Thursday, October eighth.
Part seven came in at six, and I was in the booth by six-thirty with my coat off and no tea, the laptop open, the lamp on, and the new rule at my elbow like a chaperone. Read it once. Read it cold.
"Q, part seven."
A breath and a half. Then I read:
> At noon his message arrives, no capital, no greeting. thursday? I keep him waiting an hour, because a woman should, and then I answer with one word of my own. yes. He writes: same time? I write: same dark. Four lines, sent into the air like paper boats, and I read them over until the words come loose and become only shapes. That night I ride the elevator to the sixth floor, and the dark of six-fourteen takes me in, wherein nothing is asked and nothing is promised. I lie down. He lays his hand on me, slow and patient as the blind, and I understand that this is what he has been doing all along: reading me, a page at a time, with his fingertips. I lie in the dark and let him read me like braille. The silence between us is the only honest sentence either of us has written.
I stopped, and held the silence for the razor, and ended the take.
Thirty-six minutes. No stumbles. I took off the headphones and read the four lines again with my eyes, silently, on the screen.
thursday? yes. same time? same dark.
Two accounts in the world have those words. One is a string of letters with no capitals. The other is an address I keep for nothing else and sign with nothing, and I have never shown it to anyone or forwarded a line of it. I checked anyway, which was ridiculous. The folder was where I'd left it.
I didn't send the file. The rule was to read it cold, not to hand it over cold, and I couldn't have told you why. I saved it and closed the laptop, and the take sat in my closet in my own voice where nobody could hear it but me.
I had a plan for the night, which was to ask him. Not "did you write this"; you can't ask a man that and learn anything. Something with a floor under it.
I'm a person who plans a question for fourteen hours and loses it in the first minute.
"Evening, Q."
"Thanks, Arturo."
The door was on the latch, and he was first. I stepped in and shut it, and the dark came down.
He was on the bed, low and to the left, and it was a different quiet. Most nights his quiet has room in it, enough to lie down in. Tonight it was shut, as if he'd locked the inside of it. His breath came slow and even and a little too careful, as if he were holding a tray.
Every Thursday since May I have let my coat fall. Tonight I walked it along the foot of the bed with my hand trailing on the blanket, and found the armchair with my knee. His coat was in it. I laid mine across the top. The leather creaked.
My hand, spreading the wool to settle it, brushed something stiff. A corner. Folded paper, heavy stock, standing up out of the open pocket of his coat like a card out of a deck.
I didn't think. That's the only defense I have. My fingers closed on the corner and drew it out, and I slid it into the waistband at the small of my back, under my shirt, where it lay against my skin like the flat of a knife. He didn't move.
Then the rest of the ritual, because the rest of the ritual was cover. The nightstand, the cord, the plug. He didn't say "Every week."
What he did was open a bottle.
A plastic cap cracking its seal, a sound so small and bright in the dark that I turned my head. A drink, two, and the cap going back on. He had brought his own water. The room has its own: a glass on the nightstand, six inches from my hand, filled that afternoon by someone with a cart. My fingers have found it there every Thursday since May. He never drank from it either. I'd thought that was tact.
A man who won't drink what the room gives him knows something about the room.
"I need a minute," I whispered.
"Okay."
The bathroom is on the right in the hall, by the cold off the tile. I went in and shut the door and stood with my hand on the wall and did the thing I swore I would never do in that building.
The switch is beside the mirror. I pressed it.
The light came down on me like a slap. Five months. I stood in it with my eyes squeezed shut, and the exhaust fan started overhead with a rattle like a card in bicycle spokes, which was wonderful; it covered everything. I rolled a towel against the gap at the bottom of the door. I turned my back on the mirror. I unfolded the paper on the edge of the sink and opened my eyes.
A single sheet, in the serif face N. uses, the same wide margins, the author's brackets set between the sentences. Folded in thirds and carried against a man's body; the creases were soft, and they smelled of him.
Delphine, and Jude. Two paragraphs: a latch, a dark room, a chair with a man in it, a woman who says her name is Delphine, a hood in a lobby, an envelope with one letter on it, and a nightstand at the foot of the page, where it stopped. I know the seven parts I've recorded as I know my own address. This was not any of them.
A part I hadn't recorded. A part I hadn't been sent.
He has it before I do. The thought went through me and came out the other side as a wish to be sick, and I put my hand over my mouth.
I could have walked out and put it in his hand. I wanted to get out of that room, and I wanted proof, and I couldn't have both by asking. If I asked, he'd say he didn't know what I meant, and the page would be a page again.
There was no June on it. Remember that; I did.
I folded it on its creases and put it back under my shirt. I turned off the light before I opened the door, and the dark poured back over my eyes like water over a stone, and I was afraid in a way that has nothing to do with seeing. Coming back, I slid the page into the pocket of my own coat on the chair. It took a creak of leather and a held breath.
I lay down beside him on top of the blanket, in my clothes. His hand found my wrist and stayed there, the thumb resting on the pulse. He was counting it. I let him count a rate I was ashamed of.
"Do you write?" I whispered.
The pause that came back was the length of a held tray.
"Prescriptions."
Dry. Almost a joke. He had never in five months said one word about what he did, and he'd said it now, lightly, like a coin tossed into a fountain. I did not say "I know."
"Do you?" he asked.
"Only my name," I whispered. "On checks."
And I laughed. A small laugh, nervous, not the one I can't flatten; the laugh of a woman who has just said the one true thing in the room and heard how it sounded.
His hand tightened on my wrist.
"You laughed," he said. "Don't."
Sharp. Not loud; he's never loud. Flat as a blade laid on a table. My skin went cold from the wrist outward. I have been told not to laugh by directors, and by one husband. Nobody had ever said it as if the laugh were a thing in the room that could be seen.
Then, softer, in a different voice: "Sorry. Not tonight."
"All right."
"I'm sorry."
For a while neither of us said anything. I turned my face toward his shoulder and put my mouth near his ear and asked the other thing, the one I'd been carrying all week, because I wanted every reason off the table, one at a time.
"Is there somebody who waits up for you?"
"There was." Level, close to my ear. "She's in Phoenix. She married a dentist. She's happy."
He said it like the name of a street he used to live on. I believed him.
I was three-quarters sure he was writing me when I did what I did next.
I took my wrist back out of his hand, and I sat up, and I took off my shirt in its one motion and dropped it off the side of the bed, and I lay back down against him with my skin on his shirt. He went still. Not the stillness at a laugh. The stillness of someone handed something he isn't sure he's allowed to hold.
"Are you sure?" he said, low.
"Yes."
"After that—"
"Yes," I whispered. "Ask me again and I'll say it again."
He asked again, with his hand, flat on my stomach, not moving. I put my hand over his and moved it.
I knew what I was doing. I was lying down with a man I believed was taking my life down in his own hand, and I wanted, God help me, to see if I could feel it in him. If a man is writing you, it has to be somewhere in his hands. What his hands showed me was that he had missed me. That's the only word. He undressed me as if he'd been thinking about the order all week. When I pulled at his shirt he sat up and let me have it, and the cold of the room and the heat of him came together along my whole front and I heard myself make a sound I've never made into a microphone. His mouth went to the comma and stayed. My hands went into his hair and held his head there and I said "yes" with my teeth together.
"Still yes?" he said into my skin.
"Still yes."
"You'll say."
"I'm saying. Don't stop."
Every time I thought I knew where his hands would go next, they went somewhere else, and waited there, and let me find out what I wanted by wanting it. The inside of my wrist. The hollow under my ear, where he put his mouth and breathed out, slowly, until I turned my head on the pillow to give him more of it. I'd come in with a stolen page under my shirt, and now I couldn't have said my own last name. I pulled him up by the hair and kissed him hard, harder than I ever had, and he made a sound into my mouth that went straight down my spine, and I thought, very clearly, in the only clear sentence I had left: if this is the man, then I'm in his book tonight, and I don't care, with his weight like this.
The bed knocked once against the wall, and he caught the headboard with one hand and held it off the wall so it wouldn't knock again, and kept going, and for a while I didn't think about anything at all.
Then his mouth was at my ear, and his breath had lost its evenness, and he said, low, like something he'd been saying to himself all day:
"Nothing asked. Nothing promised."
Everything in me heard it.
Part seven: "wherein nothing is asked and nothing is promised." My take was still sitting unsent on my laptop, so he hadn't heard those words; he'd read them, in a text only N. and I had.
I should have stopped. I didn't. I put my mouth on his shoulder and held on, and I was afraid of him all the way down, and my hips came up anyway, and his hand came under the small of my back, and he said "yes" against my neck as if I'd asked him something, and maybe I had. I held my breath. I don't know for how long. I held it like a woman at the edge of a cold lake. A train was coming up Wabash from the river, and I held on to him and to the breath, and when the window began to shake I let both go at once, and so did he, and the L came over and took everything, his voice and mine, under its iron.
After, I lay with my cheek on his chest and listened to his heart come down. It came down slower than mine.
Two ways the book could know my Thursdays: through the room, or through the man. A room doesn't answer. A man answers, and you can't tell if he's lying.
So I took his hand and turned it over in the dark, palm up, as he'd turned mine on the first cold night. I put my fingertip on his skin and wrote on it, silently, one letter at a time, so there could be no mistake.
J. U. N. E.
Then, below it, so he'd understand it was a gift: M. Y. N. A. M. E.
He went very still. His whole hand went out of motion under my fingertip, every muscle in it, and then it closed, slowly, on my finger, and held it, as a child holds a thing she's been told to give back.
June is not my middle name. My middle name is Anne. June was a lie I made up for him, and I wrote it on his hand so it never went into the air.
He let go of my finger. Down on Wabash a cab door slammed, and in its wake he sat up, and I heard the bed let him go.
He found his clothes, and the water bottle. His feet went around the foot of the bed to the armchair, and wool rustled: he lifted my coat off his and laid mine on the arm, and his own went on, and I held my breath, and he did not check the pocket.
He stopped in the hall, by the cold of the tile.
It was the first time in five months he'd left before me. And it was my line he used, the one I'd said to him the first night in May and never since: whoever goes first, the other waits ten minutes, so we never meet in a lobby with our faces out.
"Wait ten minutes," he said.
Then the door, the lock catching, and he was gone.
I counted them in trains: four, and a freight that went on forever.
When it was done I got up and found the room's glass by feel. It was full. I carried it to the bathroom in the dark and poured it down the sink, and set the glass back.
In the armchair my coat held the page against its lining, flat and folded, where I'd put it.
He had left first, and taken his water with him.