I sit on Patrick’s sofa, my bare feet tucked beneath me. It’s evening, the final day of April. I could reach out and wipe everything away: the cream-colored living room, Patrick’s body beside me, the dusky world beyond the window. But I’m here. The world is here.
I wear a new dress, the one I tried on with Dora. I returned to purchase it just this morning. The fabric is the green of a furled bud, the neckline plunging low enough to expose my breasts. My mouth is dark and full with Sylvia’s lipstick.
Patrick holds the slim stem of his wineglass. His fingers are long and thin, the fan of bones clearly visible. I lift my gaze to catch him watching me. He smiles and I turn away too quickly.
The Braddocks’ house has enormous windows dominating the front, like a dollhouse with one side opened to the world. It’s a showy home, valuing pride over privacy. Where we sit now, anyone could look inside and see us arranged here. An ordinary couple. A man and a woman after a first date. A husband and a wife with a baby upstairs asleep. Lovers reconciling; lovers breaking apart.
Up close, the rough edges show. I can tell that Patrick is attempting to make it a home again, and to a casual observer, nothing is too obviously out of place. It’s as if Patrick is a museum curator, rebuilding a convincing replica of a past he only knows through books. But the telling details present themselves one by one the longer I gaze around the room.
The house has an unused smell. The light bulbs in the hallway don’t work; we had to pick our way through the gloom. The hard, shiny shell of a dead wasp, ruffled with legs and wings, curls against the leg of the coffee table.
When Patrick lowers his wineglass, there’s a light stain on the chapped skin of his lips. I have the impulse to press my mouth against the mark.
“Do all of your coworkers make house calls like this?” he asks.
I smile, unsure, but his eyes over the edge of his wineglass are light and conspiratorial, inviting me in. “What I’m doing this evening is a service I’m providing on my own time.”
“Well, I respect a woman who can take initiative.” Patrick lifts his glass in a brief toast.
Framed photographs scatter across the bookshelves and against the wall. Sylvia smiles at me in duplicate. Music playing in the background covers the brief silence that hangs between us.
“Your home is lovely,” I say.
“Sylvia is responsible for most of the decorating,” Patrick says, glancing around as if noticing his living room for the first time. “I can’t take credit.”
I imagine what Sylvia must have felt, during parties, during quiet evenings, surveying the home she’d designed. A child with a dollhouse, choosing the decorations she liked. And the husband smiling beside her.
“Should I give you the grand tour?” Patrick says. He sets down his wineglass; it’s already empty. “I probably remember how to do this.”
The entire house is beautiful, though I spot needling signs of neglect. In the kitchen, a cluster of amber bottles stands on the counter, a single fly buzzing greedily around one open mouth and then the other. A cupboard door hangs open, revealing empty shelves. I notice a thick pile of mail on an end table, envelopes flaking onto the floor.
But I focus on the monuments to Sylvia’s taste that still stand: the rug so exquisitely soft that I shiver when I cross it in my bare feet. The windows are tall and bare, slicing up the outside world into private works of art.
My mind returns to the photographs. The way I first saw the Braddocks’ lives, offered up in small pieces. A corner of a doorway, an edge of a window. I spun together my own version of their home. Walking through the reality now, the differences keep catching at me. The living room is larger than I expected. In the kitchen, the hallway branches off to the left instead of the right. I feel the other version of their home flickering, fading.
I reach out and brush my fingertips along a wall to reassure myself.
We reach a second hallway. Patrick flips a switch and the recessed lights glow like flat halos above us. We stand together, his elbow nearly touching mine. My breath comes quick and shallow. I feel an uncoiling inside me, something tight and inflexible finally loosening.
“These are all photographs she took,” Patrick says in a hushed voice. It’s as if Sylvia is sleeping nearby and we might wake her. “Every year, we went on vacation right around our anniversary. Sylvia picked her favorite photo from each vacation.”
The six framed photos take up half of the hallway, trailing off like an unfinished sentence. One photo shows terracotta soldiers, their faces static but alive and alert. In the next photo, the ungainly lines of Stonehenge rise against a mute gray sky.
Patrick stops in front of a narrow cobblestone street, wet red pansies in the windowsills. “I wanted to show her everything she’d missed before we met.” He reaches out to wipe dust from the lip of the frame, leaving a streak of shiny darkness.
When he speaks, his voice is careful. “Anyway. To finish the tour.”
There’s a door at the end of the hall, hanging open. I follow Patrick, but he pauses at the threshold, pushing the door so that it swings inward. I see a bed that seems to take up most of one wall.
If there’s a moment to turn back, it’s now. Patrick and I look at each other. We don’t look away. I feel at once as if I’m not here at all and as if I’m the only woman who’s ever lived on this planet. In my years working as a body, I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be desired.
And I want him back. It’s a pure greed that cuts through everything else. I want him. It seems impossible that I could channel what I feel into any other pursuit, any other direction, without destroying everything in its path.
Patrick pulls me into his arms. For a moment, the fierceness of desire fades, and I’m astonished by the simplicity of being held against another body. My contact with other people has been so stingy, doled out in accidental touches. This close, I can feel Patrick’s heart beating through the fabric of his shirt. His chin is rough against my cheek.
I’m the one who kisses him first.
When I pull back, he stops me, holding onto my wrists. “Where are you going?” he asks. Although I’m already breathless, his voice stays soft and unhurried.
“I thought you wanted her.”
“I want to be with you first,” he says.
I hesitate. “That wasn’t part of the agreement.”
“But it’s what you want?”
“Yes,” I say. “It’s what I want.” It feels as if I’ve never said anything this true before. Even just admitting that I want something is arousing.
Patrick’s grip tightens. He pulls me toward him. “If it’s what you want, then you should have it,” he says, as if it’s always been this simple.
My shorn dress on the bedroom floor is iridescent green, like the husk an insect leaves behind. We’re on the bed. The sheets are thick with his scent. The pillows indented, blotchy and misshapen. I can’t get enough. It’s thrilling how used everything feels. Compared to the cool anonymity of Room 12, Patrick’s bedroom is opulent with odors and clutter.
In the mirror across from the bed, my hair is tangled and my eyes are wet and luminous. I’m feral. A creature awakened from a long slumber.
Afterward, I lie across the bed. I’m dazed and pulsing, someone cast up on an unfamiliar shore and slowly returning to consciousness. When I glance down the length of my body, I could be encountering a stranger. I didn’t recognize the voice that issued from my throat while we were together.
Patrick strokes my hair away from my forehead. When he kisses me, I catch an unfamiliar taste on his lips and realize that it’s me.
“I liked that.” I’m still unguarded enough to say such naked things.
He laughs, low and intimate. We lie together, Patrick loosely embracing me. The uncurtained windows overlook the backyard. An impression of thick foliage, the night pressing up against the glass, as if we’re alone in the middle of an enchanted forest. I’m tired, suddenly, my eyelids weighted.
Dark water leaks at the edges of my consciousness, then swells from a trickle to a roar, rushing over my head.
it can’t last
it never does
“Edie.”
With effort, I open my eyes. Patrick looks down at me, face half in shadow.
He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t have to. I remember. And while I was compliant before, now there’s a glimmer of stubbornness. I don’t want this to end just yet. The two of us.
I rise from the bed, Patrick’s arms falling from me. I walk past the mirror, my reflection a long, willowy apparition crossing the darkness, and retrieve a single lotus. “I’ll need water.”
Patrick lifts himself up on one elbow. “You’re taking that?”
“It’s the same as when you visit the Elysian Society.”
Patrick rises. His elbow brushes me roughly as he moves by, and I’m jarred. In an instant, I have been reduced from his lover to something inconvenient, a mere obstacle.
When he comes back with a glass of wine, I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, covered with the sheets. He hands me the wine. “Be careful,” he says.
His concern feels as tender as a bouquet of roses. As romantic a promise as a diamond ring. Emboldened, I touch his hand.
I slide the lotus between my lips. Maybe it’s the wine that makes the lotus work more quickly than usual, or maybe it’s my lusty, drowsy state, but I recede almost instantly. My last image is of Patrick’s face, his eyes looking down at me, lips parted slightly, waiting. Waiting.
It’s early in the morning when I leave, the predawn sky creamy and pale. When I see my reflection in the entryway’s mirror, I’m rumpled. My already clumsy eye makeup is smudged.
“How much do I owe you?” Patrick asks from behind me. He doesn’t meet my eyes, his voice cool.
I turn from the mirror. He’s counting a sheaf of bills from the depths of his wallet. It’s impossible to think that he’s the same man whose head was between my legs just hours ago, so that I could look down and notice, as if from a great distance, the way the hair was beginning to thin at the top of his scalp. His exposed scalp felt as intimate a revelation as the presence of his mouth against me.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“We already discussed this,” Patrick says.
“You’re right,” I say. He hands me the money. I accept, holding the bills like a wilted corsage. “Thank you.”
Now that this ugly part of the evening is over, tucked away, Patrick relaxes again. He reaches out to slip a strand of my hair behind my ear. Even after everything else we’ve done, the smallness of this gesture brings my heart speeding. “I’ll see you soon,” he says.
It’s as if I’ve been allowed into a secret world and then forced to reemerge, unprepared for the narrowness of my reality. I move through the confines of my apartment, astonished at the apparent connections between one life and the other: the glass of stale water that’s been sitting on the kitchen counter for days; my toothbrush propped inside the medicine cabinet; a brush with golden hairs curled through the tines. These remnants of my presence are the only way I can connect the woman I am now with the woman I was before I walked into Patrick’s house.
One thing still troubles me, an ache I can’t place. It doesn’t come to me until I go into my bedroom and lie down on my colorless bedding. The photo doesn’t fit anymore. The Polaroid of Sylvia, naked, in the too-dark lipstick. Unconsciously, I always filled out the details with the bedroom from the photo. Compared to this, the actuality of their bedroom seems too pale and too ordinary.
Later, I remind myself. Later, later. I can think about it later.