The Christmas Kid

That evening, they sat in a booth in a coffee shop on Broadway. She told him her name was Daria Stark, and her parents were from Russia, and she lived in Coney Island. Hugo told her about his life, his job, his time in the navy; he talked in great torrents about life and death and love. She listened to him in an enigmatic way, offering little comment, laughing out loud at some of his more extravagant flights, her amber eyes turning glassy when he fumbled for the Meaning of It All. Then it was time for her to go. Not home. To meet friends. In the Village.

“Can I go with you?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said, and then, as if to ease the blow, added, “but—”

He rushed into the opening. Coffee again? She shrugged. Why not? Monday? Okay. Here? Sure. All the way home to Brooklyn, Hugo felt like singing. Daria Stark, he thought; my Russian. He went to the library, borrowed And Quiet Flows the Don, and spent the weekend in the Soviet Union, in heroic encounters with Whites and Reds, Cossacks and Separatists. He felt the aura of Daria Stark on every page. He heard her whisper the words to him: “Blinding and irresistible shines the feather grass along the steppe.…” He identified with the protagonist, Gregory Melekhov, as he groped from one incomplete collision with history to another; Daria would make him complete. They would forge a union based on intelligence, art, generosity, the heroic ideal.…

She didn’t show up on Monday. She wasn’t at the Art Students League, either. She wasn’t there that week or the following week or even after that. He looked for her in the subway, he called everyone named Stark in the Brooklyn phone book, he walked along Surf and Neptune Avenues, looking for her; he wandered the Village, haunted art galleries and museums, never seeing art, simply looking at faces. He never found Daria Stark.

Weeks passed, and then months, and finally years. Hugo left the advertising agency, went to work for a magazine, moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan. He dated other women, of course, and even entered into a few serious affairs. But each time he began to make that mysterious leap into total commitment, he would pass a coffee shop or come out of Carnegie Hall and look left to the Art Students League or hear a fragment of conversation about Russian novels or see a woman with a portfolio, and Daria Stark would force her way again into his consciousness, filling it completely with her enigmatic smile and her dark presence. He couldn’t ever explain this to the wounded and baffled women in his life; he couldn’t make clear the extraordinary moment of connection on the D train long ago; he couldn’t describe the…aura.

After a while, he stopped going out with women altogether. He became a Village character; his beard grew out, a rich brown at first, and then scratched with gray. His eyes, weakened by endless copywriting, were soon masked by thick glasses. He was a steady, controlled drinker, but every once in a while, on clear days in winter, he would sometimes drink too much. I met him on one such day in the Lion’s Head. His voice was choked, slurred, guttural. “She had the aura,” he said, trying to tell me the story. “Her name was Daria Stark and she had the aura.…”

At such times, he would get drunk for a few weeks, and lose his job, and then suddenly stop at the edge of the abyss, and go for a haircut, have his suit pressed, move to another magazine, and resume the routine of his life. He was often embarrassed after such binges, as if uncertain about how much he had revealed of himself while drunk. But most of the time he was just another one of those quiet wounded men who live out their lives in bars.

Then one humid summer afternoon, Hugo was sitting on a bench in Union Square Park. He tried to read a paper, but the day was too hot. He watched the junkies and winos for a while, and the pair of cops who moved through them like pedestrians feeding pigeons. Then he dozed, dreamy with summer exhaustion, and then was snapped awake by the backfiring of a truck.

He looked up at a thick-bodied, white-haired woman walking across the park, stepping tenderly, as if her feet hurt. Her head was down. She went to the curb at Fourth Avenue, waited for the light to change, and then hurried across the street to get on a bus. And then Hugo knew that it was Daria Stark. This lumpy middle-aged woman. It was her. And suddenly he was up, rushing to the corner, seeing the bus wheeze into the distance, heading uptown for Grand Central. He jumped into traffic, and a cab stopped with a squeal of brakes, and a cop turned to face him from the opposite corner, and a truck pulled around him, and Hugo began to run. Uptown. Calling her name. Through traffic. And never saw the taxi running the red light on 20th Street.

When I went to see him at Bellevue, his voice was an injured croak. His left leg was broken, his pelvis smashed, his skull fractured; there were tubes in his arms.