by Nina Solomon
“This is another Il Duomo,” Grace covered.
“Maybe we—I mean I, could join you.”
“We?” Grace asked. She couldn’t help herself. “Kane, I know about Greg.” A look of complete surprise came across Kane’s face.
“You do?”
“Laz’s mother told me yesterday at Thanksgiving.” Grace tried to keep her tone light. She fiddled with the latch on the glove compartment.
He turned to her as if having figured out something vitally important. “Oh, that explains why you were acting so weird last night.”
“What are you talking about? I wasn’t acting weird. I’m fine with it. I just wish you had told me yourself.”
“It’s all so new, Grace. I’m just sort of taking it all in. But we couldn’t be happier. I can’t wait for you guys to meet.” Grace was not overly pleased to be included under the heading guys. Kane began talking animatedly, as if relieved to finally be able to speak freely. “You’re going to love each other,” he assured her. “You’re so alike.”
“Really?” Just then, the glove compartment flew open and a stack of dog-eared AAA guides and a tire-pressure gauge tumbled onto Grace’s lap. She attempted to push them back in, but no matter how hard she tried, the door wouldn’t stay shut.
“And we understand each other so well,” he continued. Grace suppressed the urge to say, I can imagine, taking this time to rearrange the travel guides. She slipped one unusually thick guidebook into the side pocket on the door, and with a firm shove, managed to shut the door.
“I’m happy for you,” Grace said. Then, more quietly, “Laz will be, too.”
“You haven’t mentioned it to him?”
“I thought he’d like to hear it from you,” she answered. She kept one foot planted firmly on the glove compartment door, eyeing it warily just in case it flew open again, like some unpredictable, menacing jack-in-the-box.
“I’d be glad to, if I ever get ahold of him,” he said, sighing.
KANE GOT OFF the highway and turned onto a two-lane back road. They saw a sign that indicated the way to the Christmas tree farm, and proceeded up the gravel driveway. Grace was glad she’d worn boots, as the snow was starting to melt and get slushy. She followed Kane down a dirt road, slipping her hands into Laz’s gloves.
As she walked behind Kane into the thickening woods, Grace was reminded of being knee-deep in snow in Central Park with Chloe. They couldn’t have been more than ten at the time and had been sledding all morning. Grace had followed Chloe, pulling her sled reluctantly behind her in search of a hill that Chloe insisted was just beyond the bend. They circled around what looked like the same circuitous, snow-covered paths until they were clearly lost. Grace became panicked but, to her own amazement and relief, she somehow found the way back before Chloe’s mother realized they were missing. Grace now suddenly noticed that she’d taken the lead once more—Kane behind her, walking in her deep footprints.
“How tall?” Kane asked, inspecting the branches of a moss-green Scotch pine. It was about a foot taller than Laz. Grace told him it was perfect. Kane was wearing a gray Woolrich jacket, sturdy boots, and striped hat. Nature boy, Laz liked to call him when he was in the wilderness. Even in the outskirts of New Jersey, he metamorphosed into a sort of well-heeled version of a scout leader, always prepared. Kane took out his Swiss army knife and sliced off a strip of bark.
“Is it fresh?” Grace asked.
“Grace, it’s still growing. I just wanted to see if it was well hydrated.” Kane motioned to a young guy leaning against a red pickup truck, apparently the universal signal that they’d chosen a tree and were ready to chop it down. Kane did the honors, as always, air cast notwithstanding, wielding the saw with the same unswerving focus that Grace’s father used on the turkey with the carving knife.
After wrapping the tree in green plastic netting, Kane and the young guy managed to fit the tree crosswise in the Jeep, one end in the front seat and the trunk sticking out the rear window, leaving Grace to sit in the back. Kane gave her a plaid wool blanket to help her keep warm. Surrounded by branches and covered with the blanket, Grace felt as if she were in a fragrant nest. Kane pointed out sites along the way, offering bits of information in his tour-guide voice, like, “That’s Twain’s house—it’s shaped like a hexagon,” or, “Don’t Pass Me By—the best banana cream pie in a hundred-mile radius.”
They passed a lake on the left side. The surface was coated with frost, making it look frozen. With the unseasonably warm weather, though, it couldn’t be more than just a superficial layer of ice.
It was almost dusk—that gray, undelineated time of day that Grace’s father referred to as accident time, the time, he claimed, when overtired children had to be rushed to the emergency room for stitches, although Grace had never so much as skinned a knee. If Milton was driving at this time of day, he would pull into a roadside diner and wait for night to fall. It was usually only a twenty-minute stop, just long enough for a hot brisket sandwich with horseradish and a chocolate shake, which he consumed in religious silence.
Grace was about to suggest that she and Kane stop for a bite to eat—she was suddenly ravenous, when all day she hadn’t had much of an appetite—but she wanted to leave enough time to get Laz’s jacket from the bar. She thought about what she had to eat in the house—some leftover soy turkey loaf, pureed sweet potatoes, bagels, blinis, and enough frozen containers of Francine’s meatballs to reach to Grace’s fourth-floor window.
The fragrant smell of pine made Grace drowsy. She removed her boots and stretched her feet out over the divider in the front. Something about being driven home made her feel like a child. Kane was a good friend. She knew he always would be. Nothing had changed between them.
Grace felt herself drifting off, and in the last remaining minutes of twilight, she thought she felt Laz’s hand on her foot. When she woke up, it was dark and her nose was tickling.
“CAN WE MAKE a quick stop at Tap A Keg?” Grace asked, as Kane drove down Riverside Drive.
“Why? Are you up for a couple of rounds?”
“Hardly,” she said. “I think I left Laz’s jacket there last night. I can’t find it anywhere.” Kane looked at her in the rear-view mirror, his eyebrows raised.
“Well, you definitely didn’t leave it at Tap A Keg. You had it on when we left.”
“Are you sure?”
“I distinctly remember zipping you up outside,” he said. “Right after your unfortunate fall.”
Grace wrestled with this new piece of information. “Well, I’d like to check anyway,” she said.
“Suit yourself.”
Kane waited outside with the Christmas tree while Grace ran inside the bar. It was smoky, as usual, even though no one seemed to be smoking. The specials board listed Alaskan oysters and venison burgers, two dishes she would be suspicious of even in a four-star restaurant. Grace was relieved to see that the same bartender was behind the bar and that he recognized her.
“I’ve never . . .” he began, trying to contain his amusement, “had an affair with a bartender.”
“Very funny,” she said with a perfunctory smile.
“I guess that means no, huh?”
Grace scanned the room, pretending to ignore his last comment.
“I think I left my husband’s jacket here last night.”
“Your husband’s jacket?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“I didn’t find anything,” Pete said, folding his arms across his chest. “But I’ll ask the day guy when I see him tomorrow.”
“I’d really appreciate that,” Grace said, reaching into her bag for a pen. She wrote her telephone number on a cocktail napkin and asked him to call her if he found the jacket. Then she started for the door.
“Wait, I have something for you,” he said, holding out a closed hand. Grace watched as he opened his hand to reveal two pink gumballs.
“How did you know?” she asked, taking the two gumballs from him.
“Jus
t a hunch,” he said. The gumballs had stained his hands pink, which he wiped on his white half-apron. Grace smiled and walked to the door.
“Don’t be a stranger,” he called after her. Grace was struck by the familiarity of the phrase. It was one her father used, and like most of his expressions, she was not used to hearing them in common parlance, at least not by anyone even remotely close to her age, and it engendered in her a feeling of kinship between herself and the bartender.
“I won’t,” she assured him.
KANE HAD TAKEN his time setting up the tree, puttering with the stand and turning the tree to get just the right angle. Now he was lying on the floor, adding a spoon of sugar to the water in the base, which he said was to help the tree stay hydrated, but which Grace took as a ploy to prolong his stay. She couldn’t blame him—he was probably hoping Laz would come home—but it was beginning to get on Grace’s nerves.
“I’m meeting Laz in twenty minutes,” she blurted out, finally. He stood up and wiped his hands on his jeans.
“I guess I better be shoving off. Unless you’ve changed your mind and you want to join us.”
“Let’s do it another time. Laz said he’d like to make it an early night. Say hi to Greg, though,” she said, as she watched him get into the elevator.
Grace plopped down on the sectional couch in the living room and looked at the tree. Any other year she would have made mulled cider, and she and Laz would have been halfway finished with the decorations by now. Laz liked to throw the tinsel all over the room, creating an icicle wonderland. Even weeks after the tree had been taken down, the vacuum cleaner having inhaled more than its fair share of tinsel, Grace would find strands of it clinging to her clothing and hair.
She got up to change her clothes. As she walked out of the room, she became fixated with the indentation she’d made in the couch. Her body had left a noticeable depression in the down-filled cushion, which seemed somehow deeper than usual.
Grace looked at the calendar, turning it back to October. There was a pumpkin sticker on October 31. She tried to find the date of her last period, but no days were circled. None in September, either. Ever since fifth-grade sex education, she’d been religious about keeping track of her period. She remembered the way that the nurse had fastened a pink-stained sanitary napkin onto a stuffed Snoopy, emphasizing the need to keep strict records of their still-latent reproductive cycles. Grace took the message to heart, but the demonstration also had the effect of anthropomorphizing her stuffed animals in a way she had never imagined.
She flipped through the calendar once more. And then she remembered that she had started using Laz’s date book in the fall to avoid scheduling conflicts. She went to his desk and turned the pages back. Opposite a picture of Monet’s Water Lilies, there was a red circle on the fourteenth of October, making her period approximately two weeks late, but still well within her “usual” range. Coincidentally, that was the same date as the ticket stubs that had been in the pocket of Laz’s jacket. Underneath the date, written in Laz’s scrawl, Grace read: Championship Game. Seven o’clock.
The details came back to her with such precision that it was uncanny. Laz had wanted to cancel his plans that night because she hadn’t been feeling well, but Grace had insisted he go. Before he left, he brought her a hot water bottle for the cramps and a cup of chamomile tea. He had been so solicitous, even calling her around ten to tell her the game had gone into overtime. When he came home that night, he set the trophy on the bedside table and covered her with the afghan.
“You missed a great game, Gracie,” he’d said, stroking her hair. “I thought about you all night.”
ANY FEELINGS OF doubt about that night flew out of her head. The memory was warm in her mind. Grace got the ticket stubs from the silver bowl. Laz had wanted to stay home, she reminded herself over and over again—as she tore the tickets into tiny pieces and watched as they fluttered into the garbage can.
12
THE PINK TEA CUP
The Pink Tea Cup was crowded when Grace arrived holding a tattered copy of Oblomov. Several sheets of yellow paper were tucked between the pages. Laz sometimes marked his spot in a book with a torn tissue or movie stub, never dog-earing the page, something Grace’s father also abhorred. One Christmas, Grace had given Laz a silver bookmark adorned with a biblical scene that had yet to be identified, which he’d never used. It was still in the top drawer of his dresser, along with the gold pocket watch from his father and the key to his old apartment. Before she left the house, Grace had taken the key as casually as she might an old umbrella, just in case, and had put it in her purse—either a lucky charm or her last resort.
A LOOSE APPROXIMATION of a line had begun to form by the door, and the windows were fogged up, making it difficult to see in. She made her way to the front and down the steps. Once inside, she saw that all the tables were occupied. A tall young woman wearing black jeans and a camisole approached her.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“I’m meeting my husband,” Grace answered. The hostess nodded and walked away.
“That’s a bit presumptuous, don’t you think?” a voice said. She spun around to find a man with flyaway hair and a big toothy smile.
“Excuse me?” Grace said, moving slightly to the side. The man was uncomfortably close and smelled faintly of rubber cement. She had her answer. She knew full well that this man in front of her was one of the lunatics from A Perfect Match, but she made the choice to keep up the charade.
“I mean we’ve barely met,” he said, chortling. He was dressed in a red turtleneck sweater and chinos, very unexceptional, except for his highly polished black wing tips. Underneath his cuffed pants, Grace saw a flash of white socks.
“I’m expecting someone,” she lied, glancing toward the door.
“I know,” he responded, giving Grace what he must have thought was a knowing look. She wasn’t certain, but she thought she may have even detected a wink. She looked at her watch and tried to appear occupied, hoping he would move on. She was about to turn her back to him when he made a gesture with his hands like a magician and presented her with a single long-stemmed rose.
“Please,” she said, trying her best to sound firm, but found herself feeling surprisingly touched. “I told you I’m meeting someone,” she said again, this time more softly. Grace noticed he was holding a copy of Oblomov. The man hung his head and shuffled his feet.
“I understand. It happens all the time,” he said as he backed away. “I just thought—since we had so much in common.”
“I’m sorry,” she started to say, looking down. But before she could continue, he was gone, leaving the book and the rose on a nearby table. She picked up his copy of Oblomov along with the rose and then left.
SHE STOOD OUTSIDE the door to Laz’s old apartment quietly, as if waiting for an invitation, holding the key in her hand. The door had been sanded so many times that it looked like driftwood, the fine carved woodwork nearly washed away. Voices could be heard echoing down the wide hallway, and the sound of footsteps overhead was a distant aria. All sensation began to drain out of Grace, her breath sucked away. She mistook the rumble of the elevator for her racing heartbeat; the reactions of her body, for feelings. She was the trespasser here, all the while holding the key, but unable to enter what was once a home, but which was now a forbidden place.
Outside, gargoyles loomed above to protect the inhabitants from evil spirits. But what if those spirits had already slipped through, let in by the gatekeepers? She swayed a bit. She had come this far, but found she could go no farther. All she could do was stand at the threshold. She turned to go, dropping the long-stemmed rose and the key to the floor.
THE CHRISTMAS TREE looked ghostly in the dark living room without the adornment of lights or ornaments. It had only been two hours since Kane had left, but the apartment seemed completely abandoned.
She turned on the sconces above the mantelpiece as well as the table lamps, but it made little difference. Even t
he color of the walls seemed to drain the room of light.
The fiasco at the Pink Tea Cup had left her feeling dejected, though it hadn’t been entirely her fault. Stuck between the pages of the man’s copy of Oblomov she found a business card: Adrian Dubrovsky—Private Investigator. On the same page, a passage was marked with a yellow highlighter: Life is poetry, if people don’t distort it. In the margins, scrawled throughout the book, were notes written in ink in an unfamiliar language, which Grace took to be Russian.
Laz would have found the incongruity of this situation amusing, but for Grace, the evening’s occurrences coupled with her feeling that she’d just been stood up by Laz left her with an emptiness she was unable to shake. Thankfully, Marisol would be in on Monday to string the lights and make the apartment hum again, but at the moment, it was as if Grace were in a black hole, deeper even than the utility closet.
She went into the kitchen, aware that all she had eaten since the morning were some stale sourdough pretzels that Kane had in his car and the two gumballs. She felt herself drawn to the utility closet, where she took out the picture from Halloween. Removing it from its frame, she studied it, trying to decipher Laz’s body language. She couldn’t tell if his arm was actually around Chloe, or just behind her.
Without thinking, Grace tore the photograph into small, centimeter-size pieces, which she regretted immediately. She sat down on the floor to try to fit the pieces back together, but no matter how she configured them, there was no repair.
Finally, she swept the torn pieces of the photograph into her hand, placing them in a plastic bag for safekeeping.
LAZ’S GLASSES LAY on the bedside table, as if he had just removed them to wash up for dinner. Grace lifted them from the nightstand and, holding them by the rims, inspected them in the light. She was careful not to disturb the traces of his smudged fingerprints, so as not to tamper with the “evidence.”
She put them on. She didn’t need glasses, and Laz’s prescription was strong, but as her eyes strained to decipher the blurry images before her, Grace imagined what he might have seen if he’d been there. She looked in the mirror. Her features were undelineated. Laz might have walked right by her if he saw what she was seeing now. She tried to reach out to pick up a glass of water she had brought in, but with no depth perception found herself grasping at air. She closed her eyes, resting the tiny muscles and nerves that create sight. Suddenly, she remembered something that had occurred the day before with unnerving clarity. A headline she had seen in a newspaper at the corner newsstand flashed before her: BOSNIAN PRISON STORY UNCOVERED. She’d walked by quickly.