I awoke, to a commotion, in darkness: there was a pounding somewhere, frenzied or soft, imagined or real, I wasn’t sure which. For a moment I felt the panic I’d felt sometimes as a child, waking up in the dark and not remembering where I was.
The sound again: a knock at the fire-escape door.
It was Rita.
“I’m sorry about this.”
She had been crying. Her eyes were puffy; her make-up was smudged like runny watercolour.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. I’m sort of messed up.”
She broke into sobs.
“Are you coming from Sid’s?”
“Yeah.”
“He didn’t hurt you?”
“No. It’s nothing like that. It’s just – I don’t know.”
“It’s okay. Everything’s going to be all right.”
I got her onto the living-room couch. She was wearing the same skirt and blouse she’d had on when she’d come by earlier in the week. The blouse was untucked a bit at the back like a sloppy child’s.
“I’ll make you some coffee,” I said.
“Thanks.”
I took a seat across from her while the coffee brewed, self-conscious suddenly at being only in my bathrobe.
“So I guess you had a bit of a rough night.”
“Yeah. I’m really sorry about this.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about.”
She took a Kleenex from her purse and wiped at her tears.
“I should probably just go,” she said.
“You don’t have to do that.”
I brought the coffee in. She had pulled herself together a bit, had tucked in her blouse, had dabbed some of the mascara from her eyes.
She was sitting at the very edge of the couch as if ready for flight.
“We could talk about this, if you want,” I said. “We don’t have to.”
“There’s nothing to say, really. It’s just stupid.”
“Yeah. Maybe not so stupid.”
I watched her hands as she picked up her cup. There was the barest tremor in them, an infinitesimal lack of control.
“This is my fault,” I said. “Not just you and Sid. The whole situation.”
“It’s no one’s fault. It’s my fault. I guess I was trying to prove something to you.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Outside, it had started to rain. A streetcar passed by, a low, rumbling churn of metal against metal. In the corner window I saw it float like a phantom through the misted night-time desertion of College Street.
“It’s raining,” I said. “Maybe you should just stay here for the night.”
“I’ve already bothered you enough as it is.”
“You haven’t bothered me. I’m glad you came here.”
“Are you?”
“Yes.”
She was still perched on the edge of the couch.
“I suppose Elena would be worried,” I said.
“I called her from Sid’s before. She’s not really expecting me.”
“Oh.” We both seemed to feel the same shame and relief at this. “Then I’ll fix the bed for you. I can take the couch.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“It’s nothing.”
I changed the bedsheets with an old linen set I had from home and put out a bathrobe. The robe, in a fusty blue check, was one my father had worn when he was in hospital years before. I’d been surprised when I took it over from him at how small it fit on me.
Rita came to the door. She had washed her make-up away to leave just a puffy tiredness around her eyes, as if she’d just risen from sleep.
“I’m not sure I have any pyjamas for you.”
“Maybe just an old T-shirt or something.”
She changed for bed while I fixed up the couch.
“Can I get you anything?”
“No. Maybe a glass of water.”
“I’ll bring it in.”
She was sitting on the edge of the bed in my father’s robe when I went in. She had draped her clothes over the bedside chair, the strap of a bra dangling from them.
I sat down beside her.
“Are you feeling any better?”
“Yes. Thanks. You’ve been great.”
The tension of the previous days seemed forgotten, as if we’d somehow circled back to the moment that had preceded it, before the confusion had set in.
“I guess things have been a little strange between us lately,” I said.
“Yeah. It’s been hard.”
“That day at the Falls. I didn’t mean – I’m not sure what I meant.”
“It didn’t feel wrong, if that’s what you’re saying. It’s just afterwards –”
“Yes.”
The only light was the dim glow of the bedside lamp. The particular angle it caught Rita at made her look changed, softer but also more sage, more sad, as if some hidden side of her had been revealed.
“Maybe we’re not normal,” she said. “I just think – how things worked out between us. How mixed up it’s been.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
She had half-turned her face from me so that her hair, slightly tangled and still damp either from her tears or from when she’d washed, cut off my view of her.
“Sometimes I feel like I’ve never had anything,” she said. “Anything that was really mine.”
“I know what that’s like. I suppose I always thought that you were what was mine.”
“I don’t know. Just that. That I wasn’t anything, really, except for you. I guess I hated you for that in some ways.”
“And now?”
“Not now.”
She was still half-turned from me.
“Would it be all right if you held me for a bit?” she said.
“I think so.”
I put my arms around her. She had started crying again.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just feel – I don’t know. There’s no way to put it.”
“It’s all right.”
I held her. There was a moment then that was like falling into a kind of darkness, like the two of us opening a door in a dream and stepping out; and then we were kissing. There seemed no decision in this, just a giving-in to the darkness, to the falling. The darkness was like a tangible thing, what the world had been stripped down to; only our lips had vision within it, probing along the contours of skin and bone until they met with an instant’s small, delicious cushioning of padded flesh on padded flesh.
We were still falling. There seemed no distance between us now, just this awful relinquishing as if everything were unfolding at once unreal and yet inevitable, having nothing to do with us and yet what our lives had always been moving toward. I slipped her robe from her shoulders, pulled her T-shirt up so that finally she lay before me with her breasts, her belly exposed like the pale underside of some infinitely fragile thing; and then I was lying beside her, kissing her, running my hands against her skin, doing these things and being inside the doing of them and yet seeing them as if their reality were merely a mirroring of something already lived through, that had already long ago been done and atoned for.
I entered her. There was an instant then when we were looking directly into each other’s eyes, when what was going on with our bodies seemed merely the adjunct to this moment of unblinking sight. There was something almost ruthless in us then, hopeless, the instantaneous mutual admission of wrong and its flouting. There would be this one time, we seemed to say, when the world would split open and every unspeakable hope, every desire, every fear, would be permitted. Then I came and it was as if we had suddenly dropped to earth again.
We lay several minutes without speaking. Rita had wrapped herself in her robe again.
“Are you all right?” I said.
“Yes.”
In the dim light our voices seemed disembodied. There was a mood between us of blank calm like the unrippled surface of a pool; but it seemed the slightest word, the slightest thought, might disturb it.
“Maybe we should get under the covers,” I said.
We fell asleep cradled against one another like children. In the first haze of sleepfulness what I felt to be holding her, to have her there in my bed and be able to run a hand if I wished along the whole, smooth plane of her body, was the sort of matter-of-fact elation I felt on first waking from dreams of flying: there was always a moment then when the thing seemed truly possible, because of the way in the dream it had come about not like some miracle but like the slow working out of mathematical law, something that had had to be worked toward, tested, refined, till at last my heaviness gave way to willed, precarious flight.
But then as I fell deeper into sleep, further and further away from the place where we’d been together, where things had made sense, the horror began to take shape. It began with just a gnawing at the back of my mind like the onset of a fever dream, the scrambling search for a solution to a question that refused to take solid form; and then gradually it grew into a kind of panic. I was running, running, through deserted night-time streets, down subway stairwells, through dim, blue-lit passageways only just wide enough to slip through; and there was something I was moving toward or away from, it was never clear which, something inevitable and large, unnameable, but also, in a way, banal, all the more horrible for that.
I awoke, with a start, toward dawn. Rita was still beside me, turned away now and sprawled face-down like someone who had fallen from a building. Her breathing was rhythmic but shallow; once she sucked in her breath as if at some sudden fright, then resumed her regular rhythm again. I could smell her there beside me, a complex mixture of sweat and sex and a soapy, milky scent that made me think of how her pillow had smelled when we’d slept together as children years before.
I slipped out of bed to the bathroom. There was blood on me from her, I saw now. There were smears of it on my fingers, on my thighs; in the morning there would be dried stains on the covers and sheets. I tried not to think of what this meant, how dire, perhaps, this made things. I remembered the wedding jokes about bedsheets when I was a child in Italy, how strange they had struck me then, how brutal a thing they had made marriage seem.
I went back to bed, my hand going out instinctively to test the sheets, expecting wetness; but they were dry. Rita shifted as I settled myself, pulled herself in, away. She had turned again, so that her face was etched out in greys and whites against her pillow; what I saw there for an instant were my own features, the set of her jaw, of her cheeks, could read in the placement of muscle and bone my own genetic code.
For a long time I lay awake turned away from her toward the window, staring into the brightening dawn. A few scudding clouds left behind from the night’s rain gradually dispersed, leaving behind a clear, northern sky that held the intimation of sunrise like a great blue-dipped bowl. For a while, before the traffic increased, I could make out a sound of birds, tiny, industrious whistles and chirps like the coming to life of some vast, miniature household.
At some point I felt Rita stirring beside me and instinctively closed my eyes to feign sleep. The bed creaked, then the floor, and then I could feel her weight rising up from the mattress, hear the rustle of clothing as she went through the clothes on the bedside chair. She went into the living room to dress: I could picture with each sound, each hiss and whoosh of cloth, as she slipped on skirt, stockings, blouse. There were a few minutes of silence then, the moments when I should have gone to her; and then finally the sound of motion again, of furtive footsteps across creaking hardwood, of a closing door.