It is Friday. He returns home. Willem will be arriving at around ten that night, and although Mrs. Zhou has already cleaned, he wants to make certain there is no evidence, that he has hidden every clue, although without context, the clues—salt, matches, olive oil, paper towels—are not clues at all, they are symbols of their life together, they are things they both reach for daily.
He still hasn’t decided what he will do. He has until the following Sunday—he has begged nine extra days from Andy, has convinced him that because of the holidays, because they are driving to Boston next Wednesday for Thanksgiving, that he needs the time—to either tell Willem, or (although he doesn’t say this) to convince Andy to change his mind. Both scenarios seem equally impossible. But he will try anyway. One of the problems with having slept so much these past few nights is that he has had very little time to think about how he can negotiate this situation. He feels he has become a spectacle to himself, with all the beings who inhabit him—the ferret-like creature; the hyenas; the voices—watching to see what he will do, so they can judge him and scoff at him and tell him he’s wrong.
He sits down on the living-room sofa to wait, and when he opens his eyes, Willem is sitting next to him, smiling at him and saying his name, and he puts his arms around him, careful not to let his left arm exert any pressure, and for that one moment, everything seems both possible—and indescribably difficult.
How could I go on without this? he asks himself.
And then: What am I going to do?
Nine days, the voice inside him nags. Nine days. But he ignores it.
“Willem,” he says aloud, from within the huddle of Willem’s arms. “You’re home, you’re home.” He gives a long exhalation of air; hopes Willem doesn’t hear its shudder. “Willem,” he says again and again, letting his name fill his mouth. “Willem, Willem—you don’t know how much I missed you.”
The best part about going away is coming home. Who said that? Not him, but it might as well have been, he thinks as he moves through the apartment. It is noon: a Tuesday, and tomorrow they will drive to Boston.
If you love home—and even if you don’t—there is nothing quite as cozy, as comfortable, as delightful, as that first week back. That week, even the things that would irritate you—the alarm waahing from some car at three in the morning; the pigeons who come to clutter and cluck on the windowsill behind your bed when you’re trying to sleep in—seem instead reminders of your own permanence, of how life, your life, will always graciously allow you to step back inside of it, no matter how far you have gone away from it or how long you have left it.
Also that week, the things you like anyway seem, in their very existence, to be worthy of celebration: the candied-walnut vendor on Crosby Street who always returns your wave as you jog past him; the falafel sandwich with extra pickled radish from the truck down the block that you woke up craving one night in London; the apartment itself, with its sunlight that lopes from one end to the other in the course of a day, with your things and food and bed and shower and smells.
And, of course, there is the person you come back to: his face and body and voice and scent and touch, his way of waiting until you finish whatever you’re saying, no matter how lengthy, before he speaks, the way his smile moves so slowly across his face that it reminds you of moonrise, how clearly he has missed you and how clearly happy he is to have you back. Then there are the things, if you are particularly lucky, that this person has done for you while you’re away: how in the pantry, in the freezer, in the refrigerator will be all the food you like to eat, the scotch you like to drink. There will be the sweater you thought you lost the previous year at the theater, clean and folded and back on its shelf. There will be the shirt with its dangling buttons, but the buttons will be sewn back in place. There will be your mail stacked on one side of his desk; there will be a contract for an advertising campaign you’re going to do in Germany for an Austrian beer, with his notes in the margin to discuss with your lawyer. And there will be no mention of it, and you will know that it was done with genuine pleasure, and you will know that part of the reason—a small part, but a part—you love being in this apartment and in this relationship is because this other person is always making a home for you, and that when you tell him this, he won’t be offended but pleased, and you’ll be glad, because you meant it with gratitude. And in these moments—almost a week back home—you will wonder why you leave so often, and you will wonder whether, after the next year’s obligations are fulfilled, you ought not just stay here for a period, where you belong.