CHAPTER 34
FROST
Matias
I had chalked nineteen on the door frame that morning, the way I chalked it every morning, standing on the cold step in my socks with the little stub going soft and greasy between my fingers, and I would like to tell you I was thinking about the number, about San Martino, about the roof that was in an office in Perugia instead of on the house where a roof is supposed to be.
The truth is I was thinking about dinner.
Thinking about dinner is the one thing my hands are allowed to do in this country, and I do it with my whole chest, and by seven I had put together a plate of the things a man puts together when nobody is coming and he still wants to set a table for two — the good cheese, the last of the tomatoes gone soft the right way, bread I had to argue Nella out of a second loaf for and lost.
We ate standing up. We always ate standing up now, in the kitchen, by the counter, because the downstairs had changed and neither of us said so.
Two days ago they had struck the centring, taken the whole forest of props out through the door in pieces, and the room down there did not sound the way it had sounded all autumn.
You could hear it from up here if you stopped talking.
A voice used to hit a wall of timber and come back short.
Now it went out into the vault and did not come back at all, and it was a good sound, it was the sound of a thing standing on itself, and it made the back of my neck cold and I could not have told you why.
Palla came in from wherever she had been and went to Malick's leg first, the way she does, the way she has done since the first week, before she will look at me, before she will look at the food, and lay down on his foot like a sack somebody dropped.
He did not look down. He put his hand on her head without looking, the flat of it, once, reading her the way he reads everything, and then he went back to his plate.
"The carpenter wants to be paid Friday," I said.
"I told him — listen, I told him he could have had it Tuesday, I don't know why he waits, it's not like I'm going to run out of —" and I heard myself and stopped, because there is a shape to a sentence about money that I have learned to hear now, late, the way you learn to hear a wasp in a room after it has already been in the room a while.
I put a piece of bread in my mouth instead.
Malick set his plate down on the counter. He did not stack it, or rinse it, or do any of the small things a man does with his hands when he is going to keep the evening ordinary.
"I want you in the bed," he said. "Tonight."
Not a question. He does not ask that way.
He says the weather in three days and he says this in the same voice, a thing already decided somewhere in him and now being told to me, out loud, plain, from a standing start, in the small orderless English that is the only language the two of us have that is nobody's.
His hands were still white to the wrist. They are always white to the wrist. He had washed them and not the rest of him and I could smell the day on him, the pit, the wall, the cold.
"Okay," I said. Just that. I did not make it into anything. I did not put a joke on top of it to carry it, which is what I do, which is the only thing I know how to do with a silence, and I heard myself not do it and so did he.
The bed was cold and then it was not. There is a sheet where half the roof should be, two rooms over, and the whole house holds the night the way a thing holds it when it is not finished, and none of that was in the bed.
His mouth. I want to start with his mouth because that is where I started, because he kissed the way he does everything, slow, total, checking, unhurried by anything but the plain fact of a body, and I laughed once against it out of nerves and he did not laugh and I stopped.
For a while it was only that. His mouth, and the cold going out of the sheet under us, and the changed room two floors down holding its one long note while we did not talk.
He kept a hand at the side of my face, just the flat of it, still, and I felt the callus ridge along the pads and the short nails and the lime that does not wash out, the grit of a whole day on him because he had washed his hands and nothing else of himself.
I turned my head into it. I put my mouth to the inside of his wrist, where the old burns are, and felt him breathe out through his nose, once, not steady, and his forehead came down against my temple and stayed there.
Neither of us said anything. There was nothing yet to say.
There was only the slow cold business of two bodies deciding, without a single word, to stop being careful with each other.
I got my hand around his cock and he made a sound that was not a word, and then a word, low, not my name, said into my jaw.
His breath went wrong. I felt it go wrong, felt the shoulder under my other hand catch at the place it always catches, the place a day overhead had put in him twenty years before I ever drove up that track, and he pressed his forehead to mine and breathed there like a man deciding to jump.
He touched me the way he touches things that could hurt somebody if he were careless — I did not think it in words, I only felt it, the slow, checking, all-of-it attention that does not speed up and does not skip a part, and I have watched those hands do that to a wall for three months from the wrong side of a rope, and I could not make a joke about it because there was no room in my chest for the joke.
His nails are cut down to nothing and there is lime under them that does not come out, and I felt the one flat thumb, the left one, gone flatter than the right from some handle he has held since he was nineteen, move along me, and I said something with no words in it either.
"I want to fuck you," he said. Small words.
No idiom in them, nowhere to hide, and that is exactly why they land, because there is no clever in this room, there is not one clever thing between us, we meet in the language where we are both children and cannot lie.
His forearm was against my mouth, the inside of the left one, the old lime burns there gone shiny and pale, and I turned my head and put my lips on them without thinking, on the worst of them, and he let me.
His breath was at my ear now and it was not steady, it had not been steady since he decided this at the counter with a plate in his hand, and I understood in some low part of me that had no words that steady was not what this was, that the fear did not leave him when the scene turned, it stayed in the bed with us, and he had come in anyway.
"I want your ass," he said, plainer, the crudest thing he said all night, three flat words with nothing over them, and my whole body answered before I did, and he waited, up on one elbow, close, watching my mouth for the yes he would not go a single step without.
"Yes," I said. "Yes, come on." Easy. Glad. The way I have said yes to everything my whole life, because yes has never once cost me anything, because being wanted is the one room I was ever let into for free.
And I reached for his hip and pulled.
That is all it was. I hooked my hand at his hip and I pulled him down and over, to set the pace, to take it, to have it the way I have always had things — and for exactly one second, in the dark, with a good man's breath in my mouth, my hand closed on the bone of his hip and pulled, and I did not think, and the pulling was the whole of the mistake.
"Frost," he said.
One word. He did not put anything on it. No sorry, no wait, no small laugh to file the edge off, none of the things I would have hung on it to make it easier to receive. Just the word, said into the space between us, exact, the way he says the date on a certificate.
My hands came off him.
I did not decide it. That is the thing I keep coming back to, lying here now — I did not think it through, I did not understand it, I could not have told you what it meant or what I had done or whether I had done anything, and my hands came off him anyway, off his hip, off his shoulder, up and back into the cold air, and my weight went off him, and I was still.
Two seconds. They were the longest two seconds of my life and there was nothing in them.
I had heard the word before. Not the fight it came out of — I did not think of the fight, the fight was gone, I could not have given you a single line of it.
What came was smaller than that and it was only a picture: the exact shape his mouth made around the word once, across a table, the top lip pulling flat over it and the jaw going still after, a man setting something down that could not be argued with.
My body had kept the shape when my head had let the rest go.
That is where it learned to stop. I know where it learned it and it does not matter and neither of us has ever once said so.
"Okay," I said again. Into the dark. Nothing clever.
And nothing happened.
That is the part I did not have room in me to expect.
I lay there in the cold with my heart going and I waited for the thing to arrive, the fight, the door, the long apology one of us would have to build and the other would have to accept, the whole architecture of a night going wrong that I have carried in me my whole life like loose change, and it did not come.
He did not explain the word. He did not explain himself to me, and I understood, without being told, that I was not owed it.
I did not ask what I had done. There was nothing to ask.
It was just a man saying stop in his own house, and being heard.
He found my hand in the dark. Not to hold it, exactly. To put it somewhere. On his chest, over the plain ordinary going of his heart, and we lay like that, and it was warm now, we had made it warm, and outside a bird did something stupid in the dark and gave up.
I opened my mouth. I was going to make it fine. That is what I do — I fill it, I price it, I host the silence, I put a plate in the middle of it so nobody has to sit with the empty. I was going to say something to close the account.
"Is the dog in?" is what came out. "I didn't hear her go."
"She is in," he said. "Under the table, in the other room."
"She'll want out at four. She always wants out at four, she wants out at four and then she wants in at four-ten, it's a whole —"
"I will let her out," he said.
"Okay," I said.
And that was all. Neither of us said the true thing, and the true thing came anyway, the way it does, unasked, and got into the bed with us, and it was not the thing I had been afraid of all autumn.
I had been carrying it since summer, the small certainty that there was a version of this I would eventually reach for wrong, and that it would be the thing that ended it, that I would want too much or take too fast or hold on the wrong way and he would be gone up the road to his mother's house and his father's wall and I would be alone in the house.
I had been so sure of it. And here was the wrong reach, arrived at last, and here was the word, and here was the man still in the bed with my hand on him, breathing, letting the dog stay under the table.
His sentences end. Mine never end. I have never once let a sentence end in my life, I add a clause to keep the room open, I keep the room open because I am terrified of what walks in when it closes.
We just went quiet, the two of us, in the plain small register of two people who have run all the way out of anything they need to prove, and the dog shifted somewhere in the dark house, and the vault two floors down held itself up in the silence it had finally been given, and I fell asleep first.
I got no scene to be forgiven in. That is the only thing it cost me, and I did not know it was a cost until I am telling it to you now — that being forgiven is the one currency I have ever known how to spend, the smile, the plate, and he did not hand me a debt to settle, there was nothing to make right because nothing had gone wrong, and a man who has only ever known how to be square with the world does not have a word for that and has to go to sleep instead.
* * *
In the morning the light came in the ordinary way, gray and then not, over the sheet where half the roof was gone, and he was already up, and I could hear him downstairs in the room that sounds different now, walking the floor with the slow attention he walks everything, and the door was open at the bottom of the stairs, and the dog had already been let out and let back in and was asleep again under the table like nothing.
I went down in my socks and chalked eighteen on the frame.
My hand was steady. The number was smaller.
On the wall of the far room, low, in the new lime that had gone hard as anything two summers back, there were four prints where a dog had once walked through it wet, and nobody had ever taken them out, and nobody said a word about them, and I stood there a second with the chalk in my hand and did not say a word about them either.
He said the word, and the room stopped, and we slept, and in the morning nothing at all had happened.