“Nothing.”
“Conversation, talk, whatever. Affection,” he said. “This is not a major moment in the world. It’ll come and go. But we’re here, so.”
“I want you to leave, please.”
He shrugged and said, “Whatever.” Then he sat there.
“You said, ‘Tell me what you want.’ I want you to leave.”
He sat there. He didn’t move. He said, “I canceled the thing for a reason. I don’t think this is the reason, this particular conversation. I’m looking at you. I’m saying to myself, You know what she’s like? She’s like someone convalescing.”
“I’m willing to say it was my mistake.”
“I mean we’re here. How did this happen? There was no mistake. Let’s be friends,” he said.
“I think we have to stop now.”
“Stop what? What are we doing?”
He was trying to speak softly, to take the edge off the moment.
“She’s like someone convalescing. Even in the museum, this is what I thought. All right. Fine. But now we’re here. This whole day, no matter what we say or do, it’ll come and go.”
“I don’t want to continue this.”
“Be friends.”
“This is not right.”
“No, be friends.”
His voice carried an intimacy so false it seemed a little threatening. She didn’t know why she was still sitting here. He leaned toward her then, placing a hand lightly on her forearm.
“I don’t try to control people. This is not me.”
She drew away and stood up and he was all around her then. She tucked her head into her shoulder. He didn’t exert pressure or try to caress her breasts or hips but held her in a kind of loose containment. For a moment she seemed to disappear, tucked and still, in breathless hiding. Then she pulled away. He let her do this and looked at her so levelly, with such measuring effect, that she barely recognized him. He was ranking her, marking her in some awful and withering way.
“Be friends,” he said.
She found she was shaking her head, trying to disbelieve the moment, to make it reversible, a misunderstanding. He watched her. She was standing near the bed and this was precisely the information contained in his look, these two things, her and the bed. He shrugged as if to say, It’s only right. Because what’s the point of being here if we don’t do what we’re here to do? Then he took off his jacket, a set of unhurried movements that seemed to use up the room. In the rumpled white shirt he was bigger than ever, sweating, completely unknown to her. He held the jacket at his side, arm extended.
“See how easy. Now you. Start with the shoes,” he said. “First one, then the other.”
She went toward the bathroom. She didn’t know what to do. She walked along the wall, head down, a person marching blindly, and went into the bathroom. She closed the door but was afraid to lock it. She thought it would make him angry, provoke him to do something, wreck something, worse. She did not slide the bolt. She was determined not to do this unless she heard him approach the bathroom. She didn’t think he’d moved. She was certain, nearly certain that he was standing near the coffee table.
She said, “Please leave.”
Her voice was unnatural, so fluted and small it scared her further. Then she heard him move. It sounded almost leisurely. It was a saunter, almost, and it took him past the radiator, where the cover rattled slightly, and in the direction of the bed.
“You have to go,” she said, louder now.
He was sitting on the bed, unbuckling his belt. This is what she thought she heard, the tip of the belt sliding out of the loop and then a little flick of tongue and clasp. She heard the zipper coming down.
She stood against the bathroom door. After a while she heard him breathing, a sound of concentrated work, nasal and cadenced. She stood there and waited, head down, body on the door. There was nothing she could do but listen and wait.
When he was finished, there was a long pause, then some rustling and shifting. She thought she heard him put on his jacket. He came toward her now. She realized she could have locked the door earlier, when he was on the bed. She stood there and waited. Then she felt him lean against the door, the dead weight of him, an inch away, not pushing but sagging. She slid the bolt into the chamber, quietly. He was pressed there, breathing, sinking into the door.
He said, “Forgive me.”
His voice was barely audible, close to a moan. She stood there, and waited.
He said, “I’m so sorry. Please. I don’t know what to say.”
She waited for him to leave. When she heard him cross the room and close the door behind him, finally, she waited a full minute longer. Then she came out of the bathroom and locked the front door.
She saw everything twice now. She was where she wanted to be, and alone, but nothing was the same. Bastard. Nearly everything in the room had a double effect — what it was and the association it carried in her mind. She went out walking and when she came back the connection was still there, at the coffee table, on the bed, in the bathroom. Bastard. She had dinner in a small restaurant nearby and went to bed early.
When she went back to the museum the next morning he was alone in the gallery, seated on the bench in the middle of the room, his back to the entranceway, and he was looking at the last painting in the cycle, the largest by far and maybe most breathtaking, the one with the coffins and cross, called Funeral.
MIDNIGHT IN DOSTOEVSKY
We were two somber boys hunched in our coats, grim winter settling in. The college was at the edge of a small town way upstate, barely a town, maybe a hamlet, we said, or just a whistle-stop, and we took walks all the time, getting out, going nowhere, low skies and bare trees, hardly a soul to be seen. This was how we spoke of the local people: they were souls, they were transient spirits, a face in the window of a passing car, runny with reflected light, or a long street with a shovel jutting from a snowbank, no one in sight.
We were walking parallel to the tracks when an old freight train approached and we stopped and watched. It seemed the kind of history that passes mostly unobserved, a diesel engine and a hundred boxcars rolling over remote country, and we shared an unspoken moment of respect, Todd and I, for times past, frontiers gone, and then walked on, talking about nothing much but making something of it. We heard the whistle sound as the train disappeared into late afternoon.
This was the day we saw the man in the hooded coat. We argued about the coat — loden coat, anorak, parka. It was our routine; we were ever ready to find a matter to contest. This was why the man had been born, to end up in this town wearing that coat. He was well ahead of us and walking slowly, hands clasped behind his back, a smallish figure turning now to enter a residential street and fade from view.
“A loden coat doesn’t have a hood. A hood isn’t part of the context,” Todd said. “It’s a parka or an anorak.”
“There’s others. There’s always others.”
“Name one.”
“Duffel coat.”
“There’s duffel bag.”
“There’s duffel coat.”
“Does the word imply a hood?”
“The word implies toggles.”
“The coat had a hood. We don’t know if the coat had toggles.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Because the guy was wearing a parka.”
“Anorak is an Inuit word.”
“So what.”
“I say it’s an anorak,” he said.
I tried to invent an etymology for the word parka but couldn’t think fast enough. Todd was on another subject — the freight train, laws of motion, effects of force, sneaking in a question about the number of boxcars that trailed the locomotive. We hadn’t stated in advance that a tally would be taken, but each of us had known that the other would be counting, even as we spoke about other things. When I told him now what my number was, he did not respond, and I knew what this meant. It meant that he’d arrived at the same number. This was not supposed to happen — it unsettled us, it made the world flat — and we walked for a time in chagrined silence. Even in matters of pure physical reality, we depended on a friction between our basic faculties of sensation, his and mine, and we understood now that the rest of the afternoon would be spent in the marking of differences.