Thursday, September twenty-fourth.
Six exactly. "Ms. Quill. Part three. N."
I opened it at the counter with the kettle just starting to tick. I'd recorded part two in the small hours on Tuesday, and delivered it at nine, and the money had come at ten, and I had spent the two days since telling myself one coincidence was a thing a grown woman could carry. I'd almost managed it. I opened part three like mail I was expecting, with one finger.
Part three began:
> He finds it in the dark, the way a blind man finds the one raised letter on a door. I don't stop him. I have let so many strangers into my voice that letting one into my skin seems almost a courtesy, a small and private hospitality. His hand moves over me slow and certain as weather crossing a field, and then it stops, because there is something under my left ribs that stops it. A comma of scar under my left ribs, as if my body had paused once mid-sentence and never finished the thought. He rests one fingertip on it. He doesn't trace it. He doesn't ask. Men never ask; they only wonder, and their wondering is a kind of silk that settles over you and does not lift. I lie under his wondering and say nothing, and the comma says nothing, and the city goes by outside like a long gray river with no mouth. I think: this is the only sentence of mine he will ever read. I think: let him. I think, beneath everything, that I would like someone, once, to ask me how it ends.
I read it twice at the kitchen counter, standing up, as you read a letter from a hospital.
A comma of scar under my left ribs.
Not a line. Not a seam. Not any of the hundred words a writer could have reached for. A comma. Under the left ribs. And in the first person, so that by Friday I would sit in my own booth and say "my left ribs" into a microphone, and some woman in a bath in Tucson would imagine it on her.
The kettle came to the boil and clicked off. I didn't move.
Here is the scar, told once, and then I'd like not to tell it again.
I was nineteen and home from college for the summer in Rockford, riding my bike down State Street in the late afternoon, and a city bus came past me close enough that its side mirror caught me under the left arm and folded me over the handlebars. I don't remember the mirror. I remember the asphalt being warm. There was a surgery, and a drain, and a summer of not laughing because laughing pulled at the stitches, and then a scar about as long as the top joint of my thumb, with a little curl at the top where the drain had been. It's pale now. You'd only find it in the dark if you were looking for it with your hands.
For years it didn't have a name. It was "the bus thing." Then one night, in bed, in a marriage, a man ran his thumb over it and asked me what it was, and I said, "That's my comma," because it was the first thing I thought, and because I was in love and saying clever things in the dark. He liked it. He said it was the only punctuation he'd ever let me put in his work.
That's two people who knew it was called a comma: me and the man I married.
And last Thursday, in six-fourteen, with a stranger's fingertip resting on it, I'd whispered it again. "My comma." The first time I'd ever said it in that room. The only time.
So now it was three people. And one of them was a page in a book.
I should tell you about Graham, since he's the first man.
Graham Lusk wrote one novel, eleven years ago. Somebody at a small press hired me to narrate it, and he came to the studio for the first session, which authors are always told not to do, and sat behind the glass with his arms folded, listening to me read his sentences. He said afterward I'd read it better than he wrote it. He meant it as a compliment. It took him about six years to stop meaning it as one.
We married two years later, in the fall. The reviewers had liked the book, and they'd liked my reading of it more, and said so in print, in the kind of sentences an author keeps in a drawer to look at when he's angry. He was the writer. But he read his own prose like a man reading a lease, flat and suspicious, as if he expected it to cheat him. So I read it to him. In bed, at night, chapters at a time: his novel, and then the pages of the next one, which never turned into a book. For six years I read Graham's sentences to Graham in the dark, and he lay beside me with his eyes closed, listening to them come out of my mouth sounding better than they were, and I think for a long time that was the happiest either of us ever got.
He slept with a rain machine. A little white box on his nightstand, really a fan with a rain setting, nothing like a person: a flat steady hiss all night, every night, for six years. I hated it for about a month and then I couldn't sleep without it. When he left, he kept the plants, the rain machine, and some insurance thing he'd set up the year we married that I never read, and the first night in the apartment alone the quiet was so loud I sat up until dawn. I've had trouble sleeping ever since. That's the divorce, in a sentence. The rest of it is lawyers.
He teaches composition now, at two different colleges, on two different train lines. We haven't spoken in a year. The last time was about a box of his books I'd found in the basement.
I didn't call him. Graham knew the word "comma," once, a long time ago. He doesn't know the room, or the man, or a sentence I whispered into a stranger's ear last Thursday on Wabash. And he has never once had the patience to write a book a part at a time. He went out of my head as fast as he'd come in.
That left the other one.
I sat down at the table with both hands around a cup of tea that had gone cold and made myself say it out loud, because if I didn't say it now I was going to say it in a whisper at three in the morning, and that's worse.
He knows the scar. He's known it since May, by fingertip, every week. And last Thursday I told him its name. And last Thursday, with my mouth at his ear, I told him I couldn't sleep without a voice in my ear, and four days later it was in a stranger's book, give or take a word.
The comma, and the sentence. Only one man knew both. And I didn't know his last name.
It sounded worse out loud. True things do.
I went through the other doors first, because you check the other doors before you accuse the man in the room. The speaker on the nightstand: I'd heard the plug come out of the wall. My phone: off, by feel, in my coat on the floor by the door.
What did I actually know about him? That he was called Jonah, or said he was. That he talked low and exact and chose his words like tools. That he arrived every week scrubbed raw, as if from somewhere that required it. That he carried a pager in his coat that went off three times last Thursday and that he let it go off three times. That he was a stranger at a dinner in the dark, which is to say, someone who'd sat next to a woman for three hours in a room where she couldn't see him and found that he liked it. That he'd never once asked me a question I'd have had to lie to answer. I had thought that was kindness. I sat at my table at six-forty in the morning and turned that over, and it didn't look like kindness from underneath.
I was afraid of him. I sat in my own kitchen in daylight and I was afraid of a man I'd been naked with seven days before. And under the fear, low and warm and not the least bit interested in my reasoning, my body was already counting the hours until nine.
Bettina called at eleven-thirty, New York's lunch.
"Darling. The second wire came through, they're very punctual, I like punctual people, it's so rare. Did you see? Are you spending it? You're not spending it. I can hear you not spending it."
"I saw."
"So spend it. Get a coat. You've had that coat since the Obama administration."
"Bettina." I was standing at the window over the courtyard. Somebody's sheets were drying on a line in the courtyard below, and the wind kept filling them and letting them go. "Who are these people? Nightjar. Have you ever actually talked to a person there, or is it all email, because—"
"Don't." She said it fast and bright, her voice for turning down a bad offer. "It's in the contract. Spend the money."
"I only meant—"
"I know what you meant, darling, and the contract says if you go poking at who wrote it, it all goes away, and I'd like it not to go away. They're a little strange. Everybody with money is a little strange. Read the book, cash the wire, buy a coat." A horn behind her, a door. "I have to go eat a salad with a publisher who wants you to read a cookbook. I said no. I love you."
She was gone. I stood there with the phone against my ear and the sheets filling and emptying in the courtyard. It was in the contract. She was right. Fine. I wasn't going to identify the author.
But nobody had said anything in the contract about a man in a hotel room.
It took me most of the day to decide, which is to say it took me no time at all and then I spent the day pretending to decide.
I wasn't going to ask him. Asking was against the rules, my rules, the ones I'd set on a sidewalk on Randolph with my back to him. If I asked him, "Are you writing about me," then I'd be a woman with a face and a last name and a fear, standing in his dark asking him to make it go away, and he'd say no, because anyone would say no. And then I'd have his no, and nothing else, and I'd still have to decide whether to go back.
In the afternoon I read part three a third time, out loud, at the kitchen table, only to hear what it would be like in my mouth. "A comma of scar under my left ribs." It's a good sentence to say; it has a little dip in the middle, like the thing itself. That was the worst part. It was written to be said, and I was the one who'd say it.
So I was going to go, as I always went. I was going to take off my coat and let it fall. And I was going to listen.
I'm good at listening. It's the other half of my job, the half nobody pays for.
At eight-thirty I put the hood up at my own door. The wind had come around off the lake, and on the platform at Damen I held my hands together in the hoodie's pocket.
Somewhere around Belmont I noticed what my left hand was doing. It had come out of the pocket and gone under the hem of the hoodie, under my shirt, and was lying there, on my skin, below the ribs, over the scar.
I put my hand flat over it on the train like a woman covering a name tag.