CHAPTER 7 #3
I do not move for one full count of ten.
Then I reach behind me with my right hand and find the brass radiator under the window.
The cast iron is warm enough now that I flatten my palm against the layer of cream paint and not the metal.
The cream paint has the soft give of a century of paint over paint. I grip. My knuckles whiten.
I grip the radiator behind me because my knees are not, at this minute, willing to do their job, and the cast iron is the only thing in this room that has not become a question.
I stand for thirty seconds. Then I walk on legs I do not entirely recognize to the small table where the two crystal decanters sit.
I pour one third of a glass of Rémy XO into a cut-crystal old-fashioned.
I drink half of the third. The cognac is honey and orange peel and the small flame of a thing that does not know it is medicine.
I close Volume One with my left hand. I pick up the leather memo cover from the seat of the reading chair.
I take the brass pencil out of the inside clip.
I wipe the cap with the pad of my thumb — once, twice, three times, because my thumb has been on his shirt and on his jaw and I want one clean thing in my hand.
I clip the pencil back into the cover and tuck the cover under my left arm.
I open the library door. The corridor is empty. The teak panelling glows in the low Sunday light. I walk past the kitchen, past the dining room, past the great room with the Tabriz worn pale in one spot, and along the back hallway to the guest suite.
I close the door behind me. I do not lock it. I have never locked it.
I cross to the four-poster bed and sit on the edge.
Then I lie back, the leather memo cover set carefully on the bedside table, the brass pencil inside it, my shoes still on.
I lie with my hands flat on the cream wool of the blanket on either side of my hips.
The ceiling has a small plaster medallion at its center where a chandelier used to hang; the medallion has been painted over six times.
The wool of my trousers, on the inside of my right thigh, is wet.
I feel it without putting my hand to it.
The wet is small. The wet is a fact. The mouth at the lower-left of my own mouth is bruised — not bruised black-and-blue; bruised in the way a thumb pressed too long against the wrist comes up pink and stays pink for an hour.
He did not bite me. He did not put his teeth at the freckle.
He kissed it. The bruise at the lower-left corner of my lower lip is the bruise of a careful kiss, not a careless one. It is the bruise of a kiss begun with a man holding back.
It is 17:30.
I lie still. I do not let myself think the word that wants to be thought, because if I think the word I have decided something I have not yet decided.
I think instead about the 1882 ledger entry, and the seal of the wheel, and the V on the page with the saber-arm tremor on the right side, and the way the forged signatures on the routing manifests do not have the tremor; I think about the variance memo I have not sent and will not send; I think about my mother's chart, and the dose of vancomycin that was on the order and not in the line; I think about my father in a room outside Albany asleep at this hour on a Sunday with the rail visible through the small window over his bed.
I think about Henry Quinn. I think about Constance Quinn.
I trace the appendectomy scar on my right hip through the wool with my fingertip without sitting up.
I do not think the word.
I lie on the bed in the guest suite at 17:30 with my mouth bruised at the lower-left corner and the wool of my trousers wet at the inside of one thigh and the brass pencil cap clean under my thumb in the leather cover on the bedside table; I do not yet think the word I will not yet think.
Julian crossed the corridor outside his office on floor 35 and stood with his back to the cool teak panelling of the wall for the length of one full minute, the brand on the inside of his left forearm pulsing cold under the cuff of the charcoal shirt.
He had told her the year of his birth. He had let her say his given name in his own house.
He had let her open her mouth to him at his writing desk above his first ledger, and he had not — not — taken more than her mouth, and the discipline of the not-taking sat in him like the silver coin that had lain at his right temple for fourteen hours in 1689.
He went into the office and poured Hennessy Paradis into a Baccarat tumbler that matched the one she was, at that moment, drinking the Rémy XO out of in the library, and he set the tumbler down without lifting it to his mouth.
He thought about the freckle and the inhale and the brass pencil cap she had been turning under her thumb in her pocket for three days that he had heard her turning every time she crossed a corridor.
He took the private elevator down to the clinic on floor 42.
Helene was not in; her cobalt enamel pin sat on the steel cart.
He drew a steel cup of A-negative from the cooler — her type, by coincidence; his preferred, by metabolism — and drank it standing.
He did not need to feed. He fed. The brand cooled by a degree. He set the cup in the sink and went back up.