GIVEN HIS INABILITY or unwillingness to work on anything new—the first being his own belief and the latter the suspicion of his crueler acquaintances—Thomas took to things he found beautiful in only the purest sense. For the first time in his life, he appreciated photographs of mountains, saturated paintings of cornfields. He liked to tell friends who called that he had misplaced his taste somewhere, that they could forward any and all snapshots of rainbows and glaciers his way. His growing fascination with Adeleine followed from this naturally.
She seemed made of words often paired together, and observing her helped Thomas to understand the hackneyed couplings: creamy skin, shining eyes, flowing hair. He hadn’t truly noticed her in the year and a half she’d been across the hall; perhaps he had found her perfection boring. The women who had stomped across his life before had always been jagged in their appearance and furtive in their intent: a sculptor who wore gray exclusively and brought him back to a charcoal-painted apartment twice a week for silent, brutal sex; a jilted pregnant woman with coarse eyebrows who only wanted to be held and fed; several who drank too much and stood by his canvases nodding before becoming bellicose and picking circular fights.
Adeleine was different: symmetrical and soft and glossy to an extent that didn’t seem naturally occurring, with cheeks that glowed like peaches in commercials and eyes as violet as industrial fireworks.
Even after he realized the extent of her beauty, Thomas had no interest in talking to her. He only wanted to watch, to fully appreciate the precision of her making. It helped that she never spoke or looked at him as she put out a bag of trash or opened the door for a deliveryman.
When her nighttime weeping began, he was blindsided by his vision having grown complex and animate and tried to will the noises away. The stroke had left him cold, and sometimes slowed reactions to other people’s pain, but the sounds coming from her body were without rhythm, impossible to become accustomed to and ignore, and he quickly felt moved to mollify them.
The first time he knocked, he heard the strangled stifle of a sob and the hurried footsteps to switch off the light. He burned with embarrassment at a rejection so obvious, but the next night found him at her door again, listening. He did not bring his knuckles to the wood, only crouched and slipped a note under the door: I thought you could use a drink.—Apt. 3A. When he checked a half hour later, the mug of bourbon and lemon and honey had disappeared. In bed that night, he thought of her lips on the porcelain, and his skin grew tight, his pectorals and hamstrings newly awake, tensing under her image. He arranged his dead hand on his abdomen, then slid his other under the elastic band of his boxers and moved it forcefully, repeatedly, until every part of him ceased to complain.
What followed was like some archaic dance, one that required mastery not only of the steps but also the nuanced system of nods and glances that marked its transitions. After ten days, Thomas realized with mild panic that he’d sacrificed all of his cups, the university mugs and the gifted beer stein and the ridged water glasses. He hadn’t left her with any instructions as to their return, of course, and she hadn’t offered any communication beyond the simple receipt of his nightly gifts. He thought about it with pain throughout the day until the ritual hour passed. After several hours of sleep, he woke with an urgent feeling and drank several bowls of water in the kitchen, surprised by how the act of sleeping had induced such a thirst. He looked out at the unlit room as a thief might, scanning for value and an unhindered escape.
—
TWO NIGHTS LATER, the knock came.
“The little bell’s been going off and I’ve been salivating, but the Russian scientist in charge has forgotten me,” she said. Her eyes remained somewhere to his left, and it was unclear whether she was seeking his laughter.
The mass of her heavy hair was pinned up and swirled above her face, and her chin jutted from a crisp lilac linen that buttoned all the way to the neck. Though he hadn’t considered what her voice might sound like, the reality of it, scratched and thick-throated, still seemed incorrect. It was that of a tollbooth operator, worn in by rote speech, eroded by fumes. The door of her apartment remained open behind her, and one of her hands clung to its knob as she straddled the hall.
“I—I ran out of glasses,” Thomas answered. He emphasized glasses as though discussing something irreplaceable and watched with resounding discomfort as her fine face flushed, her body retreated homeward by an inch, then two. He heard the measured voice of some nature-channel narration and tried to push it away, but the black humor nagged at him: meeting the rare creature out in the open, should he play dead, or offer his food, or wave his arms and yell?
“You can—” she began, gesturing towards her apartment’s rose glow. “Bring?” He understood, with a thrill, that the exchange made her nervous, and he nodded as though they’d done this before and knew their parts, and went to retrieve the bottle. The smell of all her things, fusty and smoky and dense, had already reached him.