No One Knows Us Here(20)

He narrowed his eyes and looked me up and down, trying to assess my situation. The wet hair, the robe, the empty laundry basket. He reminded me of a grumbling detective in a noir film, trying to piece together the clues. “What happened here?” His voice was gray, too. Like gravel.

“I locked myself out. I, uh—” I tightened my robe around myself and wished my hair weren’t wet. It was my best feature, full and shiny with golden highlights. Without it I was powerless.

He fiddled with the lock on his door. With a nod of his head, he gestured for me to follow him inside.

His living room was so dark he had to switch on a lamp. The entire west-facing wall of windows was covered with thick velvet curtains, which he pulled open with a flourish, revealing my familiar treetop view. I squinted as my eyes adjusted and took in his living room: bookshelves to the ceiling, tattered Persian rugs, oil landscapes in gilded frames, a music stand overflowing with sheet music. “Wow,” I said. It was all so beautiful, but at the same time, odd. I couldn’t match the apartment up with the man standing inside it.

He leaned against a bookshelf and stared at me again in that disconcerting way, like he was trying to figure me out.

“Rosemary, right?”

My mouth opened, but I didn’t say anything.

“I met your friend Margorie,” he explained. “The day you moved in.”

I remembered now, Margorie telling me that she had met my next-door neighbor. She had said he was hot. Except that wasn’t how she had put it, exactly. She had said I would think he was hot. I’d asked her what she’d meant by that, and she’d said he was skinny and sad.

Anyway, she wasn’t wrong. I did find him hot.

“What about your sister?” he was asking me.

“What about my sister?” I narrowed my eyes at him.

“Your friend said she was moving in with you?”

“Yeah . . .” I shook my head, unsure where he was going with this line of questioning.

“She has a key, right?”

“Oh, right.” I exhaled in relief. “She won’t be here until next weekend. She’s—” I shut my mouth, not sure what I planned to say next. “She’s just a kid,” I blurted out. “I’m taking care of her. I’m supposed to be taking care of her.”

“Oh—wow.”

“Margorie didn’t tell me your name.” I wasn’t flirting; it was a matter-of-fact question, a very normal question I’d ask any neighbor I’d had the pleasure of meeting.

“Sam Ferguson.”

“Sam,” I repeated. “Nice name.” It was a stupid thing to say.

“Thanks,” he said in a sort of amused, deadpan way.

“Your apartment is just like mine,” I told him. “In reverse.”

“It’s my aunt’s. She’s a patron of the arts.” Sam gestured toward a music stand and an instrument case. The music stand was overloaded with books and loose sheets of music. On the floor next to it were more stacks: Bach, Walton, Bartók, Hindemith.

“That’s you? The violin?”

“It’s a viola,” he said. This was obviously a mistake he had been correcting over and over his entire life.

“Sorry.” God, he looked almost angry. “Do you play professionally or—”

“I’m a violist in the Oregon Symphony.”

“You don’t look like you’d play in the symphony.”

“Oh yeah? What does someone who plays in the symphony look like?”

My hand waved in Sam’s general direction. “Not like that.”

He offered to lend me some clothes and left me in his room to change. His room was neat and spare, in contrast to the bohemian messiness of the rest of the place. These were his things, I guessed: a bed with a Pendleton wool blanket, a Danish Modern bookcase, another music stand.

The jeans and T-shirt he left for me were both too big, and not in a cute way. I knew this for sure when I checked myself out in the bathroom mirror—I looked like a prepubescent boy wearing his older brother’s clothes. With my bathrobe back on over the whole ensemble, it looked better. Sort of like a smoking jacket, I figured. It gave my waist a little definition at least.

I found Sam making coffee in the kitchen. He placed a coffee mug in front of me at the small kitchen table. The mug had a cartoon of an old woman on it with a speech bubble coming out of her mouth. “I hate Mondays,” she was saying.

“I don’t have any cream,” he said. “Or sugar.”

“That’s okay. I like it black,” I lied.

He stared at me with a pensive expression. He really was very good-looking. Tortured hero in an indie movie. Too skinny, too sad to play the leading role in a Hollywood blockbuster. Like Margorie said, just my type. His right hand was twirling around and around, stirring his coffee into a whirlpool with a spoon.

“I thought you didn’t have any cream or sugar.”

“I don’t.”

“So what are you stirring into your coffee?”

Sam stopped stirring and stared into his cup. “Nothing.”

We sat across from each other, not saying anything, for an awkward moment. “Your aunt—she just lets you live here? For free?”

“Nothing’s free.”