The Disappearance of Grace (6 page)

There is only the white noise. Until it's broken by a faint voice.

“I.See.” says the voice. It sounds like a man. Perhaps an old man who is talking to me over the phone from a great distance away. But this is the age of satellites. He can be located on the other side of the world and it's possible for him to sound like he's standing in the room next door.

“What do you see?” I pose.

More white noise.

“I. See.” he repeats.

“Who is this? What is your name? Please tell me your name.” I'm lobbing the queries but they don't seem to be registering in the least.

Once more the receiver fills with white noise, and once more come the words softly spoken: “I. See.”

And then the line goes dead.

* * *

“Hello,” I bark into the phone. “Hello. Hello. Hello…”

But it's no use. The man on the phone is gone. Disconnected.

Grace comes back in.

“May I?” she begs.

It startles me when she pulls the cordless phone from out of my hand and punches a couple of numbers into the handset. In my head I see her face. Her cheeks will be tight as a tick, her lips pressed together, her green eyes bright and wide. It's the face she wears when she's angry or upset.

“What's happening?” I say, standing inches from her in the corner of the room by the apartment's open door.

“Star sixty-nine.”

“You sure that works in Europe? In Italy?”

“We'll soon find out.”

I wait along with Grace. Even though the phone is not pressed against my ear I am still able to make out the faint, tinny sound of the computer-generated operator speaking in rapid-fire Italian. I can't make out a word she's saying, but I sense that Grace is trying her best to make sense of it all.

“Well?” I pose.

“Greek to me,” she jokes. But I know it's not funny. Then she adds, “Something about the number I just dialed is not correct or can't be connected.”

“More than likely the man is calling from a cell phone, his number blocked.”

Graces reaches beyond me with the phone, her arm brushing up against my shoulder, hangs it up in its cradle.

The room fills with a hard, icy silence. After a beat, Grace breaks it.

“Does anyone know we're here, Nick?” she asks.

I shake my head.

“Far as I know,” I answer, “only Uncle Sam.”

“Do they often rent this apartment out to other wounded soldiers?”

Wounded soldier.
I've never thought of myself as a wounded soldier. A casualty of war. But I guess that's precisely what I am. A casualty.

“I have no way of knowing.” I go for the phone. “But I can make a call or two—”

Grace grabs hold of my arm just before I'm able to grab hold of the phone.

“Let's just go,” she insists. “I'm sure there's a logical explanation for whoever's called and lets us know that he can
see
something…whatever that's supposed to mean.”

“I still say it's some kind of bad joke,” I add, lowering my right hand.

“Or bad timing,” Grace says. She heads for the open door. “You coming, Nick?”

“Yes,” I say, trying to picture in my head an old man standing somewhere in the world speaking the words, “I. See.” into a cell phone. I picture a bald, craggy-faced old man. Perhaps the man who used to own the rare bookshop.

“Close the door behind you,” Grace insists as she begins to descend the steps down to the first floor.

I do it. I close the door behind me, reach out for the railing, and begin to make my way down the staircase.

“Be careful,” Grace reminds me after a beat.

“I will,” I say, carefully feeling my way down each step with the bottom of my feet. “I survived Afghanistan. I'm not about to die in Venice.”

Chapter 12

I CAME TO VENICE to live again.

I came to Venice to heal.

I came to Venice to regain my eyesight.

I came to Venice to learn to love Grace all over again and to forget about the mistakes of the past.

I came to Venice to forget about a village I bombed.

I'm not sure I've succeeded at anything yet. I'm not sure I will succeed. I'm not sure of anything other than the next footstep I will take and the one after that and the one after that. Other than an old man who keeps calling and telling me that he sees something at a time when I most definitely do not see a thing.

Or do I?

Walking arm in arm with Grace through the narrow alleys and cobbled corridors, I once more see the moment when we first met. It was still long before my second war and I was working on building my writing career. I'd published a couple of novels, one of which became a bestseller. That one book resulted in a few invitations to speak at some writing and book conferences all across the states. When you spend as much time as I once did all alone inside an eight-by-ten room writing for a living, you learn to take advantage of these conference invitations, no matter how humble the event.

At one such conference in New York City, I find myself giving a lecture on “the writing life” to a group of young, would-be authors. It's my job to tell them what it's really like to write books for a living. The large room is filled mostly with young people learning how to write. Young people buried in jobs they can't stand, student loans they can't pay off, and a quickly developed conviction that the nine-to-five life of sleep/video games/bed is the sure path to suicide. They're also convinced the one unfinished opus they have going on their laptop is the next great American novel. I know the feeling. I was there once myself. Two books ago. Two wars ago. One ex-wife, two grown sons, and many, many failures ago.

The room is about two-thirds empty and that's okay. I'm not an entirely anonymous author, but then I'm no Stephen King either. I'm just me, Nick Angel from upstate New York, son of a construction business tycoon, former full-time soldier turned National Guardsman, turned newspaper reporter, turned writer. Obsessive writer. The mirror image of a salt-and-peppered, forty-something man who wears his loneliness and losses on a thin chain wrapped around his neck along with his dog-tags, gym pass, and the old rusted key to his bicycle lock.

I talk about the writer's life to these hungry, open-mouthed birds.

My. Writer's. Life.

A couple of rows in sits one of these young writers. A woman. Long, lush, dark hair that drapes her shoulders, green eyes, and heart-shaped lips that make her dimpled cheeks glow like electric bulbs when she smiles. Her eyes dig into me as I speak and soon, I find myself focusing in on her as if I travelled by train the one hundred forty miles from Troy to Manhattan to speak with her and her alone. And maybe I have.

When the lecture is over, a half dozen people line up to pick my brain, as if I haven't told them enough lies. I find myself searching for her almost frantically. She's there, waiting behind everyone. Waiting patiently. Waiting to be the last person who gets my attention. I sense that she knows what she's doing, and I couldn't be happier for it.

When finally we're alone, she offers me a smile that does something to my heart. Makes it beat and heat up and swell all at the same time, like a tire tube that's been overfilled with air. Her nearly pale complexion goes flush, as if something is happening inside her too. And something else. I know I've never met this woman before, but somehow I feel like I've known her my whole life.

She begins to ask me something about writing. Something that completely goes in one ear and immediately out the other and I am only seeing her beautiful mouth move with her words, and already I imagine myself kissing the mouth and swimming in those green pools.

I'm expected to head up a panel in a few minutes, but I take a shot and ask her if she'd like to grab a coffee at one of the coffee shops situated outside this tuna can of a chain hotel conference center. She nods thoughtfully, her face filling with more blood. Pushing the strap of her bag up onto her shoulder, I can't help but capture a quick hint of her black lace bra through her low cut shirt. I lower my gaze and watch her nervously cross one booted foot over the other. When I raise my head back up, her eyes are locked onto mine. Her infectious smile tells me she would love to join me for coffee.

I want to ask her to marry me then and there. But I figure it's probably better that I wait a while on that. Together, we escape the conference, like our lives depend upon it.

* * *

Her name is Grace.

And here is Grace's life according to her own invention: She is not only a painter, but a poet, and shaman of sorts who believes far more in the power of astrology than in a mysterious white-bearded, white-robed, omnipotent God. She doesn't drink coffee but loves tea, and unlike me, isn't much of a drinker when it comes to the hard stuff. But she does like to smoke herb on occasion and together we make a joke about how pot will make me so paranoid I would have to insist that she stop looking at me, especially with those giant green eyes.

There's something else too.

Grace is married.

My heart sinks when she tells me this.

“You're all married,” I say from across the table outside the coffee shop. “All the good ones.”

Eyes wide, she shakes her head like she doesn't understand.

“I'm sorry,” I say, staring down into my cappuccino, searching the white froth for divine inspiration. “I shouldn't have said that.”

“You're
not
married?” she poses, that red flush returning to her cheeks.

“Divorced,” I nod, holding up my left hand and one lonely ring finger. Then, “I have a son who's not too much younger than you.”

“I'm thirty three,” she admits beaming the same smile.

“And all's fair,” I tell her. “Even if I'm old.”

“Yes, you are an old man. All of what? Forty. Forty one?”

“Forty something,” I correct her. I don't tell her my oldest son was born when I was only nineteen. I also don't bother telling her I haven't spoken with him since I left for Afghanistan more than a year and a half ago.

She nurses her tea and I sip my cappuccino and eventually she gets around to asking me if I wouldn't mind taking a look at some of the pages she's written for what she hopes will become her first novel. She has them in her bag. It would only take a moment. She would understand if I'm too busy with the conference, or if I'm too busy in general. She doesn't want
not
to be polite.

I stop her. Mid-Sentence.

“I'd love to,” I say, finishing my coffee. “Maybe we can find some quiet space in my hotel. And something a little harder to drink.”

New York is teeming with cars speeding past on Park Avenue, hordes of suited workers and poorly dressed tourists crowding the sidewalks and the din of thousands of conversations going on all at once.

But somehow the whole world stands still.

Grace gets up, looks one way and then the other, and with her eyes peering not at me, but up past the glass and steel towers at the blue heavens, she says, “Okay. Yes. Why the hell not?”

* * *

We're not three feet inside the hotel room before our mouths are locked and I'm undressing her and she's undressing me. We leave a trail of jeans, underwear, coats and sweaters that leads to the queen-sized bed. It's all very awkward and first-timey and at one point, we both start laughing out loud and I am able to feel more at one with her as I enter inside her, our hips pressed together, her wet heat surrounding my hardness tightly, drawing me further and further in until we both come to that place at the same time.

Afterwards, she lies with her head on my chest and I'm running the fingers on my right hand through her lush hair. I ask her to tell me about her husband. What's his name, for starters.

“Andrew,” she whispers after a weighted pause in which her entire body goes perfectly still. “And I love him. Love him very much.”

This proves it, I want to tell her. But I don't, because this…what we've just done…doesn't prove anything. Only that it's very possible she could also fall in love with me.

She begins to tell me a little about him. Snippets really. Little facts about the life. His life. That he's a full professor at the university. That he's a musician. That he's one of the most loving and open men she's ever known. Then without trying, she reveals something that might explain this. Explain us in bed, that is. Here and now.

“We've been together for sixteen years,” she exhales.

I allow the fact to sink in.

“Almost a full half of your life,” I say, my fingers dancing in her thick brunette hair.

“I never looked at it that way. But yes, half my life.”

I feel the heavy profoundness that can only come from our mutually staring out into the same space at the same time inside a cheesy New York Marriott hotel room. But then I also feel her fingers running down my chest and down my belly. When they find me she begins to work on me again. She uses her mouth and when I come she does not remove it. I return the favor by going down on her and afterwards we get out of bed to take a shower together. I slip on the porcelain and she reaches out and catches me before I fall, but not before I tear the plastic curtain off the ringlets. We laugh so hard I find it impossible to comprehend that we've only just met and that she's married to a professor named Andrew, whom she still loves.