by Nina Solomon
“That’s my favorite,” the waiter beamed, still hovering around their table.
“Hey, you know,” Grace said, trying to ignore the waiter’s unctuous glances, “I was looking at that picture of the four of us at Halloween. Remember—when Laz was the Invisible Man?”
“Yes, of course. I was there, remember? Me Tarzan, you Wilma.”
“By any chance, do you happen to have another copy of that picture?”
“Why?”
“I thought I’d send one to Chloe,” she answered, not mentioning that her copy was now torn to pieces.
“Are you sure Chloe would want a reminder of that night?” The question surprised her.
“What do you mean?”
“It was sort of weird, don’t you think?” Kane looked down, smoothing out the tablecloth with his hands. “At least for me it was.” Grace didn’t know how to respond.
“Well, if you can find it,” she said, finally.
“I’m sure I have it somewhere,” he said. “Unless it pulled a vanishing act, like your husband. He’s even more invisible than usual.”
She had assumed that what Kane had been alluding to was Laz’s very conspicuous absence over the last few weeks, but then it occurred to her that she must have been doing such a good job of simulating his presence that he was not even missed. Or maybe they didn’t really miss him after all. And maybe neither did Grace.
“Oh,” she said. “I see what you mean. Kind of like how my father covers every book in the house with plastic laminate.” Kane broke into a smile.
“Exactly. Like the time he gave you a Zagat guide with a dust jacket?” he joked. Grace felt relief at their having finally begun to find their usual rhythm, the kind of easy conversation that she didn’t have with anyone else, not even Laz.
“Yeah. He calls them prophylactic covers. Just in case anything spills on them. He even coats them with a special solvent to repel dust mites.”
“Sort of like safe texts?” he asked. Grace gave Kane a disdainful look. The waiter returned with two salads and what appeared to be a soggy disk laden with mushrooms that was sprinkled with bits of unmelted shredded tofu.
“You always take things one step too far,” she said. Grace took a bite of fennel salad, which tasted a little too close to Black Jack gum for her liking, a predilection she’d had for a while during her grammar school years. As she lifted the soggy slice of pizza to her lips, the mushrooms slid off onto her lap. “It’s not too late to make a break for it,” she conspired. “Ralph’s is only two blocks from here. I promise I won’t tell Greg.”
“Speaking of Greg,” Kane began, “We’re thinking about moving in together.” Grace almost spit out the water that Kane had advised her to drink in order to wash down the spelt, which had already begun to coagulate in her mouth.
“What? Isn’t that a little premature?” she asked in a tone that sounded more accusatory than she’d intended.
“Premature? Do you think I would make this decision lightly?” he asked.
“No,” Grace answered tentatively, trying to regain her composure. “I just mean you haven’t known each other very long.”
“Long enough to know we’re compatible,” he countered, spearing a cherry tomato with his fork.
“Haven’t you considered that this might just be a passing fancy?”
“A passing fancy? Look, let’s not talk about Greg right now.”
“I just mean,” she said, formulating her words slowly, realizing that she was in touchy territory, “that these things eventually tend to lose their appeal.”
“Really?” Kane reached for his glass of water and leaned back in his chair as he took a long drink.
Grace knew she was walking a precarious line. She cringed at her words, but it was too late to take them back, and for some reason, she was unable to stop from adding more. “Once you get over the novelty of it, that is,” she said.
“The novelty? I’m not quite following,” Kane said, staring at her. “Maybe I’m just not ready to talk about Greg.”
“Don’t you want to at least see what Laz thinks about this?” she asked. Even before she said it, she knew she’d gone too far.
“Well, far be it from me to make any sort of informed decision without first clearing it with Laz. I thought you of all people would be happy for me.” Just then, an attractive woman passed by their table. Grace was perplexed while watching Kane’s head turn.
“You don’t have to pretend with me,” she blurted out. She wondered if the soy milk shake was spiked.
“Pretend? Grace, what are you talking about?” With that, he picked up his fork and focused on eating, looking up only once to motion for the check. Suddenly, Grace felt a hard lump forming in her throat. If she tried to utter a word—any word—she knew she would dissolve into tears.
Kane paid the bill, glancing repeatedly at his wristwatch, and they sat in silence as they waited for the change. The waiter had insisted on wrapping up what remained of the spelt pizza and fennel salad, which he handed to Kane.
“You take it home. For Laz,” Kane said, passing it to Grace.
As Kane held the door of a taxi open for her, he barely met her eyes. Until just then, she had been so busy perfecting her performance, she hadn’t realized she was lonely. As the taxi pulled away, Grace looked out the rear window, trying to catch a glimpse of Kane, but all she could see was the glare from passing cars. She had just offended one of the people closest to her. She searched in vain for an explanation for her erratic behavior. If it weren’t simply a case of premenstrual hormones gone awry, and if she continued with this trend, then by the time Laz did finally come back, she might just have managed to alienate everyone within her proximity.
THAT NIGHT, SHE dreamt that Kane was driving her home in a car filled with sterling roses, but instead of stoplights, there were Magic 8-Balls at each corner. The 8-Balls glowed green like neon halos, but when she and Kane approached them, the 8-Balls turned red. At each corner, the same message was displayed: You may deny it.
16
WATSON AND CRICK
There were seven messages on the answering machine when Grace got upstairs. It was only nine o’clock, but it felt like midnight. She wagered a guess before playing the messages that at least five of them were from her father, hopefully one from Kane. That would leave one remaining message. It was the last one that Grace held out for with white-knuckled tenacity, like a child clinging to a helium balloon.
The first one was from her father. Hi, Gracie, it’s Dad. She skipped ahead to the next message, which was from Laz’s mother, reminding her about an auction solicitations meeting on Wednesday. Then another one from her father. Dad again. Just calling to see if you got home safely. She assumed the next message would be her father again, but it was from Chloe.
Hi. It’s me. It’s been a long time. I guess you haven’t heard. My mother died in September. I was in briefly to sort through some things, but not really in the Thanksgiving mood. Call me. I’d love to talk to you.
Grace replayed the message. She hadn’t realized that she and Chloe had drifted so much that Chloe wouldn’t have even called to tell her about her mother. She remembered when they used to talk every day.
She played the next message. Grace, it’s your father. Give a call when you get in. She hit the delete button. The next message was garbled. She heard a woman’s voice mumbling in Spanish. Grace recognized some of the words. No está en casa. Finally, after some confusion and shuffling sounds, she was able to discern Marisol’s voice: Señora Grace? My niece will be in tomorrow. The doctor says I cannot work until Thursday. Gracias.
Grace played the final message. Just a long dial tone. She rewound it and played it again, turning up the volume in the hopes of hearing something that might indicate that the call had been from Laz, and not simply a wrong number. She was about to replay it for the third time when the telephone rang and she hit the delete button by accident. She picked up the phone and had already said, “Hi, Dad,” when sh
e heard an unfamiliar voice on the other end.
“Hello. Is Lazarus Brookman there, please?” a woman inquired. She had the kind of voice Grace recalled from poetry workshops she’d taken in college—self-assured and polished.
“Hello?” the woman said again.
Grace had a flash of recognition, like the sighting of a lightning bug, but each time she thought she’d caught hold of it she came up empty-handed. Grace was about to answer when the woman began speaking to someone in the background. “Let me handle it,” the woman said, her voice slightly muffled.
“He just stepped out,” Grace told her. “Can I take a message?”
“No, thank you. I’ll call back,” she said, hanging up before Grace could get her name.
Grace went to the closet to hang up her coat, and to her amazement, there on the same wooden hanger where it had always hung was Laz’s leather jacket.
She touched the jacket and had a strange impulse to embrace it, instead zipping it up and adjusting it on the hanger, as if it were a disheveled child just home from school. In the morning, she’d take it to the tailor to get the pocket lining mended.
As soon as she closed the closet door, she was suddenly overcome with exhaustion, when only a moment ago she’d felt elated. The jacket had returned, but with it, only more questions. The Magic 8-Ball wasn’t wired to deal with conflicted emotions, and neither was Grace. She proceeded to go into her default mode, blanking out all self-doubt and worry—even the sound of the woman’s voice now escaped her—until the only thing she thought she needed was a good night’s sleep.
WHEN SHE WOKE UP, she had no recollection of having fallen asleep, just the awareness that she’d had no dreams, a span of time with no thoughts—a feeling close to bliss, as if her memory, along with the dream about Kane, had been erased. It was still dark out. She thought it must be nearly dawn, but when she looked at the clock she saw that it was only four in the morning.
As a child, when she couldn’t sleep, she’d think about her father’s beige argyle sweater. Most of what he wore was either beige or some other neutral tone. Her father, a creature of habit, ate the same breakfast—cornflakes, half a toasted English muffin with currant jelly, and a cup of Postum with nondairy creamer—without fail each day. Grace found this predictability soothing, as regular and soporific as the pattern on his argyle sweater. She tried to close her eyes now, but she was strangely alert. She decided she might as well get up and string the Christmas lights.
The lights were in the utility closet inside two large plastic bags, next to some unopened cans of paint and tile grout that Laz had purchased during one of his home-repair phases, which had never come to fruition. The lights were a tangled mess of wires and bulbs, as Grace never had the patience to wind them back neatly. She preferred the stuff-them-in-a-bag-and-forget-about-them method of taking down the tree; she didn’t mind the necessity then the following year of having to run out to the hardware store to buy new lights.
She set about trying to separate the strands that had twirled together like some genetic experiment gone haywire. There were equal numbers of white and colored strands, and many of each. Grace liked every inch of the tree to be lit up so that it blazed. Last year when they’d decorated the tree, Laz had said that if they strung the lights end to end, they would span the length of the George Washington Bridge.
As Grace untangled the lights, she thought of the meteor shower that she and Laz had seen on Block Island the first summer they were together. On a clear August night, they had been huddled by the dunes. Laz had pointed to the sky, which was streaked with sprays of light, and told her that for him it was what was in between the stars that intrigued him. Grace told him she preferred the stars themselves.
“Tell me what you can’t do,” he asked, pulling her closer. “I love you as much for what you aren’t, as much as for what you are. Maybe more.”
“I can’t do a cartwheel,” she said. “Or be alone.” At the time, Grace had found the request strange, like trying to define something by its negative image, but now it made perfect sense. However, she still preferred the lights.
THE MOST DIFFICULT part of untangling the Christmas lights was having the restraint not to tug too hard, so as not to unwind the double wires that made up each individual strand. Grace found this particularly trying, as her initial inclination was to wrench them apart with brute force. Her second thought was to get a pair of scissors and cut them. She succumbed to neither strategy, forcing herself to remain in a state of calm and balance that was utterly unfamiliar to her. She had once read that the smell of lavender was supposed to have a relaxing effect on the mind, and she would have lit an aromatherapy candle now if she’d had one. Instead, she settled for trying to conjure a mental facsimile of the smell.
After several minutes, managing only a vague olfactory approximation of essence of apple, she gave up. Although unsuccessful, the distraction had served its purpose. In the meantime, she’d been able to disengage several strands from the chaotic jumble. She marveled at her work, then inspected each strand to make sure that no bulbs were missing or broken.
The tree had settled in over the last few days, spreading out like a houseguest with a lot of luggage. It looked significantly larger than when Kane had first set it up. Grace moved the furniture to give the branches more space and hoped that the tree would not continue to expand.
Once Grace began stringing them, the lights went up easily. She fastened the strands together, following the natural flow of the branches, and before she knew it, she was ready to plug the cord into the outlet. The tree lit up in a sparkle of white and jewel colors. Grace stood back to admire it. The lights soon began to blink in a perfectly timed sequence that, for Grace, mimicked and in some way even surpassed the randomness of stars.
She was tired when she finished, the first hint of morning a pale glow above the park. She prepared José’s coffee, took it downstairs, and, exhausted, went back to bed.
GRACE HAD GRACE REMOVED THE that Marisol’s niece was coming that morning, so she was surprised when she was awakened by the sound of the vacuum. She looked at the clock. It was nearly eleven. Grace jumped out of bed, realizing that she’d neglected to leave any further evidence of Laz around the apartment. Laz’s side of the bed appeared eerily unslept on, the pillows neatly stacked, the comforter uncreased. She pulled down the comforter, rumpled the sheet, and twisted it into a tornado-like formation. Laz was a fitful sleeper, often sprawling diagonally across the bed, the pillows ending up tossed on the floor. Grace, on the other hand, could sleep in one position all night. In the morning, all that was needed for her side was a light smoothing of the bedspread and fluffing of the pillows; otherwise, it was hard to tell that anyone had even slept there.
After a few final touches—Laz’s razor blade and a tube of toothpaste in the garbage can; an unopened tin of Altoids on the dresser; his tattered black Dartmouth sweatshirt, now faded to a grayish green, slung over the back of the chair—the scene was set. It was more for Grace’s own benefit, she acknowledged, than for Marisol’s niece, on whom the fine attention to detail would be lost since she was not well acquainted with Laz’s habits.
Grace bent down to retrieve Laz’s sheepskin slippers out from under the bed and had the sudden impulse to try them on. They were far too large for her, of course. She could feel the indentations that his toes had made in the thick fleece. Instantly, her feet began to overheat in them. Laz wore them all the time, complaining that his feet were always cold, but still preferring the aesthetic of bare floors or area rugs to wall-to-wall carpeting. If pressed, though, it was the carpet’s seeming permanence that scared him.
Except for the kitchen, every square inch of Grace’s parents’ apartment, including the closets and the bathrooms, was covered with a thick, wool Berber. To Grace, it felt homey. Her mother had put her foot down, however, when Grace’s father had suggested using the scraps to line the kitchen cabinets. Her father had even invested in an industrial-strength rug shampooer, whic
h he lugged out religiously every month.
Once, on a trip to Morocco, Grace and Laz had visited a local rug shop. An array of brilliant carpets hung from the rafters, others were piled high on the floor. Laz had remarked to the owner of the shop that he liked the fact that the carpets could be rolled up and taken with them if they ever moved.
Sipping a glass of mint tea, Laz pointed to a small flat-weave rug. The owner shook it out and let it fall gently to the floor. “This one I could slip into a backpack,” Laz joked, making the merchant smile. When Laz saw the expression on Grace’s face, he put his arm around her and pulled her close. “Don’t worry, Grace, I’d slip you in there, too—if there was room,” he said, laughing. “You never know, you might wind up leaving me. But you’d need a six-piece set of luggage, and that’s not even counting the passage for your family. And you can’t forget the Sugarmans. Travel light—that’s my motto. If I teach you one thing, that should be it.”
GRACE REMOVED THE slippers from her feet and arranged them to look as if Laz had just kicked them off. She bent down to smooth the dust ruffle. As she stood up, she felt a sharp twinge in her lower right side. She took three deep breaths until the pain subsided.
She looked around the room and admired her work, deciding she might have missed her calling as a stage manager, or at the very least, a competent window dresser. The room looked like a life-size diorama. As if the curator of a museum, she formulated the caption in her head: Portrait of a Marriage, circa 1999. She angled the door for the best possible view, stopping just short of cordoning off the room with a velvet rope.
Marisol’s niece Dolores was polishing the silver when Grace walked into the kitchen. Grace was dressed in a black sweater and a pair of gray pants that had just come back from the dry cleaners and were a bit on the tight side. “Buenos dias, Señora Brookman,” Dolores said, smiling.
