Transparency by Frances Hwang Page B

came by.
    The conductor did not look up, punching frenetic holes into their tickets. “We’re like the atmosphere,” he muttered. “Before
     you know it, we dissipate.” None of them said anything, and the conductor glanced up, eyeing them for the first time. “We’ll
     be there in two hours.” He slid their tickets into the slots above their heads and walked on.
    Paul gave a half laugh. He leaned over, his elbows on his knees as he studied the floor. He puffed one cheek out, then the
     other, tapping his fingertips together. He had a narrow face and deep blue eyes, and Iris had mistaken him for a teenager
     when he first came into the bookstore where she worked. She liked to look at him when he was most oblivious to her, when he
     was reading a book, or in the mornings when he was still asleep and there was a sweetness in the warm spaces of his skin.
     They had been together for five months now.
    She took his present out of her bag and quickly placed it on his lap. “Happy birthday!” she exclaimed.
    Paul reached over and put his arm around her neck. Iris had to bend forward out of her seat for a kiss. She smiled, though
     she felt a little awkward with Jeremy watching.
    “I was born two hours before midnight,” Paul explained to Jeremy. He stuck a thumb into a crevice of the paper, and the wrapping
     split open easily. “My doctor was at a party when he got the call and arrived at the hospital in a tuxedo. He wasn’t very
     pleased to see me.”
    “Do you like it?” Iris asked.
    It was an oval black lacquer box that she had found at an antique store on Pine Street. “It’s hand-painted from Russia,” she
     told him. On the lid was a night scene of three horses, all different colors—red, white, and brown—gaily pulling a sled. There
     was a driver holding a gold whip in the air, and two lovers seated in the back of the troika. They were passing through the
     snow, but the way the ground was painted with its swirls of blue, it seemed to Iris that they were racing magically across
     the sea. Tiny gold stars shone in the blue-black sky.
    “It’s very nice,” Paul said, lifting the lid to look at the bright red interior. He then picked up the book that she had added
     at the very last minute.
    “Herbert Marcuse,” Paul said.
    “I’m afraid that was my idea,” Jeremy said.
    “It’s about Freud,” Iris said hopefully. She didn’t mention that it was a critique of Freud. It had been kind of a joke. She
     had told Jeremy that Paul was a Freudian, and Jeremy had said, “Maybe we can change that.”
    “Fantastic,” Paul said, but the way he said it slowly, almost ironically, made her feel that she had made a mistake. He turned
     to Jeremy. “You’re going to graduate school for sociology, right?”
    “I am,” Jeremy replied.
    “Where?”
    “In California.”
    “Like it there?”
    Jeremy paused. “I do.”
    “You sound surprised.”
    “I didn’t expect to ever live in California.”
    “I thought you wanted to study philosophy,” Iris said.
    “Too impractical,” Jeremy said. “It doesn’t have any real-world applications. You end up feeling isolated.”
    “You want to be connected to the world,” Iris said, smiling at him. She had not seen Jeremy in two years. He had arrived at
     her doorstep in Philadelphia the previous night, flushed from the cold. Maybe it was the color in his cheeks, the fact that
     he had come from outside yet looked so warm in his thick wool sweater, but she thought there was a glow about him that she
     hadn’t seen before. He was different from the way he’d been in high school, when he wore braces and talked slowly, sometimes
     with a mild stutter. In college, he grew out his hair, wore flannel shirts, and strode around in combat boots with slightly
     hunched shoulders. He had short hair now, a finely clipped beard, and there was something in the way that he held himself
     that made him seem more at ease with his own body.
    “Has Laura told you?” she