By the time she reached Malcolm’s house, Annelise had been asked the same question in four different ways by three different people, all of whom had received the answer in writing before lunch.
She sat in the car with the engine off and held the steering wheel. Nothing disastrous had happened. Nobody’s pay was missing. There had been a late correction, a disagreement about whose responsibility it was, and a long conversation during which someone had kept saying they were only asking. Her work was finished. Her shoulders hadn’t received the news.
Through the front window, she could see Malcolm moving across the room. She wanted to be with him. She didn’t want to produce another sentence.
He opened the door before she knocked.
“You’re just in time. I have a decision for you.”
She must have made a face, because his smile faded.
“What?”
“Nothing. Hello.”
She kissed him, put her bag down too hard on the chair by the door, and heard the metal clasp hit the wood.
“Sorry.”
“It’s a chair.”
“I know.”
He took her coat. The house smelled of onions and something warm with cumin in it. The smell made her realize she was hungry, which was another thing she would eventually have to do something about.
“Bad day?”
“Long.”
“Do you want to tell me?”
“Not particularly.”
He hung up her coat, more slowly than necessary. She could see him adjusting to her, trying to determine what kind of arrival this was. Then he stepped aside.
“All right. Dinner’s nearly ready.”
She followed him toward the kitchen. A pan sat on the back burner. On the counter were a bowl of rice, two plates, and a jar with a stubborn label partly peeled away. He had made an evening for them. She could feel the pressure to rise to it, to become the woman who had driven over because she wanted to see him.
She was that woman. She was also the woman who had used all her good answers.
“What was the decision?” she asked.
“It doesn’t matter.”
She looked at him.
“Malcolm.”
“It was whether you wanted rice now or if we should wait and make something else. I started too early.”
“Rice is good.”
“Fine.”
There was a flatness in his voice now, an answering withdrawal. The silence between them had become something neither had asked for.
Annelise rubbed her forehead with the heel of her hand.
“I’m doing this badly.”
He set down the spoon. “Doing what?”
“Arriving. I want to be here. I’m glad you cooked. I don’t have anything useful left in my head for about an hour.”
He watched her, the crease between his eyebrows still there.
“Are you annoyed with me?”
“No. I’m annoyed with three people who aren’t here and one spreadsheet that cannot defend itself.”
His mouth moved, but he didn’t quite smile.
“You could have said.”
“I’m saying it now.” She took a breath. “Can I be very quiet for an hour? Eat, if you’re ready. But no questions I need to answer well.”
“I wasn’t asking you to answer well.”
“I know. My head doesn’t know. It thinks everything is work.”
He leaned back against the counter. For a moment she worried that she had made the request so elaborate it had become another task for both of them.
Then he said, “An hour’s fine. I’ve got photographs to sort.”
“You don’t have to find something.”
“I already had the something. I was going to do it tomorrow.”
She nodded. “Good.”
“We can eat first. The food won’t ask you much.”
This time she managed to smile.
They ate at the kitchen table. He put the bowl where she could reach it, then stopped himself halfway through asking something and shook his head. She laughed quietly. He lifted both hands in surrender.
The food was good, warm and sharp enough to draw her attention out of the day. She told him so. He said thank you and didn’t attempt to turn the exchange into conversation. She noticed the effort. She also noticed that, after a few minutes, it stopped seeming like effort. They ate. The radiator made a noise. Malcolm went back for more rice.
When they had finished, she carried the plates to the sink. He pointed toward the living room.
“You have forty-two minutes.”
“You’re timing?”
“Only because you made it sound like an official allocation.”
“I may apply for an extension.”
“Forms are by the door.”
She took her bag to the living room and settled into the worn chair she liked. There was a paperback in her bag she had been reading in ten-minute portions for nearly three weeks. She opened it, found she could not remember who one of the characters was, and went back two pages without deciding this meant she had failed at leisure.
Malcolm sat on the sofa with his laptop. At first she was conscious of every click, every movement he made. She wondered if he was disappointed, then irritated with herself for using the time she had asked for to supervise his feelings.
She read another paragraph.
The woman in the book was searching for a missing necklace. Annelise had forgotten the necklace too. Gradually the small invented problem became more interesting than her real, completed workday. Her feet grew warm. She slipped out of her shoes and tucked one leg beneath herself.
Malcolm got up once to make tea. He set a cup beside her without asking, exactly the kind she would have chosen. She looked up and smiled. He touched her shoulder, then returned to his photographs.
Eventually her jaw unclenched. She felt it happen, a release so physical that she was startled to discover how tightly she had been holding it. Across the room, Malcolm frowned at the screen, pressed a key, and frowned more.
She watched him for a little while. His glasses had slipped down his nose. He pushed them up with the back of his finger, leaving the other hand on the keyboard. She liked the concentration on his face when it wasn’t directed at her.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He looked over the top of his glasses. “Am I allowed to answer?”
“Tentatively.”
“Trying to decide which six photographs are the same photograph.”
“That sounds difficult.”
“They’re all of the same drainpipe. I may have overcommitted.”
She put a finger between the pages of her book. “Show me.”
“Are you sure?”
“I have never been more ready to look at a drainpipe.”
He moved the laptop so she could see from the chair. The first image showed a red-brick wall, the pipe cutting down one side of it, and a wedge of light that made the narrow space between them seem deep enough to step into.
“Oh,” she said.
“Disappointed?”
“No. I expected more drainpipe.”
“It’s present.”
“I see it.”
He showed her the next. Almost the same, except a little lower, the light wider. She preferred the first. He preferred the second. When he asked why, she discovered she had an answer: the first made her want to look around the corner, and the second showed her too much wall.
“That’s fair,” he said.
“You sound surprised.”
“I’m trying not to defend the wall.”
“You can defend it. I won’t report you.”
He went back and forth between the two images, explaining what he had been trying to see. The explanation was practical, interested, occasionally uncertain. He wasn’t presenting finished work for admiration. He was looking with her, and sometimes she saw something he hadn’t intended at all.
In one image a reflection made a parked car seem to have a window full of sky. She liked that one immediately. He said it had been an accident.
“Still counts,” she said.
“I know. Irritatingly, it’s better than the ones I meant.”
She moved to the sofa so he wouldn’t have to keep turning the screen. Their legs touched. He handed her the laptop for a moment while he fetched the memory card case from a shelf, and she saw the folder of rejected images, small dark squares and blurred streets.
“You keep those?”
“For a while. Sometimes I change my mind.”
“About blurry ones?”
“Sometimes they’re good blurry.”
“That’s convenient.”
“You mock a serious discipline.”
“I’m trying to understand its loopholes.”
He sat down beside her and took the laptop. His thigh was warm against hers. She put her head briefly on his shoulder, then lifted it to look at the next photograph.
They spent twenty minutes choosing the drainpipe image and rejecting an earnest photograph of a bench. She thought the bench looked sad. He thought she was confusing the weather with the furniture. Neither persuaded the other.
Her phone vibrated in her bag. She checked it because she was expecting a message from the choir organizer about the winter term. The email was there, with dates, a modest fee, and a request to indicate whether they planned to return.
She read through the dates. Tuesday evenings. A break around the holidays. The same room, the same early struggle to get out of the house after work.
“Something wrong?” Malcolm asked.
“No. Choir registration for winter.”
“Right.”
He returned to his laptop. She appreciated that he didn’t look over her shoulder.
She checked her calendar, found one Tuesday she would probably miss for a work commitment, and read the attendance note. Missing one rehearsal wasn’t a crisis. The organizer had said they were adults with lives. Annelise could trust that sentence enough to apply it to herself.
She marked yes, filled in the short form, and sent it.
There was no rush of triumph. She was simply pleased, and already thinking she should get a better folder because the corner of hers was splitting.
“I’m doing winter,” she said.
Malcolm turned toward her. “Good.”
“You may have to listen to some extremely seasonal practicing.”
“I’ll invest in another magazine.”
She pushed his shoulder. He caught her wrist, kissed the back of her hand, and let go before she had decided whether to lean in for more.
“I want to go out with the camera the Sunday after next,” he said. “The fourth. Morning, if the weather’s decent. Nothing organized. Just around the old streets by the market. Would you like to come?”
“The day after the concert?”
“Yes. Unless you’ll be recovering from fame.”
“My schedule may be crowded.”
“I understand.”
She looked again at the drainpipe, now enlarged on his screen. She had walked past things like it all her life without feeling deprived. Now she wanted to know what else he stopped for.
“I’d like to come.”
“You don’t have to wait while I take fifty versions of one thing. You can tell me to move.”
“How many versions before I’m allowed?”
“Forty-nine.”
“Generous.”
He grinned. “We could get breakfast afterward.”
“Now you’re selling it.”
“I thought the drainpipes had done that.”
She leaned closer to look at a small image near the bottom of the screen. It showed the side of a building at dusk, three windows lit, the fourth dark. She pointed at it.
“That one.”
“What about it?”
“I like it.”
“Even though the building may be sad?”
“The building is keeping its feelings private.”
He laughed and clicked it open. The photograph was slightly crooked. One window had a plant in it; another had blinds pulled halfway down. There was no person visible, but she could imagine people moving just beyond the edge of the frame, making dinner, taking off shoes, ending a day.
“When was that?” she asked.
“Last winter. I was waiting for Tobin to finish a call.”
She studied it a moment longer, then leaned back beside him.
“I want to try taking something on the walk.”
“You should.”
“With my phone. I’m not becoming an equipment person.”
“A wise boundary.”
“And you can’t tell me my drainpipe is wrong.”
“No promises.”
She turned on the sofa to face him. “You can have one opinion.”
“Per drainpipe?”
“For the morning.”
He closed the laptop and set it on the table. “I’ll save it.”
Without the screen between them, she could see that he was tired too. There was a faint redness at the edge of his eyes. He had cooked and waited and spent a Wednesday with her, some of it silent, none of it wasted. She touched the crease beside his mouth with her thumb.
“I didn’t ask about your day.”
“You can ask now.”
“How was it?”
He told her about a customer who had chosen a finish from a photograph and then been startled by what it looked like in actual daylight. He was annoyed, and funny about it without trying particularly hard. Annelise listened. Once she asked a question. Once she disagreed with him, gently, about how much people could be expected to understand from a tiny sample.
“You’re taking their side?”
“I’m considering the tiny sample.”
He sighed. “Tobin said the same thing.”
“A man of judgment.”
“Unfortunately.”
By the time he finished, she was sitting against him, her feet under his leg, the book abandoned in the chair. She would have to drive home later. Tomorrow would have its own work. For now his hand was moving slowly along her arm, and she had no remaining interest in drains or samples.
“Thank you for the hour,” she said.
“You used fifty-three minutes.”
“I’m saving the rest.”
He turned his face toward hers. “For what?”
She kissed him before answering, one hand at the back of his neck. When she drew away, he had lost the faintly argumentative expression he had worn over the customer.
“Something quieter,” she said, and kissed him again.