by Alix Ohlin
“I’m your second opinion,” her fiancé said.
Tug was smiling wryly, absently, as Grace walked toward him, trying to arrange her face in some semblance of casualness. She put her plastic bag on the counter and said, “I’m interested in some invitations.”
“Are you getting married?”
“No.”
“So what kind of event, then?”
“I’m just kind of interested,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at the other clerk. “In general.”
“Hypothetical invitations, right,” he said, and flipped open an album.
Leaning over it, their heads close together, she could feel the heat coming off him. “I was just wondering,” she said, “how you were.”
“I’m fine.”
“I don’t see any crutches.”
“I’m a quick healer,” he said. He saw her looking at his throat, whose redness might have been mistaken for a rash, and flushed.
“And otherwise?” she said.
“I’m great,” he said. “Never better.”
“You don’t have to be flip with me,” she said evenly. “I’m not judging you or asking you for anything. I’m just concerned.”
“Why?” he said, sounding more curious than angry. “It’s not every day that I meet someone so … invested in my well-being.”
Grace looked up, holding his gaze. “It’s not every day that I meet someone the way I met you.”
“I’m sorry about dragging you into my life,” he said. “It’s not what I meant to have happen.”
“I don’t mind it,” she said.
She slipped a sample of expensive bonded paper out of the album he held. With one of the store’s fancy pens she wrote down her name, address, and phone number. “This is who I am,” she said. “You can call me, if you want to.”
“What if I don’t want to?” he said. “Will you leave me alone?”
Grace was taken aback. “I don’t know,” she said.
Another smile broke over him then, composed of equal parts surprise, cynicism, and amusement, and he looked like a different person, younger, sweeter. She realized he was handsome. He had a beautiful smile, with even white teeth and a dimple on the left side. “You’re something else,” he said. “I’m just not sure what.”
She smiled back, and then the blond clerk cleared her throat, indicating the presence of other customers, so she gathered her purchases and left.
Of course he didn’t call. She didn’t expect him to. They were strangers. So she tried her best to forget about him, the day on the mountain, the unexpected sweetness of his smile. But in still moments, when she was driving home, or folding laundry, or in the shower, images would flicker in her mind. Not memories, but images of what she hadn’t seen: Tug skiing by himself into the woods. Tying the rope around his neck. His body falling, heavy but soundless, into the snow. Waiting for her to come skiing down from the Chalet. Waiting to be found.
An idea came to her with the weather. She woke up on a Saturday morning to find the world softened with snow. Outside people were shoveling out their cars, the trucks rumbling through the streets, plowing and salting. Her neighbor, Mr. Diallou, cleared a path around his Honda only to see a truck banking snow around it, obstructing him again. He raised his fist and cursed the driver. Grace smiled, knowing what to do.
She called the stationery store and asked for him. When the manager said he wasn’t working, she cleared her car, loaded it up, and drove to his apartment. It wasn’t yet ten o’clock. He came to the door wearing a thick gray sweater and jeans, apparently still half asleep, his eyes heavy-lidded, his clothes rumpled.
“Let’s go skiing,” she said.
Tug looked at her with no trace of the cynical distance she’d seen in him before. Maybe she had caught him at an unguarded moment. “Do you want some coffee?” he said.
She followed him inside and took off her boots in the hall, wondering if he hadn’t heard what she said. She unzipped her ski jacket as he poured her a cup of coffee from a full pot. On the table was his own cup, the newspaper, a plate with crumbs. He was rubbing his hair absentmindedly, the loose curls spreading around his head, the lines around his eyes deeper than usual.
“Milk? Sugar?”
She shook her head. He gestured at the chair across from his, and she sat down. With what she understood to be a welcoming gesture, he pushed a section of the newspaper in her direction. It was the Business section, and she read through it carefully while sipping the coffee, as if she might be tested on it later. Laurentian Bank’s revenues had increased. Four people had died in an accident in a diamond mine in Botswana. Tug yawned, flipping the pages and shaking his head over some article or another.
Fifteen minutes passed. There was no sign of the dog, and she wondered if his ex-wife had come by to pick it up. If he’d told her what he had done on the mountain, or had tried to do.
He rubbed his hair again, tousling it even further. Then he said, “I’m never much good before coffee. When I used to travel a lot, I always took a coffee kit with me. People would make fun of me, and it used to drive Marcie crazy. She’d sit across from me and tell me all her dreams, and then the entire plan for the day, and think everything was settled. Half an hour later I’d go, ‘Were you saying something?’ ”
It was his first unprompted confidence, and she didn’t speak, not wanting to startle or interrupt him. She only nodded.
“No wonder she left me,” he said, without apparent rancor.
She smiled at him, encouraging him to go on, and his eyes focused on her face, then on her clothes.
“Were you saying something?”
“I thought we could go skiing.”
As if this were the first he’d heard of it, he looked out the living-room window at the snow. “I never pay attention to the weather,” he said softly, seemingly to himself. “What’s wrong with me?”
Grace kept quiet. It seemed like a rhetorical question, and anyway she didn’t yet know the answer.
“I’d love to go,” he said after a pause, “but I don’t have skis.” He looked at her, shrugged, and the memory of the day they met registered between them.
“I brought you some,” Grace said. When he frowned, she explained, “They belonged to my ex-husband. He was around your height. Close enough to make do, anyway. You still have the boots, right? His might fit you, but I’m not sure.”
Tug puffed his cheeks comically, then let the air slowly drift out. She could tell he was relieved that she hadn’t actually bought him a new pair of skis.
“The social lives of divorced people,” he said. “All the old equipment still around.”
Grace leaned across the table and touched his wrist, so suddenly that the movement was upon her even before she’d decided to do it. She could feel his warm skin and the butterfly beat of his pulse. His eyes met hers, steady and green, and she knew that the electric charge between them wasn’t just on her side. He was flushing too.
“Let’s just go,” she said, “before you change your mind.”
Instead of heading to the mountain she took the Trans-Canada to a nature preserve on the West Island. In the early years of their marriage she and Mitch had often skied there. She had looked at the families around them, romping with their kids and dogs, and thought she was seeing her own future. But she hadn’t seen this: herself and Tug, almost strangers, unloading skis and poles after a car ride during which neither of them had had much to say. Yet she didn’t feel unhappy. She was pleased he’d agreed to go, and she was happy to be skiing, too.
They set off into the woods, Tug ahead of her moving swiftly, rhythmically. Mitch’s skis seemed to suit him well enough. Fresh snow had fallen on old tracks, and they could feel both the satisfying crunch of new powder and the underlying structure of the trail. Her breath rose ahead of her. On either side pine needles confettied the snow. She could hear Tug panting a little as they pushed up a hill. The sun was shining. Looking at his back, Grace thought, before she could stop herse
lf, You’d have to be crazy to want to leave this world.
Half an hour later they came to a clearing and stopped to catch their breath. A few winter birds were picking at the bare, desiccated trees. When she offered him some water and he turned around, his cheeks were red, his eyes bright. He looked happy.
“When I lived in Geneva,” he said, “I skied all the time. Even trained to do a biathlon. But I left before I could actually compete.”
“What were you doing in Geneva?” Grace asked.
He handed the bottle back and bent down to adjust his boot. “Exchange student,” he said without looking up.
She assumed from his evasive tone that he was lying, but thought better of calling him out. “Must have been spectacular,” she said lightly. “But this isn’t bad.”
“No,” he said, and she hoped his look meant he was grateful she hadn’t pressed him. “It’s not.”
They started up again, Grace in front this time. They met a middle-aged couple on the trail with two large dogs. Tug stopped and chatted with them briefly about the weather, the snow conditions, how much exercise pets need, much friendlier than he had ever been with her. With his face reddened by the wind he looked younger and healthier, a casual smile transforming his face.
By now it was noon, and the preserve was bustling with newcomers, children, and dogs. Snow was falling again, a soft, lush drift. The day was warming, the trail slick with melt, and without discussing it they quickened their pace. Grace unzipped her jacket and put her hat in her pocket, and it occurred to her that she had never seen Tug wearing one. She was already thinking like that, as if she’d been around him so many times.
The last part of the trail was uphill, back to the lodge, and they herringboned this stretch madly in a kind of crazy, splay-legged sprint. She could hear the staccato rhythm of his breath behind her, and whenever she lagged he gained, so she picked up speed, not wanting to seem anything but strong. By the crest of the hill her thighs were burning. They skied to the finish as if in a race, each taking longer and longer strides until the trail was broken up by footprints, choppy ice mixing with gravel, their skis crunching, and it was time—too soon, she thought—to stop.
Tug smiled at her. “Well,” he said, “you gave me a run for my money.”
“I used to race.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I can picture that. You in a ski uniform with a number pinned on front. Intent on winning unless somebody was injured or in trouble. Then you’d veer off course.”
She couldn’t tell if he was joking, and she narrowed her eyes at him. “I was a laser beam of competitive focus,” she said, and he laughed.
They loaded up the skis and she drove back east, the highway’s gray-brown slush ruffled with tire marks. The car smelled of sweat and wet wool. With the heat on, she felt sleepy, almost dangerously so. How Tug felt she had no idea. He was leaning, either lethargic or relaxed, against the passenger-side door.
She double-parked in front of his apartment and waited.
“That was nice,” Tug said. He sounded surprised. “It was good we went.”
“I’m glad. I was hoping it would be.”
“I liked seeing all those people out there, just having a good time. I sometimes forget people actually do that.”
“Have a good time?”
He frowned impatiently. “No, that people ski in groups, or where other people are around, and it’s still fun. For me it’s always been a solitary activity. Something you do to be alone.”
She nodded; this was how it usually was for her on the mountain, away from the hours and days of conversation and chatter, with endless problems haltingly and passionately delivered.
“In Switzerland I always went to the quietest place. But maybe if I’d gone somewhere crowded I would’ve had a better time.”
“When you were an exchange student.”
She thought she’d kept her tone even, but Tug took it as a challenge. He was shaking his head. “All right, fine, I wasn’t a student.”
“I didn’t mean to say you were lying.”
“Well, I was. I’m a liar.”
“Okay,” she said.
There was a pause in which he must have expected her to ask him for the truth, but she didn’t. She thought of the animals she’d rescued in childhood, the stray kittens and lost dogs. You didn’t cajole or chase them, she’d learned; you crouched down and waited for them to come to you.
Tug opened the door and cold air rushed into the car. With one foot on the pavement outside, he smiled glancingly at her and said, “It was another life.”
She nodded. “I’ve had one of those myself,” she said.
That night she went to bed tired, with the bone-deep, gravity-flattened exhaustion of muscles that had done their part. She thought she would dream about him; but if she did, it was lost in the inky darkness of her sleep, and gone by morning.
It was the following night that she had trouble sleeping. As she lay in bed, her mind paced ahead of her into the week to come, feeling for its coming trouble spots and few expected pleasures. She’d have to figure out, for example, what to do about Annie and her parents. So she was awake, or at least not fully asleep, when the phone rang at three in the morning.
“What are you doing?” Tug’s voice was garbled and slushy. He’d been drinking.
“I was trying to sleep, but not succeeding.” She sat up, cradling the phone to her ear. From outside came distant sounds of traffic, and she could make out, through the curtains, the lightness of a winter night in the city when snow is on the ground.
There was a long pause before he said, “Well, I’m glad I didn’t wake you up.” It was clear from the pause that he hadn’t, actually, given it much thought.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“I’m having a dark night of the soul. You seemed like the person to call.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Grace said, trying to picture him alone in his dark apartment, in his bed, his hands agitating his curly hair. “Not that you’re having a dark night of the soul, I mean. I’m not glad about that part.”
“Oh, I am,” Tug said. “I’m positively thrilled.”
She chose not to encourage this sarcasm. Instead she concentrated on the near-silence between them on the line, the cadence of his breath. “What would you say is keeping you up?” she asked after a while.
“At this point I’d have to say it’s the drinking,” Tug said.
“And before that?”
“I feel bad about lying to you,” he said, not an answer to her question but a separate tack. “And you knew it, too. That’s probably why people don’t like to spend time with you, Grace. Because you can tell when they’re lying and you call them on it.”
This stung her. “Who says people don’t like to spend time with me?”
“You don’t seem to have much of a social life. And you’re pouring a lot of energy into being friends with me, God knows why. And you’re divorced.”
“So are you.”
“My point,” he said, “exactly.”
Tug was wrong, Grace thought: she had friends. But she had to admit there was some truth to what he said. With men, she was curious enough to pay attention to them, but they either recoiled as if she were too intense or else unraveled, told her everything, then wound up saying, “You’re a great listener, Grace,” and dating somebody else. Lately she’d sort of given up on meeting anyone. As her friends got older, busy with their marriages and children, she was starting to feel isolated, marooned on her own private island, and sometimes weeks passed without her making any plans at all.
But she was still curious about Tug. “So what did you lie about?” she said.
He lowered his voice to a whisper so unfocused that she had trouble making out the words. “I was never an exchange student in Switzerland. Also, I haven’t exactly worked at the store forever. I was headquartered in Geneva for a time, then Central America, then Africa, then back here. I’ve been restless for most of my life, and
maybe that’s my problem—that I came home.”
“Are you a spy?” Grace said.
“I was. But not anymore.”
She let the silence stretch between them again, a joint project, loose and home-fashioned, like a string between two tin cans.
“That was a lie. The spy thing, not the geography.” He was barely audible now, his mouth far from the phone, and she could picture him clearly, head on the pillow, the phone next to him like a companion, a pet.
“Ah,” she said.
There was a scuffle on the other end of the line as he started to say something, but then he hung up—whether accidentally or on purpose, she didn’t know. He didn’t call again.
The next day she was back at work. Never had she been more grateful for how the hour-long sessions broke the day down, and she poured her attention and focus into each one. Only in a few off moments did the memory of his slurred, confiding tone return to her, the intimacy of his middle-of-the-night voice. She resisted the temptation to give in to it. She wanted to be fair to the people who sought her help, without distraction, and she promised herself that she could think about him all she wanted some other time.
As if in reward for this promise, he called her that evening at seven thirty, and his voice was articulate and dry, haltingly sober. “I want to apologize,” he said, “for last night.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Maybe you don’t think so,” he said. “Though it’s a mystery why.”
“I was glad you called.”
“There’s something weird about a person like you,” he said, “who’s so intent on helping a fuck-up.”
“I don’t actually think you’re a fuck-up,” Grace said mildly. She was standing in her kitchen, holding a half-eaten sandwich. “And anyway, maybe there’s something weird about a person like you, who thinks he doesn’t deserve anybody’s help.”
“Maybe,” he said, not sounding very convinced. “I shouldn’t be drunk-dialing at my age. I’m sorry.”
“Are you all right?”
“My hangover’s more psychological than physical, if that’s what you mean.”