by Nina Solomon
The bookbinding course pleased Grace’s father to no end, and this in turn pleased her. Laz called it her “little notions thing,” which Grace took as sweet rather than demeaning. She knew how much he valued her insights into his own work, not to mention her editorial and proofreading skills, which usually involved her sitting on his lap, with some form of stroking or removal of items of clothing going on while she tried to work. She thought someday she might actually fill one of her little notions books with more than just notions, and maybe Laz would sit next to her while he proofread her words—as soon as she wrote anything and when he came back, of course.
GRACE’S FATHER HAD learned bookbinding from his father but never went into the family business, instead finding his calling in podiatry. There wasn’t a single book in her parents’ apartment that was not beautifully bound, often in embossed leather, with hand-sewn folios, a tenderly repaired spine, and sometimes even a dust jacket.
Her mother’s cookbooks were wiped clean with appropriate solvents and dusted carefully so as not to cause any damage; they were covered in a clear laminate material for protection from the elements or spills. “People keep their cigars under better conditions than their books,” Milton often grumbled. “I have some cigars older than you, Gracie, and they’re as good as the day I bought them,” he’d say as he refilled the humidor with water, even though he had given up smoking when Grace was a freshman in college. Her parents had recently installed a dehumidifier and ionizer to help keep the apartment dust-free. If her father could just control the climate outside, he’d be a happy man.
He was also a stickler for detail and was never satisfied with any job unless he’d done it himself. More than a few house painters had quit after completing only half the job, refusing to return his phone calls, frustrated by his insistence that they repaint a room one too many times because of barely detectable drips or streaks. Grace had always secretly thought her father should have gone into plastic surgery instead of podiatry, but she kept this to herself, realizing that she and her mother would then have been prey to his inexorable desire to preserve and restore.
During the first year that she and Laz dated, Laz had a bookbinding workshop set up for Grace’s father in an empty storeroom in the basement of her parents’ building. After befriending the super, Laz was even permitted to break through to an adjacent washroom so that Milton wouldn’t have to run upstairs to wash his supplies. Her father subsequently spent much of his free time in the basement, emerging from time to time to check on the weather.
“Still snowing out?” he’d ask, surfacing for air or a light snack. Except for going to his office, which was across the street, he might never have ventured out at all. The workshop had been a gesture worthy of a lifetime of appreciation, but Laz thought it was never enough. To him, Milton was the father he’d never known.
The following spring, at Grace and Laz’s engagement party with the Sugarmans over Peking duck at Shun Lee, her father gave Laz a present wrapped in brown butcher paper. As Laz opened it, Grace’s father had been simply bursting with pride. Inside was Laz’s two-volume first edition of Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad— pristinely restored—along with two plane tickets. For a pleasure trip, her father had written on a note card. Grace told her parents that they shouldn’t have done it, and she’d really meant it, too, because she knew that the value of the book was now quite compromised. She didn’t know how her father had even gotten hold of the books.
“Didn’t he do a beautiful job?” Grace’s mother beamed. “He even relettered the title in gold with a tiny hammer. And look at the new endpaper. Milton never comes out of that workshop. He’s like a little cobbler.”
“Blueberry or peach?” Bert asked.
“Bert!” Francine said, slapping him on the shoulder as she leaned over to admire the books.
“Surprised?” Grace’s father asked.
Laz turned the books over in his hands, raising his eyebrows and opening his eyes wide in disbelief. Grace expected him to be polite as always, but when he addressed her father and said solemnly, “Mark Twain would have been honored,” Grace realized that he was not just being polite, but was truly touched by her father’s kindness. The books were displayed behind glass among his other first editions like precious wax flowers.
It was after her and Laz’s return from six weeks abroad, loosely following Twain’s peripatetic inclinations, that Laz wrote a journal article entitled The Disintegration of Words, and Grace’s class was first conceived.
THE PAST TWO DAYS had been unusually rainy, and Grace had been vigilant about leaving two wet umbrellas in the vestibule and then removing one of them, to indicate Laz’s absence. She also left a pair of Laz’s tan-colored Docksiders that she had held under the faucet until they were soaked through and had turned a mucky dark brown. Marisol arrived on Wednesday with a bunch of eucalyptus cuttings arranged with purple asters, which she had brought especially for Laz, who liked the fragrance.
“Feels like a holiday,” Marisol announced after she hung up her coat and went into the kitchen to fill a vase with water.
“Good morning, Marisol. Thank you for the flowers.”
“My pleasure, Señora Grace.” Grace was sitting at the dining room table, which was still rather dimly lit, as she had not remembered to pick up another extension cord.
She had decided after the previous day’s mishap that she was better off contacting the custom lipstick company by mail. She wrote the address on an envelope and filled out the appropriate information, such as how many tubes she would like, and settled on three. There was a two-week wait after the company received the lipstick color sample, sometimes longer if it was a difficult match.
As instructed, she made a streak on a sheet of white paper and covered it with Scotch tape. Grace thought better of having them add a flavor, aware of the olfactory power that fragrances had on her. Even essence of vanilla, innocuous as it might sound, could conjure up for Grace a trail of memories that invariably led back to some unwanted locale she had hoped never to revisit. She couldn’t go wrong with fragrance-free. Sunscreen seemed a sensible addition, but she decided against adding frost or glossiness. All she wanted was an exact duplication, a seemingly simple enough request. Grace sealed the envelope and got up from the table.
“Marisol, could you give the telephone receiver in the bedroom a wipe? It’s a little sticky.”
“Certainly, Señora Grace.”
But no sooner had Grace uttered the words than she had misgivings. The thought of wiping away the stickiness, Laz’s fingerprints along with it, made her feel a disproportionate sense of loss.
THAT EVENING, SHE arrived slightly late at the bookstore with her supplies due to her feeling preoccupied and a little bit on the sluggish side. Her students were already waiting. The bookstore had been decorated with tiny icicle lights around the windowsills as well as with red, purple, and yellow dreidel lanterns that had been strung along the shelves, as Hanukkah was early this year. Grace’s family had never celebrated Hanukkah when she was growing up, which she thought nothing of until recently. Her mother had become obsessed with celebrating every Jewish holiday, usually with a roast of some sort and noodle kugel, suitable for every occasion.
“It’s traditional,” Paulette would insist, even on Passover, when noodles are not permitted. But then Francine Sugarman’s honey-glazed pork chops with bread crumbs and Parmesan cheese violated every law of kashrut known to mankind.
The store looked so festive that Grace perked up and began to feel festive herself. She even accepted a glittery holiday crown, which all the salespeople were wearing. As she set up the materials—small-gauge needles, white PVA glue, and a ream of rice paper, she looked up quickly and noticed a young man, probably not yet of legal drinking age, watching her. He was dressed in jeans and a snow-boarding sweater—the generic style typical of people in that zone somewhere between college and work. In his hands he held a volume that was clearly in need of repair. He seemed interested in the p
roceedings but reticent about interrupting.
As she looked at him, he glanced down at the book in his hands and flushed slightly. Grace couldn’t help but stare. Everything about him—his eyes, his messy brown hair and delicate eyebrows, his almost beardless complexion, even the way he held himself, half slouching—reminded her so much of Laz it was uncanny, and she found herself drawn to him.
She started off her students with the sewing of the pages, having them first thread their needles with the nearly transparent thread, then she went over to speak to the young man. As she walked toward him, she imagined a few silver hairs sprouting at his temples, as if every step she took were measured in years, not feet, and that by the time she reached him he would be Laz.
“Can I help you?” she asked. She looked more closely at the book in his hand. The spine was cracked and warped, the binding fraying. She gestured toward it. “Are you interested in repairing that book?” He turned the book over and Grace read the title. It was Twain’s Innocents Abroad. She was thrown by the coincidence.
“I’d like to sign up for the bookbinding course,” he began, and Grace heard in his voice a confidence that was belied by the flush in his cheeks. She couldn’t help but notice that he was staring at her; then she remembered the crown on her head, and she removed it.
“The next session doesn’t begin until January and runs for ten weeks,” Grace explained. “You can sign up at the front desk, if you like.” She smiled and explained that the course was really an introduction to bookbinding, all the while trying to place his accent, which was vaguely Southern. She discounted her initial reaction as rooted purely in magical thinking.
Her mother had always said she had quite an imagination, though it had never been tested as it was now. He did remind her of Laz, but only in the most superficial ways. And the book he was holding was not in fact a first edition, but rather part of a specially bound collection of literary classics. He thanked her, and Grace figured that the chances of his actually signing up were slight, as he’d probably be back in college by then. She returned to her students, who had sewn their books backward while she was talking to the young man. Her mind was still off on its own peregrinations, not unlike Twain’s, but with the added advantage of never having to physically go anywhere.
WHEN GRACE RETURNED home that evening, she turned on the computer on the chance that Laz had sent her an e-mail. The icon indicated she had mail, and she felt instantly buoyed. Grace was utterly amazed at the number of letters she’d received since she last logged on. Suddenly, the world made sense to her again. All the letters that Laz had been sending her must have gotten jammed or lost somehow and now were miraculously retrieved. There were at least fifty unread e-mails. However, as she scrolled down, she saw that not one of the e-mail addresses was familiar. Then she saw one from aperfectmatch.com and understood immediately what had happened. In her haste the night before, she must have hit the wrong command and sent, rather than deleted, her meanderings about Oblomov and her description of Laz.
Click here to sign up for your one-month free trial membership. We are so sure you’ll be satisfied, we have sent you a sampling of responses. Grace was stunned. Here were fifty-some-odd strangers—odd being the operative word—who wanted to read aloud to her in some way, shape, or form.
A kind of grotesque curiosity overcame her, and although her first instinct was to delete each and every one of the e-mails, she found herself unable to do so. Oblomov, himself, might have even contemplated leaving the safety of his bedroom, throwing off his dressing gown, and hightailing it out of there. Grace felt a morbid impulse to continue and began to read. The respondents ranged from a lawyer from Montclair, New Jersey, who listened to books on tape while commuting, to a student of Russian literature, to one man who said he liked to watch the Turner Movie Classics station in his pajamas, to a few widowers and even some who Grace suspected were e-mailing from behind prison walls.
She scrolled up and down several times, thinking she must have missed the one from Laz, then signed off. She tried to erase the image of the pajama-clad gentleman from her mind and felt fortunate that she was not single and alone in what seemed a very uninviting abyss.
5
THE MAGIC 8-BALL
Until recently, Grace had been unaware of how simple it was to deceive. Not to be deceived—she’d always known that it was easy to let oneself be fooled. That was a personal choice people made. Grace was not gullible. Rather, she chose—and this was a great distinction for her—to have faith. Deception was her new hobby. What she found most disconcerting was how much she liked it.
JUST AS SHE was about to leave the house for her anniversary party at Sky Rink, José called up and said there was a UPS deliveryman who needed her signature. A few moments later, Grace opened the door to the deliveryman, who was holding a large carton with the word FRAGILE taped along the sides, and THIS WAY UP on the top. If only everything came with such clear instructions.
“What’s this?” Grace asked, knowing that the question didn’t even warrant a response. She signed the slip of paper and closed the door. The carton was light and filled with bubble wrap, tissue paper, and Styrofoam peanuts, and it took many minutes of unwrapping until the contents were revealed. Inside the box were six Duro-Lite bulbs, each nestled in an individual gold-colored cardboard sleeve, like a honeycomb. Grace thought her father must have written to the company and they were replacing the defective bulb, which to Grace meant that she no longer had to mourn the bulb’s premature demise. She left for the party, thinking that the other bulbs had another twenty good years left in them still. Not to worry, as her father would say.
LAZ WAS AN expert skater, captain of his Wednesday night ice hockey team. Kane was the goalie, but he hadn’t played since injuring his wrist four weeks ago. They played at odd times, sometimes from three to five in the morning, practicing on Sundays before dawn when the ice was free. Kane usually brought some Coronas and limes.
The first time Laz took Grace skating, he’d arranged for the ice to be empty, still shining from the Zamboni. She had felt the warmth of the peppermint schnapps radiating through her chest as he stood behind her on the ice and taught her how to shoot a hockey puck.
The temperature was unusually mild for November—almost seventy degrees. Her father mentioned something about a jet stream from the Gulf of Mexico. It was strange weather. Grace was not against the warmth, but she preferred the weather to fit the season and felt out of sorts when it didn’t. She liked cool temperatures when it was supposed to be cool, warm ones when it was supposed to be warm. Just as she didn’t like hot fudge on her ice cream, or, worse still, whipped cream, which had no discernible temperature at all.
THE NIGHT’S DECEPTION was easier than Grace had expected. She showed up as planned at eight, dressed in jeans and an ivory turtleneck and carrying her white figure skates. When Laz didn’t arrive, she made a small fuss and hobbled over on her ice skates to the pay phone in a feigned attempt to reach him.
“He must have missed his train,” she told Kane. “He spent the day fishing in New Hope and I haven’t heard from him. Will you please make sure everyone has fun, in spite of this?”
“My pleasure, Gracie. But he’s going to have to come up with a good one this time.” Kane kissed her on the forehead, a not unpleasant sensation. “Tell Laz he doesn’t deserve you—I’d tell him myself if I ever saw him.”
Grace skated across the ice to greet some late arrivals. As she did, she closed her eyes and imagined that Laz was leading her. The feeling was close to elation, but when she opened her eyes, she found herself about to careen right into a woman she’d never seen before. Grace veered off to the side, banging into the plastic railing. The woman was dressed in a short black skirt and stockings, with a red hat on her head, her hair tucked underneath the collar of her fitted black down jacket. Grace looked down at the woman’s feet and saw that she was wearing brown hockey skates, identical to Laz’s, only smaller. Before Grace had a chance to say she was sorry
, the woman darted off, disappearing in the crowd.
GRACE HAD BEEN a skater in her youth, although her mother had insisted she skate only at indoor rinks for fear of thin ice. Grace, herself, was similarly uncomfortable with depths—two dimensions were more preferable to her. Grace learned to skate at an East Side indoor rink that was enclosed in glass like a giant fish tank. It wasn’t until Grace was a teenager and had been invited to her best friend’s sweet-sixteen party that she even ventured to step onto the ice at Wollman Rink in Central Park.
“There’s concrete underneath,” she’d told her mother, trying to reassure her.
“You never know, dear,” her mother answered. Grace remembered how hard she had tried to think light as she skated along with her girlfriends that day.
Grace was a reasonably good skater still, and as she twirled around on the ice, she was overcome by a feeling of optimism, a feeling she attributed partly to the 3/4-time Skater’s Waltz and the synthesized winter chill, but mostly to the belief that Laz would soon return.
AROUND TEN THAT evening, a bouquet of two dozen sterling roses, a case of champagne, and a scaled-down replica of Grace and Laz’s wedding cake—a chocolate confection embellished with colorful frosting to rival van Gogh’s sunflowers—arrived along with apologies “from Laz.” Grace had only remembered ordering one dozen roses, but Laz was such a good customer at the florist that they must have thrown in another for good measure. Grace had also struggled over how to word the card—how to make it sincere without effusion. She had finally decided that less was more and had written, From your loving husband, who will make it up to you when I get home.