31. Dulcie
DULCIE
After I leave Kit at my parents’, I come home and move a pile of clean laundry off my bed.
There is nothing wrong with the laundry. It has simply become possible to imagine somebody else seeing it, and that makes me look at the room differently.
I put my clothes away. I leave the book on the bedside table and the glass of water beside it. The lamp is the one Dad found for me, with a shade Mom considers an improvement on his earlier work. The bed fits between the wall and the dresser with just enough room to walk past.
My room.
I sit on the edge of the mattress for a moment.
Kit’s bag is at my parents’ house, together with the milk and clothes and small collection of things which make an overnight visit seem like a modest relocation. Mom knows when he last ate. Dad knows where everything is, although he asked twice about the spare shirt.
They know I have invited Magnus to dinner.
Neither asked whether they should be pleased.
I am grateful for that now, alone in a room where my pleasure still feels like something I am learning how to keep.
The blouse I chose is blue, softer than the one I wore to the gallery. I turn up the cuffs, decide I prefer them down, and leave them that way. Nobody is waiting downstairs to tell me how late I have made us.
When the bell rings, I am ready.
Magnus stands outside with a paper bag from the bakery I asked him to stop at. He looks past me only far enough to make certain he isn’t stepping on something as he comes in.
I remember him standing here, examining the stairs and explaining the apartment he had found.
Tonight, he hands me the bag.
“They had the one you wanted.”
“Then this has already gone better than my day.”
“What happened?”
“A lid came off a pot of blue paint while I was carrying it. Most of the floor. Some of me.”
“Is that why your hair’s wet?”
“Yes.”
He laughs. I take the bag to the kitchen, and he follows after hanging his coat where I point.
The food is ready. I planned something that would not require me to make decisions over a hot stove while he watched. We eat at the little table where I read his messages, and for the first few minutes I am aware of that with every movement of my glass.
Then he tells me about an argument over the name of a machine part. One of the people involved has insisted on a term so elaborate that nobody can finish saying it before somebody else interrupts.
“Give it a number,” I say.
“We did. They argued about that too.”
“Then it has become a pet. You’re all attached.”
“I’ll suggest they take it home.”
I laugh. The memory of the phone on this table stays where it is. It doesn’t have to occupy every chair.
Last week, we disagreed about changing a visiting time. He had a reason; I had another. We found a different hour without him arriving anyway or me spending the evening defending why my plans counted. I remember that more readily than I remember the time we eventually chose.
There has been no spectacular new proof since Arthur’s birthday. Magnus comes when we agree. He asks about work. He knows which shirt Kit will tolerate going over his head and which one makes all of us regret the purchase. He remains interested when an answer takes longer than he expected.
I have watched that continue on days when I gave him no particular reason to hope.
“Where have you gone?” he asks.
“Nowhere. I’m here.”
I put down my fork.
“Wanting you here tonight doesn’t mean I’m moving back.”
His expression stills. He looks at me for a moment before answering.
“I know.”
“I need you to know it before the evening goes any further.”
“I do.”
“And I don’t want to spend the rest of dinner discussing it.”
“All right.”
He reaches for the water jug and fills his glass. Such an ordinary action, after an answer I used to think would ruin everything.
“Tell me about the paint,” he says.
So I do.
We leave the plates soaking and take the bakery bag into the living room.
The sofa cushion slips when Magnus sits. He catches it before it reaches the floor and pushes it back without a word about the sofa.
I sit beside him. For a while we share the pastry from a plate balanced on my knee. He takes the less neat piece without pretending he has made a sacrifice.
I set the plate on the table.
He watches me do it.
For a few seconds I am shy in a way I didn’t expect. We have been married, become parents, watched our marriage break under the truth of what he intended. I know the sound of him sleeping. Yet I don’t know what my hand will feel like when I put it in his tonight.
I try.
He turns his palm upward and closes his fingers around mine.
“I missed this,” I say.
“So did I.”
“I don’t mean only touching you.”
His thumb rests still against my hand while he waits.
“I missed having somewhere for the things I thought about you to go. Something funny. Something I wanted to ask. I would reach for the phone, then remember that I didn’t want to be the person who made everything easy again.”
“I noticed what I had expected you to keep giving me.”
“I know.”
The answer surprises us both. I can tell by the way he looks at me.
“I don’t need you to say it all tonight,” I add. “I remember.”
He nods.
I move closer and kiss him.
There is no abrupt disappearance of the past. I recognize him too well for that. But I recognize myself here too: the woman who has a key in her own bag and plans for tomorrow, who asked him to come because she wanted the evening in front of her.
When I draw back, his forehead rests lightly against mine.
“Dulcie.”
I like my name in his voice. I let myself like it.
His hand lifts toward the back of my neck.
Then it stops.
He catches the movement before it reaches me, fingers still in the space beside my face. His eyes meet mine. He doesn’t turn it into a question I have to answer quickly enough to spare him embarrassment.
The pause reaches something in me more deeply than a promise could.
I take his wrist.
For a moment I hold it, feeling the simple fact that the movement is mine to make. Then I put his hand against my cheek, where I want it, and turn my face into his palm.
“Here.”
His breath leaves him slowly.
“Here,” he says.
I kiss him again.
At the top of the stairs, I switch on the lamp instead of the overhead light.
Magnus stops inside the doorway. The room leaves very little space for two people to hesitate. I take his hand and draw him farther in. His hip catches the corner of the dresser.
“Sorry,” I say. “There’s no other way past it.”
“I’ll learn.”
He smiles, and some of my uncertainty loosens.
This is the room where I cried after telling him not to come to the hospital. Where Mom helped me fold my own shirt into the bag. Where I sat listening to him leave after the first time I stopped him in this house.
It has held more than fear. It has held me reading to Kit before I knew his face, laughing on the phone with my father, sleeping without waiting for another person’s answer.
I am allowed to bring happiness into it too.
“I need you to listen if I ask for something different,” I say.
“I will.”
“Even if I don’t explain it well.”
He takes a moment before answering.
“You don’t have to make a case.”
I sit beside him on the bed. I have spent so much time imagining this as a decision that I haven’t allowed for the small awkwardness of being here, of wanting familiar closeness in a body which has had its own enormous months.
I don’t want to be praised for getting back to anything.
I tell him that.
He looks at me, his face serious in the lamplight.
“I’m here with you now.”
It is a plain answer. It leaves room for me to believe it without arguing with my own reflection.
I reach for him.
He lets me pull him down.
The bed shifts under two people; I bought it for one. His weight settles on an elbow beside me, careful, and I put my hand flat on his chest. His heart is going faster than his face admits.
“Kiss me first,” I say. “Then I’ll tell you the rest.”
He kisses me. It isn’t the sofa kiss. This one has his whole mouth in it, and I open under it and hear the sound I make, low in my throat, the one I’d forgotten was mine. Heat climbs the back of my neck. My thighs press together and then apart without asking me.
“Shirt,” I say.
He sits up and pulls it over his head. I’ve watched him do that a thousand times, and I watch it now as though it’s owed to me. His shoulders. The line of dark hair below his navel. He drops the shirt on the floor and doesn’t look to see where it lands.
I undo my own blouse. His hands stay at his sides. His eyes don’t.
My body isn’t the one he had. My belly is soft where it was flat, and the line below my navel hasn’t faded. My breasts are heavier, and they aren’t only mine; I fed his son from them at four o’clock. He looks at all of it. I wait to want to cover myself.
I don’t.
“You can touch me,” I say. His hand comes up, and I catch it and move it from my breast to my waist. “Not there. They’re sore. Later, maybe. Ask.”
“I’ll ask.”
His voice has gone low and rough on two words, and that goes through me lower than his hand does. His palm is hot against my side. He spreads his fingers to hold more of me, and I lie back and take him with me.
We get my trousers off between us, badly. One leg catches at the ankle, and I have to kick, and the lamp shade tips against the wall and stays tipped. Neither of us fixes it.
Then his mouth is at my collarbone. Then lower, at the top of my breast where it doesn’t hurt, and my back comes off the mattress on its own.
“Lower,” I say. “Magnus. Lower.”
He goes. His mouth on my belly, on the soft part, on the line. I would have hurried past it. He doesn’t. He kisses it as if it were somewhere he meant to visit. Then his shoulders push my thighs apart, and his mouth is on me, and I stop being able to hold my sentences in order.
He is slow. He’s learning me again, and I can feel him doing it, the pause when I breathe in, the change when I don’t. My hand goes into his hair. I don’t pull. I hold on.
“There,” I say. “Don’t. Don’t change it.”
He doesn’t change it.