Bonus Three: Clause Sixteen

They gave him his belongings back in a brown paper bag.

It was the sort of bag a child takes to school, folded over at the top and stapled, with a white label on the front and a number in black marker. A guard in a gray uniform slid it across the counter at seven in the morning on a Thursday in April, and watched with the bored gentleness of long practice as Anselm Varga opened it and took out the contents one at a time and laid them in a row on the scarred Formica.

A wallet. A belt. A pair of black leather shoes with the laces tucked in. A white shirt, ironed. A charcoal jacket that no longer fit across the shoulders. And a gold pocket watch, closed, with a worn lid, engraved on the back with two letters and two words.

"Sign here," said the guard.

He signed.

"And here."

He signed again. He did it left-handed, with the cheap blue pen on its bead chain, because the right shoulder still ached in cold weather and the doctors at the camp infirmary had told him, with a kind of shrugging cheerfulness, that it always would. The signature came out cramped and awkward and quite unlike the hand he had once been proud of. He looked at it a moment. He thought: good.

"That's all," said the guard. "Good luck, Varga."

"Thank you."

"Don't come back."

"I don't intend to."

"They all say that." The man smiled, tiredly. "But some of you mean it."

…

He had served ten months and eleven days.

He had not counted them.

That was what he kept returning to, in the long gray waiting hours in the processing room, sitting on a bench with his hands on his knees and the paper bag beside him. For twenty-four years he had counted everything. Containers and deaths and bribes. The slow arithmetic of a man who believes that if he keeps a perfect enough record, one day it will balance. And in the camp at Otisville, in a cinderblock dormitory on a hillside above the Delaware, with a hundred and twenty men and a lawn and a library and a view of a distant ridge, he had put it down.

He had not meant to. It had simply happened.

He had worked in the kitchen, at first. Then in the library, because a counselor had noticed he could read. He had taught a class on Thursday evenings: contract law, in plain English, for men who were going home in a year and wanted to know what they were signing. There were eleven in it. One was a former shipping clerk from Elizabeth. One was a boy of twenty-three who could not read at all and who sat at the back with his chin on his fist, listening, until Anselm began to read the clauses aloud. He had learned a great many things about himself, teaching. He had learned that he was a patient man. He had learned, to his considerable surprise, that he liked it.

And on Saturdays, between ten and three, she had come.

Forty-two Saturdays. She had missed three, for a hearing and a flu and a funeral, and written him a letter each time, five pages, in green ink, about nothing: the price of eggs, a remarkable cat she had met on Atlantic Avenue, a long and furious opinion of a judge. He had kept the letters in a shoebox under his bunk. He had read them over until the paper wore thin at the creases.

She would sit across from him at a plastic table in a bright noisy room with a vending machine, and she would say: Tell me what you did this week. And he would tell her. And then she would say, in that level, lucid, faintly amused voice, with her gray eyes steady on his face: What would you rather do next week?

He had never, in forty-two Saturdays, known the answer.

It was the hardest question he had ever been asked. He had been asked about murder, and bribery, and a ledger of the dead, and he had answered each in turn, flatly, without flinching. But what would you rather defeated him every time. He would sit there, big and silent, with his hands on the table, and search himself, and find a large dark empty room.

I don't know, he'd say.

That's all right, she'd say. Think about it.

So he had thought. He had thought on the kitchen line, scrubbing pans. He had thought in the library, shelving. He had thought in the long blue evenings in the yard, walking the track with his hands in his pockets and the sun going down over the Shawangunks. And slowly, over months, like a man learning to see in the dark, he had begun to find things.

I would rather be early.

I would rather be asked.

I would rather learn to play the piano.

He had told her that last one in February. She had burst out laughing, in the middle of the visiting room, and the guard had come over, and she had said through her tears, I'm sorry, officer, it's the first time he's ever wanted anything.

…

He opened the watch.

It was still ticking. It had been in a locker in the property room for ten months and eleven days, wound by no one, and it had gone on, because it was a good watch, and because his grandfather had been an honest man. He held it to his ear. He listened to the small dry sound of it, and thought of a morning in October, in a hospital, when a woman had pressed it into his palm and said: Then we'll count. Both of us. From here.

He had given her the other one on his first morning.

The counter. He had set it in her hand in the parking lot of this very prison, in a hard June rain, ten minutes before he walked through the gate. Keep it, he'd said. I'm told I won't need it. She had looked at it for a long time. Four zeros in four brass windows. Then she had closed her fingers over it and said, in a voice he hadn't known she possessed: All right. I'll hold it for you.

He had not asked what she meant to do with it.

He had not counted. That was the thing he kept returning to. He had put the whole thing down, the way a man puts down a heavy case on a long road and discovers that he has been walking bent for years. He had simply stopped.

He closed the watch, and put it in his pocket.

…

The gate was a plain steel one.

It stood at the end of a short asphalt road, between two low guard towers, in a chain-link fence with no wire on top. Beyond it lay the world. A parking lot. A grass verge. A line of bare maples on a slope, just coming into the pale green of April. A road. A sky, enormous and clean and washed with rain, the soft intricate blue of a thrush's egg.

The guard pressed a button. The gate began to slide.

He stood on the threshold with his paper bag under his arm and the jacket that didn't fit, and breathed. The air smelled of wet earth and woodsmoke and cut grass. A bird was singing somewhere in the maples. There was a cold, sweet wind. He closed his eyes.

I am thirty-nine years old, he thought.

I am out of prison. I have no money, no company, no house, no name.

I have a wife in a parking lot.

He opened his eyes.

She was standing by the car.

She was standing at the far side of the parking lot, beside a dull gray Subaru with a dent in the fender, and she was alone. She wore jeans, and a green wool coat that he had never seen, and boots. Her hair was loose. In one hand, at her side, she held a battered black umbrella, closed. She was looking straight at him. She did not wave. She did not move. She only stood there in the clear spring light, small and still and upright, with her face turned toward the gate like a flower toward the sun.

And she was smiling.

He began to walk.

It was perhaps sixty yards. He had walked a great many longer distances in his life. He had walked the length of a pier in the rain. He had walked a corridor smelling of formalin with an umbrella in his fist. But he had never walked a road like this one, which went in a straight line across an asphalt lot in the early morning with nothing on it at all, and at the end of which stood a woman who had made no promise, and no claim, and no demand, and was waiting there anyway because she chose to be.

He stopped before her.

"Counselor," he said.

"Mr. Varga."

"You're early."

"I'm always early." She tilted her head. "It's a thing I learned from a very bad influence."

His mouth trembled.

"I have something for you," he said.

"I thought you might."

"I've been working on it for six months. It isn't very good."

"It's a legal document. It isn't supposed to be."

He laughed. It came out as a sort of sob. He put down the paper bag on the hood of the Subaru, and reached into the breast pocket of the charcoal jacket, and drew out a single sheet of lined paper, folded in thirds. It had been carried for months in a shoebox. It had been rewritten fourteen times. It was written in a cramped uncertain left-handed script, in blue ballpoint, and the corners were soft as cloth.

"I borrowed a pen," he said. "I didn't have green."

"Show me the clause," said Linnea.

He held it out.

…

She unfolded it. She read it standing, with the wind lifting a strand of her hair across her cheek, and the umbrella tucked under her arm.

It said:

PARTNERSHIP AGREEMENT, CLAUSE 16

16. The Asker's Clause. Before deciding any matter that concerns the other, each party shall ask the other what they would rather do.

The other shall answer truthfully. The answer may be "I don't know." It may be "I'd rather you didn't." It may be "I'd rather you decide, and I will tell you if I mind."

Each shall accept the answer. Each shall remember that the answer may change.

The asking is not a formality. It is the whole of the thing.

Neither party shall pay for the other without being asked. Neither shall rescue the other without being asked. Neither shall spare the other a hard truth because the truth is hard.

If either party forgets to ask, the other may say, "Ask me." This shall be sufficient.

I have never done this before. I may forget. I would like it recorded that I wanted to.

—A.V.

She read it twice.

He watched her face. He watched the little crease form between her brows, the one that appeared whenever she read a sentence she meant to take apart. He saw her lips move, very slightly, on the last line. He saw her swallow.

She folded the page.

She did it slowly, in thirds, along the old creases, and held it for a moment against her chest. Then she looked up at him with her gray eyes bright and her mouth trembling and an expression he would carry for the rest of his life: grave, tender, unashamed, entirely and unconditionally present.

"There's a drafting error," she said.

His heart stopped.

"In the third paragraph. 'Each shall accept the answer.' It's ambiguous." Her voice shook. "It should say, 'Each shall accept the answer, and be allowed to be sad about it.' Otherwise it's just a gag order."

He stared.

"I'm only saying," said Linnea, "that a clause worth having should have a remedy for disappointment."

"Linnea."

"Yes."

"I would like to ask you something."

"Please."

"What would you rather do now?"

She considered it with great seriousness. She looked at the gate, and the maples, and the long road down the hill. She looked at the umbrella under her arm. She looked at the man in front of her, in a jacket that didn't fit, with his hair gone gray at the temples and a thin white scar through the left eyebrow and the paper bag of his whole life on the hood of a car.

"I'd rather," she said, "have breakfast."

"Breakfast."

"At the Starlite. Dolores is holding booth six. She says if you don't show by nine, she's giving it to a trucker." Her mouth quivered. "And then I'd like to go home. And then I'd like to go to sleep in my own bed, and wake up, and see you at the table. And have coffee. And ask you what you'd rather. And see what you say."

"I'll say that I don't know."

"That's an acceptable answer."

"I'll say that I'd rather be with you."

"That's even better."

"And in the afternoon," said Anselm, "I would like to learn to play the piano."

She burst out laughing.

It was a bright, cracked, helpless sound, and it went up into the clean April air and rang off the guard tower like a bell. She dropped the umbrella. She put both hands over her face. And he stood there and watched her laugh, the whole slender trembling length of her, doubled over, with the wind in her hair, and the sun on the green wool coat, and felt his heart open like a door.

When she straightened, her face was wet.

"Give me your hand," she said.

He gave it.

She took it in both of hers. She held it for a moment, as one holds a thing one has been afraid to lose. Then she turned it over, and opened her own right fist, which she had kept closed since he walked out of the gate, and laid something small in his palm.

It was warm. It was scuffed. It was brass.

"I clicked it every Saturday," said Linnea. "On the way back to the car. In the parking lot, with the gate behind me. One click for each time I came." Her voice shook. "I know it isn't what it was for. I know it was your count. But I couldn't think of anything else to do with it. I didn't want it to go on counting the other thing."

He looked down.

The four little windows. The brass lever. The numbers, steady, in the clear morning light.

0043.

"Forty-two Saturdays," she said. "And one last night, on the phone, when you said 'tomorrow.' I was sitting on the kitchen floor." She laughed, and it broke. "I don't know why. I just did."

He could not speak.

He stood in the parking lot of a federal prison in the April sun with a brass machine in his hand and understood, slowly, as the dawn comes up through a gap in a wall, that she had been counting too. That all those months, while he had been learning to put down the tally of what he'd done, she had been keeping the other one. A tally of the days she had chosen to come.

Not a ledger, he thought.

Not a wall.

A record of the days I was glad to be alive.

"Click," she whispered.

He pressed the lever with his thumb. The little brass wheel turned over, soft and exact, and the number in the window changed, as it had changed forty-three times before, and would change again, and again, on every morning of a long ordinary life.

0044.

Behind them, the steel gate slid shut.

Neither of them looked back. They walked together to the car, in the clear light, in the cold bright wind, with their hands joined between them. The maples shook out their new leaves. A bird sang. And somewhere far to the south, past the hills and the river and the long gray sprawl of the city, the tide was beginning to turn in a harbor where a line of old brown stain ran along the pilings of a dead pier, showing, as it had always shown, how far the worst had come.

It had come that far. It had gone no farther.

The water was still rising.

It was going to be a very good day.