CHAPTER 13 #3
"The first one. The one where the moon used to be close enough that they could climb to it on a ladder out of a boat. The one where she stays. The one where he watches from below and she watches from above and the moon goes away from them and they never speak."
He stays still for a beat. He gives me the look I have learned as his attention at full draw — flatterless, flinchless, set at the steady aperture of a man who has tuned his attention the way other men tune instruments.
"Why that one."
"Because she chose to stay."
"Yes."
The sentence because I chose to stay stays inside my mouth, said and unsaid at once. He has heard it. I can tell by how his hand on the edge of the desk relaxes by one degree and then settles.
"Calvino was wrong about the moon," he says. "The moon is closer than he thought."
He says it as he says everything: declarative, low, the spaces between his words the charge.
"How so."
"The moon is at the window. The moon is in the room.
The moon is what is held, and what is held is close by the holding.
He wrote the story as though the closeness was the thing that had been lost. The closeness is the thing that gets built.
" He pauses. "He was a very good writer with one error.
The error is permitted, as long as the prose around it is honest."
I sit with that.
"You have been reading me," I say. "You registered the book."
"I register everything you read."
He offers the fact past the apology stage; my asking-for-one passed weeks ago.
"Take another," he says. He slides a second slim volume across the desk. Il barone rampante. The Baron in the Trees.
I take it.
"Thank you."
"Elena."
"Gabriel."
"You are tired."
"I am."
"Then go to the suite. The corridor will not bother you tonight. Stefan will not knock unless you ask. Alexei has been told. Nikolai has been told. " His eyes go to the window I cannot see — the storm is in his ear too. "The building will hold."
"I know it will."
I take the book and I stand. He stands too, finally, on my way out — for the gesture itself, as a man stands when a woman he is paying attention to has decided to leave a room.
The walk to the door is mine alone, and the leaving holds steadier for it.
I close the door behind me. The latch is small and clean.
---
At 23:00 the suite is warm under the circadian lamps at their dim-evening setting and the storm is still on the building.
I sit at the window-that-mimics-a-window — the framed daylight panel above the writing desk — and beyond it, four floors and twelve stories of building between me and the sky, the West Annex high windows are doing what they have been doing all day. The rain has held steady since morning.
I imagine it on the glass at Floor Eleven. I imagine it on the air-shaft. I imagine it on the seam at the upper sash of Lab B.
The Calvino is on the bedside table. Le Cosmicomiche, returned today and forgotten on the chief's small fridge tray; Gabriel had Stefan bring it back to me. There is a thin paper marker at the moon story. Gabriel's hand. Of course it is.
I take the photograph out of my wallet and I look at it for the second time today.
Sophia at twenty-one. The Cardozo lanyard.
The Fifth Avenue building behind her. Her eyes went past the camera and found me; the camera was an excuse.
I am the one she was looking at; she has been looking at me out of this photograph for six years; the looking continues.
I want the looking to continue. I have said her name today.
I have said it twice, into a telephone, to a woman who heard it steady and held the line, and I have said it under my breath in a small room with a teak veneer table, and the saying left me whole. The silence might have broken me. The speaking held.
I put the photograph back. I close the wallet. The drawer stays empty; the wallet rides the bedside table tonight, beside the book.
I sit at the desk. The silver is at my sternum where it has been all day, warm against me, and the warmth tells me it is there without my hand.
My grandmother lifted bread out of the oven and said ti tengo in the precise tone she said everything to me — soft, absolute, complete.
I hold you. I have you. I keep you. The architecture of being held was a lesson she taught past her intent to teach it.
The teaching arrived anyway, and it stayed.
I look at the panel above the desk. I watch the simulated rain on its simulated glass.
I follow the raindrops sliding down the pane-that-mimics-a-pane.
The drops live elsewhere — on the high windows above me, four floors up — and I mark them across the distance, as I register anything outside the room I am in: by proxy, by listening, by a kind of remote palpation I have learned from caring for children whose pain has gone past their words. One. Two. Three. Four.
The four-beat. Stefan's count. I keep it. I register five. Six. Seven. Eight. The wind gusts and the count slips. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve.
I lose count at twelve.
I am held.