CHAPTER 16
Avery
◆
“The Institute opened that year,” he said, with his hands where I could see them. “The college took the money the year after, and the trustees took a room in this building.”
“You could have told me that in the car,” I said.
“You would have gone to the board anyway.”
“That is a very polite way to say you wanted to watch me do it.”
“I wanted the board to tell you before I did,” he said, and he kept his eyes on the bronze the entire time he was saying it. “You believe metal and paper. You do not believe men. The metal and I happen to agree about that year, so let it go first.”
“I do believe you. I also check you. Those are two different jobs and I intend to keep doing both of them.”
The chapel bell started while we were on the steps. It ran four seconds behind the clock over the hall door, and it did that at every quarter for the rest of the night. Every course after that was measured against a wrong instrument. Once I heard it I could not stop hearing it.
The dining room off the main hall is paneled to the picture rail.
The oak is dark enough to swallow two lamps.
There were eleven of them at that table and then me.
Every one of them held a seat on the roll or a chair on some board that answered to it.
Nobody said the name of the thing they were, because nobody in that room needed telling.
They put me at the middle of the long side, which at a table like that is the chair you give the exhibit.
They were courteous in the way money is courteous.
It costs nothing and it buys the room. One of them asked what winter does to the Kestrel Library, and another answered him for four minutes.
I ate, and said the small true things, and kept my hands off the silver.
The man across from me set his glass down and spoke to Julian. He did it without looking at me, which is its own kind of accuracy.
“The Custodian asked to be kept informed of the work.”
Julian answered him with one nod and went back to his plate. My fork was in my left hand. I put it down and left it down. Then I did the sums on that sentence while the plates were cleared, and the sums came out the way they always come out with that name in them.
The man on my left stood to reach the water and did not sit back down right away. His hand came down flat on my back while he was standing over me. There was one dress layer between his palm and my skin. He left it there and said something warm about the residency to the room in general.
Julian’s face did nothing. He did not look up and he did not look away. He finished the sentence he was in. His glass did not move a quarter inch on the cloth.
Then the table changed, and no person at it did anything I could have pointed to.
The man two seats down stopped partway through a word about the endowment and started the word again lower.
Somebody at the head turned his chair a few degrees toward the fire, so that his shoulder came between him and us.
The talk about the library came back on, and it came back on smaller.
My back was warm under one hand. The room around that hand had dropped several degrees. The hand came off me without hurry, and its owner sat, and put both hands on the cloth where they could be seen. He did not touch his glass again for a long time.
Nothing had happened. Eleven grown men had rebuilt a dinner around a man who had done nothing whatsoever. I was the only person there who was not doing it, so I got the whole picture instead of my part in it.
Julian set his glass down and spoke to the room once, in the voice he keeps for instruments and agendas.
“Miss Vance is the Carrow Fellow in residence. Her progress is a matter for the Institute.”
Nobody argued with it. Somebody asked about the road work out past Marrow Creek. The table went back to being a dinner. I sat in it with a cold place on my back and a piece of bread I had no intention of eating.
We waited under the portico while the car came around.
The cold had the clean, hard quality it gets on the first night the stars look wintery.
Thirty-three at midnight was the forecast and it was getting there early.
My breath went out white and his went out white, and neither of us spent any of it on talking.
The bell rang the quarter somewhere behind the roof, four seconds late.
He drove, and the lake was on our right between the bare branches, flat and black. The heater came up, and the college went out of the back window behind us in one piece. I let the first mile go by, and then I said the thing I had been holding since the water glass.
“You didn’t move when he put his hand on me,” I said. “Everybody else at that table moved.”
He did not tell me I was imagining it. He did not ask me what I meant. Those are the two doors most men take, and he took neither.
“I did not move,” he said. “That is not the same as not minding. Do you want the true answer or the one that lets you sleep?”
“The true one. I have had the other one all night and it did not help.”
“I am jealous. I am not going to dress it up and I am not going to apologize.”
The heater ticked over. I turned that sentence around twice looking for the trapdoor in it, and there was no trapdoor in it. My hands had gone colder than the air in the car.
“You went the whole night without changing your face,” I said.
“My face is not a reliable document,” he said. “You should stop reading it.”
“Then give me the count instead. How long was his hand on me?”
“Nine seconds.”
“You counted,” I said.
“I count. You have known that about me since the Ledger Room, and you have never asked me to stop.”
“I could have handled it myself. I was handling it.”
“You did handle it,” he said, and he took the turn without slowing for it. “You put your fork down, you kept your hands where they were, and you let him be the only man at that table doing anything. That was a better answer than any of mine would have been.”
“And your answer was to sit there and finish your sentence.”
“My answer was to sit there and let eleven men work out the weather without being told,” he said. “Tomorrow every one of them will remember being cold. None of them will remember why.”
“That is a horrible thing to be good at.”
“It is. I am going to keep doing it.”
“You are angry,” I said, and I put it as a statement so that he would have to work to get out of it.
“I am not angry. Angry is weather and it passes through a man on its way somewhere. This is a decision. I made it at the table and I am making it now.”
“You said jealous and I said angry, and you corrected me twice tonight,” I said. “Both times you reached past the easy word and took the one that costs more.”
“Because the expensive word is the accurate one. You would have found that out inside an hour, and then you would have thought less of me for the hour.”
“You could have said something to me at the table.”
“I could have,” he said. “You would have had to be defended in front of men who do not love you, and I do not do that to you. I did the other thing.”
I put my head against the cold glass. Then I did the arithmetic I do every night without meaning to.
I have been counting the days down since the night I signed, and each one that went was something I got back off them.
I counted them tonight in the same order, and the count had turned over on me.
I did not want this to run out. That is all of it, plainly, with nothing underneath it, and I had been walking a wide circle around it for a while.
He took the gate slowly. There was frost on the gravel and the lamps only reach so far up the drive. The car came in under the portico at half past ten. He shut the engine off and did not open his door.
“Ask me for something,” he said.
“Your rooms. I want to come up, and I do not want to hear the word dinner again tonight.”
“Say the rest of the sentence and I will take you up the stairs.”
“I want you to take me upstairs,” I said. “I want you not to be careful with me on the way.”
His rooms are four floors up at the east end, past my door and the shared kitchen.
The corridor floor reports a person’s weight to the whole wing before the step lands.
The radiator under his window had been running all evening.
The place smelled of hot dust, which is the smell of a room that has been waiting for somebody.
He turned on the lamp by the chair, which sits at knee height. Then the one on the shelf by the door, which throws at face height. The third lamp is over the bed and he left it off. He did not explain the choice and I did not make him.
He hung his coat before he came near me. He makes the necessary motion and no other, and I have learned to read the ones he leaves out.
“Nobody in that room looked at you correctly,” he said. “I have, since the ninth of September. May I take this off you?”
“Yes. All of it.”
He put his fingers under the shoulder of my dress and drew it down my arms. The fabric hung at my waist. The air in that room was warmer than the fabric had been, and my nipples went hard anyway, and he did not pretend to miss it.
“You are shaking and I have barely started,” he said. “I want it on the record that I asked.”
“It is on the record. Ask me the next one.”
“May I put you against that wall?” he said. “Your room is on the other side of it and you already know what the plaster does with a sound.”
“Yes. Put me against it.”
He got my back against the wall his office shares with my room.
Then he put his mouth on my nipple and held it there until my hips came away from the plaster.
He moved to the other nipple and did it slower.
He kept the air on my nipples between passes, and he made sure I knew that part was deliberate.
“Tell me what you want,” he said, against my skin.
“Lower than that. Considerably lower than that.”
“I already know the answer,” he said. “Say it out loud anyway.”