Thursday, October fifteenth.
I got up off the bed. I needed to be somewhere he wasn't.
Four steps along the end of the bed, the radiator's warmth on my shins, and then the drapes under my hands, cool and heavy, and the strip of tape down their seam. I stood with my palms flat on the cloth and my back to him. Through the glass, through the cloth, I could feel Wabash: a bus kneeling at the curb, a siren a long way off. Then the L came up from the river and the whole window began to shake, and I waited until it was right on top of us, roaring, and said it into the noise.
"You gave them June."
The train went by. In the quiet behind it, from the bed: "I gave them everything. June was the only thing that was a gift."
I pressed my forehead against the drapes.
"You knew who I was for four months."
"Yes."
"You lied to me about your pager to stay."
"Yes."
"You lied to me about the page."
"I was ashamed." His voice didn't move from the bed. "And for three weeks I thought you were them."
I stood there with my forehead on the drapes and was angrier than I have ever been at anyone, including a husband. Not because he'd been afraid. Because he'd been afraid and come anyway, every week, and taken off my clothes in the dark knowing that by midnight he'd be typing it up in a parking garage. I'd given him the only room on earth where I was nobody. He'd been reading it aloud to a stranger.
He didn't say anything else. He didn't explain the four months, or tell me what Northside would have done to him, or say how afraid he'd been. He sat there and let each thing be what it was. I've heard a hundred men defend themselves; I've read their defenses aloud for money. I'd never heard a man not do it. It sounds like someone holding still while you decide where to hit him.
I didn't hit him. I stood at the window until my hands stopped shaking, and then a little longer, so he'd know they had.
"Why Moss?" I said, finally, to the drapes.
"Moss was my mother's name. After the first email I didn't want Merrick on anything they could find."
I came back and sat in his chair, on his coat, and put my hands on my knees, and made myself go through it, because if I didn't go through it now I'd go through it in the small hours, alone, and get it wrong.
The room was clean. He'd been over every inch of it with the lights on, and I'd been over every inch of him. I'd proved it.
There was one thing that didn't fit, and I made myself look at it. Part two. "I can't sleep without a stranger's voice in my ear." I'd whispered nearly that sentence into his ear on the seventeenth, and part two arrived on the twenty-first, at six in the morning, before he'd sent them a word.
Half the women in America have said that sentence to somebody. June was mine.
And someone had followed him on the seventeenth. That was all the rest of it needed: somebody who knew where his car was, and what his pager meant, and what room he went up to. Somebody in a lobby, or a garage. Not in here.
"Why do they want you reading Jude?" I said.
"I don't know. I thought it was for you. So you'd hear me."
"I've never heard you. They've never sent me a line of it."
He was quiet.
"Then somebody's building a duet," I said.
I could hear him think about that and not like it.
"Tell me what you've read for them," I said. "All of it."
He told me, in one breath, every line, in order, in the flat low voice he'd used for them in a parking garage. "'Don't turn on the light.' 'Sit.' And last night: 'Come at seven. Before the light. I want to tell you my name.' And 'There's water.'" A breath. "That's everything. From now on, every line they send me, you hear it first."
I didn't know the last two. They weren't in any part I'd been sent. Somewhere a man in a book was going to ask a woman to come early, and offer her water, and I'd read it in my own voice on some Monday morning, and he'd already said his half.
At eleven-forty he picked up the phone off the blanket.
"Do you want to write it?" he said. "Or should I?"
"Both of us."
So we did. I sat beside him on the edge of the bed with my mouth at his ear and told him what we'd done tonight, in the whisper, a sentence at a time, and he said each sentence after me, low, into the black phone, and the phone said nothing back, only listened, a faint click at each pause. I gave them a quarrel at the window, because there had been one. I gave them nothing about the page, or the card, or June, or Moss, or a duet. I gave them a man and a woman in a dark room who had talked late and not slept together, and every word of it was true, and none of it was anything.
It was the strangest session I've ever done. I'd never dictated a lie made entirely of facts to a doctor, so that he could read it to the person who'd hurt us both. His jaw moved against my lips each time he repeated me. Twice he got a word wrong and I whispered it again, patient, exact, like a resident taking down orders. Once I felt him almost laugh.
"She was tired," I whispered. "She's going home."
"She was tired," he said into the phone. "She's going home."
At eleven fifty-eight he tapped it twice. The flat little woman's voice said, "Sent."
He set the phone face down on the blanket. Then he turned to me, and both his hands came up and found my face again in the dark, the way they had an hour before, as if to check it was still there.
At eleven fifty-nine the phone spoke.
"New message from N. Received, J."
His hands were on my face. Both of them.
I put my own hands over his and held them there.
"I want your number," I said.
"No phones in here."
"No phones in here," I agreed. "Out there. If something happens."
He said it once, low, all ten digits, and I had it. I don't need anything twice. I hear a sentence and keep it, like a stone in a pocket. I said mine into his ear, and he said it back to me without a mistake.
"If we ever have to use a phone," I said, "we talk like the book. Let them think we're rehearsing."
"Like the book."
"Like the book. And if it's really us, at the end, we say same dark."
"Same dark," he said. He said it as if he were trying it on, and it fit, and I heard him decide to keep it.
After that it was quiet for a long time, and I could feel him on the other side of the quiet, not reaching.
"I want you," I whispered. "I'm still angry."
"I know."
"I don't want you to take that as a yes. I want to give it as one." I found his hand, the one that had held the card, and held it. "I'm choosing this. Not the room. Not the rules. You, knowing what you did. Do you understand?"
"Yes." A breath. "Are you sure?"
"Ask me something else."
He was quiet. Then, very low: "Can I say your name?"
Five months. Nobody had ever said mine in that room.
"Yes," I whispered.
"Iris."
It went into me like a hand into warm water. My own name, in his low voice, in the dark of six-fourteen, not in the whisper, not in a book, not on a slate. Nobody says my name to me. They say it about me, on covers, in credits. He said it to me, once, like someone who has carried a word in his mouth for four months, and then again, against my throat, and I pulled him down.
It wasn't like the other nights. Tonight there was nothing left to look for, and so everything was slow. He undressed me as if there were no clock anywhere in the world. When I put my hands on him, he shook. I'd never felt him shake. I kissed the place under his jaw where the stubble stopped, and his breath came out of him with a sound like a word he'd forgotten.
"Tell me what you want," he said against my collarbone.
"This. You. Slowly."
"Like this?"
"Yes. Just like that. Don't you dare stop."
He didn't. He kissed me as if there were a right pace and he meant to find it, and when I moved under him he followed, and when I went still he went still, and waited, his breath on my lips, until I closed the inch myself. I rolled him onto his back and he let me, and I put both hands flat on his chest and felt his heart going like something let out of a gate, and said into his ear, in the whisper, every place I wanted his hands next, in order. He did them in order. When I ran out of places he found one I hadn't known about, low on my back, and I heard him make a sound that was almost a laugh and almost a prayer.
His mouth went to the comma and stayed there, and for the first time I didn't think of it as a mark someone else had read. It was mine, and I was letting him have it. Every time I made a sound he held still to listen to it, as if it were the only recording in the world he'd never heard, and then he went on, and the going on was worse and better than the stopping.
Near the end, with his forehead against mine, he said it so quietly I almost didn't hear it.
"Someday say something nobody wrote."
I didn't answer. I couldn't. I breathed in, and held it, and held it, and didn't count, and the dark came apart around me with my breath still held, and I didn't let it go until I had to, and when I did, it came out with his name in it.
After, we lay on our backs in the dark with the sheet over us and his hand loose around my wrist, and the sheet cooled on us, and between trains the room went very quiet, and I let it.
"Monday," he said into my hair. "Ten at night. Same dark. I'll book it."
"On a Monday?"
"I'll book a Monday. I want to talk to you with the lights off and nobody's deadline."
I left first. That much of the old rules was still mine.
"Night, Q."
"Night, Arturo."
On the platform at Adams and Wabash the wind came down between the buildings and went straight through my coat, and I stood under the heater with my hands in my pockets, one of them closed around a recorder with no card in it. I wasn't afraid of him anymore. I was afraid for him. Somewhere a person who was awake at midnight had his name, and his hospital, and his pager, and his voice saying "Come at seven," and I didn't even know what they looked like.
The train came in rocking. I sat at the back of the car and said his number to myself, under my breath, in time with the wheels, the way I used to say multiplication tables in Rockford so they'd stick. It stuck. Somewhere under the city he was walking to a parking garage with a black phone in his pocket and my card in his hand and his name in somebody else's mouth, and I wanted to turn around on a platform and see his face, only to be sure it was all right.