William and I were each similarly connected to our art, and though William was more taciturn about his work, I felt some tie to his approach that I couldn’t explain. He’d said that, like me, he still shot film. He liked the way film captured light. He liked the old lenses. We’d talked for a long time on the phone about our cameras and our preferences. I enjoyed making prints—I didn’t tell him why—and I thrilled to see the figure I’d photographed appear, though others saw only the light and some sort of golden glow that seemed to tremble in the location of my subject.
I sat by the window and pressed my face against the glass. After all of our talking on the phone, I didn’t know this man in my bed at all. Perhaps he didn’t want me pliable, eager to have him. Maybe he wanted me to play hard to get, to dole out pieces of myself—a mouth, a breast, a hip. Maybe he wanted me to object, to refuse him so he could force me. His sleeping, slack expression revealed nothing, and I felt a small, pitiable stone of fear. What was his interest in me? I wanted to wake him and demand an answer. But I carefully slipped back beneath the blankets. When I finally slept it was near morning, and I awoke to find him watching me in the gray light. We were like sentries who had traded places.
“Here we are,” I said, a little too cheery.
His cheeks flushed. His breath came out in a white cloud. The candles in the fireplace had burned down to flat saucers of wax. He sat upright, his bare chest exposed, and my grandmother’s crocheted afghan swaddling his waist, multicolored and gaudy.
“What time do you think it is?” he said.
“Do you need to leave?” I asked.
He ran his hands through his hair. “Do you think,” he said, “I might be someone you could actually have feelings for?”
“Well.” I sensed his staying or leaving was dependent on my answer, but I didn’t know what to say. Del had cautioned me against revealing any true feelings, of having any feelings at all. I knew experience had taught her this—but I also knew Del didn’t want a man’s love and wouldn’t have known how to return it if any had offered it. A boy had flowers delivered to our house once—a dozen roses. My heart had sunk when I answered the door, when Del pulled out the card with the boy’s sloppy handwriting. Later, when I’d asked her what she did with them, she said she’d taken them to the cemetery and put them on David Pinney’s grave. Back then, before the Institute, these were the kinds of things she said to me. “I like to get your goat, Martha,” she’d said.
I had thought William and I wanted the same thing—that neither of us needed any real declarations of feelings, that what we felt could remain unspoken. I considered pulling him down under the blankets and warming him up, but even that seemed like coveting his body.
“You look cold.”
His chest rose, pale against the afghan. “That’s your answer?” he said. I felt like one of his students, bullied to provide a better response. But he didn’t make a move to get up and leave. I felt sorry for him then. He was a nice man who thought we might have a normal relationship, and I’d tarnished it by not having the courage to voice my feelings. There was nothing I could do, honestly, that would change the situation. I didn’t dare attempt to touch him, for fear he would recoil from me.
“You don’t have to stay,” I said. I rolled away from him, to the metal edge of the bed. Geoff would be waking with his Saturday morning routine—toast, black coffee in a china cup, listening through the wall with buttery crumbs on his fingers. I thought of Del, her ear pressed to the other side of my door. William heaved himself out of bed. He was tall, and his body unfolded, a sound of cracking joints and rustling sheets. He found his clothes, and the fabric slipped over his arms and legs. Finally, he put on his shoes, big boots that clomped on the wood floor. I rolled over and he was standing by the bed.
“Ask me not to go,” he said.
“Tell me you want to stay,” I told him.
“Tell me to kiss you,” he said.
“Do you want to kiss me?” I was confused.
“I want to kiss you more than anyone I have ever met,” he said, but he made no move toward the bed.
He went out the door and thumped down the stairs. I didn’t get up and lock the door behind him. I lay there for a long time before sleep overtook me, wondering whether or not to believe him.
12
When I awoke it was early afternoon. Weak sunlight marked the end of the bed. And William was there, sitting in the duck-carved armchair. He was watching television without the sound, and the station wasn’t tuned in well. He ate from a carton I recognized from the Korean place in Collegetown. Beside him on the floor was a camera—an old Leica, his favorite, I would learn. I was suddenly afraid of him, coming into my apartment without asking, and I feigned sleep, my heart thudding beneath the blankets. In my Romantic Poetry class we’d read Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes,” Madeline awakening in the poem to Porphyro’s lute. Then I remembered William’s work—the sleep studies—and I wondered, crazily, if he’d photographed me and captured my astral body rising up to mingle with those on the astral plane.