Page 65 of Soft Erasure

Caldren was in the courtyard.

No coat. Shirtsleeves, on a Saturday, on the service side of his own building.

He had taught me to find the dead spots. He was standing in one he had never shown me.

It was the bench. The one where my own reach had gone up my throat and found nothing at the top of it, and the band ticked and took even that.

“You have the salon at four,” he said.

“I do.”

“You’ll be on time.”

He didn’t ask where I had been.

A man who logged the angle of a doorman’s head didn’t ask where a woman had been for sixty minutes off his property. He would have it Friday. Four lines.

He put his hands at his sides and left them there, open, in the light, where I could see both of them.

On Wednesday I had killed that hand with a word, in front of a lens and a recorder and a dome and three phones in bags. Here there was no gallery. Glass held three sides of that courtyard and the lobby held the fourth. Every step I took to reach him would be on film. The last four feet would not.

I understood it while it was happening. He was running it again, hands down, where nobody could ever say he had crossed a distance. The record would show a woman walking toward a man who was standing still.

Knowing the shape of the room didn’t put me outside it.

I crossed the stone. It was warm. It had been warm for every woman before me.

“Matthew.”

I had never said it out loud. He had named me. I had never named him. The name had gone behind my face where the Friday lived, and it came up out of that place now, ahead of me, without asking.

I put my hand on the side of his neck.

He didn’t move until I had finished. He let me have the reach and the arrival and every inch of the distance, so all of it would be mine, on my record, not his.

Then his hand came up and landed where it had stopped on Wednesday, and it didn’t close. It stayed. Warm and dry and holding me at the exact site of the inch he had not crossed. Every rung I had climbed since that bench ended under his palm, my pulse going into his hand, and into the band, and the band didn’t tick.

He kissed me.

There was no count in it.

The man had built thirteen months of my breathing, and his mouth opened on mine and he didn’t count. His breath went where it went. His hand came off my throat and into my hair and closed, once, hard enough to say the thing his face had never said, and I made a sound into his mouth that no session had ever gotten out of me, and I was not going to stop.

He stopped it.

He put me back with both hands at my shoulders and set the distance to what it had been, and I watched him do the work, the small reset at the eye.

It didn’t take.

He gave me the elevator smile and it didn’t fit him. He stood on his own stone with his hand still half up between us, his color wrong, nothing to put in the air. I watched Matthew Caldren run out of language.

“Four o’clock,” he said.

It was the only thing left in him with a number on it.

“I know.”

He went through the lobby door and didn’t look back. The hard small fact I was left holding was that he had gone first, and that he had gone because he had to.