In the nights after the Underground bombings, they clutched, and they were alive, fortunately, wonderfully alive. Alexandra told him he was too far when they were next to each other.
In the mornings, because she’d admitted what she was too impatient to enjoy, Jeremy removed pomegranate seeds from the husk, and because she did not want him to first think to discard the imperfect thing, she fussed a small screwdriver to repair his watch, though always it was breaking. When they watched a movie, he asked after if the gladiator would live, and no matter the quality, she declared the warrior’s future thrive. She began to pay attention to men’s shirts in shop windows, cuff links.
They had met in May and now it was July, and as days ticked off, the calendar grew suggestive. “I’ve seen you more than the inside of my own refrigerator this week, you know that?” Alexandra said.
“A dry goods woman, are you?”
“Just north,” Alexandra said. “Freezer.”
“That’s the one shaped like a boot.”
“It’s an intemperate country, but you’d be surprised at the idyll,” she said. “Food never spoils, and there is no fever, war, or taxation.”
Her foot was in his hand. “I will levy no impost,” he said. “But I cannot speak for the food.”
That afternoon, he noticed that she paperclipped magazine pages to keep her place. He remarked on it. Later, when she removed an issue from her overnight bag, she found a note clasped where she’d left off reading. Have a drink with me. Or have a museum with me. Have tea.
Am I allowed only one? she wrote on the blank side of a receipt. And when after a week he did not find her small letter, she did not tell him its contents, but she did invite him to meet her best friend.
At the bar, over glasses of whiskey and ice furnished with regular fleet, Jeremy removed and layered clothing, muttering too warm, too cold. He reiterated what she’d told him of Genevieve Bailey in the form of questions. Did Genevieve still prefer for different foods not to touch, and was it true that she preferred to write in pencil?
“It is true,” Genevieve told him.
“I like him,” Genevieve told her.
Once, Alexandra would have on the occasion of bringing him flowers said she was bringing his house flowers. Less to lose then. Less frightening. Now, she asked, “Can we be trusted to raise a houseplant?”
He brought home two kittens.
The Abyssinian they named Jill. The all black, So-So. The shell-pink felt of the pads on their paws shocked the sequester of her where careful language stacked, modular, ready-made. They lay on the carpet, jouncing shoelaces, and she made fool noises.