Harvesting the Heart

pictures stretched halfway across the diner, and with each one I felt a little more as though I truly belonged.

I had been sleeping on Doris’s couch, because she felt sorry for me. The story I had given was that my stepfather had been making moves on me and so the minute I turned eighteen I had taken my baby-sitting money and left. I liked that story, because it was nearly half true-the eighteen and the leaving part. And I didn’t mind a little sympathy; at this point, I was taking whatever I could get.

It was Doris’s idea that we do some kind of blue-plate special-tack two bucks onto the price of a turkey club, and you’d get a free portrait with it. “She’s good enough,” Doris said, watching me sketch the frizzy lines of Barbra Streisand’s hair. “These Joe Shmoes would be Celebrity for a Day.”

I felt a little weird about the whole thing, kind of like being a circus sideshow, but there was an overwhelming response to the notice we stuck in the menu, and I got bigger tips drawing than I did waiting tables. I drew most of the regulars on the first day, and it was Lionel’s idea to make those original sketches free and hang them up with my others for publicity. Truth be told, I could have drawn most of the diner’s patrons without their posing for me. I had been watching them carefully anyway, picking up the outlines of their lives, which I would fill in in my spare time with my imagination.

For example, there was Rose, the blond woman who came for lunch on Fridays after having her hair done. She wore expensive linen suits and classic shoes and a diamond wedding band. She carried a Gucci pocketbook and she kept her money in order: ones, fives, tens, twenties. Once, she brought in a balding man, who held her hand tight throughout the meal and spoke in Italian. I pretended this was her lover, because everything else in her life seemed so picture perfect.

Marco was a blind student at the Kennedy School of Government, who wore a long black overcoat even on the hottest days in July. He had shaved his head and wore a bandanna around it, and he’d play games with us. What color is it? he’d ask. Give me a clue. And I’d say something like “McCarthy,” and he’d laugh and say Red. He came in late at night and smoked cigarette after cigarette, until a gray cloud hovered at the edge of the ceiling like an artificial sky.

But the one I watched most was Nicholas, whose name I knew only because of Lionel. He was a medical student, which explained, Lionel said, his odd hours and the fog he was always in. I would stare at him point-blank because he never seemed to notice, even when he wasn’t reading, and I tried to figure out what was so confusing about him. I had been at Mercy exactly two weeks when I figured it out: he just didn’t fit. He seemed to gleam against the cranberry cracked vinyl seats. He held court over all the waitresses, holding up his glass when he wanted a refill, waving the check when he wanted to pay, and yet none of us considered him to be condescending. I studied him with a scientist’s fascination, and when I imagined things about him, it was at night on Doris’s living room couch. I saw his steady hands, his clear eyes, and I wondered what it was that drew me to him.

I had been in love in Chicago, and I knew the consequences. After all that had happened with Jake, I was not planning to be in love again, maybe not ever. I didn’t consider it strange that at eighteen some soft part of me seemed broken for good. Maybe this is why when I watched Nicholas I never thought to draw him. The artist in me did not immediately register the natural lines of him as a man: the symmetry of his square jaw or the sun shifting through his hair, throwing off different and subtler shades of black.

I watched him the night of the first Chicken Doodle Soup Special, as Lionel had insisted on calling it. Doris, who had been working with me since the lunch rush, had left early, so I was by myself, refilling salt shakers, when Nicholavin Ahen Nichs came in. It was 11:00 P.M., just before closing, and he sat at one of my tables. And suddenly I knew what it was about this man. I remembered Sister Agnes at Pope Pius High School, rapping a ruler against a dusty blackboard as she waited for me to think up a sentence for a spelling word I did not know. The word was grandeur, e before u. I had stood and hopped from foot to foot and listened to the popular girls snicker as I remained silent. I could not come up with the sentence, and Sister accused me of scribbling in the margins of my notebook again, although that was not it at all. But looking at Nicholas, at the way he held his spoon and the tilt of his head, I understood that grandeur was not nobility or dignity, as I’d been taught. It was the ability to be comfortable in the world; to make it look as if it all came so easily. Grandeur was what Nicholas had, what I did not have, what I now knew I would never forget.

Inspired, I ran to the counter and began to draw Nicholas. I drew not just the perfect match of his features but also his ease and his flow. Just as Nicholas was digging in his pockets for a tip, I finished and stepped back to view the picture. What I saw was someone beautiful, perhaps someone more beautiful than I had ever seen in my life, someone whom others pointed to and whispered about. Plain as day, in the straight brows, the high forehead, and the strong chin, I could see that this was someone who was meant to lead others.

Lionel and Leroy came into the main area of the diner, carrying leftovers, which they brought home to their kids. “You know what to do,” Lionel said to me, waving as he pushed his way out the door. “See you, Nick,” he called.

Very quietly, under his breath, he said, “Nicholas.”

I stepped up behind him, still holding my portrait. “Did you say something?” I asked.

“Nicholas,” he repeated, clearing his throat. “I don’t like ‘Nick.’ ”

“Oh,” I said. “Did you want anything else?”

Nicholas glanced around him, as if he was just noticing he was the only customer in the diner and that the sun had gone down hours before. “I guess you’re trying to close up,” he said. He stretched out one leg on the banquette and turned the corners of his mouth up in a smile. “Hey,” he said, “how old are you anyway?”

“Old enough,” I snapped, and I moved closer to clear his plate. I leaned forward, still clutching the menu with his picture, and that’s when he grabbed my wrist.

“That’s me,” he said, surprised. “Hey, let me see.”

I tried to pull away. I didn’t really care if he looked at the portrait, but the feeling of his hand against my wrist was paralyzing me. I could feel the pulse of his thumb and the ridges of his fingertips.

I knew by the way he touched me that he had recognized something in what I’d drawn. I peered down at the paper to see what I had done this time. At one edge of the picture I’d sketched centuries of kings, with high jeweled crowns and endless ermine robes. At the other edge I had drawn a gnarled, blossoming in A blossom tree. In its uppermost branches was a thin boy, and in his hand he held the sun.

“You’re good,” he said. Nicholas nodded to the seat across from him. “If you aren’t keeping your other customers waiting,” he said, smiling, “why don’t you join me?”

I found out that he was in his third year of medical school and that he was at the top of his class and in the middle of his rotations. He was planning to be a cardiac surgeon. He slept only four hours a night; the rest of the time he was at the hospital or studying. He thought I didn’t look a day over fifteen.

In turn, I told him the truth. I said I was from Chicago and that I had gone to parochial school and would have gone to RISD if I hadn’t run away from home. That was all I said about that, and he didn’t press me. I told him about the nights I had slept in the T station, waking in the mornings to the roar of the subway. I told him I could balance four coffee cups and saucers on one arm and that I could say I love you in ten languages. Mimi notenka kudenko, I said in Swahili, just to prove it. I told him I did not really know my own mother, something I had never admitted to my closest friends. But I did not tell him about my abortion.

It was well past one in the morning when Nicholas stood up to leave. He took the portrait I’d drawn and tossed it lightly on the Formica counter. “Are you going to hang it up?” he asked, pointing to the others.

“If you’d like,” I said. I took my black marker out and looked at his image. For a moment, a thought came to me: This is what you’ve been waiting for. “Nicholas,” I said softly, writing his name across the top.

“Nicholas,” he echoed, and then he laughed. He put his arm around my shoulders, and we stood like that, touching at the sides, for a moment. Then he stepped away. He was still stroking the side of my neck. “Did you know,” he said, pressing a spot with his thumb, “that if you push hard enough here, you can knock someone unconscious?” And then he bent down and touched his lips to where his thumb had been, kissing the spot so lightly I might have imagined it. He walked out the door before I even noticed him moving, but I heard the sleigh bells tap against the steamed window glass. I stood there, swaying, and I wondered how I could be letting this happen again.