Truth in Advertising

IT’S THE MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF THE YEAR


The woman behind the desk at the hotel says with a big grin, “Are you here for Knockwurst Night?”

“I’m not sure how to respond to that, but no, I don’t think I am.”

“Oh, okay, then.” The grin remains intact.

“Just a room, if you have one.”

She chuckles. “Wide open tonight. Take your pick.”

“Something quiet, please.”

“You’re on Cape Cod in the winter. Quiet is guaranteed. Let’s see here. I’ll put you in one of our nicest rooms, how about that?”

There’s a hotel in Venice, Italy, called the Danieli that sits on the Grand Canal. There’s a hotel in Bangkok called the Mandarin Oriental that serves high tea each afternoon. There’s a hotel in Buenos Aires called the Alvear that has a butler on each floor. There’s a hotel in Cape Cod where the room smells of mold and stale cigarette smoke and the TV is locked to the console, which is a pity because I was thinking of stealing it. The bedspread is a polyester paisley that looks like it’s seen better days.

I dial Ian.

He says, “I hate you. What’s the temperature?”

I say, “Eighty-one degrees. Sun’s just set and I’m on my second ice-cold Dos Equis.”

Ian says, “You sound weird. You’re lying. Where are you?”

“Cape Cod.”

“What? Why? What happened?”

“My father’s dying.”

“Jesus. Fin. I’m sorry.” He pauses for a moment. “Wait. I thought your father was dead. You told me he died years ago.”

“I might have said that. He’s not, though. Not yet.”

My room looks out on the parking lot. A car pulls in and I watch as five men dressed as Santa get out of a car. They’re laughing and talking loudly. They seem drunk. I lean my face against the window and exhale from my nose, watch the condensation form on the window, see that my left nostril is the one with the most air. I read once that it switches throughout the day, that it’s never even.

I say, “My brother called. Someone from the hospital called him. No one was going to come down. I just thought . . .” I don’t know what I’d thought.

I say, “You wouldn’t think it was so hard to take a vacation, ya know?”

“How is he?”

“Not good. Heart attack. A thousand years old. Smoker. Drinker. Ate red meat like M&Ms. They say it’s a matter of time.”

“You want me to fly up? I’ll come up in the morning. I’ll bring Scott. We’ll drive to P-Town, have dinner. We’ll make a thing of it. I’m serious.”

I lean back from the window and I can just make out, as if I’m almost not there, my own reflection. I can see that I have a slight smile on my face. Ian’s got ten people coming to his apartment tomorrow and he would cancel it and get on a plane to be here with me. He is more like family to me than my family.

I say, “You’re a selfish prick, ya know that?”

“Seriously.”

“I’m fine. To be honest it’s really not that different from the Yucatán Peninsula. Gorgeous, dark-skinned people, a very relaxed attitude.”

“Call me, okay?”

“I just saw five drunk Santas.”

“Is that a band?”

I’m about to hang up when I say, “I don’t know what I’m even doing here. I mean, I haven’t seen him since I was twelve.”

“You’re doing what you’re supposed to do. He’s your father.”

“In theory.”

Later, I turn on my computer, check e-mail, and for a moment consider working on Snugglies. But suddenly I am a camera on a crane outside this hotel looking through this window at me on my laptop on Christmas Eve. Alone. Time to go to a commercial break.

• • •

Sadly, I never spot the drunk Santas again. I sit at the bar and drink a beer and enjoy a knockwurst (as you do on Christmas Eve) and the musical stylings of Surf ’n’ Sand, a seventy-ish-year-old couple, he on piano, she holding a microphone and making noise into it with her mouth. Some might call it singing.

Surf (Sand?) plays “Moonlight in Vermont.”

I look over to see two women looking back at me. They look over and smile. Nothing good will come of this. And so I decide to say nothing. Which is when I open my mouth. “Hi.”

“Hi,” they say, all smiles.

“Mind if we join you?” one of them asks.

“Please do.”

“You look lonesome over here all by your onesies,” one of them says. I have made a horrible mistake.

“Fin,” I say, extending my hand.

“Hi, Fin. That’s Marta and I’m Janie.”

We shake hands, sit, and smile at one another for what seems like forty-five minutes.

“Are you staying at the hotel, Fin?” It’s Marta.

“I am, Marta. Do I detect a slight accent?”

“You have good ears.”

“Marta, I’m going to guess Holland.”

“Germany.”

“That was my next guess.” I laugh out loud. They laugh with me. Marta points and raises her eyebrows as if to say, “Good one!” I have glasses for distance, though I rarely wear them. Closer, I see that Marta and Janie are fifty if they are a day. Indeed, they may be closer to fifty-five. And yet, in their own way, in their St. John outfits, the hem of Janie’s skirt a bit too high, Marta’s black slacks a size too small, the blouses knowingly too snug, too revealing, they are remarkably well-preserved. Though, at some point, a grown woman should stop calling herself Janie.

“What brings you to Cape Cod on Christmas Eve?” I ask.

“Divorce and rotten kids,” Janie says, smiling. Marta laughs.

“Ha,” I say.

“No, really,” Janie says. “We needed some me time. Some us time. Some time, I guess is what I mean.”

“I think that sounds great,” I say.

“We’re driving to Provincetown tomorrow and staying at an inn.”

That doesn’t sound sad at all.

“You know who he looks like,” Janie says to me, but I have to assume she is talking to Marta. “He’s the spitting image of a young Tommy Lee Jones.”

Marta has the blank look of a woman who grew up watching East German national TV and Franz Beckenbauer and lightly veiled anti-Semitic dramas (“Das Juden Frau”) featuring broad-shouldered, big-toothed, fondue-eating Germans who border on good-looking but are mostly just scary. She clearly has no idea who Tommy Lee Jones is. But she nods slowly. Janie looks at Marta.

“Marta, he’s the one from, ya know, oh, what’s that one where the prison bus falls over and Sela Ward gets her head smashed in?”

“The Fugitive?” I offer.

Janie snaps her fingers and points at me. “That’s the one.”

“Jaaaaaaa,” Marta says, realizing who Tommy Lee Jones is. “But noooo,” she says. “No, I don’t zink zo.”

“Yes, Marta. He’s the spitting image of a young Tommy Lee Jones. Look at his eyes.”

“Doesn’t he have very bad skin?” I ask.

Janie nods. “He does. But you don’t. That’s not what I mean. Facially. Bone structure.”

I take a big gulp of my beer.

“Ya know who I get a lot?” I ask.

“Who?” Janie wonders, leaning forward.

“Gandhi.”

You can almost hear the tumblers falling into place. The slight squint. Click.

“Gandhi,” Marta says, howling with laughter, turning to Janie. “Gandhi. Yeah, yeah. Only he doesn’t look like Gandhi, though.” Making the final ironic link for herself, desperately fighting her German DNA.

“You’re a pistol,” Janie says, laughing. “Marta, he’s a pistol. That’s funny. Gandhi. Very funny. Now which one was he?”

Janie catches me looking at her abundant cleavage and smiles.

“What is your line of work, Tim?” Marta asks.

“It’s Fin, Marta,” Janie says, smiling but annoyed. “Not Tim.”

They’re both drunk. Marta keeps trying to make her eyes wider, as if trying to adjust the focus.

“I’m a freelance U-boat captain,” I say.

Janie says, “That sounds interesting. Do you like it?”

Marta says, “Did he say ‘U-boat’?”

Janie says, “Wait. What do you mean? Like . . . a submarine?”

“That’s exactly right. I pilot German-made submarines on a freelance basis.”

Janie, still smiling, though the smile is changing into a bad-smell confusion.

“I don’t understand.”

A waitress comes over with a basket of buffalo wings, hot sauce, sour cream, and a pornographic knockwurst with a side of hot mustard. Both of them go at it like rabid animals, not taking their eyes from me as they eat, too drunk to know that their hands are covered in sauce.

“I think he’s funning with us, Marta.”

“I am funning with you, Janie. No, I’m a copywriter at an ad agency,” I say.

“Oh my land!” Janie says. “That sounds quite exciting. What does that mean exactly?”

“I write television commercials, Janie. I come up with the ideas for TV commercials.”

“Did you hear that, Marta? He writes television commercials. You know what one I like is that little dog for the taco place. He is so cute. I like the funny ones.”

“I wrote that commercial, Janie,” I lie.

She screams. Screams like she’s won the lottery.

“You are a famous person.”

“In many ways I am. I travel only by private jet, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“I find television commercials confusing,” Marta says to a buffalo wing.

Janie says, scooping a wing and dunking it in sour cream, up to her second knuckle, “I once saw a commercial where they fired a gerbil out of the cannon and I laughed and laughed.”

“And why wouldn’t you?” I say.

Janie’s hand is on my knee. Her eyes are red, exploded blood vessels. Her breath smells of booze and soup.

“What’s your room number?” she says, a grin on her face.

It’s getting late.

• • •

I want to call Phoebe but it’s late. I start to text her but stop. She thinks I’m in Mexico. Why worry her?

I flip through the channels. MTV and VH1 and Portuguese news and all-Arabic dramas and kickboxing and a Latvian documentary about a dairy farmer with one arm and a Hallmark special about a mentally challenged boy lost in the woods who finds the true meaning of friendship with an animal and a program on the History Channel about Nazis that they seem to play a lot and a thing on the Discovery Channel about gigantic equipment and the history of gigantic equipment and old footage of steam shovels and newer footage of trucks the size of ocean liners and there are movies, lots of movies, all of which I’ve seen before but I watch them nonetheless. And there are commercials. Foot odor and erectile dysfunction and toilet paper and tampons and cars, lots of cars, almost all on a road with no other cars, going fast, far too fast it seems, on winding, rain-slicked roads, leaves flying, and there are ones for beer, with a young guy doing something to get a young girl’s attention but embarrassing himself in the process and his friends watching the entire time and laughing in the corner only the girl thinks it’s cute and sits with him anyway and a line at the end, intoned by a cool-dude voice-over who says something like, “Because life’s worth living” or “What it means to be a man” or “Here’s to good times,” jumbles of words that mean nothing, that merely sound like they mean something, words that were thought about by large groups of intelligent people for months at a time. Words that in some cases were written by me or my colleagues, there, on TV. If you only knew what went into it. The hours, the days, the weeks, the meetings, the stress, the deadlines, the money, the approvals, the casting, the flights, the hotels, the flare-ups, the drinking, the casual sex, the hope that it will mean something because at the time it certainly seemed to. It seemed to be important. And then you see it on TV. And it goes by so fast. A shot we spent half a day lighting is on the screen for eighteen frames—less than a second, a second being twenty-four frames, unless it’s video and then it’s thirty frames. The point is . . . what is the point? I look for It’s a Wonderful Life, but can’t find it anywhere.

• • •

I wake early and have no idea where I am. It’s still dark, 7 A.M. I take a long, hot shower, make coffee in my room. It tastes like coffee I made in my room. I have two hours before visiting hours begin and I have to fight the regret of coming here. I turn on my phone and see a text message from Phoebe. Merry Christmas, mister! Wear sunblock!

I walk through town, the deserted Main Street, the quaint shops with quaint names, The Grumpy Oyster, Clam Up, selling bric-a-brac like seashells and other crap you’ll find at a yard sale in a few years. Lots of things with the words CAPE COD written on them. The outline of the Cape itself is permanently ruined for me after Ian once described it as looking like an erect penis with extreme curvature.

I keep walking, hoping to find a coffee shop. Near a rotary, mercifully, I find a Dunkin’ Donuts that’s open. I stop for a coffee and a plain donut. The woman behind the counter has bad skin and speaks with a heavy Brazilian accent. I know one word in Portuguese. Thank you. “Obrigado,” I say. She looks up and smiles. “Merry Christmas,” she says.

The road cuts behind the little airport and comes out onto the other side of the Cape, Route 6A. Here the feeling is of a very different place than the strip malls and fast food dumps of Hyannis. It looks like something out of an Edward Hopper painting. Small, neatly-kept wooden houses from the 1700s, stone walls worn smooth, slate roofs. I turn down a side road. You can smell the ocean, the salt air. There’d been a light wind but now it picks up, colder. The sun is up. The road opens up onto the water. I don’t know the name of it, a harbor of some kind. There’s a sandy spit of land across the water and an old lighthouse. It looks like a painting. It looks so beautiful.

On Sundays, in the winter, my mother and I would sometimes drive, just she and I, to New Hampshire, early, after breakfast, to watch the dog sled races. Bitterly cold. So much snow. A huge field, a blanketed farm, maybe a cornfield. People lined a track and waited for the dogs to come out into the open from the woods. Eight or nine times around the course they’d go. Beautiful Siberian huskies. Thick coats, Fresca-blue-green eyes, mouths open, plumes of steam, the condensation of their labored breath. “Isn’t this something?” she’d say, her eyes wide, a good clean feeling of joy and purpose, of being in the right place at the right time, at being away from a place of menial chores and quotidian tasks, being far from that man who shared her bed, who would never make this trip, who thought it foolish and said so. Of course it was something. It was the best thing. How could anything be better? I was alone with her, standing next to her, in our boots and hats, and later we’d walk to the shack at the edge of the field, near where people parked their cars, and get warm by the wood stove, drink a hot chocolate, eat a plain donut. When the dogs came around, out of the woods, people cheered and clapped, the sound of their hands muffled by gloves.

• • •

I’m surprised to find Margaret on duty. She says her kids are out of the house and that she likes to take a shift for one of the younger married girls. She says she’ll be home by 3:00 P.M., anyway, and that she and her husband have a nice dinner and open presents then.

“Any improvement?” I ask.

“Still the same,” she says. “These things can take time, especially with older folks.”

I sip my coffee. I read the newspaper. I occasionally look up at my father. It’s really no different than waiting for a flight in an airport, if the airport has dying people in it and beeping machines and no planes.

The paper says that inflation is down and unemployment is holding steady.

The paper says that there is good news for life expectancy, up from 77.2 years to 77.4 years (lower for blacks and Hispanics, slightly higher for white women). The story says that last year, 2,417,797 people died in the U.S.

The paper says that yesterday’s Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 10,240.29, up 0.21 percent on a volume of two million shares, and that prices closed higher on the Nikkei in Tokyo. I have no idea what this means. I don’t understand how the stock market works.

The paper says there’s a chance of more snow Sunday night and that western Massachusetts reservoirs are at their highest point in over a decade.

I use the bathroom, wash my hands, scan my face in the mirror. Do I look like him? Hard to tell without a tube in my nose. His skin is ashen, his lips dry and cracked in places. He was a handsome man, with jet-black hair and a ruddy complexion, a man who worked outdoors in all kinds of weather. He took odd jobs, especially painting, between shifts at the police department. Will this be me someday? Will I look like this? Will anyone be in the room?

My cell phone rings. It’s Phoebe.

I say, “Merry Christmas from Meh-he-co.”

Phoebe says, “How’s your father? Ian called me.”

“He’s great. We just played paddle tennis. I kicked his ass.”

“That’s not funny. Okay, it’s a little funny.”

“He’s not good.”

“Where are you now?”

“The hospital. But I might as well be on a park bench for all the good it’s doing.”

“I want you to do me a favor, okay?”

“Phoeb. I’m fine.”

“I want you to do me a favor. There’s a bus from Hyannis to Boston. I want you to get on it and I’ll come pick you up. You can have dinner with my family tonight.”

Phoeb, I can’t. These are the words I want to say. But they don’t quite make it out because the idea of staying in this room another minute, of going back to the hotel for what is sure to be Leftover Knockwurst Night, is too much. And for what? Why am I here? What would happen if he did regain consciousness? What if he wakes up and he’s pissed? What if he says, “Get the f*ck out of my room”? Won’t I feel like an a*shole. Still, I’m going to say no. Because it’s awkward. Because I’d be imposing. Because I don’t know Phoebe’s family.

“That sounds really nice,” I say.

• • •

I do the dishes and talk with Phoebe’s mother, Judy.

Dinner was a rack of lamb and parmesan potatoes and green beans, followed by pumpkin and pecan pies for dessert with ice cream from Brigham’s, a Boston institution. They talked and listened and laughed. No one said a single mean or sarcastic thing.

Phoebe and her father are in the living room. Her brothers and their wives have left. They hugged on their way out. Judy’s putting away the dishes I wash. She says, “But here’s what I don’t understand. I’m going to buy mayonnaise anyway. Why does someone need to go to all that trouble to advertise it? I’ve bought the same brand of mayonnaise for forty years and not once do I remember an ad for it.”

The dishes are old and can’t go in the dishwasher. I take my time with them. The hot water and the soap and the sponge feel good. The window above the sink looks out onto the expansive backyard, mature trees, bare branches. It’s the house Phoebe grew up in, a stately old pale yellow Victorian at the end of a wooded road in Brookline, a leafy town next door to Boston.

“Judy. You’re calling into question my very existence.”

She grins and sips from her wineglass, moves clean cups and saucers back into the cupboards.

We had drinks in the living room. They opened presents. There was one for me, wrapped in today’s newspaper. An old scarf that could not have been uglier. I smiled, they laughed. Her brother said, “Everyone in this family has worn that scarf, Fin. And every one of us has tried to pawn it off on someone else.” I wrapped it around my neck.

Mr. Knowles stood and said, “Fin, I seem to have accidentally spilled my drink down my throat. Getting a refresher. Top you off?”

He’s clean-shaven with a gray crew cut. Phoebe told me that he saved a friend’s life once when skating on a pond. The ice cracked, the friend fell in and disappeared. A deep pond. Mr. Knowles went in after him. This was a few years ago. Tonight he wears a sports coat and a tie.

They are a family of golfers and there was talk of the new greens-keeper at the club. He comes highly recommended—did Winged Foot, did Baltusrol, did Myopia. I have to assume that these are golf courses, though for all I know they could be Broadway shows. I merely nod.

Her brothers asked me questions about making TV commercials. They wanted to know about Gwyneth Paltrow. Phoebe’s father said, “Is she the one who adopts all the African children?” Judy said, “No, Stu, that’s Angelina Jolie.”

I watched her parents watch Phoebe. It is a lie that parents have no favorites among their children.

I’m on the last of the pots now and reach under the sink for a fresh Brillo Pad.

Judy says, “Leave that. Come look at these.”

She sits down at the kitchen table and opens a photo album. She pours out two small glasses of wine.

I do a final wipe-down of the counter and sit down next to her. Judy leafs through the album and turns it toward me.

Pictures of Christmases past. Of birthdays. Of cookouts, vacations, weekends. Smiling people. Happy people. I could use these shots for ads. Baby pictures. Phoebe sitting in Stu’s lap as a five-year-old, in her pajamas, while he reads her a story. Stu and Phoebe on the beach. Phoebe and her brothers on skis.

Judy says, “I love that one. That’s up in Woodstock.”

“New York?” I ask.

“Vermont,” she says. “We have a small place up there. It was Stu’s father’s.”

A picture of Phoebe and Judy at a café in Paris.

A picture of Judy and Phoebe and a swarthy, handsome man at the same café, his arm around Phoebe. I feel a surprise twinge of jealousy.

Judy raises her eyebrows, rolls her eyes, and says, “We won’t talk about that.” She turns the page.

I scan each one, find Phoebe, page after page, watch as she grows up.

Judy turns another page and laughs. It’s a picture of Phoebe with chicken pox, age fourteen. Pale, miserable, little bumps all over her face and neck and arms.

She keeps scanning, turning. She’s smiling.

“This is in Wellfleet,” Judy says. “Last year. Labor Day weekend.”

It’s a picture of Phoebe, close up, three-quarter profile, just her face, lost in thought, late-afternoon light.

I stare, perhaps too long, and then turn to see Judy looking at me.

I say, “Who took this?”

“I did.”

“It’s amazing.”

“She’s an easy subject.”

I nod, look at the picture again.

She removes it from the album and hands it to me.

She says, “Take it. I have copies.”

I take it, say nothing, suddenly embarrassed.

Judy turns the pages and there’s Phoebe in a wedding dress, which can’t be right. But there she is. There’s Phoebe in a wedding dress with bridesmaids, with her parents, with a man in a tuxedo, holding hands, kissing, cutting a large cake. It is strange to watch the feeling that comes over me, to step outside of my body slowly, the moment before impact in a car accident. My hands tingle and perspire, my eyes squint, the information unable to be fully processed. There’s been a mistake.

Judy’s looking at me. She says, “You didn’t know.”

I smile, but it’s forced and weird. I could be wrong but I think Judy senses my discomfort.

She says, “She was young. Right out of college. It was a mistake. Didn’t last long.”

I’m nodding slowly, trying to understand it. That’s wrong. I’m not trying to understand it. I’m trying to understand why I feel the way I do. Mildly nauseated.

“We all have our secrets,” I say, sounding like an idiot.

Judy says, “Phoebe told us about your father, Fin. That must be very hard for you.”

She was married. How strange. How did I not know that about her?

“It is,” I lie. Then I say, “I guess. I don’t really know.”

She looks at me, cocks her head to one side.

I shrug. “I haven’t seen him in twenty-five years. He left a long time ago. And then my mother.” I never say these words out loud. The radio is on somewhere. Classical music very low.

I say, “Yeah. My mother killed herself.”

I never use the word suicide when I think about what happened. It feels distant, academic. There’s always took her own life, but that sounds odd and passive. Took her own life where? Killed herself is much more active. Killed herself is how I think of it, how I imagine it when I do imagine it.

Judy puts a hand to her cheek. She looks pained.

I say, “I’m sorry. That came out very . . . I hope I didn’t upset you.”

“No. I’m just so sorry. How old were you?”

“Twelve.”

“That must have been awful for you. For all of you.”

Phoebe has Judy’s eyes, hazel, dabs of color, wide-set, almond-shaped. The lovely cheeks, high coloring, snow-white hair cut short. Phoebe said her mother cuts her own hair. I’ve always found it rude when people say of a woman of a certain age, “She must have been beautiful when she was younger.” I can see how a man could fall in love with Judy Knowles.

I shrug and nod. “It wasn’t great.”

Images of Eddie’s outbursts, of Kevin’s leaving, of Maura’s desperation to get away and start a new and very different life. You think you can walk away, leave it behind. It is amazing the lies you can tell yourself. I see the green bike again on its side on the grass by the back stairs. No kickstand. You’re not supposed to be home. She drives away.

I want to tell her that for years I’ve told people that my father was dead, told them I was an only child. She watches me.

I say, “Thank you for having me tonight. You have an amazing family.”

“Phoebe talks about you so often. She says she’s learned so much from you.”

“Me? You’ve got the wrong guy.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“Well, I’ll do my best to talk her out of advertising.”

“As long as she’s happy, I don’t mind what she does.”

I hear Phoebe and her father coming toward the kitchen.

Stu says, “I’m heading up.” He shakes my hand. “Fin. So great to meet you. Sleep well.” He kisses Phoebe’s forehead.

Judy kisses Phoebe on the check, then she leans over and hugs me. Chanel No. 5.

• • •

Phoebe and I walk through the backyard, through a wooded area that opens onto the fairway of a golf course and a field of snow. There is a partial moon and the sky is very clear and you can see stars in the black sky. There’s no wind but it is very cold. I’m wearing my new old scarf. Phoebe has on her mother’s Sorels and what looks like one of her brother’s old coats. A wool hat her mother knit from old sweaters. Somehow Phoebe makes it look good. I follow her through the woods, watch the steam rise up over her. Our breathing is heavy, the snow crunching under our feet.

Phoebe says, “We’re going skiing tomorrow.”

I say, “That’s great. That’ll be fun. I’m going to New York to work. Also fun.”

“Do you ski?”

“The name Franz Klammer mean anything to you? Alberto Tomba? I’d embarrass these guys.”

I can tell, even standing behind her, that she’s smiling.

She says, “You could come with for a few days. If you wanted.”

I look up, at her back, waiting for her to turn around. But she doesn’t. She just keeps trudging through the snow.

“Thank you. That’s really nice. Honestly. And I’d love to. Except for this thing.”

She says nothing for a time. Then, “See that tree over there?”

I say, “No.”

She says, “Well, there’s a tree over there and that’s where Matt Simon gave me my first kiss.”

I say, “I made out with him once. Guy’s a pig.”

“Jackass.”

“Tongue?”

“It was so gross. He opened his mouth as wide as he could. Tongue going like he was searching for a filling.”

I’m walking alongside her now.

I say, “Your mother’s mean.”

She smiles. “She likes you.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

I say, “The hug. It was the hug, wasn’t it?”

“She hugs everyone.”

“Then what?”

Phoebe says, “The dishes.”

“What about them?”

“She let you do them. You volunteered for them. She likes that.”

“That’s it? That’s all you have to do? Do the dishes?”

“Not just the dishes. She likes you.”

“I like sleep. I like warmth. Why are we out here again?”

“Stop whining.”

“Where are we going?”

“Just trust me.”

A long, gradual rise. We don’t speak. It’s a struggle in the snow, the cold air in our lungs. Toward the top Phoebe starts to run. She reaches the top ahead of me.

Phoebe says, “What d’ya think?”

There, laid out before us, is Boston, the city lights, the buildings, a plane in the distance on its approach to Logan. We’re standing close. I can feel her against me, hear her labored breathing from the sprint up the hill. I’m looking at her profile when she turns and looks at me, smiling.

Did she stand here with him? Her husband? Did she look at him like this?

Unless you are married, unless you are in a relationship, unless you are at the dentist, it is very rare to see another person’s face close up. Something happens in that small space. Fewer words, perhaps. A more fully realized understanding of the moment, of time, of vulnerability and fragility. Of breathing. You see them differently. When they do speak it’s in a slightly different voice. Quieter. Intimate. There have been a few moments like that—a party, out with friends at night at a crowded bar, once on our way downtown on the subway—when I’ve been this close to Phoebe. And they have unnerved me.

Now, here, in my mind, I wrap my arms around her waist, gently pull her toward me, feel her body through the layers. She puts her arms around my shoulders, her face so close to mine. I can smell the Carmex she put on her lips before we left the house. What a thing, what an impossible gift. She leans into me before I have the chance and kisses me on the mouth, gently at first, then more intensely, more forcefully.

“Phoeb,” I whisper.

“Hi.”

Except that’s not what happens. Only in my mind. I want to reach for her hand. I can’t seem to do it. My mind races forward to what if. What if she rejects me? What if it doesn’t work? What if the sun comes up and I want to run?

I’m looking at her and she’s looking at the skyline.

Phoebe says, “One beautiful thing.”

I say, “World peace.”

She says, “You’re a moron. C’mon. One beautiful thing.”

I say, “Your family.”

She turns and looks at me. “That’s a nice thing to say.”

“What about you?” I ask.

She looks out over Boston. “That you came up.”

It’s very cold. We stand there for a long time.