Page 64 of Faceless

She put the fork down again. “There is something I want to ask you.”

“Then ask it.”

“I want to ask it, and I want you to listen to the whole of it before you answer.”

She heard him set his glass down. “Very well.”

“I want to know about you. Where did you come from? Why are you hiding even from me? Whom would I tell… what? And you have never seen me any more than I have seen you. Are you not curious? Have you never once wondered what I look like, sitting across from you in the dark?”

She heard him stop breathing.

Then, after some moments — long enough that she had decided he would not answer, and then thought perhaps he might, and decided again that he would not —

“I have a report that you are handsome.” His whisper was careful, polite, the most ceremonious he had given her since their wedding night. “It was your character that drew me, and your character that has held me, and I do not flatter myself that an evening of seeing you would have altered either. I confess to being as intrigued by a handsome woman as any other man might be, and I should not pretend otherwise. But it is, unhappily, a pleasure I will have to forego for the present.”

A pleasure he would have to forego. As though seeing her would have been a pleasure he had any reason to anticipate. As though he had given the matter thought.

“Then I am the less patient of us,” she said. “I had told myself that a man hiding his face for cosmetic reasons — a scar, a wound, any disfigurement — would not also need to hide his voice. The voice is a separate concealment, and it tells me there is more than a face. I know that. So, I am not asking only about the face. I am asking everything. If there is another name, I would like to know the name. If there is a country, I would like to know the country. If there is a man somewhere who has driven you here, I would like to know him as well, by name and by deed. I am asking it because I am the woman you married, and I have been here for two months, and I have given you my word on more than one occasion not to use what you tell me against you, and I do not break my word. That is my request.”

She heard him breathe again.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I cannot give you any of it. Not for a refusal of you. For your safety, for mine, for things I cannot describe to you without already giving you part of what you have asked. Please.” Another silence. “Please do not press me. Do not ask me again tonight. I am not — I am not equal to refusing you again tonight.”

She had him.

It was not what she had been after; it was a great deal more than she had reason to expect. She had asked the impossible, knowing he would refuse it, and he had refused with something close to apology, and she had only to wait now until he had recovered enough to think she had let the matter go.

She gave him a long minute.

“Then let me ask a lesser thing,” she said. “I am not asking what your true voice means or where you came from or why. I am not asking to see your face. I am asking for it under my hands. That is all. I will not ask about what I learn there. I will not speak of what I find. I want only to have some shape to put to the whisper I have been listening to for two months.”

She heard his breath catching in a different way — the relief of being asked for less. He had been braced for further pursuit. He had been given reprieve. “I cannot… that is not…”

“Please,” she said, very quietly, in the moment of his relief.

She heard his chair shift. She heard him cross to her — she counted the steps — and then she heard him kneel. The fabric of his coat moved against the leg of her chair as he came down. The warmth of him reached her in the dark, close but not touching. His hands found hers, both of them.

“You must tell me,” he said, “if I am to permit this, that you will hold yourself to the lesser question.”

“I give you my word.”

He was quiet for another moment. Then, very slowly, he guided her hands upward.

His jaw first. She had not been prepared for any of this — for the warmth of a human face, for the breadth of him under her palms, for the slight scratchiness of a jaw shaved that morning and already wanting attention again.

She had thought that to put her hands on his face would be to know him. She found instead that her hands were not eyes. A jaw was a jaw. A mouth was a mouth. A nose was a nose. The pieces would not assemble into recognition. She knew faces by sight, by no other sense, and she had not known until now how much of recognition was the eyes’ work and not the hand’s.

She moved her fingers carefully. The line of his jaw was clean and strong. Not a soft face. Not a man gone to ease or age. The chin, the angle of it. The mouth, which she did not linger on. The nose — straight, unremarkable, wholly intact. His breath fluttered across her fingers, and she heard him check it, heard the effort of the checking.

She moved higher. The cheekbones. There ought to have been the damage the solicitor told her about. There ought to have been the irregularity that explained the dark. There was nothing. The skin was smooth and unmarked where she could reach.

She moved to his brow. His sideburns. The temples.

Her left hand stayed at his temple. Her right hand moved a half-inch back into the hair at the corner of his brow and stayed there. She tipped his forehead a little closer to her, with care, the way one might draw an unfamiliar book down off a shelf. And then she whispered into the space between his skin and hers.