Читать книгу Atmospheric Disturbances - Rivka Galchen - Страница 19

She said to me: “Anatole, I am worried about you.”

Anatole? I felt for a moment like I could sense my own skin desiccating, that all those people I’d seen in the coffee shop were members of my own self, in masquerade, laughing at me, that I could sense water molecules moving not toward boiling but doing the opposite, colliding together out of the air. What came out of my mouth was: “What?” I saw red. Or beigey stars with red auras, receding.

She answered in a very quiet voice, “Well, I said. I said: Well, that I am worried about you.”

“You said Anatole,” I said, turning my head to look up at her face. From down below like that—I was still on the floor of the kitchen—her lips looked like bas-relief, exaggerated and grotesque.

“For a toll?” She said. “No, no I didn’t say that.”

I could still sense the dog in the room, but it was as if she were unfathomably far away, as if her tail were metronoming over a distant horizon.

“You said,” I said again, “Anatole.”

Her eyes were watering. “No, I didn’t. I said just, oh, that I am worried about you.”

“I heard Anatole,” I said again, unembarrassed, because after all she was a stranger. I lifted myself off the cool, dry, dusty floor—feeling somehow a small loss at no longer being able to see the lost jack under the fridge—and I sat myself up next to the woman. “Anatole. Is that the name of the night nurse?”

She kept crying very quietly and did not answer me.

“Is he your boyfriend? Is he in on this?”

She wiped her face with her sleeve. “So stupid,” I heard her mumble.

“What?” I said. And one might fault me for not attending to this woman’s suffering—but I myself was still in such shock, under such duress.

“No, silly. No, not what you might think at all,” and she began to laugh a little bit in her tears. She stood up then, from the ground, the floor I mean, and walked to the bedroom.

I did not follow her, not right away.

I went to sleep knowing that if I was somehow wrong, if this really was Rema, then in the morning we’d pretend none of this had happened. That’s how things were with us. I liked that, our mutual commitment to delimiting our intimacy, that commitment, in its way, a supreme form of intimacy, I’d argue. I often miss that very particular habit of ours these days, when it seems everything I’ve said or done or eaten or worn the day before is being made reference to, is being discussed. People need secrets. Anyway, that night I slept at the very edge of the bed; the woman did not seem to mind. She slept with her back to me. She held the dog in her arms and did not touch me.

I also let her remain alone.