CHAPTER 9 #4
The master bedroom door is half open. The lamp on the writing table by the window is on.
The blackout shades are down for the night and have been down since seventeen-hundred.
The wood-burning fireplace at the south wall is banked low; cedar in the wood, a small bright orange line under the gray.
The four-poster of iron-darkened oak — the iron of the southwest post catching the firelight cooler than the iron of the other three; I will learn that, three weeks from now — is made up in white linen with an ivory wool blanket folded at the foot.
The 19th-century chaise is at the east window, cream velvet, one cushion at the head, a small cashmere throw over its arm.
I walk to the bed. I lift the ivory wool blanket from the foot of the four-poster.
The wool is dense and warm and smells of cedar and, beneath it, of him — a clean, dry, almost-mineral something underneath the cedar that I do not have a word for and will not have a word for tonight.
I carry it to the chaise. I sit on the cream velvet.
I take off the dove-gray wool trousers and fold them on the cushion at the head; I leave the cashmere on. I lie down on the chaise. I pull the ivory wool blanket up to my chin.
He comes into the room at twenty-two-twenty.
I am not asleep. He does not turn on the overhead light.
He walks across the carpet without looking at the chaise, as if a woman in his bedroom in his blanket on his chaise is the most natural fact in the world tonight; as if my presence is a thing he has been counting on and would not name.
He goes to the wood-burning fireplace at the south wall, lifts a small iron tool from the brass stand, and turns one log a quarter-turn to keep the bank steady.
He sets the tool down. He crosses to the four-poster.
He takes off his suit jacket and lays it over the back of a small writing chair at the bed's foot.
He takes off his tie and folds it across the jacket.
He sits on the edge of the four-poster and unlaces his shoes and sets them under the bed. He does not turn his head to me.
He lies down on top of the white linens in his shirt and trousers, his right hand at his sternum, his left hand at his side. The brand under the cuff of his shirt is hidden. He closes his eyes.
After a minute his breathing finds its long slow night-rate.
He is asleep.
He is across the room from me and across an iron-darkened four-poster and the entire history of the building between us, and he is asleep.
He has not asked me what I am doing on the chaise.
He has not said the bed is yours; come to it.
He has not said the guest suite is across the hall; go to it.
He has not said anything. He has come into the room, banked the fire, taken off his shoes, lain down, and slept.
I listen.
The compressors of the climate system cycle on at twenty-two-forty for nine minutes and off again.
The wood-burning fireplace pops once. The greenhouse stair, somewhere fifty feet away, gives its small wooden creak.
The blackout shades are down and the building is on its low heating cycle and the bar of corridor light that has held the cream wall of the guest suite for four nights is not in this room because this room has no corridor and no bar.
The dark in here is the dark Julian sleeps in.
The dark in here is dim and full of him.
I lie under the ivory wool blanket on the cream velvet of the chaise and I listen to the man across the room breathe.
I am not afraid of him.
I write the sentence on the inside of my own chest the way I would write a column footer, the way I would set a number against a row of numbers.
I am not afraid of him. The man across the room has not fed live in two years.
The man across the room has the considering line at the corner of his mouth and the right boot on the worn spot of the rug.
The man across the room said, low, Quinn, across six feet of cold tile and let his pupils retract because I had said I am all right. The man across the room is the building. The building is a body. I am inside the body of the thing. The body is not what I am afraid of.
I am afraid of the man with the scar at his upper lip.
He has my mother's photographs on his phone.
He has my father's address in his head. He has the brass pencil in the inside pocket of a navy parka somewhere in this cold city tonight, and he is, by the slow tidy logic of a man who works for a man who has been alive for six hundred and twenty-two years, going to put the pencil back on a desk in this building inside the next ten days, and I will pick it up, and the pencil will be mine again, and I will know — when I lift it — where it has been and whose hand has held it, and I will, by then, have learned the shape of his small clean smile from a frozen frame on a sixty-inch wall monitor, and I will not forget it.
I close my eyes.
Across the room he breathes.
I listen.