Somehow, I know that what she is painting has everything to do with us. But at the same time, she’s being a tease, trying to make me wager a guess on something impossible to visualize. Is the painting a portrait of me? Is it a portrait of herself? Is it us standing together on the Ponte di Rialto in beautiful Venice? Is it a portrait of a total stranger?
“You’re making me feel, really, really blind right now,” I say.
“Stop relying on your eyes and rely more on your other senses.” She kisses both my hands. “Now, Captain, what is it you see?”
“Use the force, Luke,” I say. But at the same time, I feel as if a spirit or ghost has just passed through my worn body.
“I know this is crazy,” I whisper. “But I see you and I see me. We’re standing together, naked in an open field, facing the sun. We’ve just made love and somehow, everything is different now.” I face her. “So, Gracie, how close am I?”
Grace lets go of my hands and she holds me so tightly I feel our hearts beating against one another. The salt in her tears stings the tiny cuts and scrapes on my face. They remind me of how much I cannot live without her.
“You’re seeing with your heart,” she says. “For the first time in years.”
“But how close was I to seeing what you painted?”
“Doesn’t matter,” she says. “What you saw was our future, and that’s what counts.”
My future wife. My life. My heart. My state of Grace.
We decide to get dressed and take the boat taxi to Piazza San Marco, where we can blow a day’s pay on lunch and a bottle of Valpolicella at the outdoor caffè across from the cathedral.
Grace is happy with the idea.
Giddy happy.
I don’t have to see her to feel her happiness. Her infectious delight. It’s a hell of a lot better than the absolute panic she experienced when I nearly fell to my death. Better than the anxiety-ridden woman of yesterday afternoon when I gave her a hard time and the stranger kept us solidly in his crosshairs.
We grab our coats and Grace opens the door. It’s like we can’t escape the apartment fast enough. We step outside.
Then the phone rings.
Chapter 9
I came to Venice to regain my eyesight.
I came to live again and to heal. To make new memories. To forget some old ones. But you can never forget something entirely. No matter how bad. I recall the moment when Grace and I first met in 2007. Between Army Reserve deployments, I finally had time to work on building a writing career, something I’d made several false starts at prior to Karen’s suicide. Which is how I came to attend a writers conference in New York City and a workshop dedicated to writing that first book-length work of fiction.
The large room was filled mostly with recent graduates buried in jobs they couldn’t stand, student loans they were never going to pay off, and a quickly developing conviction that the nine-to-five life of sleep/video games/bed was the sure path to suicide. They were also convinced that the unfinished opus they had going on their laptop was the next great American novel.
A couple of seats over from mine sat a young, hopeful writer. A woman. Long hair that draped her shoulders, vibrant green eyes, and heart-shaped lips that made her dimpled cheeks glow like electric bulbs when she smiled. I found myself focusing in on her as if I’d traveled by train the one hundred forty miles from Albany to Manhattan to be with her and her alone. And maybe, in some kind of cosmic way, I had.
When the lecture was over and people began to disperse, I found myself searching for her almost frantically. I must admit, even then she reminded me of Karen. They shared the same long, dark hair, same womanly build. Not too thin. Not overly voluptuous. But just perfect. Even from two seats over I had been able to capture her scent. Rose petals. Had Karen smelled of roses, too?
But it was her eyes, entirely her own, that mesmerized me. They did something to me, those eyes. Did something to my head, I suppose. Opened a door in my brain to a place that I never knew existed until that very moment in time.
When I found her by the open doors, her leather bag hanging off her shoulder, standing behind the small line of attendees who were seeking out further advice from the speaker, I rushed over to her with all the urgency of a man who’d finally found what had been missing in his life.
I tapped her on the shoulder. She turned quickly, offered me a startled smile that made my heart beat and heat up and swell all at the same time. Her pale complexion flushed, as if something was happening inside her, too. I’d never met this woman before, but I felt like I’d known her my whole life.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you were somebody else.” But then, knowing how silly that sounded . . . “Correction,” I went on. “You remind me of someone I knew a long time ago.”
“I’ve never gotten that before,” she said. “But this is a writers conference. Lotsa creative lines floating around this place.”
Together we laughed. She was witty, and I liked that. The next panel was about to start, but I took a shot and asked her if she’d like to grab a coffee at one of the shops situated outside the tuna can of a chain hotel. She nodded thoughtfully, her face filling with more blood. As she pushed her bag strap up onto her shoulder, I caught a glimpse of her black lace bra through her low-cut shirt. Lowering my gaze, I watched her nervously cross one booted foot over the other. When I raised my head back up, her eyes were locked on mine. She was smiling.
I swear I wanted to ask her to marry me then and there. But I figured I’d probably better wait a while on that. Together, we escaped the conference, like our lives depended on it.
Her name was Grace.
And here was Grace’s life according to her own invention: She was not only a poet and a would-be writer, but a painter who taught classes at the City College way uptown. She didn’t drink coffee but loved tea, and other than red wine, wasn’t much for the hard stuff. But she did like to smoke pot on occasion. I, however, confessed that pot made me so paranoid I would have to insist she stop looking at me, especially with those giant green eyes.
She wore a plain ring on her left hand.
“Married,” I said, pointing at her finger as it tapped the tabletop outside the coffee shop. “All the good ones are.”
Eyes wide, she shook her head like she didn’t quite understand.
“I’m sorry,” I said, staring down into my cappuccino, searching the white froth. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
She opened her bag then, pulled out a pad of pink Post-it Notes and a pen. “Married,” she whispered, while jotting down the words. “All the good ones are.”
“Hey, that’s my line,” I said, laughing.
“It just might end up in one of my poems,” she said, with a wink. A sexy wink. Then, returning the notes and pen back to her bag, “Was married, as in past tense. Well, currently going through a divorce.”
A spark of hope shot through my veins.
“You’re not married?” she added, that red flush returning to her cheeks. “No kids?”
“My wife died,” I said, holding up my lonely ring finger. What I didn’t tell her was that when Karen had taken her own life, she’d taken the life of our unborn child with her.
She nursed her tea and I sipped my cappuccino and eventually she got around to asking if I wouldn’t mind taking a look at some pages she’d written for what she hoped would be her first novel. She had them in her bag. In return perhaps she could read something of mine.
“I’d love to read your stuff,” I said, finishing my coffee. “Maybe we can find some quiet space in my hotel. And something a little harder to drink. Like red wine, for instance.”
New York City was congested with cars speeding past, hordes of suited workers and poorly dressed tourists crowding the sidewalks, and the din of thousands of conversations going on all at once.
But somehow the whole world stood still.
Grace got up, looked one way and then the other. With her eyes peering not at me, but up past the glass-a
nd-steel towers at the blue heavens, she said, “Okay. Yes. Why the hell not?”
We weren’t three feet inside the hotel room before our mouths were locked and I was undressing her and she was undressing me. Our trail of jeans, underwear, coats, and sweaters led to the queen-sized bed. It was awkward and first-timey until at one point, we both started laughing and I was able to feel more at one with her as I entered her, our hips pressed together, her wet heat surrounding my hardness, drawing me further and further in.
Afterward, she lay with her head on my chest and I ran my fingers through her hair. I asked her to tell me about her ex-husband.
She looked at me with frightened eyes. “Well, aren’t you the master of apropos pillow talk?”
I laughed.
“What’s his name?” I said.
“Andrew,” she whispered after a weighted pause. “And I loved him once upon a time. Loved him very much.”
He was a professor, she told me, and a musician. For a long time he was one of the most loving and open men she’d ever known.
“We were together sixteen years before we separated,” she exhaled. “For the last couple of years, we had sex maybe four or five times at most. Currently, I’m thirty-three years young.”
“Almost half of your life,” I said after a while, my fingers still dancing in her thick hair. “That’s an awfully long time to be with any one person.”
“I never looked at it that way. But yes, half my life.”
“You’re beautiful, smart, talented,” I said. “Even your brains are sexy.”
She made a fist, lightly punched my arm. A love tap.
“For as much as Andrew claimed to love me, he just couldn’t keep himself from offering extra office hours to a series of blonde, blue-eyed coeds.”
“At least he kept his preferences specific. I guess I’d say I’m sorry if it wasn’t such a cliché. But the professor’s loss is my . . .”
“Oh no. Don’t be sorry. He’s the one who’s sorry now that I walked out on him.”
Afterward we got out of bed to take a shower together. I slipped on the porcelain and she reached out and caught me before I fell, but not before I tore the plastic curtain off the rings. We laughed so hard I found it impossible to comprehend that we’d only just met and that she’d loved a less-than-loyal professor named Andrew for half her living years.
We got out and as we dried off, the atmosphere began to take on a more serious tone. Without saying so, both of us were realizing that what we’d just shared, as beautiful as it was, was rapidly and cruelly fleeting.
Now fully dressed, she looked at her watch. “I have to get to work.”
When she was gone, I felt the dreadful emptiness settle in. It’d been a long time since I’d been with a woman and an even longer time since I’d allowed myself to fall in love so easily. I thought about Karen. Her brown eyes, her dark hair, her never-ceasing optimism. The type of woman who wouldn’t stress if we were broke, but instead would plant a beaming smile on her face and sing, “But we have each other, my dear.” How she was able to hide her depression was and is beyond me. The courage and resolve it took for her to drive the car into the river on a hot summer afternoon surely paled in comparison to the strength it must have taken her to live each day, day in and day out, while planting that smile on her face.
Or maybe her depression had something to do with me and the things I couldn’t talk about. The things I’d seen in the Persian Gulf War, things I carried with me as a professional soldier.
Then came her suicide and not long after that, the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. I was called back to fight, but I would have volunteered anyway. War was nothing if not the ultimate distraction. But that’s putting it lightly. I felt a craving for going to war like a child craves candy.
During the hot summer of 2007 I was still a reservist, but instead of war and destruction, I was looking to do something creative with my days and nights. It was fate or providence or good luck that another woman had suddenly entered my life, not to take Karen’s place, but to fill a long-empty void.
I stood in the hotel room smelling Grace’s sweet, flowery scent and realized she hadn’t even left me her phone number. At the thought that I might never see her again, that the lightness I’d felt, however briefly, would be gone forever, my stomach sank. Opening the door, I stepped into the hall and searched for her.
But she was already gone.
Turning, I saw that a pink Post-it Note had been stuck to the plastic Do Not Disturb hangtag. I peeled the note off and read it.
No longer married.
All the good ones are.
It wasn’t a note at all, but a poem that made me laugh and tear up at the same time. Below the poem was her cell phone number and below that, an XOX, just like two young kids exchanging love letters.
Chapter 10
We’ve barely slipped on our coats, barely stepped out onto the landing when the phone rings. The clanging bell isn’t just the sound an old phone makes. It’s an alarm. An alarm that tells me there’s been a breach. That someone or something has cut through our invisible barrier and is about to unleash something very unpleasant on us.
“Let me get it this time,” I say, the excitement of heading out to lunch together now suddenly replaced with a dread. Like the floor is about to open up right out from under my feet.
I step back inside the apartment, shuffle the couple of steps to my right, to the wall-mounted phone beside the door. I feel for the cordless receiver, pick it up.
“Pronto.”
My ear fills with white noise. Not loud white noise. More like the static that comes from a bad connection, or a cell phone with bad reception. I listen for a voice, but hear nothing other than static.
“Who is it?” Grace asks from the landing, her words echoing in the open stairwell.
I find myself turning in order to glance at her. But of course, this is just instinct kicking in. The sound of her booted feet shuffling against the stone tells me she’s taking a step closer. “It’s him again, isn’t it?”
I hold up my hand.
Grace gets the message and goes silent. I think she’s holding her breath.
“Who’s there?” I say into the phone. Tone even-keeled, not at all threatening.
There is only the white noise. Until it’s broken by a faint voice.
“I . . . see,” says the voice. It sounds like a man. Perhaps an old man who is talking to me over the phone from a great distance away. But this is the age of satellites. He could be located on the other side of the world and sound like he’s standing downstairs in the empty bookshop.
“What do you see?” I say, pulse now throbbing in my temples.
More white noise.
“I see,” he repeats.
“Who is this? What is your name? Tell me your name, damn it.” I’m lobbing the queries but they don’t seem to be registering in the least. Not because the man on the other end doesn’t hear me. But because he doesn’t want to answer me.
Once more the receiver fills with white noise, and once more come the words, softly spoken: “I see.”
Then the line goes dead.
“Hello,” I bark into the phone. “Hello. Hello. Hello . . .”
But it’s no use. The man on the phone is gone. Disconnected.
Grace steps inside the apartment. “May I?”
It startles me when she pulls the phone from my hand and punches in a couple of numbers. Instinct kicks in. I raise up my right hand, make a fist. But what the hell am I doing? It’s Grace, not the enemy. In my throbbing head I picture her taut cheeks, her lips pressed together, her eyes bright and wide. It’s the face she wears when she’s angry or upset. I take a breath and try to calm myself down.
“What’s happening?” I say. A breeze slips through the apartment’s open door.
“Star sixty-nine.”
“You sure that works in Europe? In Italy?”
“We’ll soon find out.”
I wait along with G
race, who holds out the phone so I’m able to discern the faint, tinny sound of the computer-generated operator speaking in rapid-fire Italian. I can’t understand a word she’s saying, but I sense Grace is trying her best to make sense of it all.
“Well?”
“Greek to me,” she jokes. But I know it’s not funny. Then she adds, “Something about the number I just dialed is not correct or can’t be connected.”
“The man is calling from a cell phone, maybe, his number blocked.”
Graces reaches beyond me with the phone, her arm brushing up against my shoulder, hangs it up in its cradle.
The room fills with a hard silence.
“Does anyone know we’re here, Nick?”
I shake my head. “Far as I know, almost no one. Just a couple of guys who helped me out.”
“Do they often rent this apartment out to other wounded soldiers?”
Wounded soldier. I’ve never thought of myself as a wounded soldier or wounded warrior . . . a casualty of war. But I guess that’s precisely what I am. A casualty.
“I doubt it. They reserve it for healthy officers. We’re only here as a favor.” I dig in my pocket for my cell. “I can make a call or two to DC—”
Grace grabs hold of my arm.
“Let’s just go,” she insists. “I’m sure there’s a logical explanation for whoever’s called to let us know he can see something . . . whatever that’s supposed to mean.”
“Maybe it’s like I said. Some asshole’s idea of a bad joke.”
“Or bad timing.” She heads for the door. “You coming?”
“Yes,” I say, trying to imagine someone standing somewhere in the world speaking the words “I see” into a cell phone. I envision a bald, craggy-faced old man. Perhaps the man who used to own the rare bookshop.
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