“I am not perfect.”
I rolled my head against the cushion and looked at him, inches away. He was staring at the ceiling, chopsticks idling in one hand, chicken chop suey balanced on his ribs. His adorable hair flopped toward the cushion, a little disordered, close enough to taste. The expression on his face wrecked my chest. I said softly: “From where I’m sitting, you’re close enough to divine.”
“Don’t say that.” He sat up, catching the chicken just in time. “My dad. Pops. He’s a gambler.”
“That’s a shame, but it’s not your fault.”
“No, I mean he really gambles. Deep. Drinks, too. I was lucky, I got out when I could, went to Princeton on scholarship. I have to send him money sometimes.”
“What about your mother?”
“Died when I was ten. Cancer. But I just want you to know, my family’s not like yours. We’re nobody special.”
“For God’s sake, why would I care about that? My special family’s a mess.” I removed the white box from his hand and replaced it with my fingers. “Lie down again, will you? You’re making me anxious.”
He laughed at that and settled back against the cushion, a tiny fraction closer to me. I felt his hair against mine, his mouth disturbing the air as he spoke. “You’ve never been anxious in your life, Vivian.”
“Oh, haven’t I? I’m anxious now.”
“You shouldn’t be.”
I let that sit for a moment in perfect tranquility, because I liked the way it sounded. You shouldn’t be. Shouldn’t be anxious, Vivian, because I am the real deal, I am your Doctor Paul, and we two have an understanding, now, don’t we.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Yes?”
“Yes, we have an understanding, don’t we?”
He squeezed my hand against the bare parquet floor of his sterile white apartment. “We do.”
Doctor Paul evidently had a clock somewhere, buried in his boxes or else on an unseen shelf, because I could hear it ticking methodically as we lay there in perpendicular quietude, absorbing the force of our understanding. If I could see that clock, I guessed it would read somewhere between seven and eight o’clock in the evening, which meant that I had now known him for just over seven hours.
I traveled through them all again: the post office, my apartment, the walk to the library, the library itself, the coffee shop. Wandering up the dull weekend stretch of Madison Avenue, bending our way to the park, not caring where we went as long as we remained linked by this pulsing thread, this shimmering ribbon of you-and-me. How we talked. Not of ourselves, of course. We stuck to the things that mattered: books read, places traveled, friends met, ideas discarded. An hour had passed in a minute, and another hour in a few electric seconds, until we’d looked up to a lowering sky in blind amazement. “Where are we?” Doctor Paul asked.
“I think that’s the Guggenheim, through the trees over there. The museum.”
“I know the Guggenheim. My apartment’s only a few blocks away.”
“Imagine that,” I said.
“Imagine that. Are you hungry?”
“Enough to eat you alive.”
“Will Chinese do?”
We ordered takeout from a tiny storefront on Eighty-ninth Street—THE PEKING DELIGHT, promised the sign above the window, in bright gold letters on a lucky red background—and Doctor Paul led me to his apartment on Lexington Avenue, on the third floor of an anodyne white-brick apartment block, the primary virtue of which was its close proximity to the express subway stop on Eighty-sixth Street. “It’s only fair,” he told me, “since I handed you such a gilded opportunity to have your psychopathic way with me this morning.”
He had opened a bottle of cheap red wine, not a good match for the Chinese, but we drank it anyway in paper Dixie cups, ounce by tannic ounce.
I listened to the clock, the irreplaceable tick of seconds and minutes.
“I should head home,” I said. “You need a few hours of sleep before you go back to the hospital.”
“I suppose I do.”
Neither of us moved.
“I don’t like it,” he said. “It’s dark out, and that neighborhood of yours—”
I laughed. “Oh, nuts. It’s the city that never sleeps, remember? I’ll be just fine. Anyway, my parents live around here. I could always sleep there.”
“You could sleep here.”
Our hands were still entangled, his right and my left, clinging on for dear life. Not a muscle twitched in either.
Doctor Paul cleared his throat. “For the record, I meant sleep sleep. Real sleep. I’ll take the sofa.”
“You have a sofa?”
“Somewhere underneath all these boxes.”
“These boxes you won’t unpack.”
“I will now.” Again, he gave his words time to settle in and sink to the bone. I listened to the cadence of his breath and stared at the nubby white ceiling. I will now. I will unpack for you, Vivian, because if New York is your home, it must be mine, too.
He spoke softly. “I don’t want you to go, Vivian.”
“Why not?”
“You know why.”