In Sunlight and in Shadow by Mark Helprin

may have decided to reject him, as long as he was in her presence she could not. Why she was torn so early on he could and did not imagine, but, like her, he brightened at the instant they met. “Hello,” he said. Even in heels, she was somewhat shorter than he, and she looked up at him, thus softening her posture and her stance, so that she seemed very young. He had thought that she was in her late twenties and still youthful in many respects, but she was very womanly and had not struck him as girlish until this moment.
    She was about to speak, but then, late like Harry, the church bells in Clinton rang out from the west and the full lighting of the marquee went on, with the sound of the relays—metal thrown against metal—in counterpoint to the bells, the electric currents fusing with a knock. It seemed strange, because the sun was fairly high in the sky. Her greeting displaced by sound and light, she stared at him and asked, “What happened to your eye?”
    A long cut traversed almost the entire length of his left eyelid. It had begun to heal, but, unlike most wounds of that size, it was still red. “From a machine,” he said.
    “What kind of machine?”
    “A leather punch, a kind of stamping machine.”
    “Did you put your head in it?”
    “I was changing the belt. It snapped and whipped across my eye. Another eighth of an inch and we could go to a pirate restaurant.”
    “When did this happen?”
    “Friday after we met. I wasn’t paying attention.”
    “I see.”
    He wanted to kiss her right there as she stood in the middle of the sidewalk. He wanted to draw her to him, to feel her body through the silk, and he thought that she would have let him, and that she would have kissed him back with the same urgency and heat, but he dared not, and instead just let it wash over him. An inimitable pressure would build up until the slightest touch, or even its imagination, would echo throughout his body and hers, blinding them to the practical.
    Though they hardly knew it, they were already walking east. “I’m used to it,” he said, coming back to the cut over his eye.
    “How so?” She had no idea where they were going, and neither did he.
    “In the war.”
    “Did you work in a factory?”
    “A factory in its way, the Eighty-second Airborne, though I was often detached and sent to other formations. The cuts, abrasions, minor contusions . . . were continuous.”
    “From what?”
    “Branches snapping back, not only when you parachute into trees or brush, but in moving across country. Under fire, you move when and where you have to. You don’t notice things like brambles. And if there’s gunfire directed at you, you throw yourself into all kinds of places without knowing where you’re going to land. But that’s not the half of it. Breaking windows, making cover, loading and unjamming weapons, attaching winches and trailers, fixing recalcitrant jeeps, pulling them out of the mud.” He stopped and turned to her. “Shaving with a safety-razor blade held between the fingers. When bullets hit walls, rock, or stony ground, lots of little particles zing around. Mainly they sting, but sometimes they draw blood. Oh, and then there are animal bites, sheet metal cuts, trying to move around in the dark in places you’ve never been.”
    “What about bullets?” she asked.
    “Well,” he said, bashfully, it seemed to her, “those, too.”
    “Where are we going?” she asked, as if disenchanted with his catalog of minor wounds. He felt that his list had put her off, that he had sounded boorish and boastful, and, worse, that he was talking at her, which hurt him more than the little wounds.
    “I know a lot of restaurants that were good, anyway, before the war, but they’re closed on Monday. The French ones, that is.”
    “It doesn’t have to be French,” she told him. “It doesn’t have to be fancy. I really can’t afford that.”
    “I’ll pay,” he said. Of course he would pay. The man always