About Grace. Anthony Doerr
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Название: About Grace
Автор: Anthony Doerr
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Классическая проза
isbn: 9780007405114
isbn:
He found her in June, at the same market. This time she wore a plaid skirt and tall boots. She stepped briskly through the aisles, looking different, more determined. A shaft of anxiety whirled in his chest. She bought a small bottle of grape juice and an apple, counting exact change out of a tiny purse with brass clasps. She was in and out in under two minutes.
He followed.
She walked quickly, making long strides, her gaze on the sidewalk ahead of her. Winkler had to half jog to keep up. The day was warm and damp and her hair, tied at the back of her neck, seemed to float along behind her head. At D Street she waited to cross and Winkler came up behind her, suddenly too close—if he leaned forward six inches, the top of her head would have been in his face. He stared at her calves disappearing into her boots and inhaled. What did she smell like? Clipped grass? The sleeve of a wool sweater? The mouth of the little brown bag that held her apple and juice crinkled in her fist.
The light changed. She started off the curb. He followed her six blocks up Fifth Avenue, where she turned right and went into a branch of First Federal Savings and Loan. He paused outside, trying to calm his heart. A pair of gulls sailed past, calling to each other. Through the stenciling on the window, past a pair of desks (with bankers at them, penciling things onto big desk calendars), he watched her pull open a walnut half-door and slip behind the teller counter. There were customers waiting. She set down her little bag, slid aside a sign, and waved the first one forward.
He hardly slept. A full moon, high over the city, dragged the tide up Knik Arm, then let it out again. He read from Watson, from Pauling, the familiar words disassembling in front of his eyes. He stood by the window with a legal pad and wrote: Inside me a trillion cells are humming, proteins stalking the strands of my DNA, winding and unwinding, making and remaking…
He crossed it out. He wrote: Do we choose who we love?
If only his first dream had carried him past what he already knew, past the magazine falling to the floor. He shut his eyes and tried to summon an image of her, tried to keep her there as he drifted toward sleep.
By nine A.M. he was on the same sidewalk watching her through the same window. In his knapsack he had what remained of the second box of Apple Jacks and the Good Housekeeping. She was standing at her teller’s station, looking down. He wiped his palms on his trousers and went in.
There was no one in the queue, but her station had a sign up: PLEASE SEE THE NEXT TELLER. She was counting ten-dollar bills with the thin, pink hands he already thought of as familiar. A nameplate resting on the marble counter read, SANDY SHEELER.
“Excuse me.”
She held up a finger and continued counting without looking up.
“I can help you down here,” another teller offered.
“It’s okay,” Sandy said. She reached the end of her stack, made a notation on the corner of an envelope, and looked up. “Hello.”
The lenses of her glasses reflected a light in the ceiling for a second and flooded the lenses of his own glasses with light. Panic started in his throat. She was a stranger, entirely unfamiliar; who was he to have guessed at her dissatisfactions, to have incorporated her into his dreams? He stammered: “I met you in the supermarket? A few months ago? We didn’t actually meet, but…”
Her gaze swam. He reached into his knapsack and withdrew the cereal and the magazine. A teller to Sandy’s right glanced over the partition.
“I thought maybe,” he said, “you wanted these? You left so quickly.”
“Oh.” She did not touch the cereal or the Good Housekeeping but did not take her eyes from them. He could not tell but thought she leaned forward a fraction. He lifted the box of cereal and shook it. “I ate some.”
She gave him a confused smile. “Keep it.”
Her eyes tracked from the magazine to him and back. A critical moment was passing now, he knew it: he could feel the floor falling away beneath his feet. “Would you ever want to go to a movie? Anything like that?”
Now her gaze veered past Winkler and over his shoulder, out into the bank. She shook her head. Winkler felt a small weight drop into his stomach. Already he began to back away. “Oh. I see. Well. I’m sorry.”
She took the box of Apple Jacks and shook it and set it on the shelf beneath the counter. She whispered, “My husband,” and looked at Winkler for the first time, really looked at him, and Winkler felt her gaze go all the way through the back of his head.
He heard himself say: “You don’t wear a ring.”
“No.” She touched her ring finger. Her nails were clipped short. “It’s getting repaired.”
He sensed he was out of time; the whole scene was slipping away, liquefying and sliding toward a drain. “Of course,” he mumbled. “I work at the Weather Service. I’m David. You could reach me there. In case you decide differently.” And then he was turning, his empty knapsack bunched in his fist, the bright glass of the bank’s facade reeling in front of him.
Two months: rain on the windows, a pile of unopened meteorology texts on the table in his apartment that struck him for the first time in his life as trivial. He cooked noodles, wore one of the same two brown corduroy suits, checked the barometer three times a day and charted his readings halfheartedly on graph paper smuggled home from work.
Mostly he remembered her ankles, and the particles of dust drifting between them, illuminated in a slash of sunlight. The three freckles on her cheek formed an isosceles triangle. He had been so certain; he had dreamed her. But who knew where assurance and belief came from? Somewhere across town she was standing at a sink or walking into a closet, his name stowed somewhere in the pleated neurons of her brain, echoing up one dendrite in a billion: David, David.
The days slid by, one after another: warm, cold, rainy, sunny. He felt, all the time, as if he had lost something vital: his wallet, his keys, a fundamental memory he couldn’t quite summon. The horizon looked the same as ever: the same grimy oil trucks groaned through the streets; the tide exposed the same mudflats twice a day. In the endless gray Weather Service teletypes, he saw the same thing every time: desire.
Hadn’t there been a longing in her face, locked behind that bank-teller smile—a yearning in her, visible just for a second, as she dragged her eyes up? Hadn’t she seemed about to cry at the supermarket?
The Good Housekeeping lay open on his kitchen counter, bulging with riddles: Do you know the secret of looking younger? How much style for your money do cotton separates offer? How many blonde colors found in nature are in Naturally Blonde Hair Treatment?
He walked the streets; he watched the sky.
She called in September. A secretary patched her through. “He has a hockey game,” Sandy said, nearly whispering. “There’s a matinee at four-fifteen.”
Winkler swallowed. “Okay. Yes. Four-fifteen.”
She appeared in the lobby at four-thirty and hurried past him to the concessions counter where she bought a box of chocolate-covered СКАЧАТЬ