Chapter 3 #2
My eyes were the same, but sharper—the tiredness had been replaced with clarity, a new focus that made them almost predatory.
The line of my jaw was cleaner. My lips were fuller, the color of them darkened by something internal, as if the wanting had finally come to live there and was eating through from the inside.
My cheekbones were more distinct, like Margot’s in her best photographs, but less rehearsed: there was nothing staged about the flush that lived there and the effect was not cosmetic.
The effect was hunger, metabolized. The wanting that had always lived half-starved behind my eyes was now on its own caloric intake, and it had started to rebuild.
The neck was longer than I remembered. The line of my shoulders was surer, set just a fraction wider, as if I had been training for a marathon of being looked at and was, against all precedent, getting stronger by the step.
The sigils that ran up my neck and across the hollow at the angle of my jaw looked—fuck, I could not deny it—good.
Not pretty. Not decorative. They looked like something I had earned, by out-wanting everything that had tried to make me small.
I could not look away from her.
From us.
His gaze met mine in the mirror and did not, for the first time since arriving in this place, seem like a challenge.
The corner of my eye caught, on its way down to the floor, a flicker along the line of his cheekbone in the panel.
The flicker was gold.
Not the oyster-pale, soft mother-of-pearl shimmer that had been settled along his jaw and the inside of his wrist since he had walked toward me on the plain.
Gold. A warm, deep, unmistakable gold, the color of a coin held for a long time in a warm palm, the color of a wedding band beaten thin, and it ran along the cheekbone of the man in the panel from the corner of his eye to the small high curve at his temple, and it sat there, vivid, for the half of one heartbeat.
I stopped walking.
The hand at my back stopped with me. He did not pretend. He did not, the way he might easily have, kept walking and pulled me along with him; he did not, the way most men I had ever met would have, looked at the panel and said nothing. He stopped when I stopped.
I looked. The gold held. Then it went.
I watched, in the panel, his eyes close. He closed them with the unhurried discipline of a man closing the lid of an instrument he had been about to play and had decided not to play. The shimmer along his cheekbone, when he opened his eyes again, was oyster-pale. Settled. His own.
“I will explain that,” he said, very quietly. He had not moved his head. He spoke straight ahead, into the gallery, and his voice carried the way water carries across a still pool. “Come. There is so much to explain.”
The door, when he stopped us in front of it at the end of the third gallery, had not been a door a moment before.
It had been one mirrored panel among the hundred mirrored panels of the wall behind the colonnade, no different in size or finish or framing from any of its neighbors, indistinguishable, and then he turned his hand and the panel swung.
It swung inward on a hinge I could not, looking at it directly, locate. It opened into a low warm gold.
It was a study.
Walls of dark wood—not paneling, the wood itself, the long unbroken grain of it polished to a soft sheen the color of strong tea, and the wood had been chosen by somebody who had decided, at some point in a very long life, that he would rather sit inside a tree than next to one.
A low fire burned in a black grate set into the far wall.
The fire was the first fire I had seen in this place.
It made the small wet sound a real fire makes.
It threw real shadow. Two deep chairs sat at angles to the grate, the leather of them oxblood, soft, the arms shined to a paler tone where a pair of forearms had rested for a long time. A low table between them.
Behind a long writing desk on the right-hand wall, the wall itself was made of mirror—not the paneled mirror of the gallery but a single tall vertical strip of silver running floor to ceiling like a window, the surface of it pearled with the same soft iridescence I had touched on Suydam Street.
It moved very faintly. It was not, I realised after a half-second, reflecting the room.
It was reflecting nothing. It was waiting.
He brought me to the chair on the left. He did not seat me by his hand at my back.
He brought his right hand around to the front of me, the gloved one, and put two gloved fingers under my elbow with a courtesy so old it had no era, and he lowered me into the chair as a man might lower a glass he did not intend to spill.
The leather took me. It took me in the small warm exhale a chair takes a body it has been waiting for, and my spine, which had been holding itself in the long polite C of a woman pretending nothing was wrong, gave up the C in two soft stages and went into the back of the chair, and the back of the chair received it.
I made a small sound. I did not mean to.
He knelt.
He went down to one knee in front of me, and then to both. The black coat fell around him in two long lines on either side of his thighs. His head was at the height of my chest. His hands, both of them, lifted to the wet ruin of my right shoe.
The shoe was a Mary Jane, scuffed, bought on sale in Crown Heights two years ago, and it had filled with a black puddle on Knickerbocker Avenue at ten past nine and had been, since then, a small private misery on the end of my leg.
He looked at it. He looked at it with the same long held attention with which he had looked at me on the plain.
He lifted my heel. He turned the foot a quarter inch in his palm, the way a jeweler turns a stone toward the light.
His thumb, gloved, found the small wet buckle at the side of the strap.
He did not, having found it, hurry. He undid it with the slow precise patience of a man who had decided that this buckle, on this foot, on this woman, was the only thing he had to attend to in any of the realms he was sovereign over.
The buckle came open.
He drew the strap through the loop. He eased the shoe off. He set it down beside his knee on the rug.
He held my foot.
He did not, at first, do anything with it.
He held it in his gloved palm, the heel cupped, the arch lifted, the cold shamed instep bare to the warm gold air of the room, and he looked at it.
He looked at the dried blood at the kneecap above.
He looked at the small ladder of tights.
He looked at the smear of New York on the sole, and he did not flinch from it, and he did not, the way most men I had ever sat opposite would have, performed any reaction to it.
He looked at it the way he had looked at me.
He looked, and the looking was the thing.
Then he raised his right hand to his mouth and took the glove off with his teeth.
I want to put this on the page slowly, because it happened slowly.
He bit, very gently, at the very tip of the index finger of the glove—the soft leather between his teeth, the small private flash of his canines, the slow draw of the leather away from the hand by the tooth—and he pulled.
The glove peeled back over the knuckle. The knuckle came out pale, mercury-pale, the same shimmer along the inside of the wrist that I had touched on the plain.
He drew the leather the rest of the way off with a single slow contracted backward turn of his head.
The glove came away in his teeth. He set it, with as much care as he had set the shoe, on the rug beside his knee.
His palm came back to my foot.
His bare palm.
The heat of it went into the sole of my foot and from the sole of my foot up the long cold wet ladder of the calf and along the back of the knee where the bead of dried blood was and into the place at the base of the spine where his other hand had been resting, and it kept going.
It went up the ribs. It went into the back of my throat.
It made, as it travelled, a small humming line of itself along the cold seam of sigils on the inside of my left wrist, and the sigils, finally given the temperature they had been waiting for, settled.
I made the noise again. A small involuntary release.
To my shame, my pussy throbbed.
He did not look up at me. He kept his hand where it was. His thumb moved, once, in a slow stroke along the arch of my foot, from the ball to the heel and back. My toes curled against his palm without my asking them to.
“Eat first,” he said. His voice was lower in this room. The mirror behind his desk caught the shape of it and gave it back at the very edge of hearing. “Then I will tell you all you need to know.”
The tray was on the table at my elbow.
I did not see it arrive. I did not see anyone bring it.
It was, between one breath and the next, simply there: a low silver tray with a small round bowl of soup the color of old gold, a folded napkin of grey linen, a piece of dark bread on a wooden plate, a small dish of yellow butter, a wedge of soft cheese on a vine leaf, and a low tumbler of something the color of clear river water.
The smell of the soup came up off the tray and went into me with the effortless authority of a thing my body had been preparing for without my knowledge.
I picked up the spoon.
I ate.
He waited until I had set the spoon back in the bowl, watched me, sitting in the the chair opposite mine.
The fire moved between us in the grate. The mirror behind his desk pearled.
“So. I apologize for the shock of this. You must be confused.”
“Understatement of the century.”
“Quite. Well. My father is dying,” he said.