Six Feet

For eight days afterward, Emory Wolcott stood exactly six feet away from her.

She did not notice it at first. On the first morning she was too busy being embarrassed, and on the second she was too busy being furious with herself for being embarrassed, and it was only on the third, watching him stand in her kitchen doorway with a coil of copper pipe over one shoulder, that she registered the oddly precise geometry of the thing. He stood at the threshold. She stood at the stove. Between them lay a rectangle of old pine floor that she could have measured, if she had owned a tape measure, at an even six feet.

“You’re standing very far away,” she said.

“Am I?” He glanced down at his boots with an air of mild scientific interest. “Habit. When you’re bringing a boat alongside a dock, you leave six feet for the fenders. Anything closer and one of you gets hurt.”

“I’m not a dock.”

“No, ma’am. A dock would have been a lot easier to talk to.”

He said it with a perfectly straight face, and then the crooked canine showed, and she turned back to her kettle so that he wouldn’t see her laugh.

It had been like this since the lighthouse. He arrived at half past eight, three raps, a pause, one tap. He said god morgen in an accent that was growing, day by day, irritatingly good. He fixed whatever there was to fix: the pipe under the sink, a sticking window in the study, the hinge of the pantry door. At noon he ate half of whatever she put in front of him and washed the dish without being asked, and at one he went home. He did not touch her. He did not look at her mouth. He did not, so far as she could tell, even think about the fact that eight days ago, at the top of a lighthouse in a thunderstorm, he had kissed her until her knees went, and she had said, in so many words, I don’t want to stop.

And then she had said stop.

That was the problem. She had said both, in the space of about ninety seconds, and he had heard the second one, and he was taking it with the deadly seriousness of a man who had been taught that when a woman says no, you put down whatever is in your hands and you back away. She would have admired it enormously in anyone else. She had spent twelve years married to a man who treated her no as an opening bid.

It was just that she had lain awake until three in the morning, a week ago, and decided something. And you could not walk up to a person and say I have decided something when he was standing six feet away with a coil of pipe, being polite.

On the eighth day she tried.

“Emory.”

“Mm?” He was on his back under the sink with his head and one shoulder inside the cabinet, so that what she addressed was mostly a pair of boots and a flat stomach where his shirt had ridden up. She looked away from the stomach.

“If a person says no — hypothetically — in a lighthouse. In the middle of a certain kind of event.”

“A thunderstorm.”

“In a thunderstorm. Does that no have an expiration date?”

There was a long silence from under the sink. A wrench stopped ticking. When he spoke, it was in the very careful voice of a man who has been handed a live thing and is not sure which end to hold.

“Not unless she sets one,” he said.

“And if she doesn’t know how to set it? If she’s out of practice at the whole — procedure?”

“Then she can tell me when she’s figured it out.” He slid out from the cabinet and sat up on the floor with a smear of grease along his jaw, looking up at her. His eyes were steady, and there was no teasing in them at all. “Corinne. I’m not going anywhere. I told you. I said I could wait and I meant it. If it takes a week, or a month, or until you’re sixty and I’m forty-five and Mom has finally accepted the situation, I’m not going to — I’m not going to push on a door you haven’t opened. I’d rather have it never than have it wrong.”

“That’s a very enlightened thing to say.”

“It’s not enlightened. It’s selfish.” The ghost of the grin came back. “I want you to come to me on purpose. Not because the lightning made you. Not because I made it easy. I want it to be a thing you did, with your eyes open, on an ordinary Tuesday, so that when you think about it later you can’t say you got swept off.”

She stood there with her hand on the counter and her heart beating in her throat.

“It’s Saturday,” she said.

“I know.”

“I need a bookcase,” said Corinne, in a rush, “for the study. And a second opinion about oak. And I’ve never seen the Camden flea market. Would you drive me?”

For a second he only looked at her. Then he got to his feet, wiped his hands slowly down the front of his jeans, and said, “I could be ready in ten minutes,” in the tone of a man who had been ready for a week.

* * *

The Camden flea market sprawled across a high green field behind the Methodist church, a mile above the harbor, and on a Saturday at the end of May it looked like the aftermath of a very elegant explosion. Hundreds of striped canopies. Tables of cut glass and rusted tools, folding racks of linen, a man selling nothing but ship’s lanterns, a woman in an enormous straw hat selling nothing but buttons. The air smelled of fried dough and cut grass and old paper, and everyone’s dog was there.

Corinne had not been in a crowd in two months. She stood in the entrance gap between two tents, blinking, a little overwhelmed by the noise, and felt something close behind her. Not touching. Just the warmth of a person standing at the exact distance from which he could have caught her if she tipped.

“Too many people?” Emory said, near her ear.

“A little. I’ve gone feral. I talk to the seagulls.”

“What do the seagulls say?”

“Mostly they judge my choices.” She took a breath. “I’m all right. Lead on.”

He did not take her hand. That was the maddening part, and the extraordinary part. He walked a half step behind her left shoulder through the whole of the first row, guiding her with small, almost imperceptible shifts of his own position: a pace to the side when a toddler on a scooter came at her, a slightly wider path around a wheelbarrow of geraniums, until she realized, with a kind of dawning amazement, that she had crossed a very crowded field without being jostled once. She had forgotten what it was like to be walked through a room by someone who was paying attention.

They found the oak by accident. It was in the third row, under a green tarp, shoved between a rolltop desk and a stuffed owl: a seven-foot bookcase of quartersawn white oak, scarred, ink-stained, with a pair of leaded-glass doors in the upper half and an expression of immense and resigned dignity.

“That,” said Emory, with something close to reverence, “is a lawyer’s bookcase. About 1910. Mission style, probably out of a Boston firm, because look at the mortise there, you can see where they pegged it instead of screwing it. Oh, they loved this thing.”

“It has a crack in the glass.”

“Cracks can be mended.”

“It’s two hundred dollars.”

“It’s two hundred dollars.” He pronounced it as if it were a crime. “Corinne. Oh, please. Let me haggle. I’ve been practicing.”

“On whom?”

“On my mother. She sold me a car once, for twelve dollars more than she paid.”

He haggled. It was a spectacle. He ran his palm along the oak with the dreamy, rapt attention of a man at a séance, he sighed, he frowned, he squinted at the joinery, he pointed out a loose pegging to the old woman who owned the stall in a voice of deepest sorrow, and by the end of eleven minutes she had come down by sixty dollars and thrown in a box of mismatched brass drawer pulls, which Emory accepted with the grave courtesy of a prince accepting tribute. Corinne stood to one side with her hand over her mouth, shaking. When he turned to her at last with a look of understated triumph, she said, “You’re a monster,” and he said, “I’m a professional,” and their eyes held across a rolltop desk for one second longer than the joke required.

* * *

It was after one, walking the far edge of the field with paper cups of lemonade and the bookcase promised for delivery on Monday, that they ran into Mrs. Dunphy.

Of course they did. Port Ellis was a town of eleven hundred people, and in a town of eleven hundred people, everyone is always a few feet from everyone else’s business. She was standing at a table of cut glass in a lavender cardigan, holding a pressed-glass sugar bowl to the light, and she lowered it as they came near and turned, with an intake of breath, like a cat at a bird feeder.

“Well, there she is!” Mrs. Dunphy’s voice carried two tents in either direction. “Mrs. Aldermere. And — why, that’s Philippa Wolcott’s boy, isn’t it? Emory? I’d know that jaw anywhere. Your father’s all over it.”

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Dunphy,” said Emory pleasantly.

“It’s Ms. Aldermere now, I believe,” said Corinne, and heard how stiff it sounded. “How nice to see you. We were — I’m buying a bookcase. Emory’s been kind enough to drive me, since the Volvo’s making that noise.”

“Isn’t that thoughtful.” The bright, bird-like eyes moved from one of them to the other and back, and Corinne felt an unmistakable sensation of being weighed, tagged, and filed. “I always said that boy has a gift for being useful. Don’t I always say it? He fixed our water heater for free last winter, wouldn’t take a nickel. Devoted. That’s the word for him. Devoted to a fault. You’re lucky to have him next door.”

“I know I am,” Corinne said, a half-second too quickly.

“Mm.” Mrs. Dunphy smiled at her. It was the smile of a woman who had run a post-office counter for thirty-one years and knew what a half-second meant. “Well. Don’t let me keep you. Good young men are hard to come by. You’ll want to hold on to this one.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Emory. “We’ll be sure and let you get back to your sugar bowl.”

He steered Corinne away by a hand barely touching the small of her back. It was the first time he had touched her in eight days. Through the thin cotton of her blouse it burned like a brand, and she walked ten steps beyond the glass table before she let out the breath she was holding.

“She knows,” said Corinne.

“She doesn’t know.”

“She has a radar. She knows when the hardware store changes its cash register. Emory, by this evening everyone from here to Rockland will have heard that Pip’s boy was seen buying a bookcase with the divorced woman at the lighthouse.”

“They might hear that. That’s true.” He tilted his head. He didn’t sound worried; he sounded interested. “Would that be a problem?”

“It would be —” She broke off. “I called you Pip’s son. She said Pip’s boy and I just stood there. I introduced you as the thoughtful friend’s son who’s helping because my car is making noises.”

“Well, I am Pip’s son. And you are being driven, because of the noise.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do.” He was quiet for several steps. Then, with his eyes on the grass: “You feel like you’re lying.”

“I am lying.”

“No. You’re being careful. They’re not the same.” He stopped walking, under the edge of a canopy, in a patch of green shade, and turned to face her. The noise of the market receded to a murmur. “I don’t want you to feel like this is something you have to hide forever. I don’t want that for you. But I’m also not going to ask you to tell anyone anything before you’re ready. It’s yours, this. Whenever and however you want to share it. You get to decide who knows and when.”

It was an extraordinary thing to say, and he said it as if it were the simplest thing in the world. And it was, she realized, exactly what she had needed to hear. Twelve years with Graham, who had told his mother everything, down to the dates of her hospital stays, in the interest of “transparency.” It had never once occurred to him that her body, her grief, her silence were not communal property.

“Thank you,” Corinne said, and her voice was not quite steady. “That’s — you have no idea how much.”

“I think I have some idea.”

* * *

They found the record at the very back of the market, in the last tent before the parking field, at a stall run by a gaunt, unhurried man with a gray ponytail, who sat in a lawn chair with a paperback and did not so much as look up when they walked in. The stall was nothing but milk crates. Corinne drifted along them, flipping through jackets without much interest: Herb Alpert, a Mantovani, three copies of the same Barry Manilow. She had her head tilted to read the spines when Emory said, quite casually, “Excuse me, sir? Is that the one I asked about?”

The man lowered his book. He looked at Emory with the vague, thoughtful frown of a person placing a face.

“The lady’s record. Yeah. Last week.” He rose, creaking, with one hand on his knee, and went to a battered leather satchel behind the lawn chair, and drew out a square of faded cardboard in a clear plastic sleeve. “You said you were looking for someone who liked jazz, and you wanted something with a little melancholy. Well. I kept that one back. Figured it might turn up a buyer.”

He held it out.

It was Chet Baker Sings.

She knew the cover before she was close enough to read it. A man’s face in a gold wash of light, eyes closed, the jaw lean and sad, the trumpet resting against his lip. Water-stained along one edge. A ring from a coffee cup in the lower corner. It was the same — it was not the same copy, it couldn’t possibly be the same copy, but the coffee ring was in the same corner. Her mother had played this record on Sunday mornings in a rented duplex in Worcester, with the radiator knocking and the kettle on, and had sung along in a thin, flat, happy voice that Corinne had never been able to recapture. Her mother had died sixteen years ago last February. The record had been lost, along with half the furniture, in the move after the funeral.

“How,” Corinne said. Her voice cracked in the middle. “How did you know?”

“You told me.” Emory had gone slightly pink. He was rubbing the back of his neck. “I mean — I think you did? That first week, at the house, you had that blog post up on your screen. About your mother. The Sunday mornings. I wasn’t — I wasn’t snooping, I was fixing the router, and it was just sitting there, the title, and I read two lines, and I’m —” He stopped. “That was rude. I’m sorry. I should have said.”

She looked at the page of her own memory: the old blog post, Sunday Records, three years ago, written on a bad night in the spring after the surgery. She had forgotten she’d ever had it open. It was very possible she had left it open on the desk. It was entirely possible.

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s — I can’t believe you remembered.”

“I remember most things you say.”

“I never said it.”

“Then I read it, and I remember most things I read.” He gave her the sidelong grin, rueful and a little shy. “I didn’t know if I’d find one. I asked the guy last Saturday, and he said he might have a copy in the barn. I told him it was for a lady who’d been having a hard year. I didn’t want to say anything until I knew.”

“He said you’d said that,” said the man with the ponytail, who had returned to his paperback. “Said you came back twice to check. Dedicated young fella. You know what you’ve got there, ma’am?”

“I’m beginning to,” said Corinne.

She paid for it herself, insisting, over a quiet protest, with the fifteen dollars that the man refused to make twenty. She carried it out of the tent held flat against her chest, in both arms, like something alive. And halfway to the parking field she stopped dead in the middle of the grass with the sun in her eyes and the noise of the market washing around her, and started, to her horror, to cry.

“Oh, no,” said Emory. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll take it back, I should never —”

“Don’t you dare.” She was laughing, too, wiping her face with the heel of her hand. “I’m not sad. I’m — it’s the stupidest thing. I haven’t heard that record since I was twenty-two. I didn’t know anyone had seen me, to know about it. I didn’t know I had a thing like that left.”

“You do,” he said quietly. “You’ve got a lot left.”

She looked up at him through wet lashes, in the high bright afternoon, with the old record flat against her heart, and she thought, with perfect clarity: Not on an ordinary Tuesday. Today.

* * *

The Bookloft occupied the second floor of a clapboard building on Main Street, up a flight of steep stairs that creaked like a ship’s. Corinne had suggested it on the way down the hill, in a voice that she hoped sounded casual, because she needed a Norwegian-English dictionary that wasn’t falling apart, and because she did not want the day to end. The owner, a slight, bearded man with half-moon glasses, waved them toward the back, said “Foreign languages are behind the stairs, mind your head,” and returned to the cataloguing of a box of paperbacks.

The back was a long slope-ceilinged room under the eaves, shelves from floor to rafters, lit by two dusty dormer windows. It smelled of paper and glue and warm dust. Light fell in long gold bars across the floorboards. At the very end of the room a rolling ladder leaned against the shelves of the Scandinavian section, and between two stacks of crates a narrow aisle ran off into shadow like a path into the woods.

She found the dictionary on the second shelf. It had a green cloth cover, a cracked spine, and a name written inside in faded fountain pen: Lars Haugen, Bergen, 1962. She held it open in both hands and read the name and felt, as she always did with other people’s books, the thrill of a message left in a bottle.

“Look at this. He wrote his address. Lars Haugen, Bergen. He’d be ninety.”

“Maybe he’s still there,” said Emory, from the shelf beside her. He was reading the spines with his head tilted, and had not taken his eyes off them. “Maybe he’s sitting in a window looking at the harbor, wondering where his dictionary went.”

“That’s the most romantic thing you’ve said all day.”

“I’m just getting started.”

She shut the book. She set it on the shelf. She looked up at him, and found that he’d turned, and was already looking back, standing there in the long dusty light with his arms at his sides. He had stopped moving the way he did when he was listening to something very quiet. Six feet away, almost to the inch. And behind him, down the shadowed aisle between the crates, nobody. The owner was twenty feet away behind the stairs, and the old floor muttered under his tread, and far off the town clock was striking two.

“Emory,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I’ve decided.”

He did not move. His hands, at his sides, curled very slightly and then relaxed.

“I decided a week ago,” she said, “on the night after the lighthouse. I just didn’t know how to say it, because I haven’t done this in — in a really long time, and I don’t think I was ever very good at it, and I’m thirty-eight and I have a scar, and you’re Pip’s son, and every part of me is telling me to be sensible. And I’m being sensible. I’ve been sensible for eight days. It was dreadful.” She drew a breath. “So I’m saying it plainly, so that there’s no confusion, so that there is no way you could say later that you misunderstood. Yes. I want to. I want you to kiss me. I want to be kissed by you in a bookshop on an ordinary Saturday with my eyes open. And I’d like it — if you don’t mind — to not stop at the kissing.”

For a moment the only sound in the room was the creak of a floorboard somewhere far away.

Then he crossed the six feet.

He did it slowly, deliberately, one stride and then another, and the old boards sang beneath him. He stopped when he was close enough that she had to tilt her head back. He didn’t touch her. He lifted his hands and held them, open, an inch from her arms, as if asking.

“Say it again,” Emory said, very low.

“Yes.”

“Once more.”

“Yes. I’m asking you to —”

He kissed her.

It was nothing like the lighthouse. There, he’d been tender, tentative, careful. Now there was no care left in it at all. Eight days of waiting came into his mouth and his hands, which closed hard on her waist and lifted her bodily onto the balls of her feet, and her back met the shelves with a thud that rattled the whole Scandinavian section. A book fell. Neither of them looked. She had one hand in his hair and the other flat against his chest, over the wild thump of his heart, and she kissed him back with twelve years of hunger, with the sheer astonished joy of a person who has been told that the door was never locked.

“God,” he said, against her mouth, in a voice stripped raw. “God, Corinne. You have no idea. I have thought about this every single hour. I counted. I had the hours counted.”

“You’re allowed to stop counting,” she managed.

“No.” He laughed, breathless, and pressed his forehead to hers. “I don’t think I am.”

Somewhere downstairs a bell jingled and the owner called, “Be right there!” to a customer, and the floor groaned as he hurried away from the stairs. They were still pressed against the shelves. Emory raised his head, and she saw that his eyes had gone nearly black, and his breathing was uneven, and he looked at her with an expression that was almost frightened.

“Don’t go home tonight,” he said.

“Emory —”

“I don’t mean — I’m not saying —” He swallowed. “I mean stay a little longer. Today. Just don’t let it end at four o’clock. I’ll drive you home, I’ll drive you anywhere. But I don’t want to put you in the Volvo and watch you go. I want one more hour. And then one more after that.”

She took his face in both hands, and felt the rough warmth of his jaw under her palms, and the tiny muscle flickering beside his eye.

“I have a record,” she said. “And a kitchen. And no one to tell me I can’t play it loud.”

His whole face changed.

“Take me home, Emory,” said Corinne, and picked up Lars Haugen’s dictionary from the shelf, and went down the creaking stairs to pay for it with her heart going like a drum and her blouse buttoned wrong, and he followed, not six feet behind her, but close enough to touch.