Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(128)
He got his pipe lit and leaned back against the wall of the gallery. She leaned beside him, an arm’s width away, and they looked at the pattern of the absent paintings.
“I don’t know how to answer you,” he said. “I don’t have feelings as I used to. These pictures used to move me.”
“I used to move you.”
He took her hand. “I went so far down before they pulled me out. I’m sorry.”
She looked at her hand in his. “You still care, at least.”
“I care that your leg must be aching. I care that I must be making you sad. I care for a thousand things I would like to make better for you.”
“Then might you still try, Alistair? Could you love me again, with time?”
“I’m so afraid in case I won’t.”
“And I’m so afraid in case I always will.”
She kissed him and they stood for a time without speaking. Mary felt the weight of their silence but there was no sadness in it because the silence had not yet found its moment to slip from the heart and lodge itself in the ordinary. Perhaps, if the two of them were careful, then it never would. Perhaps the real work of lovers was to hold themselves apart from theaters and train stations, from jam jars and picture frames, from all the bellicose everyday things that sought to beat one with time. Even to hope for love was a trap, Mary supposed, if when one said love one only meant armistice. Maybe it was foolish to imagine any more definite thing—since the heart, after all, did not declare victory. The heart declared only forgiveness, for which there was no grand precedent and no instrument of surrender.
Her leg was giving out, and she sank to the floor. Alistair joined her. In the empty gallery they sat a little distance apart—not so far that life could easily get between them, but not so close that it couldn’t if it tried. They stared into the pattern of lighter gray shapes where the paintings were supposed to be. Through the holes in the roof and the cracks in the walls the city grew lighter around them—their ancient city with its ordered tides reverting to the sea.
And now from the river in the east rose a vivid red sun, surprising Mary. She hadn’t meant to sleep. The day had got in through the broken dome and flooded the gallery wall. It blinded her and she blinked until the world was restored. Beside her in the ruins Alistair lay with his eyes closed, without a mark on him. The quick bright shock of the light between the cloud and the eastern horizon: an unimagined thing, thought Mary, a life. It was an unscrewing of tarnished brass plaques. It was one tile lost to the pattern. It was a world one might still know, if everyone forgiven was brave.