“Tell me about it.”
“I told you already that the time of that phone call was just after I’d moved into an apartment. A month and a half. And when I saw Claire, I’d been in it maybe a week. It was early December, out in the street in the city, and it was late afternoon, but seemed closer to nightfall because of the shorter days. There were a lot of people out on the sidewalks, but it was colder than hell, and they were walking fast to get to their bus stops or into the stores. The light posts were already wound with those tiny white lights, and the display windows framed with ribbon. I don’t know how it is for you to feel heartbroken, but for me, it—” He stopped for a half minute, and Josephine didn’t speak. “For me, it made the world more alive. Closer. Raw. I remember feeling this cynicism. At the orgy of buying going on in those streets. And the next second, I remember almost weeping at one of the shop displays where a gold ribbon was strung above a child mannequin’s head like it was a halo. I thought it was so beautiful. Before I saw Claire, I was standing near a bell ringer. Someone working for the Salvation Army, an old woman. She did not seem right all the way, you know? There was something fixed in the smile on her face, and her eyes seemed vacant. She was probably half-frozen. But a few people were dropping in coins. And I remember standing there, imagining how cold those coins must feel in people’s hands, and how much colder they were sitting in that kettle, and I was fingering a dime and a quarter in my own pocket, and not feeling particularly charitable, and then suddenly wanting to empty my wallet for the strange woman. The coins in my hand were cold, too, and I said to myself, ‘Well, I think I’ll give my coldness away,’ and I remember thinking—like it was an epiphany, and it wasn’t—that the source of all charity was not a human warmth but instead a need to distance yourself from the cold, and then my eyes glazed with it, and despite myself, I saw a beautiful woman coming around the corner across the street.”
He could feel himself sweating, and he could hear himself breathing in the odor of it. Each time Josephine came to see him, he was increasingly aware of the smell of his body, which had grown worse even though he washed up in the mornings with the basin half-full of stale water.
“I wonder if you’d wipe my face,” he said to her.
He heard her stand up. He thought he heard her lift a corner of her garment, and she started with his forehead, and, with a light touch, worked around the circumference of his face, then under his eyes, and down his neck before she sat back down.
“Thank you.”
When she turned back to her chair, her clothing moved the air over his skin.
“So, like I said, my vision was blurred. But, like everything else that afternoon, her beauty seemed vivid. Striking. I wanted it closer, and ran my coat sleeve over my eyes, and saw that it was Claire. And I thought I was losing it, then. For a few seconds, I thought I was falling apart, hallucinating, and I was terrified. But it was her. And she was beautiful, but not in the way I’d first seen. She was walking with her arms wrapped around herself against the cold, no gloves, in a navy-blue coat. She had a wool cap over her head, but I could see her red hair falling to her shoulders. Her eyes were focused on a spot on the sidewalk always a few feet ahead of where she was stepping. I guess I was transfixed. Her expression from that distance—I thought it was troubled, but why wouldn’t I? She looked pale, but she was always pale. And then a man walked into that space in front of her, and she glanced up at him, and she smiled with—well, people call it a radiance, but it was actually that way—and then I saw her mouth the words Excuse me, and she reached up and tapped the man’s shoulder as she passed. And it was only then, after she touched him, that I thought to say her name. My jaw was tight with the cold, and I probably said it barely audibly at first. By the time I said it with a shout, she was already heading around another corner.
“But she heard, and she slowed and looked back. I couldn’t tell you if she saw me. From that distance, you can’t tell when someone’s eyes meet yours. But she kept on going. There was a lot of traffic on the street. By the time I’d crossed over, she was gone.”
He heard Josephine stand up again, and again she wiped his forehead, and ran the garment in precisely the same motions she’d used earlier, as if it were a ritual she’d been observing for months.
“Thank you,” he said again. But he was feeling the knife edge in his gut. She was sitting in silence in front of him. He was under the blindfold. Claire was turning the corner. She was turning the corner. He called her name again. She looked back. She was turning the corner.
“I want to see your face,” he said quietly.
She sighed, but it sounded more like she was blowing a candle flame to make it flicker.
“Marc, you know that will never—”