Fourth Row Watcher

Chapter 8: Every Other Day

Every other day. Yesterday had been one of the days, so tonight would be nothing, and Ellis had that worked out before he was all the way into the bed.

He showered first and did not drag it out. There was a speed for that — a way of doing it that made nobody wait and nobody ask — and he had learned it. The water was hot and he stood in it exactly as long as it took. His legs ached from the afternoon: an hour, maybe more, folded into the front of Otis's car with the engine off and his knees against the glove box, and then the walk back up Main Street in the cold.

The kitchen had been warm and the floor cold through his socks. He came in through the back hall, and the cat's bowl was on the counter with nothing in it, and he put a measure of the dry food in anyway. Eleven dollars a bag, five weeks to a bag. The cat would come in through the night and look at it. The can of wet food at the fence had been the treat.

Under the two magnets on the refrigerator there was a sheet of paper from a meal service in White Plains. The name of it was at the top and the phone number at the bottom and the weekly fee in the corner, and the days ran down the left side with what went with each one, and there was a line at the end for what to do if he was still hungry. Four weeks of it came to more than he had ever paid anyone for a room in his life. He had done that sum the first week the sheet went up. He had read the line at the bottom more than once. He had not eaten any of it.

He hung the coat in the closet on the far rod. There was a folded slip of paper in the inside pocket and he left it where it was. There was a strip of tape inside the collar with a number inked on it, half rubbed out.

Then the bed, and the lamp.

Its base was no bigger than two of his fists, and a tassel hung off the shade. It had come back from Europe last year in a box lined with tissue paper that had a shop's name on the lid in another language. He had never asked what it cost. Nathaniel had said once, at the beginning, that he could not sleep with light in the room, which was what the heavy lined curtains were for. The curtains were still the heavy lined kind. The lamp was on every night now. Ellis had never turned it off. It was on when he came up to bed, and it was on when he woke, and that was as much as he knew about it.

The house was kept at a temperature he had never set and never asked about. Under the comforter it was almost too warm, and the window on his side was cold when he put the back of his hand against it, and the lamp made a yellow circle on the nightstand and left the rest of the room in the dark. The bed was the size of a small room. He slept at the edge of it, on his own side.

He lay on his side and turned the tassel one way and then the other with two fingers. The threads were the color of weak tea, and some of them had been pulled loose of the knot over a year of somebody's hands, mostly his.

He heard the water stop. Then the fan. Then nothing for a while, and then the bathroom door.

The light in there went out and the room was the lamp again. Nathaniel came around the bed and got in behind him and put his arm over him and stayed like that. He smelled faintly of oranges, and of soap and hot water. He did not say anything. Ellis was not going to be the one.

He had come home and had not said where he had been, and Ellis had not asked.

His watch lay face up on the nightstand where the lamp lit it: 10:51. It ran a minute behind the clock in the hall, and he had stopped setting it right for that. He could feel the weight of the arm across him and the slow rise and fall of it, and he was most of the way asleep when the hand moved.

It came down flat on his waist, low on the left, over the bruise, and his breath stopped and then went on. The hand went up over his ribs and closed on his chest and squeezed once, and Ellis came up out of sleep all at once and shrank and put his own hand over Nathaniel's and held it still.

Nathaniel pulled his away.

"Do you ever eat a proper meal?" he said, against the back of Ellis's neck. "You look thinner again."

Ellis half opened his eyes and looked at the lamp. "Maybe it's the heat."

Nathaniel did not say anything to that.

The breathing at the back of his neck evened out and slowed. That patch of skin had been hot since yesterday and had not stopped being hot. Under the soap and the oranges there was still the other smell, faint, not his own, and somebody breathing on it did not help it any. Ellis lay still. Moving would wake him. Then he moved anyway, without having decided to, and pushed back until Nathaniel's chin came down on the top of his head.

The arm got heavier. The breathing behind him went slack and stayed slack, and Ellis waited past the point where it could have been anything else.

Then he put his hand out from under the comforter and found the tassel again and closed his fist on it, careful, so the lamp would not move on the table.

Steps came along the hall. Somebody's, unhurried. They went past the door and on to the stairs, and he lay with his fist in the tassel and listened to them go down.