*
Kay had circled behind his desk and leaned over Theo, draping her slender arms over his shoulders, and clasping her hands against his heart, squeezing firmly until he raised his hands to hers. She kissed him lightly on the cheek, her long hair falling in front of his eyes, so that he felt encased by her until the moment he moved his hand and she unfolded herself and was away, always running late, trailing a string of good-byes as she departed the room, and the next sound was the door closing with a bang.
The silence after Kay left disturbed him more than the noise she made in preparing to go. For an hour, Theo had been trying to work on the translation, turning over in his mind the problems abandoned the night before, anxious to get to the solutions but waiting, waiting to be alone in the apartment so he could concentrate. He never began while she was present, not wanting to miss the opportunity to share a few words with her as she dressed or dallied over the eggs and toast they shared at three in the afternoon. Most days, she seemed barely aware that he hesitated for her, that he devoted his attentions, for she was also thinking ahead to her work, anticipating the moves that would be required of her during the show. She stretched her limbs and bent her body, and he watched from his chair, enthralled by her simple grace, turning over in his mind a particular phrase, the mot juste, the sound and sense of the French he struggled to turn into English. His mind in two places at once, with her and without her.
When they first came to this city, they contrived to spend as much time together as possible exploring the old French part of town. Most afternoons he would accompany her like a lovesick schoolboy, leaving their apartment on Dalhousie and winding their way to the warehouse where the company rehearsed, and he would sit with a coffee and the newspaper and watch the acts, week after week. The performers would meet there every afternoon to go over any changes to the show, and then head over to their outdoor performance space. Later, once the run of shows began, Theo would join the parade of visitors to the makeshift theater that had been set up for the season in a vacant lot underneath a highway overpass. It was a wonder to behold, the raised stage surrounded by fences and scaffolding, the arc lights and spots. Ropes hung down from the guardrails, and flying acrobats thrilled the audience by swinging out into the night sky. Small trailers served as dressing rooms, and at the back of the plaza sat a control center for all of the special effects. Most of the crowd would have to stand for the show—like groundlings at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre—but there were two portable bleachers for special guests and a small backstage area that was often crowded with performers making their entrances and exits. There he would watch from the wings night after night, anxious as she performed, until at last she excused him from the duty.
“You have work to do,” Kay had told him. “You needn’t make this journey every day. You will grow bored with it. Bored of me—”
“Never,” he said.
She blushed and looked away. “You’re sweet, but honestly. Work to do.”
Theo wondered if she meant more by that, if she was not somehow glad to be gone, happy to be apart for those few hours. He uncapped his pen and laid it atop a blank page and then opened the text he had been engaged to translate. The French swarmed before his eyes like thousands of bees. L’homme en mouvement, a strange story about a very strange man, the nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, the man who studied the art of motion.