Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,36

catches sight of the flap end of Solomon’s gray suit as he disappears into a taxi. The little bald head dips. The slam of yellow. Into the traffic and away.

He does not even know about the visitors—she will tell him sometime, but not yet, no harm. Perhaps this evening. At dinner. Candle and wine. Guess what, Sol. As he settles in the chair, fork poised. Guess what. A slight sigh from him. Just tell me, Claire, honey—I’ve had a long day.

Nimble out of her nightdress. Her body in the full-length mirror. A little pale and puckered, but she can still stretch out of it. She yawns, hands high in the air. Tall, still thin, jet-black hair, a single streak of badger gray from the temple. Fifty-two years old. She passes a damp cloth over her hair and brushes it with a wooden comb. Turns her head sideways and presses the hair lengthwise against her palm. Tangled at the split ends. Time for a trim. She cleans out the comb and dumps the strands in the foot-flip garbage can. They say the hair of the dead still grows. Takes on a life of its own. Down there with all the other detritus, tissues, tubes of lipstick, toothpaste tops, allergy pills, eyeliner, heart medicine, youth, nail clippings, dental floss, aspirin, grief.

But how is it that the gray hairs are never the ones to come out? In her twenties she had hated the badger streak when it appeared overnight, dyed it, hid it, chopped it. Now it defines her, the elegant swift ray of gray, sideways from the temple.

A road in my hair. Do not overtake.

Things to do. Hurryhurry. Toilet. Toothbrush rub. A light swish of makeup. Some blush. A little eyeliner and a lipstick dab. Never one to fuss with makeup. At the dresser she pauses. Bra and panties in simple beige. Her favorite dress. Aqua and green silkscreen, with a shellfish motif. A-line. Sleeveless. Just above the knee. Bows on the slits. Zip behind. Fashionable and feminist at the same time. Not too fancy or showoffy, but contemporary, modest, good.

She hitches the hem a little higher. Extends her foot. Legs that glisten, said Solomon years ago. She told him once he made love like a hanged man, erect but dead. A joke she had heard at a Richard Pryor concert. She had sneaked in alone, using a friend’s press pass. A one-off. Found the concert neither too risqué nor boring. But Solomon pouted for a week—three days at the joke, four days because she went to the concert at all. Women’s lib, he said. Burn your bra, lose your marbles. Small, sweet man.

Devoted to good wine and martinis. The last little peninsula of hair on his head. Needs sunscreen in summertime. Freckles on his dome. Boyhood summers still around his eyes. When they met at Yale he had an overhang of hair, fair and thick over his eye. In Hartford as junior counsel he would walk along the narrow paths with Wallace Stevens, of all people, both men in sleeveless shirts. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee. Home to her, they would make love on the four-poster bed. They lay on the sheets and he would try to recite poems in her ear. He could seldom recall the lines. Still, it was a sensual wonder, his lips against the tip of her ear, the side of her neck, down to her clavicle, the glow of enthusiasm about him. The bed broke one night from their hijinks. Nowadays it is not often, but often enough, and she still reaches up to hold the back of his hair. Not so woody anymore. The end of the stem where the fruit once was. The thugs in court are quiet until they’re sentenced, then the anvil comes down and they scream and shout and thrash, call him filthy names. She no longer goes downtown with him to the dark wood-paneled room to observe—why endure the abuse? Hey, Kojak! Who loves ya, baby? In chambers there is a photograph of her, beachside, with Joshua, just a boy, both leaning together, mother and son, heads touching, the dunes behind them endless and grassy.

She feels a little murmur at her ribcage, a swell of air. Joshua. Not a name for a boy in uniform.

The necklace with a phantom hand. Sometimes it happens. She gets a little rush of blood to the throat. A clawing at her windpipe. As if someone is