CHAPTER 9 #3
At twelve-thirty Adrienne brings me a sandwich on a small white plate.
She does not ask about Cora. She does not ask about the apartment.
She says, in her Parisian-French English, "Tiens.
Eat. " She watches me eat half the sandwich.
She removes the plate. She says, "Tonight you will be on the chair against the tile.
Helene will be in the room. Mr. Vance will not look at you for the first cup.
He will look at you for the second. Do not be afraid of the look.
He is in control of the look. He has been in control of the look since 1547. Bien."
She leaves.
At seventeen-hundred I take a long hot shower in the small guest bath and I dress in clean clothes — a charcoal cashmere sweater Henrik must have retrieved from Hawthorne with the rest of the bag at twenty-two-fifteen Monday night, and the same dove-gray wool trousers I have been wearing now for so long they feel like the only trousers I have ever owned. I do not braid my hair.
I pin it at the nape with a black plastic clip I find in the small marble dish on the guest-bath counter. I do not look at my mouth in the mirror. The bruise at the lower-left corner has faded to nothing.
At twenty-fifty-five I walk down to floor forty-two.
Helene is in nurse's whites and the cream cardigan and the cobalt enamel pin.
Julian is already in the surgical leather chair.
His suit jacket is on a hook by the door.
His shirt is unbuttoned at the throat — three buttons; not four; not in a way that would suggest disarray; in a way that would let a man drink from a cup with his neck free. His sleeves are rolled to the elbow.
The brand on the inside of his left forearm is not visible from where I stand at the door; he is wearing a thin cream undershirt with three-quarter sleeves under the dress shirt and the brand is concealed under the undershirt cuff.
I do not yet know it exists. I do not yet know its shape.
I do not yet know that the woman who is going to put her mouth on it three weeks from now is me.
I sit on the ladder-back chair against the tile.
The tile against my back is cold through the cashmere.
The brass surgical lamp overhead has two working arms; the three broken ones tick in the HVAC draft, small dry knocks against their own pivot brackets.
The two working arms are angled so that the raked light falls on the surgical leather chair where Julian is sitting; the rest of the room is in a soft secondary gloom.
The cobalt pin at Helene's collar catches the raked light once and throws its small bright disc onto her cardigan sleeve where it always throws, and the disc does not move because Helene does not move.
Helene goes to the small refrigeration unit against the south wall.
She lifts out a glass vial of dark red. She holds it to the light, reads the label, says, "A negativo," nods to herself, and pours the vial into a small steel cup that has been sitting in a steel beaker of warm water on her tray.
The cup is cylindrical, the size of a shot glass, the steel matte.
She brings the cup to Julian. He takes it from her with his right hand. He does not look at me.
He drinks.
The mouth of him at the rim of the steel is the first thing.
His mouth does not change. The line of his jaw does not change.
There is no slow predatory unhinging; there is no horror-movie register.
There is, instead, a small intake — almost a sigh — at the first swallow.
His throat moves. He swallows again. He drinks the cup in three swallows.
He hands the cup back to Helene without looking.
Helene takes it, sets it on her tray, refills it from a second vial she has had warming, returns it to him. He takes the second cup. He drinks it slower than the first.
Halfway through the second cup he lifts his eyes.
They find me.
The pale gray has gone dark at the pupil.
Not the cold-sky default. Not the precise pupil edge.
The black is eating the gray from the center outward, the way ink moves into water — a slow, deliberate widening that I can see across six feet of cold-tile room.
His skin at the temples has changed color: the cold-marble white of the man who has not fed in seventy-two hours has warmed to ivory.
The two silver streaks at his right temple, which I have catalogued now in seven different lights, are no longer ash on alabaster but silver on warm cream. He is, by one full quartile, more alive. I am watching the second hand of his body sweep forward.
He looks at me.
He does not move. He does not put the cup down.
He does not blink. The look is a long pull from the chair across the room, six feet of cold tile and antiseptic air, the cobalt pin's disc steady on Helene's cardigan sleeve, the brass surgical lamp's two arms steady on his face, the three broken ones still ticking.
He looks at me the way a man looks across a granite table at a woman who has just told him his logistics cost is a four-hundred-basis-point red flag.
He looks at me the way a man looks at the worn spot of his rug.
He looks at me as if I am the rug. As if my body is the place where the wool yields.
As if there is a place on me, somewhere — the freckle at the corner of my jaw, the inside of the wrist with the chemical burn, the carotid line on the right side of my throat — that has waited five hundred years for a foot to set itself down.
The look becomes a current.
I do not move on the chair. I do not lift my chin.
I do not let my face change. My right hand, in the pocket of my wool trousers, finds the brass pencil that is not there — that is in the pocket of a vampire in a parka somewhere in this city — and my fingers close on the empty inside seam the way they would have closed on the pencil. My pulse goes to my throat.
The wool of my trousers is cool against my thighs.
The cashmere is warm against my back where I have leaned into the tile.
The tile is cold through the cashmere. I am, at this moment, three temperatures at once.
I am also, I admit to myself, wet. I do not name it.
I do not unname it. I sit on the chair against the tile and I let the current pass through me the way a wire lets a current pass through it.
He sets the second cup down on Helene's tray.
He says, low, "Quinn."
I say, "I am all right."
He says, "Tell me when you are not."
I say, "I will."
He looks at me for one more beat. He breaks the look first. His pupils begin to retract.
Helene, who has not moved and has not spoken, lifts the steel cup off the tray, walks it to the small sink against the north wall, rinses it, sets it in the drying rack.
She says, in Italian-English, voice neutral, looking at me across the room: "He has not fed live in two years, signorina.
You are seeing what a measured hunger looks like.
Do not mistake it for what an unmeasured hunger would look like. "
I do not ask. I do not need to. I nod once.
I stand up.
I do not run from the room. I walk. I cross the six feet of cold tile to the door of the clinic at the pace I would walk through the corridor of any building, any morning, after any meeting that had gone as I had thought it would go and also otherwise.
I pass within four feet of the surgical leather chair. I do not look at him as I pass.
I feel his eyes on the side of my face the way I felt the cold of his shoulder on the greenhouse stair landing on Saturday. I push the clinic door open.
The corridor outside is the same warm, quiet corridor I came down.
I press my right palm against the cold tile of the corridor wall to steady myself.
The tile is colder than the tile of the clinic.
The pulse in my throat is steady — I count it; sixty-eight; the same number Helene wrote on my chart at oh-nine-thirty this morning.
I stand against the wall for two full minutes. I do not name what I am holding.
I think, instead, about Cora on the West Elm couch with Vasquez and a pepper grinder.
I think about my mother in the blue dress on the porch at Hartwell Meadows.
I think about the peacoat on the iron hook with the right shoulder lower than the left and the left lapel folded back wrong and the brass key in the inside pocket.
I think about the brass pencil. I push off the tile.
I take the public elevator up to forty-five.
I do not go to the guest suite.