limply under his arm was: their petals soggy from the volleys of snow, and the whole gesture excessive and hackneyed. He must have stood under the green canopy of Frank’s Flowers and Gifts for a whole five minutes hesitating before braving the chime of the florist’s door not more than a half hour before. The aroma of tulips and begonias and gardenias and a technicolor onslaught of pastels assaulted his senses. He’d shuffled past some shrubberies to the arrangement of roses set out for hopeless romantics, first daters and significant others in trouble, trying to dodge the florid displays and the bespectacled eye of Frank himself.

            “Jon, is that you? It’s been years,” Frank had said, as he rang up the flowers with his usual enthusiasm. It had been. Jonathan noticed Frank wouldn’t’t look at the roses directly, pretending not to acknowledge that they weren’t his usual. Frank had been the one who helped him pick out his first bouquet of Calla lilies when he’d first edged tentatively into the store almost a decade ago, blinking the early summer sunlight from his eyes and reeling from the overwhelming floral assemblage, every bit as uncomfortable, but with a look of determination found only in the eyes of a man in love. Jonathan had accidentally dropped his change all over the counter from nerves, while Frank laughed his baritone chuckle and asked who was the lucky lady. He nearly dropped the lilies too when he showed up on Elisa’s doorstep that evening, out of breath, but still ten minutes early because in his lovestruck daze he had taken the wrong train, and ended up getting out and sprinting all the way to her apartment. She’d worn a white dress. That was the first night they'd shared a dance.

             They’d been cutting through Washington Square Park, shoulders chastely brushing in the balmy air, a delicate flush creeping up her collarbone as they basked in a comfortable silence when the soft strumming of a street performer playing “La Vie En Rose” enveloped them. Struck with an unprecedented bolt of reckless courage, Jonathan took her by the hand. They swayed breathlessly in the amber glow of the street lights, fingers laced tenderly together with his other hand finding itself on the crook of her waist as if it were absurd that it could ever belong anywhere else. As the music’s cadence swelled, he lifted her up onto the fountain’s wall, and watched her spin around in her dainty heels, the chiffon of her dress twirling around her like an ethereal plume. In his mind the stars had come down to dance with them. That was when he knew. And with the sleepy salutations of the delighted passersby, the rush of the fountain barely audible over his racing heart, and the ukulele’s song his overtone, he twirled her into him, and kissed her.

            Every waltz after that, every time some distant tune hummed through the evening that sometimes only the two of them could hear, cemented their blossoming romance. He would take her hand like that first time, sometimes clumsily, sometimes with the poise and certitude of someone who had found his match and could never be parted, while the bouquet of lilies he brought her every time watched them like a miniature congregation of angels, and they would dance. They danced through the city, from the steps of the Met to the peak of the Empire, and the top of the Rock, where he’d surprised her on their one-year anniversary with a rose gold bracelet of lilies, and she in turn gave him the gold watch and a copy of the book he had seen her reading when they first met.

             In the third year of his residency back in the city, he had poked his head into the room of a Mrs. Harriet Bowles to see how she was faring after her coronary bypass, and, finding the elder lady asleep, he would have resumed his rounds, but his eyes fell over the figure curled up in the corner arm chair, engrossed in the yellowed pages of the most peculiar book.

            “That’s some pretty heavy reading there,” Jonathan said, indicating The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus.

            “Oh, this?” Elisa said, pretending to curl the book like a dumbbell. “No, it’s pretty light actually.”

            He couldn’t even remember introducing himself, because it felt as if they’d known each other for lifetimes. He found himself telling her the most cringeworthy of anecdotes, like the time he babysat his med school roommate’s goldfish and accidentally threw it out while he was changing its water, while she confided to him that she was afraid of fish. A nurse shuffled by while he lingered, not realizing he’d been blocking the doorframe for almost a half hour, and set a vase of pink roses down on the table beside Elisa: a get well soon gift courtesy of the hospital.

            Elisa had then bent into the flowers and gave them a smile and a sniff. “These are so lovely. Mum will love them. I’m not that sold on roses though, but they smell happy, don’t you think?”

            Jonathan laughed. “What do you like then?”

            She rested the book down to think. “I don’t know. White ones. Maybe tulips. Or daisies. Or maybe someday I’ll get flowers from someone special and those will be the ones.”

            The traffic light had gone through another cycle. Across the street, a homeless man bundled in a ratty blanket rifled through the bowels of a trashcan for scraps, but Jonathan took

no notice, paralyzed by the memory of Elisa whispering to him as he walked her home, their arms jigsaw-pieces intertwined, that she liked lilies.  Against the white of the snow, the vivid red of the roses started to offend him. Or maybe it was that they were roses. Roses, and not lilies. He gritted his teeth. They were obscene, red roses: infernally, odiously red, and not the white lilies that Elisa liked.

            They were not the white lilies that they were going to have at their wedding. The wedding where he would have been waiting in the pavilion across the lake from where he had proposed, under a canopy of lilies and fairy lights, his breath hitching as he ran through his wedding vows for the hundredth time, reciting Marlowe with staccato precision, “Come with me and be my love, and we will all the pleasures prove.” Where the orchestra would then take to their strings, and crooned the muted melody of “La Vie En Rose.” Their pinscher, Scully, was supposed to be their ring bearer, tail wagging as he trotted in with their gold bands on a velvet cushion. Elisa would have floated in, and he would have fallen even more in love with her if that were humanly possible. Her diaphanous train wafting behind her, she would have reached the end of the aisle, where he would tell her how beautiful she looked. They would have traded vows and rings and the priest would congratulate them, but only manage to grant half of his permission before Jonathan would have swept her into his arms and kissed her, and it would feel like a burst of starlight. They wanted to be married before Elisa started to show. She had been so excited, her whole being aglow from more than just the pregnancy. When they’d picked the location, and arranged the bundles of lilies, she’d jumped into his arms, and with the colossal promise of the eternal happiness in the life they were about to start together, he spun her, and they danced right there on the faded Persian rug of the wedding planner’s office. That was their last dance.

            The lilies that should have made the resplendent eggshell white of her wedding dress come to life still did their job, and even though she lay as cold and still as a porcelain doll, she looked every bit a beautiful bride resting in the satin of her casket. It was three days before their wedding. After the service, drunk with grief and a howling emptiness he had crawled into the church, and dropped to his knees and prayed and pleaded to God and every god there ever was. And when he’d exhausted his faith he cursed Jesus, Yahweh, Allah and Buddha. He’d have sold his soul a hundred times over, or stormed through hell, and fought Lucifer himself on his throne if it meant he could have one more night where he could roll over and wake up to the sight of her bare shoulders peeking out of her the nest of blankets, and kiss her cornflower hair. And Lord knows he tried. In his haze of insomnia and whiskey straight from the bottle he clawed through Doctor Faustus and found himself scratching obscure symbols into the hardwood of their apartment floor and regurgitating Latin. Once or twice he’d even scrawled the incantations in his own blood, but the sight of the sanguine splatters on the floor cast his mind back to the memory of when he’d come home and found her, and he collapsed into sobs.

             There had been so much blood. Red, everywhere. Red like the disgusting roses he was carrying. He had operated on crash victims, and saved people with collapsed lungs, ruptured organs, and mangled limbs. He was a doctor; that was what he did: save lives. But he couldn’t save her. The only person that ever mattered, and he couldn’t save her because he wasn’t there. She wasn’t even supposed to be home. Her kindergarden had a measles scare, so he’d taken the day off to cuddle up by her on the couch while they laughed at the inanity of the daytime soap operas, and Scully disfigured yet another one of his shoes. But then he had to go get soup. It was barely autumn, and they had an abundance of groceries and leftovers piling up in their fridge, and he decided that he really wanted minestrone from the bodega a couple of streets down from the florist.

            “Don’t forget the napkins,” she’d called out as he threw on a coat. The last thing she said to him. He couldn’t remember if he told her he loved her as he stepped out, or even gave her a quick peck on the lips and another one on her belly for their unborn child. He didn’t think he pet Scully either. And when he pushed his way through front door, the brown bag of soup warm in his arms, those simplest luxuries worth more to him than any innumerable sum of material wealth that he’d taken for granted, had been ripped away from him with two greedy gunshots.

He hadn’t even noticed their TV was missing until after the police arrived. He had been cradling both bodies so tightly in a pool of drying blood and the minestrone that had exploded across the floor when he dropped the bag to rush to Elisa’s side that it took at least three officers to wrench him away and calm him down.

            A home invasion turned homicide, the detective in charge labeled it, so clinically, as if it happened as casually as rainfall. But this wasn’t one of the procedural cop dramas that he and Elisa put on while they made dinner together, playfully trying to unravel the crime first; this was real life, and this sort of thing didn’t happen to people in real life. He was supposed to be married to her that week, and six months after that they were going to bring their child into the world. She would have been three now. Elisa was sure it was a girl, a beautiful, bright little girl with cornflower hair done up with satin bows, who would feed ducks in Central Park while tugging on his sleeve, and scribble crayon pictures that said mum-dad-scully-and-me to pin up on the fridge, and ask deep philosophical conundrums that only children do like why is the sky blue and where do balloons go when you let them go. They would have danced together, with Scully yapping at their heels. A family. Happy. Instead, he was standing alone at the head of the crosswalk, holding roses. The light ahead of him flashed white once more. The snow continued to fall. White like lilies. White like Elisa’s dress that first night. White like her wedding dress. White like her face as she lay in her irreversible satin bed, forever holding their daughter inside her in a stiff embrace. His watch read five past eight. Dahlia was not Elisa. “Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?” He had loved her the second he saw her in that waiting room. He loved her still. He would always love her.

            The stoplight blinked its warning countdown, while a disgruntled pig of a man, every massive square foot of his greasy hair moth bitten leather jacket reeking of bad coffee and cigarettes elbowed by him. Jonathan watch the orange numbers tick lower, and his feet seemed to move on their own. He turned sharply on the sidewalk.

            Neon shop signs, brownstone and surly pedestrians waddling in their winter coats blurred by him as he hurtled down 71st street, chilly clouds of gasping smoke escaping him with every desperate step. Past the deli where Elisa bought their Thanksgiving turkeys. Past the handbag boutique where he’d bought her the Italian leather carry-on to take on their honeymoon. The patisserie where she got a croissant for herself on the way to work, and an everything bagel for him every time she would surprise him at the hospital. The art gallery where she wouldn’t hold his hand saying “I’m sorry the sign says I’m not to touch the masterpieces.” Their favorite lamppost to kiss under. As he ran, he could feel her there, so ineffably close in his memories, but still so hopelessly out of reach that the illusion of proximity only tore the abyss of gaping emptiness inside him even wider. Tears started to freeze in the corners of his eyes. His scarf had flown off somehow, but he didn’t care. He would chase her to the gates of insanity or death. He didn’t even pause when he came to St. James,’ and pushed straight through the cast-iron gates of the churchyard. 

            She lay half-hidden by the frost. He flung the roses aside, and swept the snow off the marble tombstone so that the embossed writing cut a stark silhouette amongst the white.

             In loving memory of Elisa Harriet Bowles and child. In our hearts always and forever.                 In the swirling of snowfall he could see her standing there, more beautiful than the day they’d met, more beautiful than every day they’d been together. Her hair fell around her in a luminous halo, and her wedding gown billowing as it caught snowflakes in its gossamer completed the seraphic incarnation. He tried to call out to her, but his voice died in his throat. Over the wind he thought he heard the laughter of a child bubbling, and a delighted bark. He crumpled in front of the grave, oblivious to the dampness of his legs and the creeping numbness in his hands. He could have been gazing at her for an eternity, transfixed by this sublime vision. This was her. This was his darling Elisa. He was crazy to even have considered the possibility of replacing her with some pale substitute. She beckoned to him, the crown of rose-gold lilies shining on her wrist as her fingers reached out. And then from behind her, a little girl emerged, with satin bows in her hair, as angelic as her mother. Scully bounded up beside her, trying to nip at the falling snow, and letting out a yelp as the cold touched his nose.

            As his eyes began to close, Jonathan saw himself take his love’s hand, and pull her into a rapturous embrace. He lifted their daughter into his arms and drew her into the huddle, with Scully nuzzling at their shins as the Manhattan winter raged around them, but he could no longer feel the biting cold.