Page 94 of Night of Shadows
She holds the chain in her palm for a long second.
She walks to where I am at the kitchen island and she lifts her hair off the back of her neck and she says, "Put it on me."
I put it on her.
My fingers at the small clasp at the nape of her neck. The chain settling against the bone at the base of her throat, the small dip there.
She doesn’t ask why.
She doesn’t ask what for.
She wears it to bed that night and doesn’t take it off. She doesn’t take it off the next morning. She’s not, taken it off for any reason. She showers in it. She sleeps in it. She wears it under everything she puts on, every day, the small gold line at the base of her throat.
She tells me a couple of days later: ‘this is the only piece of jewelry I have ever owned that I have not taken off to sleep.’
I love the sound of that.
? ? ?
It is a Wednesday. Nora is at Eleni's for the night because Eleni has been asking for one specific Wednesday a month and we have agreed to the standing arrangement. Maeve is in the dress Eleni helped her pick at the small boutique on Newbury Street where Eleni has been a customer since 1982. The dress is a vibrant deep green that brings out her eyes with a zipper that runs up the back. The zipper has been a running architecture of the evening, because Eleni and Maeve have laughed about it during the dinner, and because Stavros has, at one point during the conversation about whether the zipper is a structural choice or a styling choice, looked at me with the fierce face of a brother who has noticed that his older brother has not stopped tracking the zipper for the last two hours.
We drive home at around 11:00 PM.
In the foyer of the brownstone, Maeve sets her keys in the bowl by the door. She turns to hang her coat. I close the door, lock it and throw the deadbolt. I throw the second deadbolt and throw the chain.
She turns back to me. "Lex."
“Yes Maeve."
"What are you doing?"
"I am unzipping your dress."
She studies my face. She decides what is happening as she turns around and lifts her hair.
I unzip the dress slowly.
Not all the way. To the bottom of her shoulder blades. To the place where I can see the fine architecture of her spine, the one I have memorized in the dark for two months. I don’t pull the dress off or move her toward the bedroom. I do not press myself against her back.
I kiss the back of her neck. Once.
The kiss is not a beginning.
The kiss is a small offering.
The kiss is the kiss of a man telling a woman in the foyer of their house that he’s been thinking about her zipper for two hours and has decided to do something about it that is not sex, just so she knows he’s been thinking.
Maeve leans back against me for one second.
She says, "Thank you."
"You are welcome."
She walks to the bedroom takes the dress off and leaves it on the chair by the dresser. She comes back into the kitchen in pajamas.
We go to bed. We read. She’s reading a book of essays by a Greek American writer Eleni has lent her. I am reading the Sokolov file. We read in bed next to each other for forty minutes. She turns out her light at 12:04 AM.
I turn out mine four minutes later.
