The Table Is Laid

"The cruelest thing a host can do is to make sure that his guest is comfortable."

Four months earlier

She could not move her hands.

That was the first thing. It came to her slowly, as a stranger's name comes after you have stopped trying to remember it. She was sitting at the head of the long walnut table, in a high-backed chair of soft, dark, heavily padded leather, and her wrists lay on the arms of it, and her fingers were open, curled slightly, like the fingers of a doll. She told them to close. She watched them very hard. They did not close.

The second thing was the band across her chest. It was cool, supple, and wide, and it ran from the left arm of the chair across her ribs and was buckled somewhere on the right. Another held her ankles. They were not tight. They were not even necessary, she thought. Her body had gone off to a great distance and would not come back.

The third thing was the light.

It was warm and low and steady. The roses had been pushed aside to the edges of the room, and the white cloth was spread before her, smooth as a sheet of paper, and at its center, in a small round dish of white china, a single candle was burning. It was a slim, ivory-colored, unscented candle, and she watched the flame bend and straighten in some draft she could not feel, and she thought, with the clarity of a mind that has nothing else left to use: That is my candle.

She had invented it.

She had sat at her kitchen table in Brooklyn on a Wednesday night in March, with the manuscript of the Paris chapter spread out before her, and found that the scene was dead. It had a lamp in it. A desk lamp, on a cord, as Desmond had told it, ordinary, brown. It was a true detail and a lifeless one. She had crossed it out. She had thought a moment. She had written, in the margin, in pencil, a candle, white dish, middle of table, and it was as though someone had opened a window in a stuffy room. The whole page had drawn breath. She remembered the small shameful thrill of it, the click of a good sentence.

She was looking at it now. It was a foot from her face. And the music was playing.

It came from somewhere behind her, from a speaker she had never noticed in the paneling, very soft. A slow piano, in three-four time. A few simple chords, with a melody that fell like single drops of water into a still well. She knew it at once. She had put it in the book, too. Erik Satie, the first Gymnopédie, because Desmond had said once that the girl liked the piano, and a scene wants music.

He's built my chapter, she thought. He's laid the whole thing out like a set.

…

"There," said Desmond Hale. "You're with me."

He was sitting at the corner of the table, in the chair that had been hers, at a respectful angle, with one long leg crossed over the other and his hands loose on his knee. He had taken off his jacket. His sleeves were rolled neatly to the elbow. In the candlelight he looked like a man at the end of a good dinner, easy, flushed, a little dreamy, and he regarded her with the affectionate, expectant look of a host watching a guest taste the first spoonful of a long-prepared dish.

"You don't need to speak," he said. "I know how it feels. The tongue's the last to go and the first to come back. Let it come. I'm in no hurry."

She tried. Her mouth was dry. Her tongue lay in it like a stone. After a while, with great labor, she shaped a sound, and it came out of her as a slow, thick, cracked whisper, as though from the bottom of a well.

"What... did you..."

"Something very gentle. A relative of the thing they give you at the dentist." He tilted his head. "It leaves you perfectly clear. That's the part I insisted upon. I wanted every faculty intact. I said to the man who supplied it, She is an editor. If she loses a word, I shall have wasted the evening."

"Oliver..."

"Is in the cottage with a bottle of whisky, and instructions to turn up the radio." He said it without malice. "He is a good man and a fine cook. He has always been a little afraid of me, and it has always been to his credit. I could not have asked him to stay."

She closed her eyes.

It was not the first time in her life that she had been afraid. She had been afraid at nineteen, in a taxi in Chicago, and at thirty-two, in a hospital corridor with a doctor's face going gentle, and again, nine years later, in the dark of a car with a phone ringing. But it was a different kind. It was not the hot panic of the animal. It was a clear cold stillness, like the stillness of a pond at the moment before the ice sets, in which every thing stood out with perfect sharpness and she seemed to see it all from a great height.

She saw the white cloth. The candle. The pale roses. The glass door that gave on the dark lawn, with a reflection of the room laid across it like a sheet of film: a long table, a candle, two figures. She saw the black recorder lying on the cloth between the silver, and the small red light, blinking, patient, unhurried.

Don't look at it, she thought.

She looked at the candle instead.

"You've lit it exactly where I put it," she whispered.

His whole face changed.

It was extraordinary to watch. The easy, affectionate, courteous look fell away, and something under it came up like a child at a window. "You noticed," he said. "Oh, you noticed. I was so afraid you wouldn't. I took the greatest pains. I measured the distance from the edge of the table. Did I do it right? It's eleven inches. You said in the middle of the table, but one has to interpret."

"Why?"

"Because it was perfect."

He was leaning forward. His eyes were enormous and shining, and for a moment she thought he was going to weep.

"Do you know what you gave me, Sophia? You gave me a better night. I had a lamp. I had a radio. It was all so poor. I had never been able to make it mean what I felt. I lay awake for seven years, trying to find the shape. And then I read your chapter, in proof, in this room, in the middle of March, and I wept. I thought, That is it. That is what happened. I was only wrong about the details." His voice broke. "You've made it true. I believe it so entirely now that when I close my eyes, I see the candle. Do you understand? You are the only person in my life who has ever improved a thing I did."

The piano went on, drop by drop. She watched his face, bright with joy, and understood, in the distant, icy part of her mind, a thing that she would not have the language for until a great many weeks later.

He's not a murderer who found a biographer. He's a reader who found an author.

…

He rose after a while, and she heard him moving behind her.

She could not turn her head. She followed him by sound: the click of a latch, the whisper of a drawer sliding on a runner, the dry rustle of cloth being shaken out. He was humming, very softly, in time with the Satie. She felt the draft of his passing as a cool breath against the back of her neck.

"I should like you to understand what is happening," he said. "I have always thought that the great discourtesy of this kind of thing is that nobody explains."

"Please..."

"You are here because you are the best listener I have ever had." He came into her field of vision at the end of the table, and she saw that he was carrying a long flat case of dark wood, like a case for a musical instrument. He set it on the sideboard and opened the lid. "And because of what you are. I have been thinking about it since Easter. What the book was. Do you know that they call you a hero? In the papers? A woman who looked evil in the eye. They have been writing you into a saint. It's very touching."

"I never..."

"But you see, it is not you they are reading." He lifted something out of the case, and held it to the candle, and it threw a thin bright line of light across the ceiling. "It's me. They love me, Sophia. It's the best thing that has ever happened. They write that they can't stop thinking about it. They write that they dream of tables. The whole country is leaning over, with its mouth a little open, to see what I will do next. That's what a reader is. A reader is a person who wants to be shown." His voice was warm, tender, almost reverent. "And I have been thinking, for weeks, about what to show them."

He laid the object on the cloth.

It was a knife. It was a long, narrow, beautifully made knife with a black handle and a blade like a strip of water, and he laid it down at her right hand, parallel to the edge of the table, exactly where the knife at a place setting lies. His hand was quite steady. Next to it he laid another, shorter, with a curved edge. Then a fork with two tines. Then a small silver instrument, bright and narrow and unfamiliar, with a hinge. He laid them out in a row, one after another, with a kind of gentle precision, as a man lays out the cutlery for a wedding, touching each with a fingertip to straighten it, and stepping back to judge the effect.

She watched him do it, and could not look away.

It was not horror that she felt. It would have been simpler if it had been. It was a hard, high, dreadful clarity, that came up in her like cold water, and with it came an awful professional recognition, and she had the sensation of standing at a great distance and looking at a very good page.

He's done it with such care.

He had done it so carefully. That was the thing. There was not a moment of haste in it. The cloth had no crease. The knives lay level. The candle burned in the exact center, eleven inches from the edge. If you had walked into the room by chance, you would have thought, What a lovely table.

"I've been looking for the last course," said Desmond Hale. "For a very long time. Something that would complete the work. A finale. I couldn't think what it should be. And then I opened a magazine, and there was your face on the cover, with The Woman Who Listened written across it, and I thought..." He smiled. "Oh. There she is."

"No," said Sophia.

"You are the whole of it. Do you see? The curious, the hungry, the good, the decent people who cannot stop looking. I have been feeding them for months. I should like, just once, to taste what they are." He took up the long knife, and held it to the light, and turned it. "I will not hurt you more than I must. I've read that it is possible to make it quite peaceful. And I would like it very much if you would stay with me while I do it. If you would watch. If you would be my reader."

She drew a slow breath.

It was shallow and quick and small. A thought was growing in her, white and cold and distant, with the clearness of a star. She had no hands. She had no legs. She had one thing left, a mind that had spent twenty years finding the weakest sentence in a hundred thousand words, and she knew with perfect certainty that it was the only weapon she would ever have.

The candle burned. The recorder blinked, a small red heart in the dark.

Keep him talking, she thought. Keep the tape running. Find the page where he goes slack.

She moistened her lips.

"Desmond," said Sophia, in a voice so low and thick that she hardly knew it for her own. "Before you begin. Would you read me the chapter?"

He stopped. The knife hung in the air, a handsbreadth above the cloth.

"The chapter?"

"Nine. The Evening." She forced the words, one at a time, like stones across a stream. "You said I improved it. I'd like to hear you say it. I'd like to hear it in your voice. It is the only thing I've ever written that anyone has loved enough to... to build." She shut her eyes. "I'd like to know that it was good."

The room was silent.

She waited. The piano went on, three-four, drop by drop. She heard the very small click of the knife being laid down on the cloth, and then, softly, with something in it that was almost like wonder, the sound of a man drawing a long unsteady breath.

"Oh, Sophia," said Desmond Hale. "You are perfect."

He went to fetch the book.