Chet Baker

The turntable had been in the attic all along.

She had never gone up there. The door to the attic stairs was narrow and painted shut, and in her eleven weeks in the house she had walked past it a hundred times and never tried the knob. Emory tried it. It opened under his palm with a sigh of old paint, and he went up into the dusty dark with a flashlight in his teeth and came down five minutes later with a cardboard box held against his chest, and a face lit with a joy so uncomplicated that she nearly forgave the house for everything.

It was a 1960s Zenith console player, a boxy walnut thing the size of a cooler, with a smoked-glass lid and a tone arm bent like an elbow. The felt had gone gray. The needle was missing. “I can fix that,” he said, before she had asked, and he was already on his knees on the kitchen floor with a screwdriver and a tiny envelope from his shirt pocket — a spare needle, new, in a paper sleeve, which he looked at himself in some surprise and said, “Oh. I have one of those,” in the tone of a man marveling at a coincidence.

“Do you carry phonograph needles around on a regular basis?”

“I carry a lot of things around. You never know.” He bent over the cartridge, and his hair fell across his forehead. “It’s the boatwright in me. You get used to being three miles from the nearest hardware store with a hole in the boat.”

It took him fifteen minutes. In that time she lit the candles on the kitchen table, which she had been saving, though not consciously, for an occasion; she poured two glasses of the Sancerre that Pip had pressed on her in Portland; and she stood for a long time in front of the open refrigerator, staring at the contents without absorbing a single item, because her hands were shaking so badly she could not have said what a lemon was.

You’re thirty-eight years old, she told herself. You’ve had a husband. You’ve given a deposition. You once translated forty pages of a Swedish serial-killer novel in a hospital waiting room. You can cook dinner for one boy.

“Done,” said Emory, behind her.

She turned around. He was standing at the end of the table, one hand resting on the walnut lid, and behind him the evening light was coming through the window over the sink in long amber slabs. He had washed his hands, and run them back through his hair. He looked younger than he had in the bookshop. He looked, she thought, exactly like a person standing at the edge of a very high dive.

“Do you want to put it on?” he said.

She took the record out of its plastic sleeve with both hands. She held it by the edges the way her mother had taught her, a gesture she had not made in sixteen years that her fingers still knew perfectly well. She set it on the platter. She lowered the arm.

There was the familiar crackle of the needle in the groove: a soft rain of static, the world clearing its throat. And then, out of nowhere, out of the smoked-glass box in the old kitchen, a trumpet, so soft and unhurried and unbearably close that for a moment she forgot where she was.

* * *

They did not talk through the first song.

Corinne stood by the table with her wineglass, listening, and Emory stood by the turntable with his hand still resting lightly on the lid. The candlelight moved. The sea went from gold to rose to a deep violet beyond the window. The song ended, and the needle hissed in the quiet, and the next one began, and neither of them moved.

“My mother used to sing to this,” Corinne said at last, softly. “Not well. She had no pitch whatsoever. She used to get the second verse completely wrong on purpose, and when I corrected her she’d say, Oh, sweetheart, it’s a free country.” She smiled, and her eyes stung. “I thought it was the funniest thing in the world. I was eleven. I didn’t know what it cost her to be funny on Sundays.”

“What did it cost her?”

“Everything. My father had left. She was working two jobs. She was already — she’d already started to be sick, though we didn’t know.” She took a breath. “She died at forty-seven. I was twenty-two, and I was writing my thesis on Ibsen, and I remember thinking that I should be sadder than I was. That I should be falling apart. And instead I was filling out forms. Do you know, there are so many forms?”

“Yes,” said Emory.

The word was so simple and so complete that she looked at him. He was watching her across the kitchen with the candle on one side of his face and the dusk on the other, and he looked, for a moment, very old: old in the specific way that grief makes a person old, from the inside.

“There are so many forms,” he repeated, quietly. “Nobody tells you that. Everyone tells you about the crying. Nobody tells you that you’ll spend six weeks on hold with the pension office, being asked to prove that your father is dead.”

“They asked for a death certificate, and then they asked for another death certificate to prove the first one.”

“They asked for a letter from the doctor.”

“For the doctor’s letter.”

They were smiling at each other, helplessly, over a wine-dark table, two people who had stood on the same bleak shore in different decades; and the smile did something that nothing else had done all day. It took the last bit of fear out of the room.

Emory crossed the kitchen. He took the wineglass from her hand and set it on the counter, and then he held out his own hand, palm up, in the old courtly gesture, and said, “I can’t dance.”

“Neither can I.”

“I’ll step on your feet.”

“I’ll step on yours first.”

“Then it’s a fair fight,” said Emory, and she put her hand in his.

* * *

They danced in the kitchen, to Chet Baker, on a floor that creaked at every turn.

He was right: he could not dance. He moved with a sailor’s rolling stateliness, counting under his breath, and he stepped on her left foot twice and apologized both times with such overwhelming gravity that she began to laugh into his shoulder. She could not dance either, she had never been able to, she’d been the girl at the edge of every party at Boston University holding a plastic cup of wine and a book. But the kitchen was small, and the music was slow, and after a few minutes the counting stopped and the stumbling stopped and what was left was two bodies leaning against each other in the half dark, rocking.

His hand was warm at the small of her back. The other held hers against his chest. She could feel his heartbeat through his shirt, a steady, slightly quick pulse that matched her own, and when she tipped her head back to look up at him she found him already looking down, with a gaze so open and so unguarded that it undid something in her chest.

“What?” she said.

“I’m trying to memorize it.”

“Memorize what?”

“This.” He swayed her gently, a quarter-turn, the candle flame guttering as they passed. “The kitchen. The light. What the room smells like, which is wine and a little bit of burnt toast, because you’ve been making toast this week and forgetting about it. How you’re standing. How you look when you’re not sure.” He dropped his voice. “I want to be able to close my eyes in thirty years and have every part of it.”

“You’re twenty-three. You’ve got fifty years of closing your eyes ahead of you.”

“I know.” His mouth tilted. “I mean to spend them all on this.”

“On this? A kitchen?”

“On you, Corinne.”

He had never said her name like that before. In the quiet, over the soft crackle of the old record, it sounded like a thing he had been carrying, small and polished and warm, for a long, long time.

She went up on her toes and kissed him.

It was the third kiss of their lives, and it was a different kiss from the first two. The first had been a question, and the second had been an answer. This one was a sentence in the middle of a long conversation, assured and unhurried and absolutely without fear. His hand slid up her back and into her hair, and the tortoiseshell clip came loose and fell and rang on the floorboards, and neither of them paid it the slightest attention. The trumpet curled up through the old walls. The candles leaned. When at last they stopped, only because she had to breathe, he rested his forehead against hers, and she felt him trembling.

“I need you to be sure,” he said, hoarsely. “I’ll ask a hundred times if I have to. There’s nothing — nobody’s waiting. I’m not going anywhere. If you want to put on the kettle and sit on the porch and listen to this record until it’s dark, I’ll be the happiest man on the Atlantic. Tell me what you want.”

“I want,” said Corinne, “to go upstairs.”

“With —”

“With you. Yes. Obviously with you.” She was laughing, and her eyes were wet. “Don’t make me say it again. I said it in a bookstore. I said it very clearly, in front of a dictionary.”

“I just —”

“Emory.” She framed his face with both hands. “I am sober. I am happy. I am as sure as I’ve ever been of anything in my life. Take me upstairs.”

He kissed the palm of her left hand. Then he bent and, with the lack of ceremony of a man who has been lifting boat hulls since he was eleven, swept her up off the floor.

“Put me down,” she gasped, scandalized, with her arms flung around his neck. “I’m not — I’ll break your back —”

“You’re not even heavy.”

“I’m a grown woman, I’m at least a hundred and —”

“I’ve carried a forty-foot spar up the Kennebec in January,” said Emory serenely. “Hush.”

He carried her up the stairs in the dark, and behind them, in the empty kitchen, Chet Baker played to the candles until the needle ran off the end of the side.

* * *

What she would remember, afterward, was not any one thing but the light.

It came through the bedroom curtains in a single long blade, last red dregs of sunset slanting over the quilt, and as the room darkened, it climbed the wall, slowly, as if the day were backing out of the room on tiptoe. She would remember the way he undressed her: not hurried, not clumsy, but as though each button were a sentence he wanted to read. The way he stopped at the hem of her blouse and looked at her face. The way she nodded, and he lifted it over her head with enormous care, and set it on the chair as though it were made of glass.

She would remember the moment she went rigid.

It was the scar. She hadn’t thought of it. It ran along her lower abdomen, pale and ridged, four inches of seam from the surgery three years ago, the fourth emergency, the one that had ended it. She had not let anyone see it but doctors since. Graham had never asked. Graham had, the one time he’d looked, turned his face away.

Emory’s fingertips stopped at the edge of it.

“Does it hurt?” he asked.

“No. It’s — it’s ugly. You don’t have to —”

“Corinne.”

“It’s from a surgery. An emergency one. I almost didn’t —” Her voice thinned. “I’d rather you didn’t look.”

“All right,” he said softly. “I won’t, if you don’t want me to.”

And then, to her undying astonishment, he didn’t. He did not look away, as Graham had done; he looked into her eyes. He laid his hand, flat and warm and very still, over the length of the scar, and held it there, the way you would lay a hand on the neck of a frightened horse. And he said, in a low, steady voice that she felt rather than heard: “Thank you for letting me be here.”

She turned her face into the pillow and wept, quietly, for the better part of a minute. He did not say a word. He did not try to fix it. He lay beside her with his hand on her scar and his other arm under her head, and when the worst had passed, he kissed her temple, her wet lashes, the corner of her mouth, in no order and with no purpose except that she was there.

“Okay?” he murmured. It was her own word, and he said it her way, as a question, and waited for the answer.

“Okay,” said Corinne.

He was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke again it was with a delicacy that made her love him a little. “Is there anything I should be thinking about? For you, I mean. Anything we need to — be careful of.”

She understood him, and was surprised by how steadily the answer came. “No. Not on my account. It isn’t possible for me. It hasn’t been for a long time.” She found his hand on her scar and covered it with her own. “I’ll tell you the whole story someday. Not tonight, if that’s all right.”

“It’s all right.” There was the smallest pause, half a heartbeat. “You don’t ever have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

Then the dark came all the way into the room, and the last of the red went out of the quilt, and there was only the sea beyond the window and the feel of his skin under her palms, hot, living, astonishingly smooth over the hard shape of him. She learned him slowly. His shoulders, the long muscle of his back, the old scar across his thumb, the rough pad of his hand moving in small unhurried circles at her hip. He learned her too. He did it like a craftsman learning a piece of wood, listening for where the grain ran, and every time she caught her breath he stopped and went back, and did it again, and watched her face. He was not shy. He was not tentative anymore, either. Somewhere in the dark the careful boy had turned into a man with a purpose, and the purpose was her pleasure, and he served it with a devotion that made her cry out in the dark, in a voice she didn’t recognize, his name.

It surprised her, how much of it was laughter. She had thought, if she had thought at all, that it would be solemn: a rite, a reckoning, something she would get through gravely and gratefully and with a faint residue of shame. Instead she found herself helpless when his elbow discovered the ticklish place beneath her ribs, and breathless when his mouth followed the line of her collarbone to the hollow of her throat, and then, appallingly, helpless again, and he lifted his head and said, with tremendous dignity, “Is this funny?” and she said, “No. It’s wonderful. They’re different muscles,” and he said, “I’ll work on both,” and did.

There were things she had forgotten that a body could do. She had forgotten that skin could be a language, that a palm drawn slowly down the inside of her arm could say more than a page of Ibsen. She had forgotten the heat that gathered low and slow and then flooded outward until her fingers tingled and her knees would not obey her. His mouth found places that had not been kissed in a decade, the inside of her wrist, the bend of her knee, the long curve of her hip, and each time she thought surely that is all of me, he discovered another country. He took his time. He took so much time that at some point she begged, in a voice like torn paper, and he raised his head, hair wild and eyes black in the dark, and said, roughly, “Not yet. I want to hear you say what you want,” and she said it, whatever it was, she never afterward remembered the words, only that they were the truest she had ever spoken, and that he closed his eyes when he heard them as though they hurt.

“Say it again,” he whispered against her throat.

“Emory.”

“Again.”

“Emory —”

When he moved over her at last she took his weight and drew him down. The old bed spoke beneath them, a long wooden murmur, and the sea went on breathing at the foot of the cliff, and she held on to his shoulders and felt the whole world narrow to a single bright line of sensation, and then widen, and widen, until it was larger than the house, larger than the cliff, larger than anything she had known. She heard herself laughing, once, in the middle of it, startled, unbelieving. She heard him say her name into her hair, over and over, in a voice that broke.

Afterward, he held her for a very long time.

Neither of them said anything. The breeze lifted the curtain and let it fall. Her head lay on his chest, rising and falling with his breath, and she listened to his heart slow down, from a gallop to a canter to a walk. His hand moved in her hair. At some point in the dark he said, almost inaudibly, “I didn’t know it could be like that,” and she said, “Neither did I,” and was shocked to find that it was true.

She fell asleep on the word.

* * *

She woke at some deep hour of the night and didn’t know why.

The room was black. The window was a faint gray rectangle where the stars were. Beneath the quilt she was warm, and lay in the shelter of a long, hard, living body, one arm thrown across her waist, one leg tangled with hers; she could feel his breath moving the hair at her nape. For a moment she lay without thinking. Then she thought: I’m in bed with Pip’s son, and nearly laughed aloud, and then thought, and I’m not sorry, and was astonished.

She turned over.

He was awake.

He lay on his side, facing her, propped on one elbow, the quilt fallen around his waist. There was just enough starlight to see by. His eyes were open, and he was looking at her with a still, absorbed, searching attention, the way you look at something you’re trying not to wake.

“What time is it?” she whispered.

“Three-oh-seven.”

“Why aren’t you asleep?”

“I was. For a little. I woke at two-twelve and I couldn’t —” He smiled in the dark, and she heard rather than saw it. “I didn’t want to waste it.”

“Waste what?”

“Looking at you.”

She propped herself on an elbow to match his, and the quilt slid, and she pulled it up. “That’s a bit alarming. You do know that. If I’d woken up and found a stranger watching me sleep I’d have called the sheriff.”

“I’m not a stranger.”

“No.” She reached out and touched his cheek, and he turned his face into her palm like a cat. “But it’s three in the morning, and you’re lying here staring at me like I’m a — a chart. What are you doing?”

“I’m memorizing.”

“Memorizing what?”

“All of it.” He said it simply. His eyes moved over her face, her hair, her shoulder, with a slow, tender thoroughness, as if he were reading. “The freckle under your left ear. The little line you get between your eyebrows when you dream. The way you breathe in sets of four and then forget and take a big one. That you sleep with your right hand under your cheek.” His voice dropped. “In case I never get another night.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s just — I’m so afraid.” He said it quite quietly, and the admission cost him something. “I keep waiting for it to be taken away. Everything I’ve ever loved has been taken. So I look as hard as I can, while I’ve got it.”

It was a boy’s confession. It was also, she thought, with a faint cold touch of something she refused to examine, rather a lot to put on one night. She felt it settle on her chest, tender and heavy as a hand.

“You’re not going to lose me,” she said. “Not tonight. Not because of anything that I can do. I’m right here. Look. I have two feet and a pulse and I snore, I’m told.”

“You don’t snore.”

“How would you know?”

“I just listened for four hours.”

She started to laugh, and found that she couldn’t help it, and buried her face in his collarbone until the shaking stopped. His arms came around her. He was laughing too, noiselessly, in his chest, and under the laughter she felt something else, a long, trembling, unspoken relief.

“There,” she said. “That is the sound of someone who’s okay.”

“Is it?”

“It’s the sound of someone who’s going to be asleep in two minutes, or I’ll go downstairs and put Chet Baker on again.”

“Don’t,” said Emory, drowsy, into her hair. “He’s sad.”

“He is not sad. He is wistful.”

“Is there a difference?”

“In Norwegian there is,” she mumbled, already half dreaming. “There’s a word. Vemod. A sweet sadness. The kind you wouldn’t trade for being happy.”

“Vemod,” he repeated, softly, with the exact accent. “I’ll remember.”

She was nearly out when she felt him draw the quilt up over her shoulder, and tuck it under her chin, and lie back down with his arm across her. Through the thin gray edge of sleep she heard him breathe in, very slowly, as if filling himself with something. She thought, from a long way off, he is still awake.

She thought: He’s going to lie there until morning, looking at me.

She thought, drifting, that it was the sweetest thing a person had ever done for her, and that she was very, very lucky.

And she slept.