Electric City: A Novel (25 page)

Sophie wanted champagne again. She wanted Henry to kiss her.

And then, he did. Reaching behind her neck with his suddenly gloveless hand, he pulled her face toward his own. All those kisses of late summer seemed to cascade forward like the closing of a circuit.

For several minutes, they tasted each other. And even though Henry’s hands stayed on Sophie’s neck and shoulder, her entire body felt like it was melting, with sensations that dazzled and tingled from her feet to the top of her head.

“Everything all right?” he asked. When he touched her lips with his fingers, lightly, she could feel how swollen they were.

“Very,” she said. The gearshift was keeping them from pressing their entire bodies against one another. The MG didn’t have a backseat, just a space barely large enough for one. Even Bear wouldn’t have been able to fit.

Nearby were a few other cars with their steamed-up windows and muffled laughter. On the far side of the lot, a car revved noisily and pulled away. Henry and Sophie watched the red taillights disappear up the road and into the pines.

“It’s getting kind of late, isn’t it,” Henry said. The dashboard clock said 10:09.

Get home before we do
, Sophie was thinking. “Yup. It’s late.”

“How about tomorrow?” Henry said. “Birthday?” He looked intently into her face, reminding her of that first time in front of the post office. She still felt unskilled at this part, being studied
;
her eyes closed in spite of her willing them to stay open. He leaned into her with another kiss, reviving a current of heat, even after he pulled away and put the car into gear.

“Birthday,” Henry repeated.

“Right,” she said, and rearranged the blanket to cover her ankles, which felt cold all over again.

“Do I get to take you somewhere? Do you have to do something with your family?”

The headlights swept across the tree trunks as he pulled onto River Road. They cruised past house after house festooned with Christmas
lights; reindeer and plastic snowmen cavorted among soot-covered snowdrifts on both sides of the road. It occurred to Sophie that aside from a wreath on the front door and poinsettia plants in the foyer, Henry’s house was remarkably undecorated.

“Didn’t you have a Christmas tree?” she asked.

“We always take it down before New Year’s,” he said. “My mother’s allergic to pine needles but hates artificial trees. She endures her symptoms for about three days before the whole thing has to go, lights and all. Until the next year, that is.”

Sophie imagined a room piled high with gifts, a page of the fairytale childhood she used to long for. Hungry to be like everyone else.

“What about it?” Henry asked, “Tomorrow, I mean?”

She reminded herself that winter solstice had already passed, which ought to mean that the worst of the dark season was behind them.
More light, coming soon
. Tomorrow would be the last day of 1966.

“It would be great,” she said, “to do something with you.”

He reached for her nearby hand in the car’s dark space and squeezed. With her right index finger, she traced the outline of her lips, felt an electric pulse at her core. Was his body singing like this too? She didn’t know how to ask.

O
N THE NIGHTS
Martin couldn’t easily fall asleep, he sat in an old rocking chair and tuned in to the college radio station, one deejay in particular whose smoky voice reminded him of Joseph’s when the years of breathing sawdust had finally caught up with him. It was the texture of his sentences as they slipped into the airwaves, smooth on one side and rough on the other; that was the way Martin tried explaining it in his notebook. But the thing was, you couldn’t describe the sound in words. You had to feel it work its way inside you, both a prelude to the music coming after it and an echo of what had just been played.

The night before New Year’s Eve was one of those long nights of listening. He played one of his oldest tapes: Joseph telling the story of the bridge disaster in Canada. Martin knew every pause, every sigh. The next day was Sophie’s birthday, but he had no idea what to offer a girl when her heart aimed itself away from him.

Never mind
, he told himself.

Maybe he could become more like his dog Bear, train himself to locate the notes too high for ordinary human ears, or too low. Maybe he could decipher how far away the source was, could tell if someone was sad or lonely just by recognizing the vibration underneath the song.

Awake in the dark, Martin vowed to be in love with the world and not any single being. He could be bigger than the place he came from,
bigger than Electric City, bigger than America even, permeable and free. Something like the life that Steinmetz chose. Not an individual partner but a kind of connection to everything.

Stroking Bear’s head, he leaned the chair back until it creaked in protest, sipped a beer in the after-midnight solace of his grandmother’s house. Imagining he could hear the river moving even though it was miles away, imagining he could hear the scrape of branches let loose by the sharp December wind. And the fish breathing deep under the ice.

F
ORTIFIED AGAINST THE
morning elements with long underwear and wool pants, bundled into layers of down and fake-fur linings, Sophie told Henry she felt about as graceful as a hockey player.

“But at least we’re outside!” he said, laughing. He drove them to the edge of the river where they would be meeting up with Martin, Sophie’s privileged birthday request. He couldn’t decide whether or not there was reason to feel jealous of the time Sophie and Martin spent together without him; Sophie’s letters referred to the way Martin rarely said anything to her at school, but maybe their friendship was some hidden valuable shared only partly with Henry. Aside from the photos he’d requested, Martin’s intermittent postcards sent to the boarding school address consisted of album recommendations listed in alphabetical order, printed in block letters. This may have been some kind of coded message, but Henry kept forgetting to ask Martin for the translation.

Hard to believe this place had been so drenched in green just a few months earlier, now that snow had disguised everything into anonymity. There were vague cartoonish lumps where bushes used to be, and ice-tipped trees shivering up and down the street, as though embarrassed to be so close to the blinking lights on so many evergreens.

Arriving early to have some time alone, Henry and Sophie sat in his car, parked along the curb and facing the frozen Mohawk. Lacelike
patterns covered the windshield, especially at the edges, and every time Henry thought about kissing Sophie, he felt like an overheating battery. After asking her to take off her gloves, he placed a small white box in her left hand, fitting it inside her palm.

“Happy birthday, Sophie.”

When she lifted the lid, she saw translucent white tissue paper gleaming with gold sparkles, delicate as fresh snow under sunlight. Folded into the tissue paper was a gold chain, fragile inside fragile. The delicate strand of links was so fine that when Sophie held the necklace up to her cheek, Henry saw how it shimmered and nearly vanished.

As if she were a gift box too, he unwrapped her scarf and touched her collarbone, the hollow of her throat.

“Can I?” he asked and fastened the clasp as though he’d been rehearsing this gesture all morning.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“So are you,” he said and placed his mouth on hers, which opened with so much welcome he suddenly realized how closed the world had felt to him before now.

Once the long kiss ended, Sophie took both of Henry’s hands and held them gently. That was the way they were sitting when Martin appeared carrying a huge branch of bright red winterberries posing as a bouquet of flowers. He smiled his stunning smile and planted the branch in a snow bank.

Henry and Sophie stumbled giddily out of the car, and Martin kissed Sophie on both cheeks while he retied her scarf around her neck.

“Foxes have been known to eat these,” he said, pointing.

In his peripheral vision, the berries looked to Henry like drops of blood against the snow
.

“Where to now?” Henry asked Sophie.

“Woods?” Martin said.

“Movies?” Henry said.

“Ice skating,” she said. “Central Park.”

“Iroquois Lake,” Martin said. He said it twice.

A
N HOUR LATER
, after collecting what they needed, all three of them sat in the warming hut beside the iced-over lake at the center of Central Park, trading their boots for skates. Henry’s were black and new; Sophie’s were beige and many times renewed with polish to obscure the scuffmarks. Martin’s were brown and double-bladed, salvaged a year earlier from the Army Navy store downtown, a remnant from someone else’s discarded hockey season.

On the scarred wooden bench, Martin was quickest with the laces, tightening and knotting; ready first, he stood up with his arms outstretched for balance. Out of habit, he whistled for Bear, but then remembered the dog was at home with Annie, curled by the stove.

When Sophie stood, she could tell that one skate was still too loose; Henry reached over to tighten it for her, and she steadied herself with hands on his shoulders.

“Better now?” he said.

“Perfect now,” she said.

He drew her close enough to touch her lips with his own. Just a light kiss; they were both self-conscious in front of Martin, who was circling nearby, vaguely paying attention. The rasp of his blades was both harsh and sweet, a kind of winter music.

Sophie thought that they could pretend to be in a movie about Flatlanders, a stiff breeze pushing against their blurry layers of wool,
their gloves and hats. Cutting arabesques on the thick opaque surface of the lake.

“Let’s dance,” Henry said, releasing one of her hands and pulling slightly on the other. They were awkward together, and Martin laughed at them; then he skated backward and stopped with a flourish, head thrown back to admire the sky.

“You two can go ahead,” Sophie said to both of them. “I need to practice a little on my own.”

“You sure?” Henry asked, letting go of her, gesturing widely.

Sophie nodded, serious about the wobble of her ankles, preferring to fall without any witnesses. Martin glided off one way and Henry did a quick hopping run-on-ice in the opposite direction. Sophie turned her back to the open space and concentrated on her own balance.
Slow and steady
, she whispered to herself. The wind was picking up.

Martin’s cap had earflaps he could pull low, shutting out voices and muffling even the knife sound of his skates. This was not something his ancestors would be doing. More likely they’d be wearing leather-strapped snowshoes, trekking among the pines. He thought of the hooded eyes of his grandmother and the suggestion of a smile on her otherwise somber visage. No matter the season, his parents stayed distant: Martine’s face had long ago become impossible to conjure and Robert’s was fading year after year. The tribal features he carried forward from Annie and Joseph would be passed on to someone, someday, and he would become an ancestor himself. This was a flickering hope.

Meanwhile, from an increasing distance, he stole glances at pink-cheeked Sophie as she struggled, and at Henry, who was already a dark silhouette against the trees.
We could be anywhere, anytime,
he thought.
We could be anyone
.