But her hands moved down, unbuttoning his pajama top, bending her body toward his so she lay against his skin, and he put his arms around her to stop her from shivering.
What’s wrong? he said, but she didn’t answer. She peeled him out of his clothes, pajama top, bottoms, socks, boxers, then pulled off her own clothes violently and came back under the covers where it was warm. Her cold body, knobby and terrible against his.
Helle? he said.
She didn’t answer. Now her mouth was at his chest, moving across it, biting, not hard. The door was cracked open and there was a light still burning in the kitchen, and he could see that her makeup had washed off in the rain. Without it, her face was ravaged, the hard life she’d lived before Bit, her twenty lost years, imprinted on the skin. You’re more beautiful to me now than when you were perfect, he’d said once, kissing her shoulder when she cried at her reflection in the mirror. She’d turned away, disbelieving, but he’d meant it. Her life was written in her face. There, at least, she could be read.
His love for her sometimes felt enormous in him, a solid thing made of spun wool, soft and deep. Even in his irritation, this love warmed him, returned her to him.
Her mouth moved down, then farther. He touched the top of her head, her fragile skull under wet hair, pulled her up gently. He wanted slowness, warmth, kissing. But she wouldn’t. She grasped him, though he wasn’t quite ready; she wasn’t either, she was dry, still cold. But she moved just slightly, sitting there above him, and after a few minutes he took the bones of her hips and pulled himself in until he’d fully stirred. She pressed down again, her body against his chest, and at last her mouth found his. He imagined the quiet street outside shining in the lights, the millions of souls warm and listening to the rain in their beds. He couldn’t stop looking at the side of her face, her eyes closed, the small shell of her ear, the scar in her nostril where the stud had been, her thin pale lower lip in her teeth. He was close but held off, until at last she whispered, Go. I can’t come.
He wonders now, the wine bottle empty on the table, if he hadn’t heard all of what she’d said. If he’d missed the most essential word. Again and again, he has replayed it, trying to hear deeper, to find the moment that foretold the future.
Go, she said; and did or didn’t say, I can’t come.
Go, she said; and did or didn’t say, I can’t come back.
In the morning, Grete dresses herself: leopard leggings, frilly pink dress, green rubber boots with googly eyes that spin and spin. She considers wearing her ladybug earmuffs, turning her head this way and that in the long mirror on the door and pursing her lips. She decides, instead, on one of Helle’s long strands of purple beads, looping it over and over so she looks like a Padaung woman. Sharon opens the door with a cup of coffee in her hand and whistles. What a fashion sense, she says. Watch out, world, here comes Grete!
Grete hops on her toes toward the door and mashes her face into Sharon’s thighs.
Sharon’s son, Frankie, comes out. He is an owlish boy, half crushed under his enormous backpack. He hands Bit one of his shoes and says, It came off. When Bit kneels to put the shoe back on, Sharon smoothes down Grete’s fine white hair, and Bit sees with a pang that he’d forgotten again to brush it this morning. Grete is a dandelion gone to spore.
Sharon takes an elastic from her own short hair and pulls Grete’s back into a ponytail. She smiles at Bit, the skin by her eyes crinkling, and she’s no longer the rumpled middle-aged mother he sees every day; she is pretty. No harm done, she says.
When Bit stands, Sharon hands him the coffee and kisses both kids on the forehead. See you this afternoon, she says. Be good.
I am good, Frankie says in a hurt little voice.
I’m bad! says Grete and gives a wicked laugh.
They go off, Grete holding Bit’s hand, Frankie clutching Grete’s, into the streaming tides of people. Bit’s own Kid Herd of two. In the morning crush, the children are swallowed by legs and rears, smashed with purses and briefcases. In a marl at a stoplight, Bit bends and lifts them in both arms. The children lean their heads on his shoulders and breathe into his jawbone. Their school is squat and brick, shielded by scraggly plane trees that Grete hugs solemnly, one by one, before they go inside.
The teacher is a plump woman so tender-looking that she seems as if her skin would bruise if she were yelled at. She looks at Bit and gives a little tremulous cry. Oh, my, she says. Are you okay? Are you getting your sleep? Are you eating? Oh, you don’t look so good.
I’m fine, I’m fine, he says, and fine, fine repeats in his head as he escapes back into the chill. Around him, a spin of bodies in dark coats, tapping thumbs on pads, pressing phones to heads, settling buds into ear canals, projecting an invisible shield of music as they move through the crowd, digital companionship warmer than the bodies around them. Every soul on the street is sunk within its body. Sometimes Bit imagines that he, alone, bears witness to the world.
It amazes Bit how well he can teach with a fraction of his attention. Better, perhaps, than when he is fully invested in what he’s doing. These children of blog and text go uneasy near focus. They clam up. He is more relaxed when he can’t give a damn, and they are too. They learn.
In the red glow of the darkroom, skinny, odd-looking Sylvie tongs paper from one bath to another. Bit stands beside her. Her skin is marked with raised moles, and she smells like powder, coffee, honey shampoo. She looks up at him. I love this, she says. The darkroom. I didn’t think I would. Digital’s just so much easier, you know?
I know, he says. That’s why I don’t do it.
Sylvie gives a private smile. That’s your reputation, Professor Stone, she says. Nobody says you’re easy.
He is startled; did he mishear? There are too many ways to read what she said, three at least, and Sylvie always seems to speak in layers.
He backs away through the rubber curtain, and into the bright room where the water bubblers gurgle. He sits on the table and lets his students slowly flock to where he is. How sweet they are; the boys are inches taller than Bit but sit in the chairs to reestablish Bit’s eminence. The girls play with their hair, watch him from the corners of their eyes. They know his story somehow: since Helle vanished, he has become more handsome than ever to these susceptible young women, the weight of his tragedy transforming his soft features into something noble, suffering. He feels himself flush and speaks to shake his embarrassment.
All right, my friends, he says. Out with your notebooks. This one is the toughest yet.
Most weekends he gives his classes a mission. Make a camera obscura in your room and draw what you see. Photograph strangers on the subway without letting them know what you’re doing. Stand in the pitch-black film closet and roll twenty rolls of film, blind. When you come out, write down everything you’ve thought of in there without self-editing.
His job is officially to teach the lost art of the darkroom; analog studies in the Photography Department. Or what used to be called simply Photography, all that chemistry and film, most recently downgraded from a requirement. Digital is just so much easier. It has been years since he taught an advanced course, the wet-plate, the large format. For most of his students, his classes are way stations into a hobby. But his job, as he understands it, is to help his students see: to make them pay attention, slow down and appreciate what they’re doing. This is something they can use in life.