Throughout we’ve maintained our promised distance. Given Amelia’s schedule, this hasn’t been as difficult as it might sound. I’ve stayed on B Schedule and, in that way, experience the circuit of No More Walls an hour after she does: I see her residue in the kitchen, in the front lawn during exercise class. A few times I’ve glimpsed her blond ponytail in the commissary or the rose garden and my heart gasped, like seeing a figure from the other side, like seeing Mama, and I turned away, terrified. At first I ached to see her, but I know this is best, the two of us, close neighbors, pen pals.
Or so it had been until recently. At that point I had reached the moment in my story when I started following Amelia, and I asked if we could take a walk together to help me better describe it. The faithfulness of our accounts had taken on a religious seriousness for both of us. Later that day I received a note from her saying, “East Portico 3pm tomorrow.”
• • •
I showed up a half hour early, forgetting how bad being early can be. The night before I had memorized certain remarks in sign language that now crackled in my fingers like static electricity. I tried to run my hands through my hair, pass them over my face, but all they wanted was to talk, to talk to Amelia, yet when I looked up and saw her fidgeting before me, one hand on her hip, they fell dead at my side. The dimple in her cheek looked like a play of light.
I said, “Are you early, too?”
She smiled, snapped a photo of me, and motioned with her hand, as if to say, Are we gonna walk or what?
I nodded. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. After you,” but she had already stepped ahead of me and didn’t see.
We walked as if chaperoned, maintaining a sort of legal distance, and in that way passed through the bee-haunted orchard and the garden. Amelia stayed a pace ahead of me, starting with the second row of apple trees in the orchard, doing what she always did, even with me trailing her, which I took as a handsome sign. From my week of following her, I knew what would come next: a walk to the garden, where she would snap the blue hydrangea bush four times, lean in, and smell its top flowers twice, circle it once more, and then continue down the embankment to the pond, where she would crouch next to the weeping willow.
All of this she did without once looking back, and I felt like Eurydice in the tale of Orpheus, one of the best and most pitiable from Heedling’s class. Watching her head to the embankment, wrapped so firmly in her repetitions, I thought of that myth all over again, and thought I understood it, too. It was that Orpheus loved Eurydice too much to look at her. He had to walk ahead or behind her. But to look at her directly, to see her head-on, the love would become a thing too real to exist. Amelia crouched under the weeping willow, anchored to that patch of earth she trusted. I sat next to her so we could face the same direction and not each other.
We sat for some time. A cloud of gnats hovered over the pond. I kept fearing she might disappear, or had already.
I turned. You just let me know — please let me know — if you ever want to leave.
When she smiled, it was like the world carving joy into her face. I had never seen a person smile like that. You can speak!
A little.
She punched my shoulder. You didn’t tell me you were practicing.
My last secret.
I doubt that. I doubt that highly, Mr. Bernini. I’d pin you for a secret machine. A secret machine, she repeated for emphasis and dropped her jaw. Then she frowned. A breeze passed and she lifted the camera to her eyes, snapping a photo. You getting all this?
What?
She waved her hand over her face. This. I feel like I’m posing for a portrait. With that, she leaned back, resting her head on her fist. Just as quickly, she snapped back to her previous position. The scrubs made the sound of raked leaves.
I’m getting it. I dared to flash a smile. But by then she was frowning again. Is it a bad feeling? If it’s bad, we can stop. Right now we can stop.
I don’t know. She shrugged. A new one. I don’t like new things usually, but this isn’t so bad. She checked over her shoulder. Twice. You really ought to do something about that beard. I don’t understand a man’s attraction to a beard. It’s something yet to be explained to me in any satisfactory way.
Hiding.
She said nothing.
I mimicked the strokes of a razor along the sides of my face. I can shave it.
It’s okay, I don’t care, really. Just making conversation.
She was sitting cross-legged, tearing out the grass. Each blade made a belching sound. I tapped her on the shoulder again. I’m worried we’ll run out of things to say.
Then we’ll say nothing. She smiled brusquely and then turned again to the grass. A moment later she looked up. And are you hiding now? With your hands? Is that what this is?
My expression, I realized, was greatly exaggerated: my brow ruffled, lips pursed. No, it’s better than that. Everything I’m saying is true, but it feels like, like something I could say, a what if. The quotation marks — it’s like we’re inside them.
Ah, Max’s famous quotation marks. She smiled wanly and tugged again at the grass.
I tapped her. You okay?
She pursed her lips in such a way that the lower lip hung out more than the upper, nodded, and returned to the grass.
I hope I didn’t say anything bad. If I did, please tell me.
But she was facing the ground.
I tapped her. I hope I didn’t say anything bad. If I did, please tell me.
She signaled again, and this time I understood. I cried. I covered my face and bawled. I hadn’t planned to, but there I was, weeping. It had been a fantasy of mine for years: to cry in front of someone I might love, and the moment, finally come, was like most moments. What I mean is, I wanted to be done with it, hide, and it hit me then how lonely a man I was. The loneliness — all of my life it had been my spine, and I didn’t know if I could live without it.
She smiled again, discreetly this time, as if many people were watching.
To the bone, I repeated, and she reached across and rubbed my knee.
We sat in silence. I said, I like speaking this way. It’s like writing letters in the air.
Not for me, unfortunately. Just chatting.
But you have a voice, don’t you?
She shook her head. Nope. A second later, though, she took my hand and placed it around her throat. I didn’t feel it at first. Then it came: a low hum, like the whoosh of a furnace. Then she executed a smile I won’t soon forget: a smile as vulnerable as it was unshy, a smile I would’ve killed for in my old days and might have stolen even then if I hadn’t been so happy — and frightened — to be the lucky fool for whom it was meant.
She released my hand. She angrily ripped the grass out of the ground, lost in her own thought, and then stood up, wiping the bottom of her scrubs. All in all it took about twenty minutes for her to make it back to the east portico. I was wracking my brain for a proper goodbye when she leapt up and kissed me. The whole thing was very quick and bashful, and felt like language. Like a specific meaning that could only be communicated one way: lips together.
That’s all you get till you’re done, she said.
Done?
With your story, and with that she opened the door and entered the sunny house.
• • •