Rules of Engagement

The first thing she knew was sunlight, and the second thing she knew was cinnamon.

It lay across her face in a warm slab, pouring through the gap in the curtains at an angle that meant the morning was already well along. She lay under it with her eyes shut, smiling like an idiot, taking inventory. Her hair was a catastrophe. Her mouth felt used. Her thighs ached in a way that suggested she had run a very pleasant marathon, and there was a faint dull ache beneath her ribs that she identified, after a moment, as happiness, which she had not felt in the body for so long that she had to look it up.

Then she opened her eyes, and saw the empty pillow, and sat bolt upright.

The sheet beside her was cool. The indentation of his head in the pillow was still there. On the bedside table, squared neatly against the edge, sat a glass of water and a folded square of paper, and she reached for it with the swift, sinking dread of a woman who has seen too many movies in which the man has left a note.

GONE DOWNSTAIRS. NOT GONE. BREAKFAST IN TEN MINUTES. DON’T COME DOWN UNTIL YOU’VE DRUNK THE WATER. — E.

She read it three times, and laughed, and drank the water.

It took her nine of the ten minutes to find clothes. Her blouse was on the chair where he had placed it, folded, which struck her as faintly absurd and wholly lovable. Her skirt had migrated to the top of the bureau. The cardigan was nowhere; after a frantic search she found it draped over the bedpost, and put it on, and buttoned it over nothing at all, and looked at herself in the wardrobe mirror, and said aloud, to a woman she barely recognized: “Well. Look at you.”

The woman in the mirror looked back, flushed, tousled, wide-eyed, thirty-eight years old and absolutely ridiculous, and winked.

* * *

He was cooking.

She stopped in the kitchen doorway and just looked. He was at the stove in his jeans and yesterday’s shirt, rumpled and unbuttoned at the throat, with a dish towel over one shoulder and a cast-iron skillet in his hand. The window over the sink was open, and a breeze off the water stirred the curtain. On the counter stood a loaf of her own bread, sliced thick, soaking in a shallow dish; beside it a bowl of eggs, a jar of cinnamon, a pitcher of orange juice she hadn’t known she owned, and three Wild Rose jars of honey arranged by size, as if for a portrait.

He was humming. He always hummed when he cooked, something wandering and tuneless that never settled into any song she could name, and the sound went through her kitchen as comfortably as the smell of toast. He did not hear her. He flipped a slice with a flick of the wrist, watched it settle, and lifted his head to look out at the sea with such an expression of untroubled contentment that she almost couldn’t bear to disturb it.

She cleared her throat.

He turned.

His whole face lit. It was involuntary, instantaneous, a lamp turned up. Then he seemed to remember himself, and tried to arrange his features into something more cool and masculine, and failed so utterly that she burst out laughing.

“Good morning,” said Emory.

“Good morning.”

“I made French toast. I was going to bring it up on a tray. I was going to put a flower on it. I couldn’t find a flower, I thought about cutting one of the lupine from the ditch, but then I thought, no, that’s a weed, she’ll think I’m calling her a weed —” He stopped, and drew breath, and said with great care, “How are you?”

“I’m in my cardigan,” said Corinne, “and not very much else, and I’d like you to know that you’re the first man I’ve ever met who made breakfast and left a note and put a glass of water by the bed, and if you keep going like this I’m going to have to ask you what you want.”

“Nothing.”

“Nobody wants nothing.”

“I want you to eat.” He set down the skillet and crossed the kitchen to her in three strides and stopped, with his hands hanging at his sides, apparently unsure whether he was permitted to touch. She solved the problem by stepping forward and putting her arms around his waist. He exhaled into her hair, long and shaky, and folded around her like a door closing against the weather.

“I was afraid,” he said into the top of her head, “that you’d wake up and regret it.”

“I woke up and found French toast. It’s hard to regret anyone who’s holding a spatula.”

“I’m not holding a spatula.”

“You’re a metaphorical spatula.” She pulled back, and looked up at him. “I don’t regret it. Not a minute. I want you to know that, plainly, so you don’t spend the day tying yourself in knots. I would like very much to do it again. Sometime in the next hour.”

His face did something complicated. She had to look away, because it was too bright.

“But,” said Corinne.

“Ah.”

“But I’m a rational person. And I think we need to sit at this table and talk about what, exactly, we’ve done.”

“Okay.”

“With rules.”

Emory studied her for a moment with his head slightly tilted. Then, to her astonishment, he went to the drawer by the stove, took out a pencil, a stubby yellow Blackwing with the eraser worn nearly down, and laid it on the table beside the gas bill. “You’ll want to write them down,” he said, with perfect gravity. “You’re the sort of person who writes things down.”

* * *

They ate French toast at the oak table with the sea in the window and the gas bill between them, and for forty minutes they were the two most serious people in Maine.

She turned the bill over. On the back, in her small, upright hand, she wrote across the top RULES OF ENGAGEMENT, underlined it twice, and looked up at him with her pencil poised.

“Rule one,” she said. “Nobody knows.”

“Until you say.”

“Until we say. I want that written in. Both of us. I know you said it’s my decision, which was lovely, and I do mean to hold you to being lovely, but it’s not fair for it to rest on me alone. It’s your mother. It’s your family. If it’s going to be told, it should be told by both of us, together, on purpose, in a way we’ve agreed on. Not by Mrs. Dunphy. Not at the Fourth of July.”

“Not at the Fourth of July,” he agreed gravely, and ate a piece of toast. “Is there any reason you’re picking on Mrs. Dunphy?”

“She looked at me like I was a mislabeled pie.”

“She looks at everyone like that. It’s her gift.” He wiped his fingers on the towel. “Rule one. Both of us. Go on.”

“Rule two.” She wrote it as she said it. “Mornings from nine to one are for the book. I have a deadline. I have a publisher in Oslo who is going to murder me in a very courteous way if I don’t deliver chapter twelve this month. You can be in the house, you can fix things, you can bring me tea. But from nine to one I’m working, and I won’t be flirted with.”

“Does a kiss at twelve fifty-nine count?”

“A kiss at twelve fifty-nine is encouraged.”

“I’ll set a timer.” He leaned his chin on his fist. “Rule three.”

“Rule three: Pip is not discussed in the bedroom.”

His shoulders began to shake.

“I’m serious!” She was laughing too. “Do you understand how much trouble I’d be in? I’ve known your mother for twenty years. I gave you a silver spoon for your fourth birthday, I taught you how to ride a bicycle, I — oh, God, Emory, I changed your diaper. It is already unspeakable. If you say my mom at a moment of intimacy, I will die. I will go out the window.”

“I won’t say my mom.”

“Or Mom says. Or Pip. Or anything that begins with a P and ends in a woman.”

“Not a syllable. I swear it on my father’s plane.” He crossed his heart with the fork. “Rule four?”

“Rule four.” She chewed the pencil. “You keep your life. You go to the boatyard, you see your friends, you do your rescue shifts. You do not rearrange your days around mine. I’m not going to be the thing that takes you away from everything else you’ve got. You’re twenty-three. I won’t be somebody’s whole world. I’ve been that — I was a person who arranged herself around somebody else for twelve years — and I won’t do it to you. Understood?”

He did not answer right away. He looked at her across the table with an odd, soft, level expression, and then down at the paper, and for the first time that morning he was quite serious.

“Understood,” he said, and she saw him decide to let it go.

She wrote it down. She wrote, 5: If either of us is drowning, we say so. She wrote, 6: and stopped, and crossed it out, and began again. This one took longer. She wrote slowly, and read it over before she spoke it.

“Rule six,” said Corinne. “If either of us wants to stop — for any reason, or no reason, or no reason that we can explain — we say so. Plainly. Once. And the other person lets go. No campaigns. No hunting for explanations. No waiting outside the door, no flowers, no just let me talk to you, no give me one more chance. If one of us says it’s finished, it’s finished. We’re adults. We can do this nicely, and we can take it nicely, and we remain people who can occupy the same town afterward. It’s the most important rule. I’d like you to say it back to me.”

He had stopped eating.

The sea went on glittering in the window. A gull cried over the cliff and was answered by another. In the kitchen there was no sound but the tick of the clock above the stove, and she could not have said why, but she suddenly felt that she was standing at the edge of something very high. She told herself it was the plain, ordinary vertigo of having said a hard sentence aloud.

“Is that something you need?” he said. “That rule.”

“It’s something I’ve never had.” She held the pencil very still. “Graham didn’t take no well. Not violently. Never that. But he took it as a negotiation. Every refusal was a position. He’d wear me down over days, weeks, until I’d say yes just to stop hearing it, and then he’d say see, you wanted to. I’ve promised myself, Emory, that I would never, ever go into a room with someone where no is a thing I have to argue for.”

There was a half-second of stillness. She saw it in his face: a very small, very quick check, like a man stepping onto a stair that isn’t there.

“If you ever say it’s over,” said Emory, slowly, “I’ll let you go.”

“Say it exactly.”

“If either of us says it’s finished,” he said, “I’ll let go. I’ll accept it. I won’t campaign.” Then, more quietly, looking at the paper and not at her: “Agreed.”

“Say I agree.”

“I agree.”

“Sign it.”

“With a pencil?”

“It’s an informal treaty.” She slid the gas bill across the table and handed him the Blackwing. “We’ll be sentimental about it later.”

He signed. E. Wolcott, in the same upright block capitals as the notes on her refrigerator, with a long firm line under the name. Then, holding her gaze, he lifted the paper to his mouth and kissed it, once, very lightly, on the signature, and handed it back. A tiny shiver went through her. It was a joke, it was clearly a joke, and yet she felt, absurdly, that she had been handed a very small, very real vow.

“Rule seven,” she said, to cover the odd flutter, and wrote without looking up: “Sundays: Chet Baker.”

“Seconded.”

“Rule eight.”

“Rule eight is mine,” said Emory.

“You don’t get a rule.”

“It’s a short one.”

She sighed, and pushed the pencil across. He bent over the paper with his tongue between his teeth, like a boy at a school desk. In block capitals he wrote, 8: SHE LETS ME FEED HER.

“That’s not a rule, that’s an obsession,” said Corinne.

“It’s a principle.” He looked up, and there was something in his eyes so naked and so earnest that she couldn’t tease him. “I know it sounds like nothing. But I’ve had a long time to watch you eat standing up, over a sink, out of the container. You’ve never had somebody just — put a plate in front of you. Let me do that. Please. It’s all I want.”

“All you want?”

“For breakfast, at least.”

She tucked the gas bill into the pocket of her cardigan, and decided she would keep it forever.

* * *

The call from Oslo came at ten past ten.

She had forgotten it entirely. She had been standing in the doorway of the study with a cup of coffee, watching Emory carry a stepladder out to the porch, indulging in the uniquely pleasant sensation of looking at a man’s back, when her laptop gave out its cheerful ringing chirp, and she lurched across the room and slapped the button just in time.

“Corinne.” The face that filled the screen was lean and tanned and sharply lined, framed by a bob of iron-gray hair, behind a pair of cherry-red glasses. Ingrid Solheim was fifty-six, ran a publishing house the size of a postage stamp, and had once reduced a Nobel nominee to tears by remarking that his adjectives were “somewhat anxious.” “You look different.”

“Everyone keeps saying that.”

“Then everyone is correct. You look as though you have slept. You look as though you have eaten a vegetable.” Ingrid leaned forward. In the background, a small window showed a tall gray Oslo afternoon, with a tram going by. “Very good. I have three things. One, the Skau pages for chapters eight through ten are excellent. I have not said that before, so you will please enjoy it. Two, I need the complete manuscript by the thirtieth of September, because our printer is a sadist. Three, Anders has asked whether you will come to Bergen in the spring.”

“To Bergen?”

“He lives there, you know. In the old part of the harbor. He says that you have made him sound less Lutheran, and he would like to meet the woman responsible.” Her mouth curved. “He has also asked whether you are tall. I told him that translators are never tall. It is a hazard of the profession. We spend too much time bent over.”

“I’m average,” said Corinne, laughing. “I’d love to go. Spring is — I’ll have to see —” She broke off, because she had heard it.

It was a small sound, in the hall behind her. A cough, quite polite, quickly smothered. And then the creak of a floorboard, and, entering the lower edge of the laptop’s camera frame like a ship coming over the horizon, the toe of a very large brown work boot.

Ingrid’s eyebrows rose above her red glasses.

“That,” she said, “is a very big shoe.”

“It’s —” Corinne turned in the chair, mouthing go away at the empty air, and swung back to the screen with a beaming smile that she hoped was not too fixed. “It’s the plumber. We have a leak. The — pipe. In the wall.”

“Does the plumber have a name?”

“Not that he’s — Ingrid, it’s very boring.”

“Corinne.” The older woman folded her hands on her desk. “I have been reading your drafts for six years. You use a semicolon like a locksmith. This week you have used four in a single chapter, and every one of them is playful. I know when a translator has fallen in love with something. It is usually the book. But the book does not have a boot.” She tilted her head, and said something rapid and warm and wickedly amused in Norwegian, so fast that it came out in a single liquid line: “Han høres ung ut. Er han snill mot deg?”

He sounds young. Is he kind to you?

Corinne’s face flamed. She opened her mouth, and had nothing in it but air, and said, at last, lamely, “Yes.”

“Good,” said Ingrid, in English, with great satisfaction. “That is all that matters. I will not ask anything else. I am a professional.” And she waved the very edge of her hand, and the call ended in a final blue flicker.

Corinne sat for a long moment in front of the blank screen with her palms pressed against her cheeks.

“She’s wonderful,” said a voice behind her.

She whirled. Emory stood in the study doorway, leaning against the frame with the stepladder in one hand and a look of the most transparent innocence on his face. The boot had retreated. Behind him, in the hall, the morning light poured in through the screen door, turning his hair to bronze.

“You were listening.”

“I was walking past with a ladder.”

“You were standing in my hall for three minutes. You coughed.”

“There was a spider.” He set down the ladder, and strolled into the room and stopped behind her chair, and bent so that his mouth was near her ear. “Han høres ung ut,” he said, quietly, in an accent so clean that it raised the hair along her neck. “That’s he sounds young, isn’t it? The høres — the ø sound’s hard. She said it fast. I think I caught most of it.”

Corinne turned slowly in the chair.

“You understood her.”

“Some.” He had the grace to look faintly sheepish. “I’ve been practicing. There’s a podcast out of Oslo, a woman who reads crime novels aloud. I listen on the boat. It’s not much. Only the words I can catch.” A pause. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. I wanted to know what she’d say. I wanted to hear what people say about you when you can’t hear it. It’s — I’m sorry. It was childish.”

“It was a little bit creepy,” said Corinne, honestly.

“I know.”

“But it was also,” she admitted, against her own better judgment, “the nicest thing anyone’s done for my Norwegian since my thesis advisor.”

He smiled, crooked, with the snaggletoothed canine showing, and went down on one knee beside the chair, and rested his chin on her thigh, looking up at her, for all the world like a very large dog who had never once chewed a slipper. “Was she right?” he asked.

“About what?”

“Am I kind to you?”

She put her hand in his hair.

“Yes,” said Corinne. “God help me. You are.”

* * *

Mrs. Dunphy arrived at eleven-thirty, with a casserole.

There was no warning. There was only the sound of a car in the drive, a door slamming, brisk footsteps on the porch, and a knock that was nothing like Emory’s, a quick, hard, proprietary rat-a-tat, like a woman who had every intention of coming in whether she was asked or not. Corinne, who had changed into a blouse and a pair of jeans in a state bordering on panic, and was scrubbing the French toast out of a pan with wild energy, froze at the sink.

“Cellar,” she hissed.

“The cellar?”

“Go be a handyman!”

He saluted. He disappeared down the cellar steps with a flashlight, and a few seconds later there came up from below a series of authoritative, workmanlike thumps. She dried her hands on her jeans, smoothed her hair, took a breath, and opened the door.

“There she is,” said Mrs. Dunphy. “I won’t come in.”

She came in. She had on a lavender windbreaker, and carried before her, in both hands, a Pyrex dish wrapped in foil, with the solemnity of a woman bearing the Host. The sharp bright eyes took in the hall, the stairs, the open door to the study, the bookshelf, the second coffee cup on the table, and finally the kitchen, where the sink held two plates.

“Tuna noodle,” said Mrs. Dunphy, handing it over. “It’s not much. I heard you’d been having a hard time of it. A divorce is a terrible thing, particularly in a place you don’t know. Divorce takes it out of a person, I know, I had my own, in 1991, and I lost eleven pounds and had a nervous rash. You’ve got a good color, though. I’ll say that. You’ve got a very good color.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Dunphy. That’s very kind.”

“Is that the Wolcott boy’s truck out front?”

“He’s — in the cellar. Doing something to the pipe.”

“Isn’t that good of him.” The smile did not change by so much as a millimeter. “He came by the store last week, you know. Asked whether you’d had any mail forwarded. Whether there was anything for you at the counter, in case you hadn’t been in. So considerate. I told him there’s nothing but the bank and the magazine. He asked me to keep an eye out.” She patted the foil. “I thought, well, there’s a boy who thinks of everything.”

“He’s been wonderful,” said Corinne. Her voice came out perfectly steady, and she was proud of it. “Pip asked him to look in on me when I moved up. I’m very lucky.”

“Oh, you are, dear. You are.” And then, with a slow, benign, devastating glance toward the cellar door, where the thumping had stopped: “I’ll leave the casserole. There’s enough for two.”

She went. The screen door slapped. The car started, and a moment later the gravel crunched away down the drive, and the house fell silent except for the faint, deliberate, conspicuously innocent clatter of a wrench being set down on a concrete floor.

Emory’s head appeared in the cellar doorway.

“She knows,” said Corinne.

“She suspects.”

“She said there’s enough for two.”

“It’s a casserole. They’re always enough for two.” He came up the steps, wiping his hands, dusty, flushed, wearing a spiderweb in his hair, and began to grin. “She asked about your mail.”

“I heard.”

“I’d asked her to hold a package of — of lamp parts. For the lighthouse. I’d ordered them to the store, it’s easier than to the house.” He plucked the web from his hair and looked at it. “I should have said.”

It was a perfectly good explanation. It was, in fact, exactly the sort of thing a person would do. She told herself so, as she stood at the counter with a tuna casserole in her arms and the afternoon flooding in at the window, and she believed it. She believed it entirely.

* * *

The text came while she was washing out Mrs. Dunphy’s Pyrex.

She heard the little chime from across the kitchen, where her phone sat propped against the honey, and dried her hands, and picked it up. She read it standing at the sink with the water still running.

Fourth of July. My place. 2pm. NON-NEGOTIABLE. Brought in 14 lbs of brisket and a man named Callum who has been told nothing. Em says he can drive you — it’s on his way, he has to see a man in Yarmouth about a bilge pump. Wear something green. I mean it. xx P.

And then, a moment later, a second message:

Also he mentioned he’d done your fridge. That boy. I only gave him the recipe for the soup. Is the honey right?

She stood very still.

Behind her, Emory had come up from the cellar and was washing his hands at the other side of the sink; she heard the water run and stop, and the rasp of the towel. She could feel him not looking at the screen.

“Pip,” she said, aloud.

“What did she say?”

“The Fourth. She wants you to drive me down.” She laughed, once, a thin sound. “She knows you’re driving me. Of course she knows. She planned it. She’s — she arranged this the way she arranges everything, like a woman moving chess pieces. She told you to do my fridge.”

“I told her I’d done your fridge,” Emory said, mildly. “I knew you’d be tired. I went to Hannaford’s and bought what you ate in the hospital the last time. She told me.” He stopped. “Am I in trouble?”

“No. It’s —” She put the phone on the counter, face up, and braced both hands on either side of it, and looked at the little glowing bubble. “I feel sick, Emory.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Twenty years. I’ve known her twenty years. She came to get me from Providence at two in the morning. She sat next to me through three —” Her throat closed. She forced it open. “And I let her send her son to bring me soup, and then I took him to bed. And now she’s asking whether the honey is right. And I’m going to stand in her kitchen on the Fourth of July with a paper plate in my hand and lie to her face.”

“It isn’t lying. It’s not telling yet.”

“Is there a difference?”

“Yes.” He stood beside her, not touching. “Lying is when you say a thing that isn’t true. This is when you keep a thing that is, so that you can give it to her properly. Gently. In your own time.” A pause. “She’ll be glad, you know. In the end.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know my mother.” It was said with an odd, quiet finality. “She wants us both to be happy more than she wants anything. She’ll be angry for a week. She’ll threaten to disown us both. And then she’ll sit down at that kitchen table and cry, and say she always knew.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“I have to,” Emory said. And for a moment he looked very young, and very tired, and she remembered, with a pang, that he had no one else.

She picked up the phone. She began to type.

Pip, she wrote. I need to tell you something.

The cursor blinked after the word something, patient, bright, a small black heartbeat.

She looked at it for a long time. Behind her, the man she had slept with last night stood in her kitchen, quietly, very still, waiting for her to decide. Out the window, the sea was a long glittering road. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere upstairs, a floorboard settled as the house exhaled.

She held down the delete key.

She watched the letters disappear from right to left, one by one, until the field was empty. It took, she noticed, no effort whatever. There was no wrench of conscience, no sensation of falling, only a smooth cold ease, like a drawer sliding shut on a good runner. She had lied to Graham for years about little things, I’m fine, I don’t mind, I wasn’t crying; she had thought of herself as a clumsy liar. It had never occurred to her that she might be a natural.

Wouldn’t miss it, she typed instead. The honey is perfect. Tell Brisket I said hello. xx C.

She sent it. The phone made its small, bright, decisive whoosh.

Emory’s arm came around her waist from behind. He rested his chin in the curve of her shoulder, and she felt, rather than heard, him whisper: “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For waiting. For us.” His lips brushed her neck, below the ear. “I know what it costs.”

She leaned back against him and closed her eyes, and told herself that this was what it felt like to be brave.

It did not feel like bravery. It felt like the sound a drawer makes, closing.