CHAPTER 10 #2
Renée closed the folio. Marina inclined her head to Elena and stepped out into the corridor to make the call to the moving crew. The vestibule was left with three people, and then Renée left too, and it was two.
“I have a case at ten-thirty,” he said. “Aortic valve. I will be finished by one.”
“Okay.”
I will find you stayed unspoken between them. There was no reason for it.
The valve was a Bentall procedure on a sixty-eight-year-old man with a bicuspid history and an aneurysmal root.
Nikolai opened at ten thirty-four. He left the East Wing conversation outside the operating-room door and thought only of the coronaries, the composite graft, and the narrow margin at the annulus where he preferred a pledgeted stitch.
He came off bypass after one hundred and eighteen minutes and completed the intracardiac work at ninety-two—four minutes slower than his personal average, and as clean as the field required.
At the scrub sink he let himself think of her.
He worked the fingernails first, then the webs, then the wrists to two inches above the crease, and he thought of the way she had put her palm on the rail of the first table in the private operating room and had not lifted it while he told her what the room was for.
It steadied his hands, which had not been unsteady, and he stopped counting on the count he was on because he had reached it.
He said one word to himself, unspoken, khorosho (good), and did not think in Russian again for the rest of the day.
He dried his hands on the paper the circulating nurse held out, thanked her by name, and went to speak to the family in the small consult room off the anteroom in a voice pitched to men and women who had been awake since before dawn.
By seven in the evening the penthouse was banked in the low light he had asked the housekeeper to keep on when he was expected home late.
He set his keys in the bowl on the entry table without looking at where they landed.
He went through the front rooms and the kitchen and did not find her, and then he went to the library and stopped in the doorway.
Elena lay on the deep couch under the pale wool throw.
The Foundation research binder was open on her chest and had risen and fallen twice while he stood there.
A pencil had slipped from her right hand and rested on the rug.
Her hair had dried and was pushed back from her forehead.
Her mouth was slightly parted. Her breath moved the top page of the binder in a small, regular flutter.
Marina came to the corridor behind him and paused at the threshold.
“Do not wake her,” he said, low.
“I was not going to.”
Marina stepped back without another word and the corridor gave up her footfall inside three paces.
He walked to the couch. He knelt on one knee beside the low table and slid a plain paper slip he had taken from the desk drawer between the pages the binder held open, at the paragraph her thumb had marked.
He closed the binder around the slip. He set the binder on the low table with the spine turned toward her, so she would see it first when she woke.
His overcoat was on the back of the reading chair where he had left it when he came through.
He lifted it and shook out the folds and settled it over her from shoulder to knee, the black cashmere still warm from him.
He turned the collar up along the side of her jaw so the draft that lived at the library window would not find her neck.
Her hair, when he leaned close, gave up a faint scent of green apple—a shampoo he had not seen in the bathroom cabinet, and he made a private note to keep it stocked.
Her breath kept its small regular flutter, undisturbed. He stood and looked down at her for a moment he did not count.
Then he crossed to the armchair opposite and sat.
He had left the Turgenev face-down on the side table three nights before and took it up now—a small blue-cloth edition of Fathers and Sons he had been re-reading in six-week cycles for a decade.
It was a private irony he permitted himself: Vasiliev collected first editions of Turgenev the way a man collects saints’ bones, and Nikolai read a shabby student copy at home.
It amused him in the way very few things did.
He opened the book at his marker. He did not turn the page.
For a long time he was aware only of the outline of the room and of the woman inside it.
The lamp threw its narrow gold on the arm of the couch and left the rest in the low library brown he preferred at this hour.
A steam pipe somewhere in the wall of the building put out one small ticking knock and then went silent.
He had lived here for eleven years and did not know which pipe it was.
The library smelled of paper and cold radiator metal and, faintly, of the sandalwood the housekeeper used on the shelves. The wall clock on the mantel put out its small brass tick at each second, and after some minutes he was not counting the ticks either.
He looked at her.
Her left hand lay open on the throw. The plain band caught the lamp; the diamond, returned after her shift, flashed once beside it.
He counted her breaths from three feet away, once through, and then he stopped counting because he did not want to know the number.