After our kiss, we stripped to our underwear, tacitly agreeing not to take it further. Colin spooned me with his downy knees. His scent—a natural musk, a few too many cigarettes, and the papaya conditioner he used to keep life in his many-years-peroxided hair—startled me with soothing memories of watching late-night Australian TV under the living room doona, the Australian word for comforter. Before I fell asleep, I looked at the palm he had swung around mine in his sleep. For a second I was sure that I could see our hands stripped of their layers of skin, like in the illustrations for “X-ray specs” in the old Johnson Smith novelty catalogue.
Colin had salvaged his life. No one in the end got hurt. What the hell did I have to show for my advanced test scores? Fuck-all. What would I do if I was still driftwood in hyperachievement circles in a few years? Since graduation, God was it six years now?, living my life felt like eating white chocolate: everything good was there, but it never truly satisfied.
Around two A.M., large pellets of hail started hitting the window pane. I sat in my red bra and panties mesmerized by their random rhythms and sizes. I had once commissioned a journal article on hail from a meteorologist. The earth sciences acquisitions editor at Bell Press had been fired for hauling publicity copies of new Bell titles to the Strand and other used bookstores for cash. Gordon made me meet the fired editor’s appointments at a conference in Atlanta. Earth sciences never clicked with me the way physics did. I had to give myself a crash course on hail in the hotel room—with xeroxed pages from our firm’s tiny library. Hailstones form in spring or early summer mostly between latitudes of thirty and sixty degrees, slices of the earth that include New Jersey. They are associated with thunderstorms; the stone’s nuclei need to be carried by turbulent winds to ever germinate. Super-cooled water, still liquid at a freezing temperature, hits the icy atmosphere and the nuclei freeze over, melt and freeze again, thaw and ice over once more. A hailstone grows with each pass through the atmosphere. At a certain weight, the updraft can no longer support the stones.
I had goosebumps from the air-conditioning; I shut it off. I tried to imagine this redhead reading poetry to Colin during sex. From the curtains, I stared over at him and tried to imagine marriage.
A relationship is so much like a hailstone. If you could carve through either one, a cross section would be layered like an onion or a tree trunk.