The Gravity of Birds. Tracy Guzeman

we’ll all be blown up and it won’t matter.’

      ‘What? You mean by the Communists? I shouldn’t think so.’

      ‘Why not?’

      ‘I don’t suppose the majority of them want to blow us up any more than they’d want us blowing them up.’

      Alice nodded, remembering other conversations she’d overheard. ‘Mutual assured destruction.’

      ‘I’m shocked at the knowledge you possess. At your tender age I think it might be healthier for you to be less well-informed. At the very least, it would make for better sleeping. You’ll grow up fast enough as it is. One becomes jaded and cynical so quickly.’ He tore a filmy piece of vellum from a roll, placing it over the sketch and rolling the pieces into a tube.

      ‘Maybe one should try harder not to be so jaded and cynical.’

      Thomas laughed and poured himself another drink. ‘A toast to you, Alice. You’re a young lady wise beyond your years. Wise beyond mine, as well. May nothing, and no one, disappoint you. Now take your drawing and go. I’ve got work to do.’

      ‘Can I come again tomorrow?’

      ‘I’ll likely go mad if you don’t. And as you kindly indicated, I need help improving my perspective.’

      She was almost all the way down the drive and back to the Restons’ cabin before she realized she’d left her books sitting on the end table next to the sofa. She hadn’t even asked him about the poem. Tomorrow, she thought. But there was a sketch she wanted to finish—the domino-marked bufflehead she’d spotted scooting through the lake’s shallows that morning—and other poems waiting to be read. So she retraced her steps.

      The wind picked up. A flock of grackles darkened the sky overhead, their raucous chatter filling the air like the swing of rusty gates. There was another storm coming in and if she wasn’t quick she’d be drenched, even though the walk back was no more than five minutes. She left the door to the cabin ajar when she went in, calling his name softly, but there was no answer. Work to do most likely meant sleep, she imagined, seeing his empty glass. She hurried into the main room. The doors leading to other parts of the house were closed and everything was quiet. The cabin itself seemed to have stopped breathing, its creaks and settlings absent in spite of the wind outside. She could still see his footprints in the chalk dust on the floor, like a ghost’s, leading to and away from his easel.

      A gust swept into the room and sent the pile of drawings resting on the easel flying. Why hadn’t she thought to close the door? She started to pick them up, intending to put them back before he noticed anything was out of place, but stopped when she glanced at the first piece of paper she touched, a colored pencil sketch. Her breath caught in the back of her throat and her skin turned clammy. She sank to her knees, unable to breathe.

      Even if she hadn’t looked at the face, she would have known it was Natalie. Those were her sister’s arms and legs flung so casually across the sofa, the pale thread of a scar just below her knee from a skiing accident two years prior. That was Natalie’s hair, mussed and wild, like caramelized sand, one long curl wrapped around a finger. That was the necklace from her latest boyfriend, the tiny pearls glowing against the skin of her neck. The tan line crossing the slope of her breasts, the small whorl of her belly button, the pale skin stretched taut between her hip bones, all the secret, private pink of her. And, erasing any hope or possible doubt, Natalie’s knowing smile.

       Chapter Two October 2007

      Finch groped for the belt of his raincoat as he got out of the cab, holding his arm up in an attempt to shield his bare head from the late October rain. He crossed the sidewalk in two steps and took the steep flight of stairs, steering clear of the refuse and odors percolating on either side of him, but landing squarely in the puddles that had formed in the centers of the treads. The wet seeped into his socks as he watched the cab disappear. Stranded. He briefly considered calling a car service and returning to his own apartment, a warmly lit, tidy brownstone in Prospect Heights, where, thanks to his daughter, the refrigerator would be well-stocked with wholesome if uninteresting food. Your blood pressure, she would say. Your heart. Your knees. He would ask, How are prunes going to help my knees?, wondering if he had remembered to hide his pipe, and she would simply shrug and smile at him and in that smile he would see for the briefest of moments his wife’s mouth, and his entire perfect world, all as it had once been.

      When he’d arranged for the Williamsburg apartment for Thomas Bayber five years ago, the neighborhood was in what the smiling real estate agent termed ‘a period of transition.’ Finch had considered it an investment, optimistically assuming it would transition for the better, but gentrification had yet to make its way this far south. He peered through a grimy, cracked pane of glass. He could barely open the front door, swollen from all the rain, and when he pressed the buzzer for 7A there was, as always, a comedic interlude when buzzer and buzzee could not coordinate their efforts and Finch yanked impatiently at the elevator door several times, always managing to turn the knob just as the lock reengaged. After three thwarted attempts and much cursing under his breath, he turned down the hall and headed toward the stairs.

      He made it as far as the fifth-floor landing before he stopped, sitting down on a step and rubbing his throbbing knees. These persistent fissures in the machinery presented themselves with stunning diligence. His head ached, whether from guilt or anger, he couldn’t be sure. He only knew he didn’t enjoy being summoned. There was a time he might have chalked this visit up to a responsibility of friendship, stretching the very definition of the word. But he had moved beyond the requirement of an explanation and now saw things for what they were. He was useful to Thomas at times, less so at others. It was as simple as that.

      His wife would not have wanted him here. Claire might even have surprised him by voicing the words she’d kept tied beneath her tongue for so many years. Enough is enough, Denny. She would have been right. Even the elaborate funeral spray Thomas had sent to the church—Finch couldn’t help but wonder whether he’d paid for that expression of Thomas’s largesse as well—wouldn’t have appeased Claire. Nor had it been of any particular comfort to him. Thomas, or things regarding Thomas, had consumed too many of their hours together to be balanced by one obscene display of orchids. A wave of grief washed over Finch, and he was overcome with her absence. Eleven months was not long—he still found the occasional sympathy card in his mailbox—but time had expanded and slowed. His days swelled with the monotony of hours, piling up in colossal heaps before and after him, the used the same as the new.

      He shuddered to his feet and grabbed the stair rail, reminding himself to be thankful for this diversion. Would he have otherwise left the house today? This week? It was far more likely he’d have barricaded himself in the brownstone, surrounded by dissertations and examinations, half-listening to Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia and allowing a sharp red pencil to float just above the surface of a paper. The text would waver in front of his eyes and he would lose interest in whatever thought his student had been struggling to express, instead becoming maudlin and drifting in and out of sleep, his head snapping to attention before sinking again to his chest.

      Even the small distraction of teaching might soon be behind him. Dean Hamilton had strongly suggested a sabbatical at the beginning of the new term next year, a suggestion Finch had opted not to share with his daughter or anyone else. ‘Take some time, Dennis,’ Hamilton had said to him, smiling as he stuffed wristbands and racquetball goggles into a shiny gym bag. It was all Finch could do not to throttle the man. Time. There was too damn much of it. If only he could wish it away.

      When he was younger, he had often wondered about the kind of old man he was likely to become. His father had been a well-grounded person, amiable and easygoing with strangers, though rigorous with