Mavis’s face is before him, her brow furrowed, her gray gaze gone sad.
She waits in silence as he squeezes his eyes shut briefly, clamps his two temples between thumb and fingers, waits for the wooziness of daytime sleep to fade. Finally he lifts his face again, looks at her.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“Just the effects of the nap.”
“I mean otherwise,” she says.
Her manner with him over the past weeks, particularly when Linda was the seemingly routine subject between them, finally clarifies itself. “You knew,” he says.
She looks at him for a few beats, filling in the unspoken words between them. “Only guessed,” she says.
“This won’t affect any of you,” he says.
“I’m not worried about that.”
“I’m all right,” he says.
She nods, minutely, as if she’s doubtful.
“It’s an understanding,” he says.
“I don’t mean to intrude,” she says.
“Thanks.”
They stare quietly at each other for a moment.
Then he asks, “How was the stew?”
She flickers a smile. “I brought you some.”
“Good,” he says. “I’ll have enough for two nights.”
She puts her hand on his shoulder, squeezes it gently, and she goes.
He rises.
He crosses to the coffeepot, pours a cup, drinks. It’s no longer fresh. At the pay phone in Buffalo in July of 1968, after the click of disconnection from his father, Jimmy hung up the receiver, turned his back on the phone, and he looked at his watch. He didn’t need to know the time to know it was time to go. In the break room Jimmy does not consciously remember that gesture, but it and the reflex that animated it, that propelled him to the life he’s lived all the years since, is the same now: He looks at his watch. It is five minutes to one. He can be on Baldwin Street in three hours. Before the shop closes and Heather goes home. It is time to go.
Less than three hours later, Jimmy steps into his shop, the entry door’s retro brass bells jangling above him, the smell of mellowed-down leather filling him, two things that always give him a surge of pleasure, this space he has created, these things he has made. And the long drive has done him good. He quickly ceased thinking about Linda and instead revisited all of Heather’s knowing looks and admiring words, compressing them into an underlying narrative that reassures him he’s not about to make a fool of himself.
The shop is empty, including the checkout counter. He moves along the center aisle with a sudden and acute sense of Heather: In a place empty where he expected her to be, he misses her.
Then she appears in the doorway to the back room.
She’s wearing her sales-floor outfit, a jacket off the rack — today a lambskin bomber — over a black crewneck T-shirt. Black on black makes her dark eyes even darker, her skin even whiter. She brightens. His narrative falls apart. He will make a fool of himself.
She comes to him.
She stops just beyond reach. A bad sign.
“I didn’t expect you,” she says.
All he has is small talk. “Things seem slow, eh?” he says.
“Winter Wednesdays. I let Greta go home. She’s working up a cold.”
“Good,” he says. He hears the ambiguity. He quickly adds, “That you let her go.”
She smiles at the correction. Then she softens the smile at the edges and lifts her chin. An inquiry. A prompt.
Such things were part of the Highway 400 narrative.
She is saying but she is not saying.
An insistent part of him wants simply to thank her vaguely and claim that he only dropped in to see how things are and he’s meeting somebody down the street and has to leave.
So he tries to drag himself in the other direction by the improbable strategy of nodding at her chest. He means to indicate the bomber jacket. He says, “You’re modeling today.”
“I sold its mate this morning. The lady took one look and said, ‘I want what you’re wearing.’”
“On a Winter Wednesday to boot.” He knows he sounds lame.
But, generously, she laughs.
Overloaded with prompts, Jimmy is mystified why this should be so difficult for him. He’s never been awkward approaching a woman. And he offers himself an explanation: It’s too important, is why. This is different.
“You look beautiful,” he says.
Heather soughs, as if she’s been holding her breath. She gathers herself and says softly, “Thank you.”
And he finds himself needing to explain. To her. To himself. “You’ve admired how my spirit seems free,” he says.
He has more words but the effort of just these makes him pause.
She fills the pause, again softly: “Yes.”
“Free by ideology,” he says. “Free by protocol. Free by …” He searches for a word now. “… devaluing it,” he says. “Thus. Thus it’s devalued, the freedom.”
He stops. Tries to clear his head.
“I’m having trouble,” he says. “Putting it into words.”
“Do you have to?” she says.
Another invitation. He won’t ignore it, but he trusts it will stay valid for a few more moments. “I have to,” he says. “I think I understand. I was free because what my wife and I decided we were free to have wasn’t worth all that much.”
He finds that Heather has moved closer to him.
They are in each other’s arms.
And in the room above his shop Jimmy lies on his side, the fern frost on the window jaundiced by street-light, Heather spooned into him, her arm draped around his chest. He closes his eyes, discerns the soft touch of her nipples just beneath his shoulder blades.
He and Heather are quilted over, the room still cold. He’ll have her call someone to look at the furnace.
It seems to have been such a long long while since he had that thought yesterday. The flex of time.
And he thinks of dark matter, dark energy. How astrophysicists now understand that all visible matter — from the galaxies to our bodies to the strands of our DNA — makes up only a tiny percentage of the mass of the universe. How all of the rest of the matter and energy — unobservable, unrecordable, the dark 95 percent — somehow resides in the spaces formerly thought to be empty. How quantum physicists are beginning to theorize the existence of parallel worlds to explain the bizarre mechanics of matter in its smallest particles. How, as well, it’s known that our bodies are made up of atoms, electrons orbiting nuclei, with empty space in between, that our bodies themselves are mostly empty space. And so if dark matter and dark energy exist in the empty space between the stars, why should they not exist inside our very bodies? Are we not ourselves mostly dark matter and dark energy? And what if that’s where those parallel worlds reside?
Linda was wrong. Being with Heather won’t stop me thinking about what’s next. Linda was stupidly wrong: It’s not worry. For millennia we’ve all been thinking there’s a place for us other than the one we’re in, this savage place where we fight each other, consume each other. This place we must escape. From the sun to the moon to the earth, from Heather’s nipples to my shoulder blades, from her atoms to mine. In all the empty space within and between, there is consciousness, there is existence. Impervious to war and betrayal and hardness of heart. It’s the place we all will run to.