Chapter 10 #2
“If I say Palermo, everything stops. Not just the scene. Everything. The cuff comes off, the ropes come off, I am not still in the room when I come back up. I am on the chaise or on the bed or in the kitchen. I am not where it happened.”
He wrote it.
Safeword protocol: full relocation. Scene space not used for recovery.
“Agreed.”
He closed the cabinet and then opened it again and lifted one of the cuffs off the rail. The smallest size. The shearling inside was cream-white and looked like it had never been worn.
“I’d like to check fit,” he said. “That’s all. Just the left wrist. You tell me if it’s too tight.”
I held out my left hand.
The inside of my wrist faced up. The blue vein there visible under the skin, the pulse steady, the narrow bones of me laid on offer.
He took my hand in his—his palm warm, his fingers long, the back of his hand scarred faintly in one place I had not noticed before—and he turned my wrist and laid the cuff across it.
The leather was cool.
The shearling was even softer than the cashmere had been.
He closed the buckle one notch. Checked with his finger inside the cuff against my pulse.
Loosened it by half a hole. Checked again.
Settled on a fit that held without compressing, the leather snug, the shearling flush against the skin I had never thought of as especially sensitive and which now, under his attention, was the only part of my body I could feel.
My pulse kicked.
I felt it. He felt it. His fingertip was still inside the cuff against the vein, and the vein jumped, and his eyes came up to mine.
He did not unbuckle it.
One second.
Two.
He did not move. Did not smile. Did not perform anything. His eyes were dark and very close and his finger was inside the cuff and my pulse was now running in a rhythm that was not the rhythm of my resting heart.
Five seconds.
Ten.
I did not breathe. I could not.
Fifteen.
Twenty.
The light held us. The smell of wood oil and leather and the faint warm note of him. His thumb on the outside of the cuff, his finger on the inside, my pulse between them.
Twenty-five.
Thirty.
He unbuckled it. Slowly. The leather loosened one notch, then slipped free, and the shearling left a faint warm ghost on my skin.
He lifted my wrist to his mouth.
Kissed the vein. Once. The lightest press of his lips—closed, dry, intentional—on the spot his finger had been.
“Good,” he said.
I exhaled.
He hung the cuff back on the rail. Closed the cabinet. Turned the brass key in the lock of the door behind us on our way out, and dropped the key into the shallow dish on the hallway console where he kept his car fob.
“Coat,” he said. “We’re going out.”
The car went north on Western Avenue.
Not the car from Nero. A different one. An old Mercedes wagon, dark green, the leather cracked and re-oiled, a rosary hanging from the rearview that had belonged to somebody’s grandmother. He drove it with the same economy he did everything.
“I like the car.”
“It’s my favorite.”
“You own two cars?”
“Eight. This is the one I like.”
Eight cars, and this was the one he liked? This old thing with its cracked leather and grandmother’s rosary and a faint smell under the cedar and re-oiled hide that I could not immediately place. Not smoke. Not cologne. Something greener. Earth after rain, maybe. Cut stems.
There was a pair of worn leather gloves tucked into the pocket of the driver’s door. Not driving gloves. Work gloves. The fingertips were darkened, the seams softened by use, and there was a dusting of pale dirt caught in the creases.
I looked at them for one second too long.
Marco noticed. Of course he noticed.
“Old gloves,” he said.
Which explained absolutely nothing.
The city moved past. Western was miles of it—body shops and bodegas and Korean barbecue and a stretch of Polish bakeries I had read about and not visited, and above it all the flat Midwestern sky doing what Midwestern skies did in the middle of a Wednesday.
He pulled up at a corner I did not recognize.
A small building in washed pink. Hand-painted script across the window:
Margie’s Candies. Since 1921.
“You said we were going out. You did not say candy.”
“I am saying candy now.”
Inside was a small, held breath of another century.
Pink vinyl booths patched at the seams. A tin ceiling painted cream.
A long marble counter with chrome stools, the chrome pitted at the edges from a hundred thousand elbows.
A jukebox against the wall playing a song with brass and a woman’s voice that had been dead for forty years.
A glass case full of hand-dipped chocolates wrapped in waxed paper twists.
The smell—sugar caramelized slowly, cold cream, the faint metallic note of a soda fountain that still used syrup in glass bottles.
He slid into a booth. I slid in opposite.
“What am I eating?”
“The Terrapin Sundae.”
“Is that a turtle.”
“It is a sundae shaped like a turtle. Vanilla ice cream, hot fudge, toasted pecans, whipped cream, one maraschino cherry.” He paused. “In a glass boat.”
“A boat?”
“A boat.”
The waitress was younger than the one at Lou Mitchell’s. Twenties. Pink lipstick that matched the booths on purpose. She took his order—the sundae for the lady, black coffee for him—and did gave a smile.
He watched me.
Not the way he had watched me eat the frittata. Something steadier. Something that had decided, before I arrived, that the watching itself was part of the point.
The sundae came.
It came in a glass boat. Actually a boat—long, shallow, footed at either end. The vanilla ice cream mounded down the length of it in three scoops, hot fudge dark over the top, pecans bright against the brown, whipped cream piped along both sides like wake, and a single cherry at the prow.
It was absurd.
It was precisely calibrated to be absurd.
I picked up the long spoon.
“Eat it,” he said. “All of it. Slowly.”
“Is this somehow to do with the contract negotation?”
“You bet it is.”
“This is a lot of sugar.”
“Yes.”
“I do not eat like this.”
“I know you don’t.”
He took a sip of his black coffee and set the cup down and folded his arms on the formica and looked at me.
“This is what I’m asking you to let me give you sometimes. Not the chair. Not the cuffs. Not any of what we just inventoried.” He tilted his head toward the glass boat. “This.”
“Ice cream.”
“Permission.”
I set the spoon down.
“Explain.”
He did.
“There’s a room inside people who carry too much,” he said. “A small one. It isn’t weakness. It’s not performance. It’s the place you can go when being the analyst has gotten too heavy to keep being, and it lets you put the weight down without breaking.”
“Regression.”
“That’s one word. The people who write about it prefer rest. I think rest is closer.”
“Not performance.”
“Not for me. Not for anyone who does it right. I don’t want a show, Sera. I already have women who can give me a show. I have a city full of them. I’m not interested in them. I want the part of you that doesn’t have to run the room.”
The jukebox changed songs. Something slower. A man’s voice now, with strings.
I picked up the spoon again. Tasted the ice cream. It was cold and very sweet and tasted like I was eight years old.
He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and put a small velvet pouch on the formica between us. Midnight blue. The size of my palm.
“What’s this?”
“Something to symbolize the day. What you’re giving me. What I will protect.”
I pulled the drawstring.
Inside was a small grey plush lamb. Not new-new.
Not luxury. Hand-sized. Soft in the way that only a thing meant to be held at night was soft.
A black stitched nose, two stitched black eyes, a bit of ivory felt for the inside of the ears.
The kind of object that had existed in various forms for a hundred and fifty years and had never been improved on.
It was innocence.
I closed my hand around it. It fit entirely inside my closed fist. The softness of it pressed back against my palm with a weight that was almost nothing and also, somehow, not nothing at all.
I ate another spoonful of ice cream with my other hand.
Under the table, I kicked a shoe off, then found his ankle with my foot.
Settled there. The bone of his ankle was warm through his sock.
He did not acknowledge it. He did not have to.
He pressed his ankle back against mine and kept drinking his black coffee and looked at me across the boat of ice cream with something in his face that was not the warm performance from Marchetti’s and was not the careful register of the office and was not even the man from last night.
It was just him.
“Promise me that you won’t make me wear a bonnet,” I said.
“I won’t make you wear a bonnet.”
My eyes narrowed.
“I’m just saying,” he continued, eyes creasing with a smile, “that if you were into it—”
I gently thumped his arm.
“No bonnets. Or eating off plastic plates.”
“Fine! No bonnets or eating off plastic plates.”
“Or speak in a voice that is not my voice.”
“Absolutely not! None of that. I don’t want a different you. I want you with the weight off.”
I held the lamb in my fist under the table. Ate the pecans. Ate the whipped cream. Ate the dark, almost-bitter hot fudge that had gone into the vanilla in cold seams.
“You’re serious about this,” I said.
“I’m serious about you.”
The ice cream was down to its last inch. The cherry was still at the prow, perched on the last mound of melting vanilla, its stem curled like a question mark.
I ate it last.
I pulled it off the stem with my teeth and chewed it slowly and swallowed it, and my foot was still on his ankle and the lamb was still in my fist, and the woman on the jukebox was singing something about a train.
He paid at the counter. Left the waitress a tip that made her do a double-take.