All's Well(82)

We’ll order everything, Paul says, how’s that?

Smiling at me. Squeezing my hand. He hasn’t let go of it all day.

Oh, I love that idea, I say. Yes, let’s! That’s perfect, perfect.

“What’s perfect?” he says. And just like that, his features shift, dissolve into another face. I’m not in the golden light of an afternoon in another life, I’m in a dark basement. It’s Hugo lying beside me, awake now. Hugo who looks only like himself in the soft blue morning or is it night? Looks concerned at me. Maybe even a little frightened. Did I doze off finally?

“You okay?” he asks me.

“Fine. I’m fine, why?”

“Just you were really having a fit in your sleep.”

“I was?” I laugh. “I didn’t even know I’d fallen asleep.”

“You screamed something,” he says. “A word.”

“A word?” My heart drums in my ears. “What word?”

He shakes his head slowly.

“I couldn’t make it out. It sounded like another language almost. You screamed it over and over.”

“Huh. Probably just production anxiety,” I say. “I have the weirdest anxiety dreams around this time of year. Always. Always, always. If I manage to sleep at all, that is.” I smile.

But Hugo still looks troubled. He reaches a hand out and strokes my hair.

“Are you sure you’re okay? Last night was a little…”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I mean I loved it, of course, but—”

“But?”

“Nothing. Never mind. I’m hungry, are you?”

“Starving,” I say.

“How about I take you out,” Hugo says. “Might be nice for us to have a real dinner together, you know? A date. Before the craziness of production really kicks in this week. Get to know each other a little. Talk.”

“Dinner. Talk,” I say. “Sure, why not? Let’s talk.”

“Great. You pick the place,” he says.

“Okay. I’ll pick the place. I’d love to.”



* * *



“Quite a drive for sushi,” Hugo says when we finally arrive.

“I thought something light might be nice. Since it’s so late. Don’t you like sushi?”

“Sure, yeah. Just Marblehead’s a little out of the way. You must really like this place.”

“Oh, I’ve only been a couple of times,” I lie. “But I remember it being great.”

We enter the place, Paul and I. I mean Hugo and I, I’m with Hugo. He’s holding my hand. We still smell of the incense sticks he burned in his bedroom, his basement flowers. All the sex we had in the fragrant smoke. Sex on crisp white sheets with tiny red petals like little tongues—sheets I twisted and gripped while I screamed, Oh, Paul, Paul. Fuck me.

What did you say? Hugo said. And then he turned on the light.

Nothing, nothing.

And now he’s taking my hand. Paul never did that. Maybe he did in the early days. The early, early days. How long ago was that? God, don’t remember. Live here, be in the here and now with Hugo. The sushi place is lovely, isn’t it? It hasn’t changed at all since the last time I was here. Same bamboo trees still in their heavy pots. Same paintings of warrior women on the walls in black frames. Same barefaced hostess in willowy black. Balmy lips, soft smattering of freckles. Does she recognize me? Hard to say, I look so different from the miserable wretch I was when she last saw me come hobbling in. I’m glowing with life now, glowing from hours of basement sex. Wordlessly, she leads us to a table. Same tiny black tables gleaming like mirrors. On each table, the same slim-throated vases out of which a bright orchid emerges, the same orchid whose boisterous color and life used to mock my death, my grayness. And the way he sat across from me then. Looking like he’d been sentenced to something. His life was a cage, and my hunched body, my drugged face, were the bars. But not tonight.

Tonight he’s looking at me like he’ll never get enough of me. Tonight, the sight of me is wine and all he wants to do is drink of the cup. Tonight, I no longer envy the orchid. Tonight, I’m the one blooming. Paul hasn’t looked at me like this since the beginning. But this is another beginning, remember? With him, this man who looks like Paul in certain lights. A lot of lights, frankly. Light of the theater but those are tricky. Light of his basement, but again that’s off—not a lot of natural light in a basement. Light in this restaurant, frankly. But he isn’t Paul, I checked his driver’s license while he was showering to remind myself. Even looked up his crimes on the internet. They were more serious than I thought. I thought maybe marijuana possession or trafficking. Maybe some dabblings in cocaine. And there were drugs, yes, but there was also a count of assault. Aggravated. With a weapon, no less. I imagined the knife, imagined him gripping it. I stared at his mug shot on my laptop screen, his young face washed out by that grim light, the deep, dark hollows under his eyes, which looked not green at all but gray and drugged. His blond hair dark and hanging lank around his face like Briana’s does now.

An accident, I thought. Or self-defense. Or maybe that person just deserved it, you never know. I wanted to tell him that no matter what he’d done, I’d understand. That sometimes these things happen, of course they do, I know that now. It didn’t even scare me, seeing his mug shot. If anything it made me feel closer to him, closer to Hugo himself. In that picture he didn’t look like Paul at all.