The Constant Heart by Craig Nova Page B

moment I lived for, when the sky came alive. What is more reassuring on a winter night than when Orion glows? Cygnus, the clouds of luminous gas in the Crab Nebula. Shock waves from the
supernovas. Delphinus. Canis Major. Ursa Major. You can’t see it with the naked eye, but it changes the sky if you know it’s there. Like knowing a woman has a tattoo beneath her underwear.

S ARA DIDN’T GO looking for trouble. After all, who does? Aside from those whackjobs you see from time to time and who, to be honest, I see at the university more than I used to. But that wasn’t Sara’s style. And the university had nothing to do with it. She took the first step, the real step, after some false starts, in selling cars. Subarus. She said it seemed like a good idea at the time to sell cars, and I guess it was. But she went over the cliff not simply because of greed. What’s greed? Just money. She had an idea, she said, to track me down, wherever I was (it might take some doing, but Sara was never afraid of things like that) and she’d be dressed in that stuff you see in Vogue and other magazines, Gucci, Versace, Chanel, and she would have, behind her ears and on her wrists, perfume that would make me think paradise had just walked up to my apartment. Wouldn’t that just blast all that interstellar medium, all those equations, all my cosmological theories into dust?
    â€œBut you were too smart to think that was going to really happen,” I said. “Weren’t you?”

    â€œLet me tell you something, Jake, no one is better at outsmarting herself than someone who has brains. So, yeah, I thought we’d settle some old scores, and it would start by me walking up to your door, as though I had stepped out of Vogue . And was looking for trouble and the trouble was you.”
    â€œIt would have been something . . . ,” I said.
    â€œThat’s what I thought,” she said. “Would have been fun.”
    The bar where we went had the periodic silence when everyone, for some unknown reason, stops talking at the same time.
    â€œBut you won’t believe the black hole I’m in now. When I think about it, I get the idea I am looking down a well. Darkness that is constricted, you know. It just gets tighter the deeper in you get.”
    â€œYou could have just written me a letter,” I said.
    â€œLetter, schmetter,” she said. “I didn’t even know where you were. I was in the slammer. Then I got out and found out you were in Berkeley, but you’ve got to realize what that seems like for someone able, for the first time, to choose what she’s going to have for dinner. You might as well have been in the Amazon. But I had this idea. Think about that perfume, coming in like a romantic front. What’s a letter compared to that? Physical reality, Jake, how about that? I thought I’d be ready when you were still in school, but things didn’t work quite right, and then when you came back here I was still working on it.”
    â€œI thought you didn’t believe in romance,” I said.
    â€œI don’t know anymore,” she said. “It’s like in baseball trades, you know. A player to be named.”
    â€œSo you were thinking about it,” I said.
    â€œListen, Jake, I got things way ahead of that question. So
I had a general idea of making up for all that trouble and I wanted to turn into a woman who would sear you into forgetting every bad thing that ever happened. And for a long time I just lived with this sort of hope, see? Years. Then that general idea turned into a specific action. It started, of course, when I decided to speed things up and began driving cars to Mexico. Not drugs. Nothing like that. All sort of clean. In a way.”
    The memory of her voice, of her trouble, lingered, just like perfume, as my boots made that small thump on the first part of the trail to Furnace Creek. The trail starts at the road, and there