CHAPTER 16
NOBODY IS PAYING HIM
Matias
The last time the house had been this quiet it had belonged to somebody else, and I had been a man with money in a bank across an ocean and a folder full of tabs and a photograph on my phone of a roof I had never stood under, and I had thought that a place could be a clean start if you paid the whole number and did not argue anybody down.
Now it was mine, or the paper said it was, and it was so empty of other men that I could hear the fig in the wall head moving when the air moved, which it had not done once in three weeks because there had always been a saw going, or a man watering a wall like it was a plant, or the boy dropping a chisel and swearing in a dialect I would never own, and today there was none of that, none, the site shut since the day the picture came off the whitewash, the machines cold, the yard swept, and the whole building breathing with nobody in it but the two of us and the dog asleep somewhere out of sight.
I had chalked sixty-one on the door frame at first light, the number of days left before the thing in November everyone kept promising me, and it was the only work my hands had done all morning, and they had been doing it for a month, and I had stopped pretending to myself that it was anything but something to do with them.
His were white to the wrist. Not dusted — set, the lime dried into the skin so it looked like he had reached into flour and it had stayed, and across the two big knuckles of the right hand the caustic had cracked him, two seams gone pink and open, from work, from the mix, from whatever a man's hands do when there is no reason to wash them because there is nowhere to go and no one to go to.
I had watched those hands for three months.
I want to be honest about the order of it: I had watched them before I had let myself watch anything else, and that had felt allowed, and I had told myself that was all it was, a man admiring good work, the way you admire a knife or a horse, right up until it was not.
He had come in from the far room without a sound, which I had learned he always did, and had stopped a few feet off, and the quiet in the house had a shape to it now that it never had with the crew in it, a dead flat quiet with no give, a room where a machine has just gone off and the ear keeps reaching for the noise and finding nothing.
I could hear him breathing. I could hear myself.
He said my name. Then he said, "There is no — the bed, there is no bed here," which was true and was not what he meant, and he heard himself get it wrong and he did not go back and fix it, he just stood there with the wrong order of the sentence still in the room and looked at me and said, "I want you to.
This. Now, while there is nobody." His breath was not steady.
He was not swept up in anything. He was frightened, plainly, the way a man is frightened putting his hand under a thing that could fall, and he had decided anyway, out loud, before he had touched me, and that — a man saying the thing first, into the quiet, with his voice not holding — that undid me more than any hand ever had.
"Okay," I said. "Yeah. Come here, come — okay."
I did not make him ask twice. I have never once had to price the wanting of something, it is the one currency I was born fluent in, and I said yes like a door opening, because it was easy, because he was standing in my house asking me for a thing I had wanted since the afternoon he did not come when I waved, and there was nothing to weigh, nothing to work out, nobody watching, so I crossed the floor and put my mouth on his and it was not soft.
He made a sound into it. His hands came up and found my jaw and I felt the cracked knuckles catch on the day's stubble, the burns rough, the nails cut down to nothing with the grey worked in under them that a nailbrush would never get out, and he held my face the way you hold a thing you are afraid to drop.
I got a hand into his shirt and he let me, and I said fuck, quietly, once, the way you say it when the thing you have been careful about wanting is actually happening and you cannot believe the room let you have it.
He laughed — a short breath, no sound in it — and turned his head so his mouth was at my ear, and he said, "Yes," just that, a small English word neither of us was any good at, and it was the only word he had and it was enough, it was more than enough, the two of us in the third language, no idiom, no cleverness, nothing to hide behind, just the flat plain words a child would use.
I got him down onto the folded canvas and the coats and my jacket, everything I could reach, dragged into a pile against the base of a wall that had stood four hundred years and would not notice us, and he went, he let me put him where I wanted him, and I understood something with my whole body that I did not put into a sentence: that this man, whose hands were all cracked knuckles and old burns and the flat worn thumb, was handing it over, was asking to receive, and had said so out loud because he would not let it happen any other way.
I have been at ease in my own skin my whole life.
It cost me nothing. Nobody had ever taught me to be careful in a body, and I had just had it, the way you have weather where you grow up and do not think of it as luck.
It was the one thing I had brought here that worked, the one fluency the village could not correct, and I used it on him with everything I had, my mouth going down his chest, my hand finding him, and he arched and said my name in the wrong shape and I did not correct that either.
His skin was warm under my mouth in the ordinary way skin is warm, and when I brought his arm up and put my mouth to the inside of his forearm there was the old lime worked into it, into the burns that ran up from the wrist, and I put my tongue to it and it was faintly bitter, the taste of the thing he did all day, and I did not stop, and he said something that was not a word.
His hand — the cracked one — pressed flat between my shoulder blades and held there, not pulling, just laid on me, the whole flat weight of it, and I have carried the print of that hand around ever since like a coin in a pocket you keep finding.
"Tell me," I said, because I could feel him holding a thing back, holding it the way he held everything, and I did not want him careful, I wanted him with the care off. "Say it."
"Your cock — I want —" and again the order came out wrong and again he did not fix it, he just let the broken sentence stand and looked up at me, and there was no shame in it, only the plainness of a man who had decided, and I gave him what he was reaching for, slow, watching his mouth come open, watching the breath go out of him, watching his eyes, and I kept my own eyes on his face and nowhere else because there was nowhere else I needed to be.
His left shoulder would not go all the way back where I had him and he moved to spare it without a word, an old accommodation, a body that had knelt to a wall since it was nineteen, and I loved it, I loved the flat left thumb pressed white into my arm and the callus ridge dragging over my skin and the burns, God, the burns, and none of it was a picture to me, none of it was a thing to look at, it was only him, the whole particular fact of him under my hands.
He talked. Not much, and none of it clever, small clumsy words, more, there, slower, and once just my name, and I gave him all of it.
It struck me even then, in the middle of it, that this was the most I had ever heard him say without a wall in front of him — that every other sentence the man had ever given me had had a job in it, timber or lime or load or weather, and here there was no job, nothing to point at, nothing to explain, and so he had almost nothing, a handful of words a tourist would have, and he spent them one at a time and meant each one down to the ground, and I have never in my life been talked to like that, plainly, by a man with no way to dress a single thing up.
I answered him the same way, or tried, and my own running mouth that fills every silence I have ever been near went short and slow and stupid, just yes and just here and just his name, and somewhere in it, with my forehead down against his and both of us past pretending, he said a thing that had no reason to be in that room.
"Eighteen months that lime has been down," he said. "I put it down before you existed."
I did not hear it right. I heard mud. I heard a man telling me a small true fact about the pit up on the pasture, the hole in the ground I had walked past forty times, and I laughed against his mouth because I was happy and stupid with it and I said, "Eighteen months?
for mud, that's — that's a long time to leave mud in a hole, no?
, I'd have thought you just —" and he made a sound that could have been a laugh and could have been the other thing, and I did not chase it, I was not chasing anything, I was so far inside how good it was that a fact went by me and I let it go the way I let everything go that summer, easy, uncounted, mine because I had not asked what it cost.
And I said the other thing then, the thing I am not proud of, said it into his skin like a gift I was giving him because I was giving him everything: "I didn't even ask anybody, you know that?
I saw it once and I bought it, the whole thing, cash, didn't haggle, and I liked — " and it curdled in my mouth halfway out, the boast, because I heard it land in the quiet where he was already not saying something, "I liked how easy it was," and there were pencilled dates on the walls around us in one man's handwriting that I had read on my second day and never once asked whose they were, and I did not think of that, not then, I only felt the sentence go wrong on the way out and kept moving so I would not have to look at why.
He pulled me back down. Whatever had crossed his face he put away, or I put it away for him with my mouth, and it got fast then, and unkind in the good way, and I told him, crude and plain, the one blunt word for it, to fucking come — and he did, and I felt him let go of the last thing he was holding, felt the cracked knuckles and the flat left thumb go finally, wholly loose against my arm, and when he came he did not close his eyes, he kept them on me, and I have thought since that it was the one moment the whole month he was not measuring anything, not the crack, not the mix, not the cost, not the day, and I put him there, I did that, and I followed him a breath later with his name in my mouth said wrong and neither of us caring.
After, we did not move for a long time. The house ticked around us the way stone does when the day heats it, small settling sounds in the walls, the cracked barrel vault overhead holding its curve on the props that had stood under it since August, the crown seam running the length of it and going nowhere, the temporary sheet over the gone half of the roof lifting once in a breath of air and dropping back, the surviving tiles above the east range holding their heat, and I lay with my ear on his chest and listened to him come back down and thought about nothing, which is a thing I am almost never able to do.
His hand lay open on my chest, cracked across the knuckles, the nails cut to nothing, and I held it without deciding to, turned it over, ran my thumb along the seam where the lime had opened the skin and along the ridge of hard skin across the pads and over the left thumb that sat flatter than a thumb should, worn down to that shape by one handle over years I could not count and he had never told me, and he let me do all of it, let me hold his hand up to the light and study it like something I had bought, which I suppose is the whole trouble with me, and he watched me do it with no expression I could name.
Outside somewhere the dog got up, turned around three times the way she did, and lay down again with a grunt, and neither of us said her name, and the not saying it was its own small tenderness, a room the two of us had that even she was only allowed to sleep at the edge of.
A pen in a notary's office in June. Two lines on a page I could not read. My hand signing under his, quick, glad, done inside a morning. I do not know why it came to me then. It went again.
"Sixty-one days," I said, to put something into the quiet, "until the — the November thing, the party, whatever it is, I chalked it this morning, I keep chalking it," and he turned his head on the canvas and looked at me for a while, and did not say anything about the number, and did not say anything about the party, and I laid my palm over his open hand on my chest and left it there, and I was warm all through, and sure of everything, and I closed my eyes.