Later on the day the postcard arrived, a hot sogginess crept in. All afternoon it came, reminding Clare of the fog coming in off the ocean in Maine. Some evenings that long-ago summer, she and Riley had watched strands of fog move among the little shingled houses and up the streets of the quiet seaside village, purposeful as ghosts. Riley had told her then that his Granny Mead had believed the fog peeked in at her window and took word of her fidelity back to her husband on board his ship, the Molly. Sometimes, Riley's grandmother told him, the fog also brought to land the news of someone lost at sea. Once, on a foggy night when she was a young mother, Granny Mead had doubled into tears over her pudding, despairing for her husband's life. And it was true, her premonition. He had been washed overboard in a Gulf Stream storm.
Clare hadn't thought of the story in years, but as the sun went down over the Hudson and she sat on the porch eating a supper of Havarti cheese and crackers, she noticed how the humidity was hung like smudged, sodden gauze over the river valley. It looked like fog. And it did look too as though it might bear tidings, and certainly nothing of comfort.
She sat outside until the fireflies had sparked in the grass and had begun to rise. Then she went to her bed. The peepers throbbed beyond the screens, and before it grew too late, the lights of an occasional car looked in the window, scanned her bedroom, and were gone. She sat in stillness under nothing but a cotton sheet, and the only movement came from the fan blowing. She was reading, waiting for Michael. But some minute, it took no longer than a single minute, she lost hold on herself, began to sink, began to let sleep rise up around her and then over her.
Riley was lying in the pine needles, and she was covering him with them, strand by strand. "Do you love me?" he asked. And she laughed. "Do you love me?" he asked again. "Clare, do you?" She put the needles on his forehead, where it was freckled. She laid them in the seam of his bare abdomen where the fine runnel of hair was red as cinnamon.
"You should love me," he said, "because I love the backs of your knees and the moons of your fingernails and the tips of your eyelashes where they turn blond."
"Hush," she told him, and laid pine needles on his mouth, covered his eyes.
"Hush," he told her in answer, and rose toward her and turned over on top of her so that the pine needles were coming down on her like autumn and he was above her and his lips were on hers, and she could feel the heat of him and the hard fact of how he loved her, the immutability of it. She was afraid he would swallow her. She wanted him to swallow her. She wanted to slide down into him, dissolve there and run in his blood, look through his eyes, savor her own kisses off his tongue. She wanted. She wanted. She wanted. She ached with how she wanted. "You love me," he told her.
Her bedstand light was still burning when she jolted back to herself. The cordless phone on the other pillow bleated again. "Michael?" she said into the receiver.
"Hi, sweet girl," he said. It was just after midnight, and his voice was grave with exhaustion. She could hear the physical strain in his vocal cords and knew that she was another of his obligations. Before he could sleep, he had to call her.
"How's your mother?" she asked, propping herself higher on the pillows. She struggled to get back to this moment, to return to her husband.
"No better, no worse," he answered, then sighed.
Limbo, Clare thought, and it was loud in her head. She's in limbo. And as long as she's there, so are we. But she didn't say this to him. She'd said it before. She'd said too many things. For his mother, there was only one way out of limbo. There was no going back to being Mommy Belle, the woman who had cut heart shapes into her son's toast every morning and sewed curtains for every room in her house as well as the house next door, the woman who made the "floatiest" matzoh balls on the face of the earth. After this, there was only one choice left for Belle: not being at all.
Clare bit the word limbo in two without saying it and groped for something simple but full of understanding. Lately though, she couldn't understand, couldn't fall into place with her husband's emotions, couldn't remember how. And how could that be? How could it have happened? This was the man whose emotions had been her mirror, the man who had sat on the couch with her one Friday night watching televised reports about troops coming home from the Gulf War. Neither of them had believed in killing for oil fields. Neither of them even knew anyone in the military. But as Clare was trying to conceal the feelings that were brimming in her eyes, she heard sniffling, and there he was over there, grinning sheepishly at his own soft heart while tears coursed down into the rough stubble of his evening beard: crying over a father reunited with a little girl in ponytails; over a bride kissing her earnest soldier; over a uniformed mother coming home to a teenage son who lifted her off the ground in his enthusiasm.
"The dance," Clare had called it, that way she and Michael had of reacting in unison. They had moved smoothly together: his hand on the small of her back as they skirted a slow walker on a city sidewalk; her eyes on the map before he knew the road he was driving on would split up ahead; his hand closing around hers just at the point in the movie when the heartbreak tightened around her throat. Whenever she had rolled over in the night, his arms were already opening for her.
Now she felt how badly they jerked out of step with one another. She got ahead; he lagged. She reached for words that would signal her sympathy; he lapsed into silence. They hesitated. They stepped on each other's toes.
She missed the dance. She missed him. And not just because he was away in Massachusetts. Even when he was home, part of him was gone, worrying over his mother or talking late into the night on the phone with his aunt Del, who cared for Belle every day, or at least did her best to care for her. Day after day, Michael turned the crisis this way and that in his mind. It was like some kind of conceptual puzzle to him, a mental Rubic's cube that he examined late at night by the circular glow of his desk lamp just as he examined it by the dim first light that fell through their bedroom window in the morning.
When Clare opened her eyes most days, his were already open, staring at the dusk that clung in the corners of their room. "Michael," she would whisper, putting her hand in the dark nest of hair on his chest, and he would seem not to hear her nor to feel her touch. Minutes later he would shudder to consciousness and pick up her hand and kiss her wrist just there where her pulse beat. Even as his lips brushed her skin, his breath warm, even then Clare felt nothing except cold, certain dread.
Clare had thought she could prevent the worst from happening to her. Not death. She could face that, she thought. She could face just not being. But she couldn't face loss. She had barely survived losing her mother. She had survived her mother's death only because of her father's work ethic: Toil will save you. She believed in it. She desperately believed in it.
The autumn after her mother's death, Clare's father had gone back into his firm and insisted on spearheading the design for a new corporate headquarters in Minneapolis. He had worked twenty-hour days in exhausting succession. But at least the fatigue muted the grief. Clare had missed him and needed him. Still, she couldn't blame him. She was finding her own salve in devoting long hours to the editorship of the school newspaper, which won a national award her senior year, her season of deepest mourning.
Ever since, she had never been happier than when she was working. When she was working, she wasn't scared. When she was working, she was doing everything in her power to keep herself safe from loss. Bad things happened only when you left yourself open to them, when you got lax or lazy, when you turned to see what was behind you when you should've been focused ahead, looking toward your goal. Wasn't that what her dad had always told her? "Don't catch trouble's eye," he had cautioned.
Maybe she had looked over her shoulder and caught trouble's eye. Or maybe it had caught hers. She knew the day it had happened, the day last spring when she'd squeezed in a checkup with the gynecologist after flying in from doing a series of on-camera interviews in D.C. It had been a harried day, and a dozen times she had considered canceling with the doctor in New York and taking a later shuttle so she could do one more interview, so she could set up one more shot under the boughs of the blossoming cherry trees.
It had been the day the cherry petals started turning loose in pink showers, a beautiful soft blue day. Sometimes since, she had thought the rogue cells might not have taken root in her body if she had not taken notice of them, if she had not acknowledged their presence, if she had just stayed and done her job. If she had stayed and worked, pushed harder. If she had stayed and worked longer in the wafting petals, in the last long light of a spring day.
"Are you okay?" she asked Michael now.
"Sure," he said. But the word was more sigh than anything made of the hard alphabet.
She waited for him to elaborate, waited for him to tell her what it was like to coax his agitated mother out of her clothes, to wrestle her arms free of the couch cushion she insisted on carrying for security, what it was like to hold her under the spray of water and to sponge the sharp ridge along her spine, what it was like to talk to her as she had talked to him when he was a toddler in the kitchen sink with a soap beard and sudsy pointed ears and a peaked little elf's cap of bubbles. Mommy Belle had always kept that snapshot over her kitchen sink, where she could see it when she washed the supper dishes. "Our little elf," she had called him. Clare had actually seen her mother-in-law kiss that picture in its frame. But the last time Clare had been to Belle's house, the image was gloomy with dust and soap spatters. Clare could hardly make out Michael's crooked little grin.
She wondered if Michael thought of reciprocity when he dried between the blades of his mother's shoulders, under her arms. She wondered if he remembered how his mother had looked at him with gray eyes that loved him best and if he twinged to see those same eyes turned on him now without any warmth of recognition, but instead with wariness. Whose hands were these that touched her with such intimacy? Who was this stranger whose palms rubbed her with Johnson's good, sweet powder?
On her end of the phone line, Clare lay under the light sheet and waited for Michael to give part of his burden to her, for him to open the door that would let her inside with him. She had waited a long time now. But Michael had not let her in. Maybe it was an impossibility: He could not let her inside his ordeal. This belonged only to him.
Even as she knew how selfish—and foolish—it was to resent his privacy, she did. She did so with her whole heart. It wasn't just resentment, though. It was terror. She was afraid of losing him. She was afraid of losing more of him than she had already relinquished. There had been a time when she believed him to be all that she had searched for, all she had needed: something to last.
She had met him because her executive producer had sent her downtown to do a piece on alternative art. It was just about the time that chocolate nudity erupted into a debate over government funding of the arts, and Clare's job was to capture the color of the avant-garde scene where some taxpayer money would inevitably go. This was drudgery for her. She was sorry. She had nothing against any of the contortions people wanted to put themselves through to make art. It just happened that she preferred Mostly Mozart and Lincoln Center, or some bruised and blazing saxophone at Michael's Pub. Her taste in art ran to the Italian cherub paintings at the Met. So sue her. She was young and single and had no use for hip. Not that she didn't wear the opaque black tights and the same little Lycra skirt that everyone else wore, it was just that she dressed it up with a high-collar lace blouse from the vintage basement on Columbus. She sometimes added what might have been her grandmother's old brooches—except that she had bought them for fifty cents apiece at the Sunday street fair. "Nostalgia chic," JoJo quipped.
In the context of the garage-style performance space on Varick Street, Clare McClendon looked out of place—she was wearing Victorian-style button boots and a crocheted dickey that night—and Michael Kline looked as though he had stepped naturally out of the shadows of the nearby buildings, which leaned over the street with no light coming from their barred, grimy windows. He had a nip of goatee on his chin, and his forehead was high and smooth, his hairline having already started its retreat. He was dressed in smug black and was wearing conspicuously gratuitous sunglasses. Dark and handsome and mysterious had never been her type. But he was playing the piano for a performance-art piece choreographed by his friend, Dane, who spun out blood-red mashed potatoes from under the tires of a Harley. And though Clare had no patience for the absurdity of the performance, she did feel that there was a limber lyricism to the music. This was the point, she found out later.
Michael always told people that he had wanted to marry Clare from the moment he saw her. "She had freckles on her nose," he would say. "Do you know how rare it is to find a fresh face in this city?" Fresh face or no, that night she had only wanted to get her reporting on tape and get back uptown. The only thing that won him her company was the pressing fact that she was dizzy with hunger, and he was offering to lead her to a special little Indian place on Sixth Street. "The best," he had assured her, and so she had sent her camera and sound men back uptown without her.
The entire street was lined with cheap Indian restaurants, but she never would have thought to eat there on her own. If she ate Indian food, it was on Fifty-seventh Street at an expense-account restaurant run by a Delhian movie star who wore her flower-color silks to greet guests. But as she and Michael walked down the row of restaurants and he recited the attributes of first one and then the next, she began to be drawn in by the idea. In the windows there were men swathed in white robes, playing sitars and drums. They sat on the heels of their long bare feet, endearingly, as children do, and their music sifted out onto the street with the spice of the curries. She began to feel as though she were somewhere only her passport could have taken her.
Michael's favorite restaurant was the size of a hallway and lit only with twinkling Christmas lights. Tables for two lined one wall, tables for four the other. Clare had to squeeze into her chair because it was back-to-back with a guy in a tuxedo who was toasting his buddy (or lover) with a bottle of Taj Mahal beer. Finally settled, she looked up to make some smart remark to Michael and found he had taken off his glasses. The words had dissolved on her tongue, and she was sure she had blushed. He had beautiful eyes. And, of all things, dimples.
"What's the matter?" he asked.
She had not told him, of course. They had talked instead of her work, and his. He played the piano at the Pierre, he admitted. Fifth Avenue. Uptown. She laughed. "And I thought you were so horrifically downtown."
Michael had explained that Dane had wanted to undercut the violence of his one-person, one-motorcycle diorama by employing the charm of piano music. But Dane had insisted that Michael wear the sunglasses—as a disguise. "Because of my eyes," Michael shrugged. "He claims my eyes are the size of a cow's." He told her that because of Dane, his college buddies all called him Bo, which was short for Bovine.
She laughed and agreed (though only to herself) that without a makeover, Michael would have ruined the edginess of Dane's performance. His eyes gave away his sweetness.
"So they dressed me for the part," he said, running his hand back through his hair.
"Down to that stuff on your chin?" she teased.
A flicker passed in his eyes. "That's all me," he said.
"Oh," she said. "It looks good on you." But the goatee was gone the next time she saw him, which was the night she first learned what he could do in a kitchen. He had made a wild mushroom fritatta, and also poppy-seed rolls that he said came from Thomas Jefferson's recipe. He had made her laugh that night too, and when she was eating her strawberries with balsamic vinegar, he leaned over and kissed her. "Sorry," he said after he had touched his lips to hers. "I couldn't help myself."
Again, she couldn't speak.
"You're beautiful," he said. "May I kiss you again?"
And she had nodded, and they had kissed, and he had never had to ask again. It had been a long time since anyone had cooked for her (other than JoJo's microwave popcorn). It had been a long time since anyone had taken her arm to guide her around dog poop on the sidewalk or held her hand as she was falling asleep. She had taken care of herself for so long that the relief surprised her, the relief of letting him share her life and its daily load.
When JoJo wasn't home, Clare and Michael shared Ivory liquid-soap bubble baths in the apartment's kitchen tub, or sat on the fire escape in the rain, or glowed together like embers on her futon mattress on the floor. In the afterglow, they would lie in one another's arms and describe the life they dreamed of having: No future was settled between them, but already they coordinated a fantasy. She told him what they would see from their bedroom window—trees and moving water—and he told her what he would make for breakfast on their fiftieth wedding anniversary. They named their someday dogs, calling them Fred and Ethel. They bandied about names for children. "Ezekiel, called Zeke," she would say. "Norman," he would counter.

Later on the day the postcard arrived, a hot sogginess crept in. All afternoon it came, reminding Clare of the fog coming in off the ocean in Maine. Some evenings that long-ago summer, she and Riley had watched strands of fog move among the little shingled houses and up the streets of the quiet seaside village, purposeful as ghosts. Riley had told her then that his Granny Mead had believed the fog peeked in at her window and took word of her fidelity back to her husband on board his ship, the Molly. Sometimes, Riley's grandmother told him, the fog also brought to land the news of someone lost at sea. Once, on a foggy night when she was a young mother, Granny Mead had doubled into tears over her pudding, despairing for her husband's life. And it was true, her premonition. He had been washed overboard in a Gulf Stream storm.
Clare hadn't thought of the story in years, but as the sun went down over the Hudson and she sat on the porch eating a supper of Havarti cheese and crackers, she noticed how the humidity was hung like smudged, sodden gauze over the river valley. It looked like fog. And it did look too as though it might bear tidings, and certainly nothing of comfort.
She sat outside until the fireflies had sparked in the grass and had begun to rise. Then she went to her bed. The peepers throbbed beyond the screens, and before it grew too late, the lights of an occasional car looked in the window, scanned her bedroom, and were gone. She sat in stillness under nothing but a cotton sheet, and the only movement came from the fan blowing. She was reading, waiting for Michael. But some minute, it took no longer than a single minute, she lost hold on herself, began to sink, began to let sleep rise up around her and then over her.
Riley was lying in the pine needles, and she was covering him with them, strand by strand. "Do you love me?" he asked. And she laughed. "Do you love me?" he asked again. "Clare, do you?" She put the needles on his forehead, where it was freckled. She laid them in the seam of his bare abdomen where the fine runnel of hair was red as cinnamon.
"You should love me," he said, "because I love the backs of your knees and the moons of your fingernails and the tips of your eyelashes where they turn blond."
"Hush," she told him, and laid pine needles on his mouth, covered his eyes.
"Hush," he told her in answer, and rose toward her and turned over on top of her so that the pine needles were coming down on her like autumn and he was above her and his lips were on hers, and she could feel the heat of him and the hard fact of how he loved her, the immutability of it. She was afraid he would swallow her. She wanted him to swallow her. She wanted to slide down into him, dissolve there and run in his blood, look through his eyes, savor her own kisses off his tongue. She wanted. She wanted. She wanted. She ached with how she wanted. "You love me," he told her.
Her bedstand light was still burning when she jolted back to herself. The cordless phone on the other pillow bleated again. "Michael?" she said into the receiver.
"Hi, sweet girl," he said. It was just after midnight, and his voice was grave with exhaustion. She could hear the physical strain in his vocal cords and knew that she was another of his obligations. Before he could sleep, he had to call her.
"How's your mother?" she asked, propping herself higher on the pillows. She struggled to get back to this moment, to return to her husband.
"No better, no worse," he answered, then sighed.
Limbo, Clare thought, and it was loud in her head. She's in limbo. And as long as she's there, so are we. But she didn't say this to him. She'd said it before. She'd said too many things. For his mother, there was only one way out of limbo. There was no going back to being Mommy Belle, the woman who had cut heart shapes into her son's toast every morning and sewed curtains for every room in her house as well as the house next door, the woman who made the "floatiest" matzoh balls on the face of the earth. After this, there was only one choice left for Belle: not being at all.
Clare bit the word limbo in two without saying it and groped for something simple but full of understanding. Lately though, she couldn't understand, couldn't fall into place with her husband's emotions, couldn't remember how. And how could that be? How could it have happened? This was the man whose emotions had been her mirror, the man who had sat on the couch with her one Friday night watching televised reports about troops coming home from the Gulf War. Neither of them had believed in killing for oil fields. Neither of them even knew anyone in the military. But as Clare was trying to conceal the feelings that were brimming in her eyes, she heard sniffling, and there he was over there, grinning sheepishly at his own soft heart while tears coursed down into the rough stubble of his evening beard: crying over a father reunited with a little girl in ponytails; over a bride kissing her earnest soldier; over a uniformed mother coming home to a teenage son who lifted her off the ground in his enthusiasm.
"The dance," Clare had called it, that way she and Michael had of reacting in unison. They had moved smoothly together: his hand on the small of her back as they skirted a slow walker on a city sidewalk; her eyes on the map before he knew the road he was driving on would split up ahead; his hand closing around hers just at the point in the movie when the heartbreak tightened around her throat. Whenever she had rolled over in the night, his arms were already opening for her.
Now she felt how badly they jerked out of step with one another. She got ahead; he lagged. She reached for words that would signal her sympathy; he lapsed into silence. They hesitated. They stepped on each other's toes.
She missed the dance. She missed him. And not just because he was away in Massachusetts. Even when he was home, part of him was gone, worrying over his mother or talking late into the night on the phone with his aunt Del, who cared for Belle every day, or at least did her best to care for her. Day after day, Michael turned the crisis this way and that in his mind. It was like some kind of conceptual puzzle to him, a mental Rubic's cube that he examined late at night by the circular glow of his desk lamp just as he examined it by the dim first light that fell through their bedroom window in the morning.
When Clare opened her eyes most days, his were already open, staring at the dusk that clung in the corners of their room. "Michael," she would whisper, putting her hand in the dark nest of hair on his chest, and he would seem not to hear her nor to feel her touch. Minutes later he would shudder to consciousness and pick up her hand and kiss her wrist just there where her pulse beat. Even as his lips brushed her skin, his breath warm, even then Clare felt nothing except cold, certain dread.
Clare had thought she could prevent the worst from happening to her. Not death. She could face that, she thought. She could face just not being. But she couldn't face loss. She had barely survived losing her mother. She had survived her mother's death only because of her father's work ethic: Toil will save you. She believed in it. She desperately believed in it.
The autumn after her mother's death, Clare's father had gone back into his firm and insisted on spearheading the design for a new corporate headquarters in Minneapolis. He had worked twenty-hour days in exhausting succession. But at least the fatigue muted the grief. Clare had missed him and needed him. Still, she couldn't blame him. She was finding her own salve in devoting long hours to the editorship of the school newspaper, which won a national award her senior year, her season of deepest mourning.
Ever since, she had never been happier than when she was working. When she was working, she wasn't scared. When she was working, she was doing everything in her power to keep herself safe from loss. Bad things happened only when you left yourself open to them, when you got lax or lazy, when you turned to see what was behind you when you should've been focused ahead, looking toward your goal. Wasn't that what her dad had always told her? "Don't catch trouble's eye," he had cautioned.
Maybe she had looked over her shoulder and caught trouble's eye. Or maybe it had caught hers. She knew the day it had happened, the day last spring when she'd squeezed in a checkup with the gynecologist after flying in from doing a series of on-camera interviews in D.C. It had been a harried day, and a dozen times she had considered canceling with the doctor in New York and taking a later shuttle so she could do one more interview, so she could set up one more shot under the boughs of the blossoming cherry trees.
It had been the day the cherry petals started turning loose in pink showers, a beautiful soft blue day. Sometimes since, she had thought the rogue cells might not have taken root in her body if she had not taken notice of them, if she had not acknowledged their presence, if she had just stayed and done her job. If she had stayed and worked, pushed harder. If she had stayed and worked longer in the wafting petals, in the last long light of a spring day.
"Are you okay?" she asked Michael now.
"Sure," he said. But the word was more sigh than anything made of the hard alphabet.
She waited for him to elaborate, waited for him to tell her what it was like to coax his agitated mother out of her clothes, to wrestle her arms free of the couch cushion she insisted on carrying for security, what it was like to hold her under the spray of water and to sponge the sharp ridge along her spine, what it was like to talk to her as she had talked to him when he was a toddler in the kitchen sink with a soap beard and sudsy pointed ears and a peaked little elf's cap of bubbles. Mommy Belle had always kept that snapshot over her kitchen sink, where she could see it when she washed the supper dishes. "Our little elf," she had called him. Clare had actually seen her mother-in-law kiss that picture in its frame. But the last time Clare had been to Belle's house, the image was gloomy with dust and soap spatters. Clare could hardly make out Michael's crooked little grin.
She wondered if Michael thought of reciprocity when he dried between the blades of his mother's shoulders, under her arms. She wondered if he remembered how his mother had looked at him with gray eyes that loved him best and if he twinged to see those same eyes turned on him now without any warmth of recognition, but instead with wariness. Whose hands were these that touched her with such intimacy? Who was this stranger whose palms rubbed her with Johnson's good, sweet powder?
On her end of the phone line, Clare lay under the light sheet and waited for Michael to give part of his burden to her, for him to open the door that would let her inside with him. She had waited a long time now. But Michael had not let her in. Maybe it was an impossibility: He could not let her inside his ordeal. This belonged only to him.
Even as she knew how selfish—and foolish—it was to resent his privacy, she did. She did so with her whole heart. It wasn't just resentment, though. It was terror. She was afraid of losing him. She was afraid of losing more of him than she had already relinquished. There had been a time when she believed him to be all that she had searched for, all she had needed: something to last.
She had met him because her executive producer had sent her downtown to do a piece on alternative art. It was just about the time that chocolate nudity erupted into a debate over government funding of the arts, and Clare's job was to capture the color of the avant-garde scene where some taxpayer money would inevitably go. This was drudgery for her. She was sorry. She had nothing against any of the contortions people wanted to put themselves through to make art. It just happened that she preferred Mostly Mozart and Lincoln Center, or some bruised and blazing saxophone at Michael's Pub. Her taste in art ran to the Italian cherub paintings at the Met. So sue her. She was young and single and had no use for hip. Not that she didn't wear the opaque black tights and the same little Lycra skirt that everyone else wore, it was just that she dressed it up with a high-collar lace blouse from the vintage basement on Columbus. She sometimes added what might have been her grandmother's old brooches—except that she had bought them for fifty cents apiece at the Sunday street fair. "Nostalgia chic," JoJo quipped.
In the context of the garage-style performance space on Varick Street, Clare McClendon looked out of place—she was wearing Victorian-style button boots and a crocheted dickey that night—and Michael Kline looked as though he had stepped naturally out of the shadows of the nearby buildings, which leaned over the street with no light coming from their barred, grimy windows. He had a nip of goatee on his chin, and his forehead was high and smooth, his hairline having already started its retreat. He was dressed in smug black and was wearing conspicuously gratuitous sunglasses. Dark and handsome and mysterious had never been her type. But he was playing the piano for a performance-art piece choreographed by his friend, Dane, who spun out blood-red mashed potatoes from under the tires of a Harley. And though Clare had no patience for the absurdity of the performance, she did feel that there was a limber lyricism to the music. This was the point, she found out later.
Michael always told people that he had wanted to marry Clare from the moment he saw her. "She had freckles on her nose," he would say. "Do you know how rare it is to find a fresh face in this city?" Fresh face or no, that night she had only wanted to get her reporting on tape and get back uptown. The only thing that won him her company was the pressing fact that she was dizzy with hunger, and he was offering to lead her to a special little Indian place on Sixth Street. "The best," he had assured her, and so she had sent her camera and sound men back uptown without her.
The entire street was lined with cheap Indian restaurants, but she never would have thought to eat there on her own. If she ate Indian food, it was on Fifty-seventh Street at an expense-account restaurant run by a Delhian movie star who wore her flower-color silks to greet guests. But as she and Michael walked down the row of restaurants and he recited the attributes of first one and then the next, she began to be drawn in by the idea. In the windows there were men swathed in white robes, playing sitars and drums. They sat on the heels of their long bare feet, endearingly, as children do, and their music sifted out onto the street with the spice of the curries. She began to feel as though she were somewhere only her passport could have taken her.
Michael's favorite restaurant was the size of a hallway and lit only with twinkling Christmas lights. Tables for two lined one wall, tables for four the other. Clare had to squeeze into her chair because it was back-to-back with a guy in a tuxedo who was toasting his buddy (or lover) with a bottle of Taj Mahal beer. Finally settled, she looked up to make some smart remark to Michael and found he had taken off his glasses. The words had dissolved on her tongue, and she was sure she had blushed. He had beautiful eyes. And, of all things, dimples.
"What's the matter?" he asked.
She had not told him, of course. They had talked instead of her work, and his. He played the piano at the Pierre, he admitted. Fifth Avenue. Uptown. She laughed. "And I thought you were so horrifically downtown."
Michael had explained that Dane had wanted to undercut the violence of his one-person, one-motorcycle diorama by employing the charm of piano music. But Dane had insisted that Michael wear the sunglasses—as a disguise. "Because of my eyes," Michael shrugged. "He claims my eyes are the size of a cow's." He told her that because of Dane, his college buddies all called him Bo, which was short for Bovine.
She laughed and agreed (though only to herself) that without a makeover, Michael would have ruined the edginess of Dane's performance. His eyes gave away his sweetness.
"So they dressed me for the part," he said, running his hand back through his hair.
"Down to that stuff on your chin?" she teased.
A flicker passed in his eyes. "That's all me," he said.
"Oh," she said. "It looks good on you." But the goatee was gone the next time she saw him, which was the night she first learned what he could do in a kitchen. He had made a wild mushroom fritatta, and also poppy-seed rolls that he said came from Thomas Jefferson's recipe. He had made her laugh that night too, and when she was eating her strawberries with balsamic vinegar, he leaned over and kissed her. "Sorry," he said after he had touched his lips to hers. "I couldn't help myself."
Again, she couldn't speak.
"You're beautiful," he said. "May I kiss you again?"
And she had nodded, and they had kissed, and he had never had to ask again. It had been a long time since anyone had cooked for her (other than JoJo's microwave popcorn). It had been a long time since anyone had taken her arm to guide her around dog poop on the sidewalk or held her hand as she was falling asleep. She had taken care of herself for so long that the relief surprised her, the relief of letting him share her life and its daily load.
When JoJo wasn't home, Clare and Michael shared Ivory liquid-soap bubble baths in the apartment's kitchen tub, or sat on the fire escape in the rain, or glowed together like embers on her futon mattress on the floor. In the afterglow, they would lie in one another's arms and describe the life they dreamed of having: No future was settled between them, but already they coordinated a fantasy. She told him what they would see from their bedroom window—trees and moving water—and he told her what he would make for breakfast on their fiftieth wedding anniversary. They named their someday dogs, calling them Fred and Ethel. They bandied about names for children. "Ezekiel, called Zeke," she would say. "Norman," he would counter.