The Width of Glass

Chapter Eighteen — Saturday

Eliot pov

She had opinions about coats.

I had expected this in the abstract, she had opinions about most things, but I had not anticipated the specific and comprehensive nature of the opinions she brought to a coat shop on a Saturday morning in November, which turned out to be considerable. She rejected the first three on the grounds of cut, the fourth on the grounds of a zip that she described as insufficient for the purpose, and the fifth because the colour, a perfectly functional dark green, was apparently too close to a coat she had owned before and had associations she wasn't interested in revisiting.

I stood and watched her work through the rail with the methodical attention she brought to documents and I thought about all the ways in which a person's professional habits expressed themselves in their private life, the particular quality of her assessment, the way she held each coat at arm's length before trying it, the brief internal calculation visible on her face as she processed each one.

She pulled out a coat in a deep navy, heavier than the others, and put it on and turned to the mirror and was still for a moment.

She said, this one.

I said, yes.

She looked at me in the mirror and said, you didn't even look at it properly.

I said, I looked at it properly.

She said, you looked at me in it for approximately one second.

I said, one second was sufficient.

She turned back to the mirror and looked at the coat and then at my reflection behind her and said, your opinions about thermal outerwear are less technical than advertised.

I said, the technical assessment and the other assessment are not mutually exclusive.

She held my gaze in the mirror for a moment and then turned and looked at the price tag and made a face that was briefly unguarded and I said, I'll get it.

She said, you won't.

I said, consider it a contribution to the Norway trip.

She said, the Norway trip that you booked without telling me.

I said, yes.

She said, Eliot.

I said, Mara.

She looked at me and then at the coat and then at me again and said, you can get it if you let me buy lunch.

I said, agreed.

She took the coat to the counter and I paid for it and she accepted this with the particular grace of someone who had decided not to make it a point of principle and was filing it away instead as something to reciprocate at a later date, which I knew because I had learned to read her filing away face, the brief tucking away of information that would surface again when she had decided what to do with it.

We walked to lunch through the Saturday market on Caldwell Street, which she took without hesitation or comment, which I noticed and did not mention. Three months ago she had taken Renner Street because a note told her to. Today she walked through Caldwell Street with her new coat on and her hands in its pockets and her attention moving through the market stalls with the easy curiosity of someone who was not managing her route but simply walking it.

I walked beside her and felt the specific satisfaction of a thing resolved.

She stopped at a stall selling old maps and spent ten minutes looking through them with the focused pleasure of someone in their natural habitat, holding each one up to the light, reading the legend in the corner, occasionally making a small sound of interest that she was probably unaware of. She bought one, a navigational chart of the Norwegian coast from the nineteen fifties, rolled it carefully and tucked it under her arm.

She said, for the house.

I said, we haven't seen the house yet.

She said, I know where it's going regardless.

We had lunch at a place she chose, small and warm, the kind of restaurant that had been in the same location for long enough to have developed a loyal and specific clientele of people who came every Saturday and sat at the same tables. The owner greeted her by name, which surprised me, and she said she had been coming since she moved to the area, it was three minutes from the archive and did the best soup she had found in the city.

I looked around the restaurant and thought about her sitting here alone on Saturday lunches for three months, working through the soup and whatever she had brought to read, building a life in this neighborhood one small habitual thing at a time.

She ordered for both of us without asking, which I noted and found I didn't mind, and we sat with our soup and the Norwegian chart on the table between us and she told me about the market and the archive and the colleague who had left last month and the one who had recently arrived and was making everyone uneasy by being extremely competent.

I listened and asked questions and listened to the answers and thought about how little I had known how to do this two years ago. Not the listening, I had always been able to listen, it was a professional requirement and I was good at it. But the particular quality of this listening, the listening that was not information gathering or assessment or the building of a picture for any specific purpose, the listening that was simply being present with another person because the person was interesting and their thoughts were interesting and the way they talked about the things they cared about was interesting.

I had not done this for a long time.

I had not wanted to, which was the more accurate version. Wanting required investment and investment required the belief that the return was possible, and for two years that belief had not been available to me in any form I could access.

She was looking at me.

She said, you went somewhere.

I said, I was thinking.

She said, about what.

I said, about listening. About the difference between listening professionally and listening because you want to.

She said, which one is this.

I said, the second one. Unambiguously.

She held her soup spoon in both hands and looked at me with the expression that was warm and direct and said, good. I'd find it disconcerting to be assessed.

I said, you assessed me for approximately three weeks before you crossed the street.

She said, that was research. Research is different.

I said, how.

She said, research has a question it's trying to answer. Assessment is ongoing with no fixed endpoint. I had a question and I answered it.

I said, what was the question.

She looked at me across the table in the Saturday lunch restaurant with her Norwegian chart and her new navy coat on the back of her chair and said, whether you were safe.

I said, and.

She said, the answer was yes. Which was not the answer I was prepared for, which is why it took me three weeks.

I said, what answer were you prepared for.

She said, I was prepared for the answer to be complicated. For there to be something that didn't add up, something that resolved the situation into something more familiar and therefore more navigable. A reason to be afraid of you rather than afraid for different and more inconvenient reasons.

I said, inconvenient.

She said, falling for someone you met because your ex was stalking you and they were watching from across the street is inconvenient, yes. It's not a story that starts simply.

I said, no.

She said, but I've decided I don't mind that. The Gloucester letters didn't start simply either. The whole point of them was that the simple version was the cover, and what was actually happening was in the gaps.

I looked at her.

I said, are you comparing us to wartime correspondence.

She said, I'm comparing the structure. The official content and the real content being different things. The real thing hidden in what wasn't said.

I said, and now.

She said, and now it doesn't need to be hidden. Which is, I think, the better version.

I thought about the notes. The first one, clean and practical, a single line of misdirection about an exit. The real content of it, which had nothing to do with Caldwell Street and everything to do with a decision I had made eleven days into knowing someone to act on their behalf rather than file it away and do nothing.

I said, the better version, yes.

After lunch we walked back through the market. She stopped at a stall selling second hand books and I stood beside her while she went through them with the same methodical pleasure she had brought to the coats and the maps and I thought about Saturdays. About all the Saturdays I had spent in this neighbourhood over the preceding twenty two months, the route to the café, the coffee nursed for too long, the return to the apartment and the afternoon's consulting work and the window and the street and the long evenings of nothing in particular.

She pulled a book out and looked at the cover and handed it to me without speaking.

It was a collection of essays about Norway.

I looked at it and then at her and she was already moving on to the next section of the stall with the small private smile she had when she had done something she was pleased with.

I bought the book.

We walked back to Harwick Street in the pale November light, her with her coat on and her chart under her arm, me with the essay collection in my pocket, and at the entrance to her building she stopped and looked up at the façade the way she had told me she had done on the day she arrived, that final assessment before going in.

I stood beside her and looked at it with her.

She said, I want to show you something.

I said, alright.

We went upstairs to her apartment, which I had been in many times now but which still had the quality of her in a way that was distinct from my apartment, warmer and slightly less ordered, the books arranged by intended reading sequence, the yellow flowers replaced now with white ones, the hexagonal bathroom tiles that she had once described to me as not charming and which I had looked at and concluded were, actually, charming.

She went to the bedroom and I followed and she stood in front of the wardrobe and opened it and inside, on the floor, the suitcase was flat and empty.

She said, I unpacked it three weeks ago. I told you.

I said, you told me.

She said, I wanted you to see it. There's a difference between telling someone something and showing them.

I looked at the empty folded suitcase and then at her standing beside me in the bedroom of her apartment that she had chosen for its anonymity and which had become, over three months, something else entirely.

I said, yes. There's a difference.

She closed the wardrobe.

She said, I have something else to show you.

She went to the kitchen and I followed and she opened a drawer and took out a small stack of papers, folded, each one creased along the same line.

The notes.

All of them, kept in a kitchen drawer.

She set them on the table and looked at them and then at me and said, I kept them from the beginning. I didn't know why at the time. I told myself it was evidence, something to take somewhere if I needed to.

She paused.

She said, but I kept them after it was over too. I've been thinking about why.

I said, and.

She said, I think they're the beginning of the story. And I keep the beginnings of things. It's what I do.

I looked at the notes on her kitchen table, the precise slanted handwriting on each one, the careful economy of the language, all the things I had told myself about them when I was writing them and all the things that were true underneath the things I had told myself.

I said, can I.

She pushed them toward me.

I picked up the first one.

Don't take the Caldwell Street exit after dark. Use Renner instead.

I looked at it for a long moment. At the handwriting that was mine and the words that were practical and the thing underneath the words that had been present from the first fold of the paper and which I had spent nine weeks refusing to name.

I set it down.

I said, I'm glad you kept them.

She said, I knew you would be.

She put the kettle on and leaned against the counter and looked at me across her kitchen in the November afternoon light coming through the window, the same window I had looked at from across a street for ten weeks, and I stood on this side of it and thought about glass and distance and the specific and unlikely geography of how two people find each other.

She said, three weeks.

I said, until Norway.

She said, yes.

I said, I found somewhere to stay. On the coast. The view from the window faces the water.

She said, of course it does.

I said, there's a ferry. Twenty minutes from the nearest town.

She said, you've been thorough.

I said, I'm thorough about things that matter.

She looked at me with the warm direct expression and said, I know.

Outside the kitchen window the street was doing its ordinary Saturday afternoon things, unhurried and indifferent, the same street it had always been and also not the same street at all, depending on which side of the glass you were standing on.

I was on the right side.

I had been on the right side for three weeks and intended to remain there.