Bridge of Clay(51)

    It was dark.

She told herself she was ridiculous, that she was a woman, not a girl. She’d traveled thousands of miles to get here. She’d stood ankle-deep on a wine-dark toilet floor, so this was nothing, nothing in comparison. Surely she could breach the gate and knock on a man’s front door.

Surely.

She did.



* * *



—

“Hallo?” she said. “But I think…I hope you remember me?”

He was quiet and so was the light; the space behind him in the hallway. And there again, that smile. At once surfaced, then lost. “Of course I do…the piano.”

“Yes.” She was getting flustered and it wasn’t English forming in her mouth; each sentence was exactly that—its own small punishment. She’d had to plant her own language in the middle and work her way around it. Somehow she managed to ask if he might like to come and visit her. She could play the piano, that is, if he liked the piano, and she had coffee and raisin toast and— “Iced VoVos?”

“Yes…” Why so embarrassed? “Yes. Yes, I have some.” He’d remembered. He’d remembered.

He’d remembered, and now, despite all self-warning and discipline, the smile he’d held fell out. It was almost like those army movies—the comedy ones—where the hopeless, hapless recruit struggles over a wall and flops to the other side; stupid and clumsy but grateful.

And Michael Dunbar succumbed:

“I’d love to come and hear you play—I only heard a few notes that first day, when they delivered it.” Then, a moment, a long one. “Here. Why don’t you come in?”



* * *



—

In his house there was a friendliness, but also something unnerving. Penelope couldn’t quite place it, but Michael certainly could. A life once had, now gone.

    In the kitchen, they introduced themselves.

He motioned to a chair.

He caught sight of her catching sight of his rough, powdery hands, and just like that, it began. For quite a while, three hours at least, they sat at the table, which was scratched-up, wooden and warm. They drank tea with milk and biscuits, and spoke of Pepper Street and the city. Construction work and cleaning. It actually surprised him how easily it came to her once she’d stopped worrying about her English. After all, there was plenty to tell him: A new country, and seeing the ocean.

The shock and awe of the southerly.

At one point he asked her more about where she’d come from, and how she got here, and Penelope felt at her face. She moved a blond patch of hair from her eye, and the tide pulled slowly away. She remembered the pale young girl who listened to those books that were read, and read again; she thought about Vienna, and its army of laid-out bunk beds. Mostly, though, she talked of the piano, and the cold barren world at the window. She talked about a man and mustache, and love without emotion.

Very quiet and very calmly, she said: “I grew up with the statue of Stalin.”



* * *



—

As the night wore on, they each told their stories about why and where they were made of. Michael spoke of Featherton—the fires, the mines. The sound of the birds by the river. He didn’t mention Abbey, not yet, but she was there at the edge of everything.

Penelope, by comparison, often felt like she should stop, but she suddenly had so much to say. When she mentioned the cockroaches, and the terror they’d inflicted, Michael laughed, but sympathetically; there was the faintest stretch of wonder on his lips for houses made of paper.

When she got up to leave, it was well past midnight, and she apologized for all her talking, and Michael Dunbar said, “No.”

They stood at the sink, he washed the cups and plates.

Penelope dried, she stayed.

    There was something risen up in her, and so, it seemed, in him. Years of gentle barrenness. Whole towns not had, or lived. Just as each of them knew they were never so game or forward, there was another truth at hand—that this would have to be it: No waiting, no politeness.

The wilderness out, from in them.



* * *



—

Soon it became too much for him.

The quiet suffering was intolerable for another second, and he stepped, reached over, and gambled—his hands still covered in suds.

He grabbed her wrist, both calm and firmly.

He didn’t know how or why but he put the other hand on her hip bone, and without thinking, he held her and kissed her. Her forearm was wet, her clothes were wet, just in that patch of shirt—and he took the cloth hard, and made a fist.

“Jesus, I’m sorry, I—”

And Penelope Lesciuszko, she gave him the fright of his life: She took his wet hand, put it beneath that shirt—the exact same place, but on skin—and delivered him a phrase from the East.

“Jeszcze raz.”

Very quiet, very serious, almost unsmiling, like kitchens were built for this.

“It means,” she said, “again.”





It was Saturday—the halfway point to the Murderer’s return—and Clay walked the road from the property, in the dark of just turned night.

His body was part elastic, part hard.

His hands were blistered raw.