“I do not know what you mean.”
“I mean be lovers.”
“We are. We will be now always.”
She didn’t say more. He kissed her brow: touched her brow with his lips for a long time, which seemed like an answer, an answer that wasn’t yes or no. He covered her.
“Don’t you go,” she said. “Stay right here.”
“I will not go.”
“Just don’t.”
“No. Kit. I will not.”
He didn’t: he stayed with her as she slept; she knew, because it was late in the night, near dawn almost, when his leaving her side awoke her. She opened her eyes and turned to see the door of his bedroom open, and the tall shape of him, like a being not in a body, against the gray light of the far window.
5.
The house that Falin lived in was owned by an old woman, Anna Petroski, who had lived in the main house all her life with her brother till he died and now lived there alone. She had a condition of some kind, Kit never learned the name, that kept her from walking or grasping things except with great effort. Her brother had cared for her, and though he was gone she managed to go on; she was tall and stooped and broad-shouldered, with long arms that looked strong though they weren’t. In her house she moved around in an old wheeled office chair, pulling herself across the floor by handholds worn paintless by her progress. Old women from her church came to help, and Falin shopped for her sometimes. He once brought Kit into her part of the house when he paid his weekly rent, and she watched the old woman move around her kitchen in her huge slippers and flowered housecoat; she kept rags in various places to help strap a pot handle or a knife to her hand. Falin counted out bills, licking his thumb in a way Kit had never seen anyone else do and making jokes or remarks in Polish that made Miss Petroski smile; she watched Kit sharply though, with a small glittering inquiring eye.
The cats around the place had been her brother’s, and she seemed to disdain them. They had found or made their way under the eaves and out above Falin’s ceiling, where they hunted mice or the little flying squirrels that nested there, and down through another gap into his kitchen, dropping to the top of the refrigerator and to the counter and the floor, where Falin fed them.
“I will be gone a day and a night,” he said to Kit as he filled the cats’ cracked saucers. He was going to the state capital, where the offices of the Case Columbia Foundation were, a couple of hours’ drive away, where he would stay the night; she was to come to feed the cats, and after sundown water the garden. “It won’t be too much trouble?” he asked. “You have too much work?”
“It won’t be any trouble.”
He seemed harried or distracted, as though embarking on a long journey unprepared. The Case Columbia Foundation, according to Jackie, had been responsible for getting him the job he now held; had paid him a salary while he awaited an appointment, and helped him in other ways maybe too. He avoided Kit’s questions about why he was driving so far to talk to them.
He was already gone when next day she came to his house after her classes. His house was empty, and almost all that had made it his was gone with him—including the poems and manuscripts that had accumulated on the card table.
Empty. Kit sat on the couch; her couch. His absence was rich around her. She took her spiral notebook and a pencil from her bag. Since morning she had been thinking of a poem, or some verses anyway; for the first time in months, toying with lines and trying to perfect them. The idea arose as she studied her Russian, practicing her pronouns, her familiar and respectful forms, lost for so long to English. In our language, we have no thou.
She shed her shoes and tucked her feet beneath her. The blinds were drawn, the house dim and hot.
In our tongue now
We have no Thou
And must make do
With only You.
What people didn’t realize about their old thou and thee was that those were actually the familiar forms, the intimate ones; now they had that air of long-ago politeness and formality, but it was really the other way around.
Thou wert my son
My childhood chum
This cat; that bum;
Wert my loved one.
She liked the way this all hovered between a sort of language lesson and a sort of declaration of something to somebody. As though she hovered too. Thou wert my son.
Yet Thou wert God
Incarnate Word
Immortal Bird
Death never trod.
She’d maybe have to explain that to Falin; Keats’s nightingale. Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down. Wasn’t “tread” the word for what roosters did to hens, what male birds did to female? She saw she’d changed the rhyme scheme, and went back and altered the first stanza to match it, and liked it better:
In our tongue now
We must make do
With only You:
We have no Thou.
She lifted her head from her page: a car might have come into the drive in front. Not him though: she could tell. One of Miss Petroski’s church friends maybe.
Who is it wipes
My muddied brow?
Is it Thou?
Is it You?
Was it okay that the first line of this quatrain rhymed with nothing? She hadn’t known whom these lines spoke to—to no one, she had thought—and now a thickness came into her throat to read what she had written.
Art Thou so low
Or art so high?
I am but I
And then there must be a last line, ending in O; it seemed to exist already—the words of it surely existed, and they were gathering, self-selected, waiting for her to notice them; what she wanted to say to him, but not to him alone. She felt at her tongue’s root the sounds the last line must make; she felt the small solemn pause the reader’s eye or voice ought to take as it crossed the words, and where it would fall; but she couldn’t hear the words themselves.
Well it was just a joke, really, a trick, it was nothing at all. She looked up. There was a man in the garden.
She stood, the notebook slipping from her lap. It was a big man, more fat than tall, and he wore a narrow-brimmed straw fedora and a pale suit; his arms didn’t quite hang at his sides, like some big men he seemed to be holding a suitcase or something in each hand as he walked. He looked around at the growing plants, the wheelbarrow, kicked at something lying in the dirt; then he stepped up to the door and came in without knocking. He was all the way through the windowed porch before he saw Kit.