City: A Love Story

We see ourselves in this city every day when we walk down the sidewalk and catch our reflections in store windows, seek ourselves in this city each time we reminisce about what was there fifteen, ten, forty years ago, because all our old places are proof that we were here.

-Colson Whitehead

The weekend began with a parade. 

J. arrived home around 4 p.m. After a quick round of drinks with friends at a neighbourhood pub, we walked back through gathering revelers to watch the celebration from our third-floor fire escape. It was the first weekend of March when Cincinnati celebrated Bockfest, a quirky and beloved beer festival that marked the official-unofficial start of spring. Unlike other parades—which might feature junior high drumlines or spritely acrobats—this one was oriented around the procession of dozens of wooden kegs, a bathtub on wheels, men and women in lederhosen and dirndls, and a multitude of docile, leashed goats meandering along a route between the oldest bar in the city and a century-old lagering warehouse-turned-event space. I watched my husband watching the merriment below and felt a flood of dread.

Earlier that day, the dean of a small college in Iowa called to offer me a tenure-track position. It was my dream job, the one out of the fifty or sixty listings I’d applied to that I couldn’t refuse. And so when I called J. to share the news, there wasn’t much to discuss. Later, in the few moments of private celebration we enjoyed before colliding with the others, we raised a toast in appreciation of my achievement, gingerly steering our conversation around the things we didn’t want to talk about: the last Bockfest, the last City Flea, the last Second Sunday, the last spring and summer here.

～

When people ask for the story of how we met, I never know quite where to begin. We first met at a party my roommates and I threw after I’d finished my master’s. He was, at that time, just a friend of a friend, an interloper passing through my neighbourhood on his way to a Wilco show. We made eye contact across the yard when I noticed him noticing me. I didn’t ask his name.

A year passed, during which I moved into my own place, muscled through the first year of my Ph.D., and ghosted men who got in my way. At the end of the next summer, I walked into a bar only to find myself halted by his gaze from across the pool table, where he was setting up a shot. Sidling up to me later, he eyed my fresh tattoo—an ampersand on my left forearm, still shiny and a bit swollen—and turned around while lifting his shirt to show me his own: the f-holes of a viola, bold and elegant, positioned like wings on his back.

At last call, J. asked me about where I might like to go on a proper date, and for the first time that night, I had nothing to say. For three years, this city had been, for me, a way station, an incubator for my ambitions, nothing special, nothing permanent. For him, it had been home for almost thirty years. 

“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t know anything outside of my apartment, the bar on my corner where I sometimes graded papers, and the university English department. 

For a time, I tried to keep things casual; the more hours we spent together, the more I looked for excuses to rebuff such a predictable distraction, as I had with other sparkly-eyed men who wanted to stay out late on school nights. But before I could gather the courage to ignore his calls altogether, I felt a gravitational shift, a force pulling me toward him; snugged into his orbit, it was easy to love him.

He tells a simpler story. “You had a cold dead heart, and I warmed it back to life,” he would say, grinning. This version is also true. 

～

I made him a copy of my key, and he dusted off the French press stowed in the back of my cupboard. I adjusted my habits so our work and leisure time lined up, and he returned to his apartment every couple of days to spend time with his cat and sort the mail. On weeknights, we mostly hung around my neighbourhood near the university, subsisting on Indian takeout, $2 Molson drafts, and discounted popcorn at the art theater around the corner. On weekends, we ventured out: into his Cincinnati. 

In the fall, he took me to hear Beethoven’s Third at Music Hall and to see the tigers at the zoo; on one early winter day, he burst through the door with a couple of plastic sleds and an elaborate plan for the season’s first snowfall. In the spring, we skipped school and hopped a bus downtown for the Reds’ Opening Day parade. Once summer hit, we calculated the meager buying power of his teacher salary and my graduate stipend and signed an $850/month lease for a sprawling, if somewhat tired, loft in Over-the-Rhine, a not-yet gentrified neighbourhood in the urban core. At the time, the area was mostly populated with artists, students, and other low-income residents. Our loft sat three stories above a storefront, across the street from a rock-and-roll bar, and in the center of everything. We bought a grill, adopted a dog, and, because we had no yard, explored the city on foot—the dog a convenient catalyst to meet people and weave ourselves into the fabric of the neighbourhood. 

J. knew everything about the city. As we walked, he’d point out his favourite murals and rattle off comprehensive histories of this or that building, even when entire structures had been razed and rebuilt. He showed me where his parents went to middle school in the late fifties, where the old baseball stadium stood before the interstate carved a permanent wound through the urban core, and where, in the nineties, his dad ran a food ministry. His affection for his home made him a perfect docent, and I was his eager apprentice.

He talked and I listened, feeling the city imprint itself upon me. Over time, I heard myself repeating the same details and anecdotes to friends and family who visited. “This road used to be the Miami-Erie canal,” I’d say about the parkway that cuts across town just south of our apartment, launching into the story of how the district above came to be known (derisively) as Over-the-Rhine. We’d continue our stroll, pausing occasionally to admire the architectural features that qualified the district for the National Register of Historic Places. At some point, it became apparent that the arc of my tumble into love with J. mirrored the arc of my tumble into love with our city, and I couldn’t give the tour without weaving the threads of our own history into the tapestry. Here is the bakery where we buy our bread. Here is where we go for coffee on Saturdays. Over there, down that block, is the brewery that opened the same day we got married.

～

As the last clump of parade entries came into view, our group of ten or so drained our beers and drifted back out into the brisk evening, weaving with festival-goers past the rock-and-roll bar and the new popsicle shop, darting across Liberty Street between waves of traffic, and cutting through the seedy gas station to the beer hall. Inside, local brewers tapped kegs of bock, bands played bluegrassy polkas and, later, a new Sausage Queen would be named.

Like any hyperlocal tradition, the festival brought together every faction of the city: parents, kids, yuppies, and hillbillies; blue-collar westsiders and well-to-do suburbanites; politicians, physicians, musicians, aestheticians, and, of course, the neighbourhood folks, all crushed in shared, pulsing revelry. We mostly huddled, marvelling at the masses, or tried to snake through the crowd together without spilling too much beer.

At seven, the main band went on, Jake Speed and the Freddies. We’d missed them last year. As the opening chords of their folky festival theme song rang out, the crowd erupted, hoisting our beers and singing along. My chest thrummed as we approached the chorus, and at that moment, it overtook my throat, choking off the song’s dearest lines altogether. Replaying the job offer I’d all but formally accepted, I looked at my husband swaying arm in arm with his lifelong friends, and just as profoundly as I’d felt the expansion of the universe all those years before, I felt the world protract, somehow constricting my lungs and leaving me gasping. Yeasty air filled my head as scenes from our life shuffled across my memory, and I felt the peculiar sensation of my heart splitting in two: one half threatened to burst out of my chest with the excitement of long-delayed vocational validation, while the other half burrowed into the depths of my stomach as if trying to root here, now, permanently. I dunked my nose into my cup and took a long draw of beer, hoping it would coax my throat back open and help me find my breath again. From a few feet away, J’s face fell from elation to alarm.

“What’s wrong?” he yelled at me over the swell of duelling mandolin and guitar. I shook my head and waved my hands. Nothing, nothing, please ignore me. He moved toward me like he always does when I try to push him away. “What’s wrong? Why are you crying?” 

Was I crying?

“I’m not,” I said, crying. “I’m fine. It’s fine.”

“Come with me,” he said, pulling me by the elbow through the throngs of people and out onto the street. “What’s wrong?”

I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands. 

“I’m sorry,” I said a little louder than I meant to, the only volume at which I could form coherent words. “I’m sorry we have to move away.” I felt my pulse quaking in my ears and my bowels. I thought I might collapse or throw up or melt into the pavement. The thin, late-winter breeze burned in my chest and snapped at my neck, moist with sweat.

“Stop—what?” he asked, frustrated now. “I thought we were having a good time. Why are you thinking about this right now?”

I could hardly look at him, choosing instead to survey the scene in front of me over his shoulders: girls slinging their arms  around each other’s shoulders, boys pissing on the few remaining piles of ashen snow, the #17 bus roaring up East McMicken on its way into Clifton Heights.

“Because you love Jake Speed!” I cried helplessly, gesturing with open arms all around us—to the festival hall and the drunks stumbling off curbs, to the passing cars honking at jaywalkers, to the twinkling lights of our city. “You’re giving all of this up for me. And I can’t say no.” It was an act that overwhelmed as it humbled, a gift I didn’t know if I could match if he had asked the same of me. With everything I’d worked for finally within reach, I couldn’t imagine unstitching ourselves from this perfect, gritty city, and I was afraid of what our life would become, what our love would become if we left behind its conduit. If we would be enough. If I would be enough.

If he was willing to go, to leave all of this, for me, should I have been willing to stay? That I knew he wouldn’t even ask made everything hurt worse.

“I’m sorry,” I said, openly weeping now and reaching for him. “We’re missing Jake Speed.” 

“I love you,” he countered. The yellow light from the Shell station cast my field of vision into an impressionistic glow. He smiled and shook his head and held me tight, and I could tell he was also afraid but trying not to think about it. “I’ll be fine,” he said, rubbing my back. “We’ll be fine.”

～

The traditional gift for the first wedding anniversary is paper. That summer, after the movers cleared our apartment of all the boxes, we made paper of our skin, inking outlines of Ohio into our arms. Mine with a heart marking the location of our city, his filled in with a blocky rendering of the fountain at the city’s center. Two weeks later, I took my last pre-dawn jog around the neighbourhood, past new kitschy storefronts and old hardware shops, weaving around sidewalk closures where construction equipment signaled the promise (or threat) of new condos or a renovated wine bar. At Fountain Square, where I usually looped back toward home, I paused to look for a penny to toss. The sun was just beginning to lift off the river, reaching out toward me from between the buildings. I couldn’t find any coins, but I stood there awhile anyway, cooling in the fountain’s mist.

Not wanting to rush the final blocks, I walked the rest of the way, stopping at the coffee joint around the corner from our place just as the owner set out his sidewalk sign: two cortados to go. We packed our dogs—two of them now—and his instruments and my bikes into the cars and drove through wind and rain to a small city bullied on all sides by oceans of commodity crops.

Not long after, we bought a house on a quiet wooded street. I’d grow tomatoes; he’d play in a band. We had a baby. We buried a dog. We lost a one-hundred-and-forty-year-old oak tree in one of those summer storms that build strength over hundreds of miles of open plains, and with our then-three-year-old holding the hose, we planted two new trees in its place.

Last week, sitting at a window table at a local brewery in the Czech district, I noticed a new sign on a building across the street.

“We should try that,” I said, pointing.

He turned.

“When did that open? Didn’t it used to be—”

“Yeah,” I said, remembering the bar we hadn’t been to since our first or second year here. 

“Man,” he said, under his breath.  

We liked that place.