When she entered the studio, at precisely four the next day, the first thing she saw was Jasper Gwyn’s pages, back in their places, not even a crease, restored again, with the thumbtacks and all. There were hundreds by now. It didn’t seem that anyone had ever walked on them. Rebecca looked up and Jasper Gwyn was there, sitting on the floor, in what seemed to have become his den, his back leaning against the wall. Everything was in its place, the light, the music, the bed. The chairs lined up on one side of the room, in order, except the one that he used every so often, placed in a corner, the notebook on the floor. That sensation of safety, she thought—which I never knew before.
She undressed, took a chair, moved it to a point she liked, not too close to Jasper Gwyn, not too far, and sat down. They stayed like that for a long time. Jasper Gwyn every so often looked at her, but more often stared at something in the room, making small gestures in the air, as if he were following some music. He seemed to miss his notebook, his eyes searched for it a couple of times, but in reality he didn’t get up to find it, he felt like staying there, leaning against the wall. Until, unexpectedly, Rebecca started talking.
“Tonight I thought of something,” she said.
Jasper Gwyn turned to look at her, caught by surprise.
“Yes, I know, I shouldn’t talk, I’ll stop right away.”
Her voice was calm, serene.
“But there’s a stupid thing I’ve decided to do. I don’t even know if I’m doing it for me or for you, I mean only that it seems right, the way here the light is right, the music, everything is right, except one thing. So I’ve decided to do it.”
She got up, went over to Jasper Gwyn, and knelt in front of him.
“I know, it’s stupid, I’m sorry. But let me do it.”
And, as she would have done with a child, she leaned toward him and slowly took off his jacket. Jasper Gwyn did not resist. He seemed reassured by seeing Rebecca fold the jacket in the proper way and place it carefully on the floor. Then she unbuttoned his shirt, leaving the buttons of the cuffs for last. She took it off, and again folded it in an orderly way, placing it on the jacket. She seemed satisfied, and for a little while she didn’t move. Then she moved back, and leaned over to unlace Jasper Gwyn’s shoes. She took them off. Jasper Gwyn drew his feet back because all men are embarrassed about socks. But she smiled, and took those off, too. She put everything in order, as he would have done, taking care that it was all lined up.
She looked at Jasper Gwyn and said it was much better this way.
“It’s much more precise,” she said.
She got up and went to sit in the chair again. It was stupid, but her heart was pounding as if she had run a race—it was exactly as she had imagined it, at night, when it had occurred to her.
Jasper Gwyn began looking around again, went back to making small gestures in the air. Nothing seemed to have changed for him. As if he had suddenly become an animal, Rebecca thought, however. She looked at his thin chest, his skinny arms, and returned to a time when Jasper Gwyn was to her a distant writer, a photograph, some interviews—entire evenings reading him, rapt. She remembered the first time Tom had sent her to the Laundromat, with that cell phone. It had seemed crazy to her, and then Tom had paused to explain a little what sort of person Jasper Gwyn was. He had told her that in his last book there was a dedication. Maybe she remembered: To P., farewell. He explained that “P.” stood for Paul, who was a child. He was four, and Jasper Gwyn was his father. But they had never seen each other, simply because Jasper Gwyn had decided that he would never be a father, and for no reason. He was able to sustain it with great sweetness and determination. And he told her something else. There were at least two other books by Jasper Gwyn that circulated in the world, but not under his name, and certainly it wasn’t he who would tell her what they were. Then Tom had pointed a blue ballpoint pen at his head and had made a noise with his mouth, like a puff of air.
“It’s a destroyer of memory,” he had explained. “You don’t know anything.”
She had taken the cell phone and gone to the Laundromat. She remembered him very well, that man, sitting in the midst of the washing machines, elegant, his hands forgotten on his knees. He had seemed a sort of divinity, because she was still young, and it was the first time. At a certain point he had tried to tell her something about Tom and a refrigerator, but she had had trouble concentrating, because he spoke without looking in her eyes, and in a voice that she seemed to have known forever.
Now the man was here, with his thin chest, his skinny arms, his bare feet placed one on top of the other—an elegant, princely animal relict. Rebecca thought how far one can go, and how mysterious are the pathways of experience if they can lead you to be sitting on a chair, naked, observed by a man who has dragged his folly here from far away, rearranging it to make a refuge for him and for you. It occurred to her that every time she had read a page by him she had been invited into that refuge, and that basically nothing had happened since then, absolutely nothing—maybe a belated alignment of bodies, always late.
From then on Jasper Gwyn, when he worked, wore only a pair of old mechanic’s pants. It gave him something of the air of a mad painter, and this didn’t do any harm.