About Grace Read online

  “In a decade,” she said, staring off at the soaring credits.

  Winkler—behind his big eyeglasses, his solitary existence—had never felt this way, never been in love, never flirted with or thought about a married woman. But he couldn’t let it go. It was not a conscious decision; he did not think: We were meant to be, or: Something has predetermined that our paths cross, or even: I choose to think of her several times a minute, her neck, her arms, her elbows. The shampoo smell of her hair. Her chest against the fabric of a thin sweater. His feet simply brought him by the bank every day, or the Newport pulled him past her house at night. He ate Apple Jacks. He threw away his tin of garlic salt.

  Through the bank window he peered at the bankers behind their desks: one in a blue suit with a birthmark on his neck; another in a V-neck sweater with gray in his hair and a ring of keys clipped to his belt loop. Could the V-neck be him? Wasn’t he twice her age? The birthmarked man was looking up at Winkler and chewing his pen; Winkler ducked behind a pillar.

  In December, after they had watched Three Days of the Condor for the second time, she asked him to take her to his apartment. All she said about Herman was: “He’s going out after the game.” She seemed nervous, pushing her cuticles against the edges of her teeth, but she was perpetually nervous, and this, Winkler figured, was part of it—Anchorage was not a huge city and they could, after all, be seen at any time. They could be found out.

  The streets were dark and cold. He led her quickly through the alternating pools of streetlight and shadow. Hardly anyone was out. The tailpipes of cars at stop signs smoked madly. Winkler did not know whether to take her hand or not. He felt he could see Anchorage that night with agonizing clarity: slush frozen into sidewalk seams, ice glazing telephone wires, two men hunched over menus behind a steamy diner window.

  She looked at his apartment with interest: the block-and-board shelves, the old, banging radiator, the cramped kitchen that smelled of leaking gas.

  She picked up a graduated cylinder and held it to the light. “The meniscus,” he explained, and pointed to the curve in the surface of the water inside. “The molecules at the edges are climbing the glass.” She set it down, picked up a typed page lying on a shelf: I measured spatial resolution data of atmospheric precipitable water and vapor pressure deficit at two separate meteorological stations…

  “What is this? You wrote this?”

  “It’s part of my dissertation. That nobody read.”

  “On snowflakes?”

  “Yes. Ice crystals.” He ventured further. “Take a snow crystal. The classic six-pointed star? How it looks so rigid, frozen in place? Well, in reality, on an extremely tiny level, smaller than a couple of nanometers, as it freezes it vibrates like crazy, all the billion billion molecules that make it up shaking invisibly, practically burning up.”

  Sandy reached behind her ear and coiled a strand of hair around her finger.

  He pushed on: “My idea was that tiny instabilities in those vibrations give snowflakes their individual shapes. On the outside the crystal looks stable, but on the inside, it’s like an earthquake all the time.” He set the sheet back on the shelf. “I’m boring you.”

  “No,” she said.

  They sat on his sofa with their hips touching; they drank instant hot chocolate from mismatched mugs. She gave herself to him solemnly but without ceremony, undressing and climbing onto his twin bed. He didn’t put on the radio, didn’t draw the shades. They set their eyeglasses beside each other on the floor—he had no nightstands. She pulled the covers over their heads.

  It was love. He could study the colors and creases in her palm for fifteen minutes, imagining he could see the blood traveling through her capillaries. “What are you looking at?” she’d ask, squirming, smiling. “I’m not so interesting.”

  But she was. He watched her sort through a box of chocolate-covered raisins, selecting one, then rejecting it by some indiscernible criteria; he watched her button her parka, slip her hand inside her collar to scratch a shoulder. He excavated a boot print she’d left on the snowy step outside his apartment and preserved it in his freezer.

  To be in love was to be dazed twenty times a morning: by the latticework of frost on his windshield; by a feather loosed from his pillow; by a soft, pink rim of light over the hills. He slept three or four hours a night. Some days he felt as if he were about to peel back the surface of the Earth—the trees standing frozen on the hills, the churning face of the inlet—and finally witness what lay beneath, the structure under there, the fundamental grid.

  Tuesdays quivered and vibrated, the second hand slogging around the dial. Wednesdays were the axis around which the rest of the week spun. Thursdays were deserts, ghost towns. By the weekends, the bits of herself that she had left behind in his apartment took on near-holy significance: a hair, coiled on the rim of the sink; the crumbs of four saltines scattered across the bottom of a plate. Her saliva—her proteins and enzymes and bacteria—still probably all over those crumbs; her skin cells on the pillows, all over the floor, pooling as dust in the corners. What was it Watson had taught him, and Einstein, and Pasteur? The things we see are only masks for the things we can’t see.

  He flattened his hair with a quivering hand; he walked into the bank lobby shaking like a thief; he produced a store-bought daisy from his knapsack and set it on the counter in front of her.

  They made love with the window open, cold air pouring over their bodies. “What do you think movie stars do for Christmas?” she’d ask, the hem of the sheet at her chin. “I bet they eat veal. Or sixty-pound turkeys. I bet they hire chefs to cook for them.” Out the window a jet traversed the sky, landing lights glowing, her eyes tracking it.

  Sometimes she felt like a warm river, sometimes a blade of hot metal. Sometimes she took one of his papers from a shelf and propped herself on pillows and paged through it. “One-dimensional snowpack algorithms,” she’d read, solemnly, as if mouthing the words of a spell. “Cd equals degree-day melt coefficient.”

  “Leave a sock,” he’d whisper. “Leave your bra. Something to get me through the week.” She’d stare up at the ceiling, thinking her own thoughts, and soon it would be time to leave: she’d sheathe herself in her clothes once more, pull back her hair, lace up her boots.

  When she was gone he’d bend over the mattress and try to smell her in the bedding. His brain projected her onto his eyelids relentlessly: the arrangement of freckles on her forehead; the articulateness of her fingers; the slope of her shoulders. The way underwear fit her body, nestling over her hips, slipping between her legs.

  Every Saturday she worked the drive-up teller window. I love you, Sandy, he’d write on a deposit slip and drop it into the pneumatic chute outside the bank. Not now, she’d respond, and send the canister flying back.

  But I do, he’d write, in larger print. Right now I LOVE YOU.

  He watched her crumple his note, compose a new one, seal the carrier, drop it into the intake. He brought it into his car, unscrewed it on his lap. She’d written: How much?

  How much, how much, how much? A drop of water contains 1020 molecules, each one agitated and twitchy, linking and separating with its neighbors, then linking up again, swapping partners millions of times a second. All water in any body is desperate to find more, to adhere to more of itself, to cling to the hand that holds it; to find clouds, or oceans; to scream from the throat of a teakettle.

  “I want to be a police officer,” she’d whisper. “I want to drive one of those sedans all day and say code words into my CB. Or a doctor! I could go to medical school in California and become a doctor for kids. I wouldn’t need to do big, spectacular rescues or anything, just small things, maybe test blood for diseases or viruses or something, but do it really well, be the one doctor all the parents would trust. ‘Little Alice’s blood must go to Dr. Sandy,’ they’d say.” She giggled; she made circles with a strand of hair. In the theater Winkler had to sit on his hands to keep them from touching her. “Or no,” she’d say, �
�no, I want to be a bush pilot. I could get one of those passbook accounts of Herman’s and finally save enough to buy a used plane, a good two-seater. I’d get lessons. I’d look into the engine and know every part, the valves and switches and whatever, and be able to say, ‘This plane has flown a lot but she sure is a good one.’”

  Her eyelids fluttered, then steadied. Across town her husband was crouched in the net, watching a puck slide across the blue line.

  “Or,” she said, “a sculptor. That’s it. I could be a metal sculptor. I could make those big, strange-looking iron things they put in front of office buildings to rust. The ones the birds stand on and everybody looks at and says, ‘What do you think that’s supposed to be?’”

  “You could,” he said.

  “I could.”

  Every night now—it was January and dark by 4 P.M.—he pulled on his big parka and drew the hood tight and drove past her house. He’d start at the end of the block, then troll back up, the hedges coming up on his left, the curb-parked cars with their hoods ajar to allow extension cords into the frost plugs, the Newport slowing until he’d come to a stop alongside their driveway.

  By nine-thirty each night, her lights began to go off: first in the windows at the far right, then the room next to it, then the lamp behind the curtains to the left, at ten o’clock sharp. He’d imagine her passage through the dark rooms, following her with his eyes, down the hall, past the bathroom, into what must have been the bedroom, where she’d climb into bed with him. At last only the tall backyard light would glow, white tinged with blue, all the parked cars drawing energy from the houses around them, the plugs clicking on and off, and above the neighborhood the air would grow so cold it seemed to glitter and flex—as if it were solidifying—and he’d get the feeling that someone could reach down and shatter the whole scene.

  Only with great effort could he get his foot to move to the accelerator. He’d drive to the end of the block, turn up the heater, roll alone through the frozen darkness across town.

  “It’s not that he’s awful or anything,” Sandy whispered once, in the middle of Logan’s Run. “I mean, he’s nice. He’s good. He loves me. I can do pretty much whatever I want. It’s just sometimes I look into the kitchen cupboards, or at his suits in the closet, and think: This is it?”

  Winkler blinked. It was the most she’d said during a movie.

  “I feel like I’ve been turned inside out is all. Like I’ve got huge manacles on my arms. Look”—she grabbed her forearm and raised it—”I can hardly lift them they’re so heavy. But other times I get to feeling so light it’s as if I’ll float to the ceiling and get trapped up there like a balloon.”

  The darkness of the movie theater was all around them. On-screen a robot showed off some people frozen in ice. In the ceiling the little bulbs that were supposed to be stars burned in their little niches.

  Sandy whispered: “I get happy sometimes for the younger gals at work, when they find love, after all that stumbling around, when they’ve found their guy and get to talking about weddings during break, then babies, and I can see them outside smoking and staring out at the traffic, and I know they’re probably not a hundred percent happy. Not all-the-way happy. Maybe seventy percent happy. But they’re living it. They’re not giving up.

  “I’ve just been feeling everything too much. I don’t know. Can you feel things too much, David?”

  “Yes.”

  “I shouldn’t tell you any of this. I shouldn’t tell you anything.”

  The film had entered a chase sequence and the varying colors of a burning city strobed across Sandy’s eyeglasses. She closed her eyes.

  “Thing is,” she whispered, “Herman doesn’t have any sperm. We got him tested a few years ago. He has none. Or basically none; no good ones. When they called, they gave the results to me. I never told him. I told him they said he was fine. I tore up their letter and brought the little scraps to work and hid them at the bottom of a trash can in the ladies’ bathroom.”

  On-screen Logan careened down a crowded street. Suits in the closet, Winkler thought. The guy with the birthmark?

  In his memory he could traverse months in a second. He imagined Herman crouched like a crab on the ice, guarding the net, slapping his glove against his big leg pads, his teammates swirling around the rink. He imagined Sandy leaning over him, the tips of her hair dragging over his face. He stood outside their house on Marilyn Street and above the city, streamers of auroras—reds and purples and greens—glided like souls into the firmament.

  Now a soft hail—lump graupels—flew from the clouds. He opened all his windows, turned off the furnace, and let it blow in, angling through the frames, the tiny balls rolling and eddying on the carpet.

  Near the middle of March she lay beside him in the darkness with a single candle burning on his sill. Out beyond the window a trash collector tossed the frozen contents of a trash can into the maw of his truck and Winkler and Sandy listened to it clatter and compress and the fading rumble as the truck receded down the street. It was around five and all through the city, people were ending their workdays, mail carriers delivering their last envelopes, accountants paying one more invoice, bankers sealing their vaults. Tumblers finding their grooves.

  “You ever just want to go?” she whispered. “Go, go, go?”

  Winkler nodded. Without her glasses, that close to his face, her eyes looked trapped, closer to how they had looked in the supermarket, standing at a revolving rack of magazines but trembling inside; her whole body, its trillions of cells, quivering invisibly, threatening to shake apart. He had dreamed her. Hadn’t she dreamed him, too?

  “I should tell you something,” he said. “About that day we met in the market.”

  She rolled onto her back. In five minutes, maybe six, she would leave, and he told himself he would pay attention to every passing second, the pulse in her forearm, the pressure of her knee against his thigh. The thousand pores in the side of her nose. In the frail light he could see her boots on the frayed rug, her clothes folded neatly beside.

  He would tell her. Now he would tell her. I dreamed you, he’d say. Sometimes I have these dreams.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said.

  The flame of the candle on the sill twisted and righted.

  “David? Did you hear me?”

  She was looking at him now.

  “Pregnant,” he said, but at first it was only a word.

  7

  He parked the Newport in a drive-up lane and tugged a deposit slip from the slot.

  Can you get away?

  No.

  Only for an hour?

  He could just make her out through the drive-up window, wearing a big-collared sweater, her head down, her hand writing. The pneumatic tube clattered and howled.

  This is not the time, David. Please. Wednesday.

  Between them was fifteen or so feet of frozen space, bounded by his window and hers, but it was as if the windows had liquefied, or else the air had, and his vision skewed and rippled and it was all he could do to put the Newport into gear and ease forward to let the next car in.

  He couldn’t work, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t leave her alone. He went by the house every night, patrolling Marilyn Street, up and back, up and back, until one midnight a neighbor came out with a snow shovel and flagged him down and asked if he was missing something.

  In Sandy’s backyard the one blue street lamp shivered. The Chrysler started away slowly, with reluctance, as if it, too, couldn’t bear to leave her.

  Each time the office phone rang, adrenaline streamed into his blood. “Winkler,” the supervisor said, waving a sheaf of teletype forecasts. “These are atrocious. There are probably fifty typos in today’s series alone.” He looked him up and down. “Are you sick or something?”

  Yes! he wanted to cry. Yes! So sick! He walked to First Federal at lunch but she wasn’t at her station. The teller in the station to the right studied him with her head cocked as if assessing the validity of his concern and
finally said Sandy was home with the flu and could she help him instead?

  The banker with the birthmark was on the phone. The gray-haired one was talking with a man and a woman, leaning forward in his chair. “No,” Winkler said. On the way out he scanned the nameplates on the desks but even with his glasses on couldn’t make out a name, a title, any of it.

  She came to the door wearing flannel pajamas printed all over with polar bears on toboggans. Something about her standing in her doorway barefoot started a buzzing all through his chest.

  “What are you doing here?”

  ‘They said you were sick.”

  “How did you know where I live?”

  He looked across the street to where the other houses were shuttered against the cold. Heat escaping from the hall blurred the air.

  “Sandy—”

  “You walked?”

  “Are you okay?”

  She stayed in the doorway, squinting out. He realized she was not going to invite him in. “I threw up,” she said. “But I feel fine.”

  “You look pale.”

  “Yes. Well. So do you. Breathe, David. Take a breath.”

  Her feet were turning white in the cold. He wanted to fall to his knees and take them in his hands. “How is this going to work, Sandy? What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know. What are we supposed to do?”

  “We could go somewhere. Anywhere. We could go to California, like you said. We could go to Mexico. You could become whatever you wanted.”

  Her eyes followed an Oldsmobile as it passed slowly down the street, snow squeaking beneath its tires. “Not now, David.” She shook her head. “Not in front of my house.”

  March ended. Community hockey ended. She consented to meet him for coffee. In the cafe her head periodically swiveled on her shoulders, checking back through the window as if she had ducked a pursuer. He brushed snow off her coat: stellar dendrites. Storybook snow.