Fiction: Leaving the City of Jewels, 2018

Marianne Szlyk

Alicia wants to cry. She could just weep bitter, salty tears in this yoga studio with its smooth, honey-colored wood floor and warm brick walls. This should have been final relaxation, savasana. The almost-Southern voice of the teacher is explaining to her students what it means to live in the city of jewels, the third chakra, the solar plexus. 

But as the students lay down on their mats, David, whose kind, brown-eyed gaze and quiet voice comfort her, reached out. The small room is crowded. As she lay, arms at her side, palms up, it was easy for him to take her hand. They came in together, set up their mats next to each other. She brought him a strap. He brought her blocks and a blanket. They look like an almost young, curly-haired couple. True, he is about a foot taller than she is although he does slouch a bit, endearingly, she thinks. The teacher won’t stop her after class, ask her if she’s okay.  Alicia feels fine. His larger hand encloses hers. It is calm, patient. She feels the electricity of his presence, the beginnings of her love for him. 

But David is her sort of friend Mary’s partner. They’ve been together for years. 

With or without another woman’s man, Alicia will have to leave the city of jewels, the secure city where everyone loves to worship, where worship is like breathing. She will retreat to the second chakra, that swamp of desire, the place that has always pulled her back. The place where she has been mired for so many years, even before her desire had a name. She smiles, remembering when she used to read novels that were far too old for her. Novels that her mother, then her father’s girlfriends, left lying around the house. David is far from the first man she could love. 

At least he doesn’t push her away—or make her contort herself in strange ways. She smiles, remembering the weeks she trotted off to Bible study with Wesley, her father’s male nurse. She would have gone with him to start his church in St. Louis, but he told her that God had wanted him to take Blessing, another nurse, a holy woman from Liberia, as his wife. She still wonders what her life would have been like had Wesley chosen to marry her. Certainly, she would not be in this DC studio during final relaxation. Once when she came back from her yoga class near the St. Agnes Library, Wesley sadly mentioned that yoga was “demon worship.” Needless to say, she did not go back to yoga until after he and Blessing had departed for St. Louis.

In the last moment of final relaxation, David’s fingers pull away from her hand. Soon they must return to the world outside this small room on the third floor. The teacher taps her miniature gong, and the class dissolves into fifteen or twenty individuals, each rising from the mat, wiping it down, stretching, hanging up the straps, returning the blocks and blankets to the shelves, leaving separately. Except for her and David, for they are a couple. She wonders whether he and Mary would appear to be more of a couple. She thinks not. 

She and David don’t speak until they are outside. She ponders whether she would have been safer staying in his house, in Mary’s house, even if it meant sleeping on the red sofa downstairs. She has never really liked Mary, but, after her father’s death, she had to go somewhere. Caring for her father for so long has exhausted her. Where else could she go besides Washington, DC? St. Louis? Her stepmother does not trust many of her poetry friends, and her only friend in NYC is married and has boisterous children. 

She would rather be anywhere else, doing anything rather than walking on this main street with almost every storefront promising some wonderful bar, café, or boutique by fall. It is late spring, early summer. She glances over at the basilica, white as a replacement moon rising on this cloudy evening. She considers going to Daily Mass there, even to confession, just to remain in the city of jewels. Her father’s ghost would be horrified. Her stepmother, a Catholic, would be thrilled. Perhaps the priest she would confess to would find a convent for her to stay in. She wouldn’t mind if she were the only one under seventy, if they kept her busy, if they kept her too busy for yoga.

But David is holding her hand again. She can feel his hand squeeze hers, constricting it. She considers going to Barnes and Noble, the one live storefront on this street. She could certainly lose him there. Especially since, as he confessed after yoga yesterday, poetry bores him. The store has a good poetry selection—something beyond Shel Silverstein, Poe, and Maya Angelou. 

Alicia and David walk past the Barnes and Noble. They turn down the street to her Airbnb. She actually isn’t paying attention to what he is saying. He could be explaining math to her, far beyond what she studied in high school. He might be talking about the conference he is going to next week. Whatever he is saying, she is glad to be holding hands with him on this moonless night as they walk away from the basilica that should mean nothing to her, a Jewish man’s daughter. Perhaps she should have gone to Israel, a trip one of her poetry friends has recommended. Or she could have visited her mother in Laurel Canyon for a day or two. She has other friends in LA, so this could have been a longer visit.

Almost too quickly, they are at her Airbnb, a wooden house shaded by the street’s largest tree. She imagines that the tree’s thickening shade hides her from God, Vishnu, Jesus, her father’s ghost, even David’s partner Mary, her stepmother’s friend. 

“I wish you could come in,” Alicia says, balanced between regret and relief.

“Come with me to the conference next week. It’s in Philadelphia. We can take the train.”

“Yes. Yes, I’d like to very much,” she says, pulling away from him, almost turning to go inside.

He pulls her in for a hug as if they were just friends. He is too tall to kiss her easily, especially when her feet are on the ground. But his embrace is more than enough.

“All I need is you. All you need is me,” he tells her as he withdraws, before he turns away to walk home.  Alicia watches him for as long as she can. Until he takes a right turn at the cross street to walk home to Mary. The woman he claims not to need anymore. The woman he may or may not have loved at some point. The woman who never loved him—or so he said yesterday over too-strong green tea at the Starbucks in the Barnes and Noble. 

Alicia stands still for a moment, then taps in the key code, and walks in. Another guest is watching TV, probably one of the political shows or maybe a sports show. It’s hard to tell nowadays with all of the bickering and posturing. She enters the kitchen and takes out red grapes, brie, crackers, and seltzer from the refrigerator. She adds an almond or two from her purse. Then she turns off her phone, not wanting to hear from her older and wiser friends or her stepmother who had advised her to stay at an Airbnb rather than at Mary’s. Her stepmother feared that David would chase after her. The older woman added that David looked too much like a younger version of Alicia’s late father—with light brown hair, not dark, with thick, plastic-rimmed glasses, not stylish, metal-rimmed ones.

Eating at the counter, her back to the TV, Alicia tastes the food mechanically. Next week she will be in Philadelphia. She will finally be leaving the city of jewels, once again losing herself in the swamp of desire. “All I need is him, and all he needs is me,” she reminds herself.

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Setu, July 2025