Page 52 of After His Eulogy
“Eat.”
“Okay.”
We eat. We do not talk much. We eat the way two people eat after a thing has happened in their kitchen, which is quietly, mostly, with the occasional small sentence about the food. He says he overdid the garlic. I say it is fine. He says it is too much. I say I like garlic. He says he knows. We eat. When we are done he gets up and he clears the plates and he puts them in the sink. He comes back and he stands behind my chair. He puts his hands on my shoulders.
“Stay tonight,” he says.
“Griffin…“
“Stay tonight. Reed. Stay tonight.”
I look up at him.
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
He bends down. He kisses the top of my head. It is the smallest kiss he has ever given me. It is the smallest kiss anyone has ever given me.
I close my eyes. He stands behind me with his hands on my shoulders for another minute. Then he says, “Come to bed when you are ready.”
He goes into the bedroom. I sit at the table for a few minutes. The kitchen is quiet. I look at the empty plates in the sink. I look at the throw blanket on the back of the couch. I look at the apartment, the apartment I came here tonight to leave, the apartment I am still in. I get up. I go into the bedroom. He is in bed. The lamp is on. He is on his side, facing the door, waiting. He sees me come in. He pulls the blanket back on the other side. I get in. I get in and he turns off the lamp and the room goes dark. I lie on my back next to him. He does not touch me for a second. Then he puts his hand on my chest, palm down, and leaves it there. We lie there.
“Tomorrow,” he says.
“Tomorrow.”
“I’m here when you call.”
“I know.”
“Sleep.”
I sleep. Harder than I’ve slept in two weeks. All the way through the night. I don’t check over my shoulder once on the walk home in the morning, and I notice I don’t, and I don’t let it scare me.Tomorrow, I tell myself,is a thing we’re figuring out together. I keep walking.
TWENTY-TWO
GRIFFIN
We go to his apartment in the morning. I had thought we would call from mine. I had been ready for that. For him to sit at my desk. For me to be on the couch behind him. For Mendez to be a voice on speaker in a room I have been in a thousand times. But Reed says, on the walk over, I want to call from my desk. I do not push. Reed has been making a series of small choices for the last twelve hours and I am letting him make them. The choice of which desk is one of them.
His apartment is small and clean and exactly what I’d imagined the few times I’d let myself imagine it. The kitchen window is small and high and faces the side of the building next door — brick three feet away, no view of anything. The desk isn’t at a window. It’s pushed against the inside wall of the living room, under a bare nail where a previous tenant had hung something, and it has a laptop on it, a mug, the syllabus from a class I’m not in, a small stack of contact sheets from his program weighed down by a coffee cup. There’s a couch with one cushion that has the impression of him in it from a thousand evenings. A bed in the bedroom that’s made the way he makes a bed — flat, the corners square, no superfluous pillows. No t-shirt on the dresser. The dresser is empty on top. A small dish for keys. A book. No sentimental object visible. No prints on the walls, which I hadn’t expected — he’s in his second year of a photography program and he’s put nothing of his own up, and the absence is its own statement. The apartment has been kept for fifteen months the way a person keeps an apartment when he’s been telling himself the apartment is provisional. He hasn’t put anything down. Hasn’t let the apartment become his. I sit on the couch.
I sit on the couch in the cushion that does not have his impression in it. I sit on the side that is mine now, though I only realize it’s mine when I sit down — I’ve arranged myself to leave him the cushion he uses. He sits at the desk. He puts the phone on the desk in front of him. He plugs it in to charge. He does not need to charge it. He is doing things with his hands. I watch him do them.
“You ready,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
“Reed.”
“Yeah.”
“Take your time.”
“I am taking my time.”
