Page 78 of Graceless

"Not — nothing's wrong. I'm fine. I mean the whole thing. The general fact." I kept my eyes on the harbor, because it was easier than his face. "I've been counting since Sunday — don't tell me not to. Gina's twelve. Nina and I were twelve. It goes fast, is my point. And you⁠—"

I made myself turn and look up at him.

"You made a bed this morning and looked at it like it was a miracle. And you've had forever, and I'm going to get, what. Fifty more, if the Gowanus behaves? Sixty?" My voice did something and I let it. "And then you're going to be up on some roof again. Watching somebody else's window with nobody in it. And I can't — I've been carrying that around all week."

For a long time he didn't say anything. The trains went by below, bright and gone.

"Sar said it to me first," he said, finally. "On the boat. I did not tell you that part."

"He — Sar talked about me dying? Nice. Great pastry investment."

"He told me what it costs. To love one of you all the way to the end." His voice was level and there was nothing level under it. "He watched brothers do it. He built his whole existence around never owing it himself. And standing in his galley, which is the emptiest immaculate place I have ever stood, he told me that the ones who paid it — every one of them — would not have traded a single day back. And that he saved nothing." He turned to face me, all the way. "I have had a week to weigh his testimony, Caterina. Here is where I came out."

He took my face in both hands. On a dark roof, with all of Brooklyn burning below us and the wind going around us like we were a rock in a river — and this close, unbanked, the pull of him came off his skin like heat off August asphalt. It is not charm. It is not anything he does. It is what he is, the thing that made people fall down at annunciations, and it rolled over me whole, and I understood that every painting ever made of his kind was somebody's failed attempt to explain this exact gravity — and I leaned into it with my eyes open, because that is the only way I do anything now.

"And it's worse than dying," I said, because apparently my fear had one more thing it wanted to say, even with his hands on my face. "I'm going to get old first. Feeble. Wrinkled. Nonna-old — folded-over, forgetting-the-word-for-colander old. And you're going to look exactly like this the whole time, forever, and you can't want⁠—"

"Stop."

Not loud. Total. My mouth closed on the rest of it.

"You have seen what I am," he said. "Believe me about what I want. Old is not less of you, Caterina. It is more of you — more years of you, written down where I can read them. You think time is going to save you from being wanted?" His thumbs moved, once, along my cheekbones. "Nothing is going to save you from being wanted.

"You are going to die. And before that, you are going to live — and I am going to be in it, all of it, every ordinary hour, every Sunday, every terrible cup of coffee, all the way to the end and past it. And when it is over, I will not stand on a roof and regret you. I will stand wherever I stand and be the thing you made — a creature who was in the world once, because a woman on Fifth Avenue was worth coming down for."

His thumbs moved once, along my cheekbones, and the blue was burning steady.

"I have spent the whole exile not looking at anything I could lose. It was not a life, Caterina. You are the life. I would rather have your fifty years than all the rest of forever without them."

"Sixty," I said, into whatever was left of my voice. "I said sixty if the Gowanus behaves."

"Sixty," he agreed, grave as a treaty.

And I went up on my toes and kissed him with the whole borough underneath us.

Raq

The cold never reached her.

I kept it off her — the wind, the tar-chill, the height — the whole time she stood at the parapet learning my sky, and she did not notice I was doing it, and that is the correct way for that work to be done.

And when I folded her hands in mine on the parapet, it came again. Hands, small, in water. The fragment, on its own schedule, grief with no address on it.

Except the hands were older this time.

Or they had always been older, and I had never once looked at the age of them. Or they were a different pair of hands entirely — hers, sixty years from now, in some water I have not yet stood beside. I do not know. That is what I carried down off the roof: I no longer know whether the grief in me is a memory or an appointment.

But I noticed what she gave me, and I will say it plainly: she stood on my post, in my watching, in the exact place my exile has been stationed for the length of her whole civilization — and she made it a place two people had been. There is no roof in this borough I have not stood on. As of tonight there is one I stood on with her. The difference is total.

And when she said the thing — I'm going to die — flat, brave, her chin up and her voice failing, naming the dangerous answer like I taught her, my whole existence came to a point, and I found that Sar's testimony had already finished its work in me somewhere over the week without my supervision, because there was no decision left to make. There was only the telling of it.

She kissed me with the borough underneath us, and her heart was going hard, and what came off her skin was not grief.

I took us home the fast way. She laughed the whole three blocks — that unguarded sound, the one that redraws my maps — and the laugh was still on her mouth when the door closed, and then it changed into something else, and neither of us reached for the lamp, and neither of us turned it off either.

Afterward she slept against my chest with one fist in the quilt, and the kitchen light we had left burning laid its small yellow line under the bedroom curtain, and I lay in the dark of a house I live in and held a mortal woman and weighed the price Sar told me no one regrets.

Fifty years. Sixty, if the Gowanus behaves.