I'd Give Anything(2)

“It’ll be magnificent, dumbasses,” I told them. I love the word “magnificent.”

I walked to the edge, to the same spot we’d all jumped from—even, once and only once, CJ, under duress and holding his nose, his eyes squeezed shut—in the daylight. I closed my eyes for a few seconds and held out my arms, the cool air making all the hair on them rise. Standing there, I could feel not only the air, but also the stars in the sky, the entire Milky Way swirling on my skin and blazing down my spine and fizzing like champagne through my veins.

I tossed back my head and sang, “O, holy night, the stars were brightly shining,” even though I can’t really sing and it was nowhere near Christmas.

The bugs went still. They actually did.

And then I heard Trevor say, “Wait, Zin,” and there he was, my brother, grinning like a devil in his boxers and his T-shirt, in his splendor and magnificence. And we locked our hands together, Trev and I, and we jumped.





Chapter Two





Ginny


Here’s what I learned on that Thursday afternoon in the produce section of Devonshire Market: sometimes, your hands can be wiser than you are; sometimes, they can sit there on the ends of your arms just like always, and comprehend truths that your mind hasn’t yet comprehended. Truths like: Ginny Beale, life as you know it just ended.

I don’t recommend it: having life as you know it end in Devonshire Market. Particularly not in Devonshire Market on a busy autumn afternoon when you’re wearing a brand-new cream-colored Patagonia fleece and holding two tomatoes, one in each hand. The tomatoes were heirlooms, the left one a piebald purple and jade, the right one striped like a palm-size watermelon, both prizefighter-battered and lumpily picturesque in a way that screamed eight dollars a pound. And if life as you know it must end like this—Devonshire Market, fleece, heirlooms—be sure you’re not engaged in conversation (the conversation, the one that ends life as you know it) with a man dangling an actual woven, double-handled marketing basket from the crook of his arm like Little Red Riding Hood.

That’s what everyone called it (and by “everyone” I mean, of course, we who possessed the willingness to buy tomatoes priced at eight dollars a pound): Devonshire Market, no the, and if that sounds vaguely British to you (“at university,” “in hospital”), I’m pretty sure it was meant to. The market was not located in a town named Devonshire; there was no town named that within a thousand-mile radius, possibly within ten thousand, possibly within the entire New World. Instead, the market was, as Jeb, the son of the owner once told me, named after clotted cream, the kind that comes in a jar.

The man was Dirk Holofcener-Sharf, the husband of my husband Harris’s coworker and my sort-of friend Elise Holofcener-Sharf. Dirk had a long, melancholy face like an old-time crooner, wore white bucks without socks, and was either brilliant or a social maladroit, depending on who you asked, reputations that seemed to derive mainly from the socklessness, but also from the fact that Dirk wrote film reviews for the local paper and displayed a marked unwillingness—or an inability, depending on who you asked—to make small talk.

To me, Dirk just seemed shy. On the rare occasions when I’d seen him at cocktail or dinner parties, he was always aslant, propped up against something—a wall, a tree, a piece of furniture—his face telegraphing a naked, if unlikely, combination of boredom and trepidation, a “how did I get here and when can I leave?” look. Unlikely to some people, I guess I mean, but not to me. I recognized that expression, having scrupulously kept it off my own face on similar occasions for most of two decades. Every time I saw Dirk like that, I would wish he and I could give each other a sign, a secret code word deposited directly into each other’s mind, maybe, a glimpse of matching cryptic tattoos, or our two hands lifted, colored light beams visible only to us shooting from our palms to meet across the party, anything to say, “We come from the same planet, and one day, we will go back.”

So when I saw him, just feet away from me in the produce section, I felt a rush of kindred-spirit spirit, and I paused for a few seconds to observe. Dirk held his phone to his ear with one hand and appraised tomatillos with the other, lifting each one, first to his nose, then to eye level, rotating it gently, fingering the papery husk, placing it either back onto the pile or into his basket. Once, twice, again. It was a ceremony, a dance. Then, as I watched, the dance halted. Dirk’s hand froze, arrested mid-pirouette, his mouth forming words I couldn’t hear. Slowly, Dirk took his phone from his ear, gazed at it mournfully, shook his head, slipped the phone into his jacket pocket, looked up, and saw me.

And in one white-hot instant, the world went raw and primitive. Dirk changed from a sad-eyed man with a marketing basket to a frightened animal. Flared nostrils; wide, panic-twitchy eyes; stark neck cords; lips pulling back from his teeth. If a creature standing on two legs to begin with could be said to rear, Dirk reared. Dirk was the horse, and I was the rattlesnake, right there in Devonshire Market. And, yes, I am exaggerating, but not nearly as much as you might think.

I said, “Dirk, are you all right?”

If he had turned around and run out the door with his basket full of tomatillos and who knew what other unpaid-for items, it would have surprised me less than what he did do, which was to take two halting steps toward me and blurt out, “I’m so sorry about Harris.”