Page 91 of Graceless

"I can sit through a movie."

"We'll see."

He put eggs in front of me and toast I hadn't asked for, and stood there until I ate the toast.

By late afternoon the light had crossed the studio floor and gone up the far wall, and my treatment report was four pages of flat clean language, and the radio was on low — allowed again, now that the letters were done — and when I looked up from the bench he was watching me from the chair with something in his face too big for a woman doing paperwork.

"What."

"Nothing."

I looked at him a second longer. Then I let it stand, a nothing for a nothing, because it was Saturday, and we were rich.

That evening I made us spaghetti aglio e olio, Saturday food, and we ate it at the table with the radio still going, and I ran through tomorrow while we ate.

"Bread first thing, before the line gets stupid. Semolina, two loaves — if the second one survives the walk home it's a miracle and we bring the miracle to Nina's." I twirled the fork. "And Gina's saving you the seat again, so pace yourself on the questions. Last week she had a list."

"The questions are good questions."

"I know they are. That's the problem, there's no end to them." I got up, found the pencil, and wrote the list on the pad's clean page — bread, semolina x2 — wine — sfogliatelle for the monster — and tore it off and stuck it to the fridge under the magnet, next to the rules, our whole government on one appliance.

When I turned around he was still standing there with the dish towel in his hands, looking at the fridge.

"It's a grocery list, Raq."

"I know what it is," he said.

The movie had explosions. Nobody we liked died.

I had my feet in his lap and the blanket from the back of the couch, and somewhere in the second act I caught him — caught him watching the movie, both eyes, actually in it, no corners, no windows, not one glance at the door the whole night.

"Look at you," I said. "Off duty."

"Yes," he said, and his hand closed around my ankle, warm as a bath.

I meant to see the ending. The last thing I got was an explosion, orange on the insides of my eyelids, and the weight of his hand, and the thought — right at the drop-off edge, half a thought, gone before I could sign it — that I couldn't remember the last time the house had felt this safe.

Raq

She surfaced when the credits ran, walked herself to bed with her eyes half shut, and was under again before I turned off the lamp.

At eleven I did the circuit.

Both corners. The alley. The laundromat step, cold a third night. The block was empty. The watchers had seen what they came to see and gone. Whatever happened next would not happen here — that was the whole point of what I was about to do.

I came back in and threw the bolt and stood in the dark of the kitchen listening to the house — the refrigerator, the radiator, Donnie's television murmuring through the ceiling — and under it all, down the hall, the slow tide of her breathing, twelve to the minute, the metronome I have set my nights by for a season.

There was no argument left to have. The argument had ended on a boardwalk with her cold nose against my jaw. Everything since had been logistics.

I went down the hall and stood in the door of our room and memorized her.

The streetlight came through the blind in stripes. She had taken the whole bed the moment my side went empty — a woman raised to fill abandoned territory — one arm thrown across my pillow, holding it the way she holds my arm, like a thing that might be reassigned if she loosens her grip.

I stood in the door and I took the inventory.

The scar through her eyebrow, from a fence she went over at nine, the year of the crash, the story she tells as comedy. The crease between her brows that never fully leaves, even sleeping. Ochre at the second knuckle of her right hand; she scrubs her hands like a surgeon and the ochre survives everything; I have come to believe it is not paint anymore but pigment gone native, part of the skin, the trade become the body.

Her breath, twelve to the minute.