Tug seemed fine most of the time, but occasionally he erupted into fits of anger over things she considered trivial. He couldn’t sit through a movie he found stupid and would retreat to the lobby and pace there, while the ushers looked at him worriedly. Gradually she understood that he often didn’t sleep, because his mind was at a simmering boil, his muscles clenched with its heat. He brought the same explosiveness to bed, covering her body with his, kissing her neck, her shoulders, and everywhere else, murmuring in her ear. Afterward, as they held each other, he gave off so much warmth that his chest grew slippery with sweat.
This didn’t trouble Grace all that much, and he did seem to be getting better. What did bother her was that he didn’t want to hear about her patients. He never once asked about her sessions, and when she offered anecdotes he would change the subject as quickly and politely as he could, visibly shutting down. But she came to understand that he’d been through enough trauma and didn’t need to be reminded of how much of it surrounded him. In a way it was also good for her, because it enabled her to draw a firm line between work and home. Work ended the second she left the office, and by not speaking to him about it, she found she thought about it less. During the day she concentrated on her patients, clear-minded, sharp with perspective, then later she focused on Tug.
When she made him laugh, the pulse of satisfaction was so powerful it was almost physical. Getting to know him, to understand the depths of him, felt like her vocation, a task set to her specific parameters. He was difficult, and the terms of their relationship complicated, yet being with him was somehow perfect. She’d been waiting to feel like this for years.
One Sunday they had planned to go shopping. She needed a new coffeemaker and a few other kitchen things, and wanted to take him to a store she liked in Little Italy. They were apart the night before; Tug had explained that he didn’t feel well and wanted to go to bed early. In the morning he didn’t come over, which was unlike him; she had never once known him not to show up where and when he said he would. And he didn’t answer the phone.
Thinking he might’ve come down with something, she drove over to his apartment and rang the bell. The lights were off, and she heard nothing inside. He hadn’t given her a key. But when she turned the handle, the door was unlocked. She walked in and said, “Tug?”
They spent almost all their time at her place, and she’d been here very little since the first weeks they’d known each other. Not much had changed. It was still very neat: no dust, no disarray, not even any mail. Wondering where he put everything, she called his name again.
Getting no response, she climbed the stairs. The apartment was so quiet that she thought he must be out. She walked into his bedroom, and stopped short.
He was lying on the bed, on top of the covers, staring up at the ceiling, his mouth open. His lips were rimmed with white flecks. Then she was on top of him, shaking him, her hands gripping his shirtsleeves, her own heart flopping and seizing, and she said, “What did you take, Tug? What did you take?”
He seemed to be looking at her through the wrong end of a telescope, and it took him a full minute to resolve her into something he recognized. “I didn’t take anything,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
Kneeling next to him on the bed, she wanted to wipe away the flecks from his mouth — spittle, she realized, from the hours he’d been lying there — but she could sense, as if there were an actual barricade, how little he wanted to be touched.
“We were supposed to go out,” she said softly. “Did you forget?”
“Oh.” He looked up back up at the ceiling, then at her. “I’m sorry,” he said, the words sounding hollow, void of content or color.
“Hey,” she said. “Talk to me. Are you okay?”
He swallowed. “A little sick, I guess.”
“Let me get you something,” she said, touching his hand as lightly as she could, knowing he wasn’t physically sick. “Water?”
He nodded. She left the room to fetch it, shaken by the look in his eyes. It wasn’t sadness or numbness, regret or remorse. He knew she wanted to take care of him, and he was looking at her with pity.
When she came back with the glass, though, he was sitting propped up on pillows like an actual invalid. As he drank she opened the curtains, letting the watery March day filter into the room with a lusterless, cloudy, blue-gray light.
He had licked his lips and his mouth was clear. “I’m sorry,” he said again.
“You don’t have to apologize to me,” she said.
“I felt bad last night, and I couldn’t sleep. And then the hours just kind of blended together. I lost track of things.”
“I figured it was something like that.”
There were things she could have said, but she didn’t because she knew he had heard them before. She herself had said them. So instead she sat with him silently, and after a while the clouds seemed to clear and the light grew a little less pale.
Afterward, they didn’t talk about it much.
Tug had gotten up and taken a shower, and they went off to Little Italy. At first he acted vague, distant, like a child who’d just woken from a nap and was still half submerged in the dream world. But soon he was helping her pick out the coffeemaker, and bought her a set of espresso cups, and by the time they were having lunch he was back to his normal self — asking questions, making her laugh. They went back to her place and went to bed, and it was like the conversation they should have had: tentative, then opening, finally finding their rhythm together. For the rest of the day it was as if nothing strange had ever happened.
But the incident had rattled her. She caught herself staring at him, wondering what had set it off. A child he’d seen in the street? A call from his ex-wife? She wanted to ask, but also not to, because she hoped that not asking would bring him to her of his own volition. Whenever he saw her looking at him quizzically, he would shake his head — knowing exactly what she was thinking, and asking her to let it go.
But she couldn’t. Two days later, they were making dinner when she poured him a glass of wine and said, “Can we talk about it?”
“Of course we can,” he said, in a tone that implied just the opposite. He was looking down at a clove of garlic, slicing it carefully. “What do you want to know?”
“Anything,” she said. “Does it happen often?”
“Does what happen often?”
“You know what I mean.”
He sighed heavily and wiped his forehead with the knife still clutched in his hand, seeming more irritated than anything else. “No,” he said, “not often.” Then he grabbed a tomato and started chopping it, round pieces collapsing into their own juice on the plastic board.
“So was it something I said?”
She had meant this as a joke but he flared with annoyance. “Yes, Grace, it was something you said. It was how you ask questions in that special therapist voice that’s supposed to make people tell you everything.”
Take a minute, she told herself. Breathe. She slowly poured herself a glass of wine, watching the liquid rise up in the crystal, a small dark sea. “Why does it upset you so much for me to ask questions?” she said.