Chapter 6
Ezra
The mural was half-finished.
We had been working in the late August heat for ten days, and the scaffolding had begun to feel like a second home — the slow daily climb up the ladder, the wind that came off the ridge at four every afternoon, the way the metal of the railing got hot enough by noon that you had to wrap a rag around your hand to grip it.
Delilah had a routine by then. She wore the overalls every morning over a thin cotton dress, and she pinned her hair up with two pencils, and she brought a thermos of cold coffee that we drank in alternating sips by mid-afternoon.
We had a system. I painted the wide work — the underpainting, the structural shapes, the long blocks of color — and she stood on the platform beside me and read me her drafts, and we revised together, and when a line was right I lettered it onto the wall while she watched, and when a line was not right we went home with it overnight and came back to it the next day.
The wind picked up around two.
It came down off the ridge in long warm gusts that smelled like grass and dust and the far-off harvest beginning in the next county.
Delilah was on the platform beside me. She had been reading aloud, and the wind kept lifting the page in her notebook, and she'd had to fold the page over and weight it with her thumb.
Around two-fifteen she leaned over the wet panel — she had been looking at a detail she wanted me to letter near — and the wind caught her hair, and a strand came loose from one of the pencils, and she reached up to push it back behind her ear without thinking, and her open palm pressed against the cerulean panel I had laid down an hour before.
She didn't realize.
She straightened. She lifted her hand. She looked at it.
She laughed.
I want to write about that laugh, because the laugh was the hinge.
I had heard her laugh by then — small private laughs at jokes I made, the kind of laugh that came out half against her will because she had been raised not to laugh too loudly in public — but this laugh was different.
This laugh was startled, and unguarded, and it had the quality of a laugh from a child who had just discovered, by accident, that her hand could do something it had not previously been allowed to do.
The sound of the laugh hit me like a shot of whiskey on a hungry stomach.
I said, You've got paint—
I reached for her hand. I took her wrist. I turned her hand over so the palm faced up.
I held it. I looked at the cerulean across the lines of her palm — the long life line, the curve where her thumb met her wrist — and the blue, in that light, looked the way the sky had looked from a roadside in New Mexico the morning I had decided what to do with my life.
I said, It suits you.
She said, Blue?
I said, Color.
I did not let go of her hand. She did not pull away.
She said, Ezra.
I said, I know.
She said, If we do this, my father—
I said, I'm not asking about your father.
I said, I'm asking about you.
She kissed me.
She kissed me on a scaffolding platform twelve feet above Main Street, with a cerulean handprint between us where her palm had ended up on the front of my t-shirt.
She kissed me carefully at first, the small testing kiss of someone who had not done much kissing, and then she kissed me less carefully.
Her hand found the back of my neck. Her fingers were warm and a little damp from the paint and the wind, and the moment her mouth opened against mine I felt a low, hot pull in my chest that traveled south fast and stayed there.
I kissed her back with the focused attention I gave to the work I cared about most — slow, deliberate, paying attention to every detail — but my hands, when I let them, were already at her waist, and they had begun to learn the shape of her under the thin cotton dress, and I had to take a deliberate breath and let her go before twelve feet above Main Street became a story I could not afford.
When we pulled apart she was breathing hard. I was ruined.
She said, Not here.
I said, Where.
She said, The shop. Tonight.
I said, Nine.
She said, Nine.
I lettered the rest of the sentence onto the wall with hands that were not entirely steady, which for a man whose precision was his livelihood said everything.
She came down off the scaffolding at six in her thin blue dress, and when she walked toward her sedan she looked back at me once.
Just once. She did not smile. She did not have to.
I went home. I showered. I put on a clean shirt. I told myself, in the mirror, that there was still time to call this off, and the man in the mirror laughed at me, and I laughed back, and we both knew the question had been settled three hours earlier on a scaffolding.
I went back to the shop at eight.
I cleaned it. I had not cleaned the shop, I am embarrassed to admit, in close to a month.
I swept the concrete floor. I put my tools away.
I wiped down the workbench. I went into the back room where I sometimes slept during late projects and I changed the sheets — the only pair of clean sheets I owned, plain white cotton I had bought four years earlier — and I put a new candle on the small table by the cot, the kind in a glass jar that I usually used to mask the smell of solvent after a long day.
I lit it. I shut the door. I came out into the main bay.
I turned off the overheads. I turned on the work lamps.
There are four of them in the shop, the big yellow-hooded ones on tall stands, and I angled them to cast a warm amber light across the bay floor that softened the corners of everything.
The shop, in that light, looked the way I had always wanted it to look — like a chapel I had built with my own hands.
I sat on the workbench and I waited.
She came at nine. I heard the sedan pull in on the gravel.
I heard the door open and close. I heard the small soft step of her bare feet on the concrete — she had taken her shoes off at the door, I would find out, because she did not want to track in the dust of the lot — and when she came around the corner into the bay I forgot, for a moment, every comfortable thing I had ever told myself about being a man who didn't need anyone.
She was wearing the sundress from that morning.
She had taken her hair down. She was barefoot.
She stood in the doorway of the bay and she looked at the lit shop, at the candle glow seeping out from the back room, at the way I had stood up off the workbench when she came in. She did not move for a second.
She said, You cleaned.
I said, I cleaned.
She walked across the bay. Slowly. I watched her cross the gold rectangle of work-lamp light where her crate usually sat — the rectangle was empty, I had moved the crate against the wall — and she came to the workbench and she stopped two feet in front of me.
I noticed the small constellation of freckles on her collarbone that I had only ever seen above the neckline of a cardigan.
I noticed the small pulse at the side of her throat.
I noticed that her eyes were the color of strong tea and there was a faint tremor at the corner of her mouth, not fear, the small specific tremor of a woman about to do a thing she had wanted to do for a very long time.
I said, We can do less than this.
She said, I don't want less than this.
I said, Whatever you want.
She said, I want all of it.
I closed the distance.
I want to be careful about how I write the next hour, because the next hour was the most important hour of my life and I do not intend to be glib about it.
I kissed her against the workbench. My hand at the back of her neck, my other hand at her waist, pulling her against me until I felt every inch of her along the line of my body and there was no part of either of us pretending we didn't know what we'd come here for.
Her mouth opened under mine. Her hands went to my shirt, and she pulled at it, and I broke the kiss long enough to drag it off over my head and drop it on the bench, and her eyes went to my chest and stayed there a half-second, and the way she looked at me — the unstudied want of a woman who had spent twenty-five years being told not to look at things this way — almost finished me before we'd begun.
She put her hand flat against my sternum. Right where she would, later, trace the poem. Her palm was warm. I covered her hand with mine.
I said, Tell me if you need to stop.
She said, I won't need to stop.
I lifted her onto the counter where I mixed my paints.
The counter is varnished pine, six feet long, scarred with twenty thousand small color marks from a decade of palette knives and dripped pigment.
The jars of pigment behind her — cadmium yellow, alizarin crimson, titanium white, ultramarine — rattled softly against the wall as I set her down.
I stepped between her knees. The hem of the sundress rose.
My hands went to her thighs — warm, smooth, the small involuntary shiver of someone whose skin had not been touched in a long time — and I let them travel up under the cotton and stop, on purpose, at the bare skin just above her knee, because I wanted her to feel the question of where they would go next before they went.
She leaned forward. She kissed my throat.
She kissed the place at the corner of my jaw.
She kissed, with a small careful experimental boldness, the line of muscle at my shoulder.
Her mouth was soft and her breath was warm, and her hands had found my belt, and the small metallic sound of the buckle in the quiet of the bay was the loudest sound in the room.
I undid the buttons at the back of the sundress one by one.