In the Company of Men

I first saw them during the gray, spongy days of early spring. When rain was not falling, it threatened, but I was full of baby and I was walking. I pushed my dirigible belly up one sidewalk and down the other, trying to convince my unborn child that there was much more room to kick and punch out here under this pale and somnolent sky.

Pacing the streets of Glendale like a Dadaist sleepwalker, pausing now and again to lean against an obliging park wall, I began watching the men. The old men. Sitting and standing around picnic tables and wooden benches, playing cards and tiles and muttering to each other in languages of Eastern Europe. They wore hats and dark jackets, button-down shirts and trousers, a little rumpled perhaps, but solemn somehow, formal. For a moment I felt transported to a Venetian piazza, or St. Petersburg, to some Old World city of shifting light, weather-dimmed stone and a populous noise that had begun with the striding footfalls of the Romans or the Visigoths.

They took no notice of me, these men (although I was certainly as noticeable as I will get in this lifetime), and for that I was grateful. They seemed to be everywhere, clustered like dark blooms in the small urban parks of the city, gathered conspicuously without female counterpoints. Together, solidly male, they smoked and spoke and kept score and sat; some sturdy and grandfatherly, chins carefully smooth and polished; others scruffier and indifferent, their frames and faces tugged at by gravity and time; still others fair and frail, in wheelchairs or resting against the shoulders of their comrades.

The women left them to their games and conversation and trundled along the avenues with me, headed for the small markets that smelled brown with coffee and warm crusts. They bought flat breads and olives, black currant nectar and feta cheese shining like white islands in a lagoon of brine. The women moved in pairs, spanning the sidewalk in low, travel-widened shoes, speaking quickly in Armenian or Russian and rarely smiling. Occasionally, a woman would approach the edge of the park, but before she could enter, a man would rise from his seat as if pulled by a string and they would confer along the invisible seam that divided their two lands. Then she would turn and move away.

I watched from behind the wall of my pregnancy, distanced by the need for distraction, rather than connection. I was far too connected to too much already. But in the strange, wild chill of that rainy spring, I loved the old men, with their collars and cuffs, resolute in their leisure, posed around their games and conversation in simple lines as if in a painting. A Rembrandt perhaps. Though I passed every day, there were no moments of greeting or recognition; my few small smiles slid by them like shadows over water. Not once did I speak.

*

The baby finally came, cut out after 16 hours of labor proved that his fine Irish head was stuck like a cork in a bottle. All the walking and internal coaxing in the world would not have moved him. He was a big boy, with an unwavering gaze, curious, with seemingly little need for sleep. Within a month, I had taken to the streets again, this time pushing a carriage full of baby, hoping a lullaby would rise from the colors and forms passing with the gritty hiss of wheel over sidewalk.

We walked for hours through a spring singed by the coming blaze of summer, and then through a summer whose heat forced us to skirt the edges of the day. We could walk only in early morning and late afternoon, when the sun was tempered by the cool of the horizon. In a month, the gray, silent sky had scrubbed itself into a blue so tight and glittering it fairly hummed. We watched green lawns turn brown, children and flowers wilt by 11, women hide beneath umbrellas and the sidewalk empty amid the clamor of a thousand fans and air conditioners.

It was a few weeks before I could pull my gaze from my baby’s face--round and lovely, watchful as the moon beneath the carriage’s hood--before I could do more than scan the street for potential dangers. But when I finally looked up, they were still there. The old men. While everyone else darted from air-conditioned cars to air-conditioned buildings, they still claimed the parks. The jackets had been abandoned, sleeves rolled or pushed up, but there were no shorts, no sport shirts, no sandals.

They were so obviously not of this city, with its mewling of eternal youth, with its fetish for the vibrant, the spotlit, the cacophonous. Dark and silent, concerned only with their own dealings, they claimed this space, these patches of green and shade. They settled into it so deeply that they were inextricable. Scatterings of the Old World, sure of their place in the universe, they sat within the summer’s heat, a bit more quietly, perhaps, but their games and conversation went on.

Some were now accompanied by grandchildren, out of school for the summer, and the old men in their dark pants and lace-up shoes stood patiently at the bottom of slides, or behind swings, pushing, creating a breeze. They spoke to the little ones with words that sounded more like music than language. Girls in sundresses and boys in shorts gripped their hands, heads tilted back to smile up into faces certain and watchful. Lovely, too, like my son’s, but from the other edge of the day, the rich hues of waning.

As I paused one day, adjusting blankets and making funny faces, delighting in my baby’s first twitching smiles, I glanced over to a picnic table card game. One man in a white shirt and a wool cap met my eye. I waited for his gaze to slide away. Instead he smiled and nodded at the carriage and made a rocking motion with his arms. I smiled back and nodded. He nodded again, then returned his attention to the game and I walked on.

Now we spend our weekdays in the city, me at work, my son in day care. But on weekends we still pace the sidewalks of our neighborhood, often with my husband, who always asks if we’re going to “visit your old men.”

My old men. To whom I have never spoken, beyond that one silent exchange. And yet I do speak of them with a possessiveness, a familiarity. They are touchstones in this place that I have chosen as my home. In the burnished light of autumn, in the windy, ashen winter afternoons, they stand in their places, now in overcoats and woolen hats, wind and sun slipping along the accommodating curve of their lowered heads and bowed shoulders.

“You should talk to them,” my husband says one Saturday. We walk slowly so I can watch them from the corner of my eyes. “Find out who some of them are. I’m sure they’d love to talk to you.”

That is not the point, I say. In the stroller, our son crows and waves his hands, leaning forward to catch golden bright leaves and their shadows as they blow just beyond his grasp. My big, tall boy, now turned away from me, sits facing forward. His world unscrolls as it should, with no maternal hovering blocking his view. As I walk, I see only the top of his head, the brown hair that stands straight up to the sky, like grass. His smiles, broad and irresistible, are flung to the future. He is changing so fast, as everyone said he would, the infant he was in those bright hot days of walking has vanished into this child who laughs and sits and already pushes me away in search of movement that is his own. And soon he too will be gone, another, bigger boy in his place.

I do not talk to the old men because then they would become specific, and soon those specifics would change, as specifics always do. And they do not need my friendship; they are content in these days that are their own. But I need them, in their tableaux. They are my landmarks. Cars and bikes and people rush by them roaring and chattering and they do not look up from their games, from their conversations. Rain, heat, holiday distractions have no import. These men move steadily in their own rhythms, with their own purpose. I do not need to understand either. I am content to watch. To appreciate the beauty of permanence, in passing.