The breakfast terrace

Nelly took the paper from the tray before the man carrying it reached the last stair.

She did not snatch it. That would have made the paper important. She took it the way she took flowers from a vase when they had opened too far, the way she took a glass from Virgil’s hand when he had begun talking to people who were not there: with two fingers, calmly, removing a thing from the world before it damaged the temperature.

The houseman stopped at once. He had the trained blankness of a person who had learned that beauty was dangerous when it changed its mind. Behind him, the breakfast terrace remained in its unconsumed ceremony: grapefruit halves sweating in their bowls, coffee cooling inside the bishop-shaped pot, spoons shining toward empty chairs. A white peacock stepped onto the lowest stair and then stepped back, as if the stone itself had become uncertain.

Nelly read.

Only the top half of the page. Only enough.

Virgil watched her from the pool shelf.

Water held him at the waist, at the ribs, under the arms. The linen of his shirt clung to him so that his old body, softened by pleasure and years of being forgiven before he asked, seemed both exposed and ceremonially dressed. The sunlight had not reached the lower pool, but it had reached Nelly. It lived on her shoulder. It caught in the dark rope of her wet hair and ran along the line where robe met skin. She stood with one bare foot on the stair below the other, weight on the back leg, the page lifted near her mouth, as if the outside world had arrived in the form of a bad smell.

“What is it?” Virgil asked.

His voice surprised him. It came up unused, hoarse, not yet belonging to the man who could fill a room. The water accepted the smallness of it.

Nelly did not answer.

She folded the page once, not along its crease, and held it against her thigh. The paper darkened where it touched the damp of her robe.

Above them, a curtain slipped from its hook and dragged softly along the terrace tile. No one moved to fix it.

Virgil put one hand on the pool edge. The tile was warm where the morning had found it. His fingers looked older there than they did underwater.

“Nelly.”

She looked down at him then.

That had always been the first correction: her looking. Even before she touched him, even before she smiled, even before she crossed a room, she could make him feel the indecency of having been elsewhere in his mind. She was not beautiful like a woman in a photograph, which allowed a man the safety of looking away and returning when he pleased. She was beautiful like weather coming through an open wall. She altered what could be thought in her vicinity. Her youth was not freshness. It was command. It made the marble seem newly quarried, the pool newly filled, the old newspapers newly irrelevant, Virgil himself newly possible and therefore newly guilty.

“You’re cold,” she said.

“I asked what it is.”

“You’re always cold when you sleep in the water.”

“I wasn’t sleeping.”

“No.”

The single word rested between them. She let it rest. She knew the island’s old talent for making denial sound childish.

He shifted, and the water broke around him. A weak current carried a thread of ink away from his thumb. It passed over the blue tile sun at the bottom of the pool and thinned until it disappeared.

Nelly descended another stair. The robe opened at her knee. Her skin, where the cloth parted, had the warm pale sheen of fruit cut with a clean knife. Virgil saw it and hated the part of himself that saw it before the paper, before Georgia, before the word he had glimpsed upside down in her hand. His desire did not rise youngly. It rose like habit and pain together, like a wound remembering the shape of the blade.

She saw him see.

That, too, she did not need to mention.

“They’ve sent a little death certificate without the death,” she said.

The pumps moved water from one level to another. Somewhere in the grotto, a fountain struck stone in patient drops.

Virgil kept his hand on the tile.

“Who?”

“The people under the weather.”

He looked past her toward the city below. Morning had begun to assemble Los Angeles from haze: silver roofs, black palms, a glass tower briefly pink, the long smudge of a freeway already alive with punishment.

“Who, Nelly?”

She lifted the folded paper, then let it fall back against her thigh.

“Georgia. Family. County. Kin. Those words. The words people use when they have run out of faces.”

The white peacock, which had retreated, opened its tail halfway and then seemed to forget why. The fan of feathers trembled once. Nelly glanced at it, and it folded itself again.

Virgil tried to stand. The pool did not release him gracefully. His wet shirt pulled against him; his foot slipped on the underwater ledge; his knee failed to remember dignity. He caught the edge with both hands. For a moment he was merely an old man levering himself out of expensive water under the gaze of a young woman who could have made pity erotic if she wished.

She did not help him.

That was one of her mercies. Or one of her cruelties. They had become difficult to separate.

He managed the pool step and sat there, water running from his sleeves, trousers clinging to his thighs, hair plastered back from his forehead. The morning touched the crown of his head and showed the scalp through the silver. Nelly came close enough that he could smell her: orange oil, bath steam, sleep, the faint mineral sweetness of the pool, and something warmer underneath that was not perfume but the private weather of her body. The smell had been the island’s true gate for years. One breath of it and the world below lost its grammar.

She crouched before him.

Now her face was level with his.

It was an impossible face, he thought, and then corrected himself at once, because impossible was the sort of word that gave her too much and not enough. Her beauty did not deny the world. It explained why men invented false worlds and then thanked them for the invention. Her mouth was soft from sleep. Her eyes were awake beyond waking. There was a small damp place at the hollow of her throat where a drop of water, or sweat, or bath steam had gathered and refused to fall.

She placed the folded paper on his knee.

He did not touch it.

Nelly smiled.

Not kindly. Not unkindly. The smile belonged to a creature testing whether a beloved animal still knew the hand that fed it.

“They think if they write you in capitals,” she said, “they can have you.”

Virgil looked at the paper. His name showed through the fold in backward bruises.

Capitals

“Let me read it.”

“You don’t need to.”

“I do.”

“You know what it says.”

He did. Not the particulars. The particulars would be absurd, and therefore powerful: a date, a seal, a petition, a phrase about absence, a presumption, a kinship, an address, Atlanta sitting somewhere inside the machinery like a nail hidden in cake. But he knew the larger sentence. Somewhere below the island, somewhere beyond the gates and fountains and the private rain, people had begun arranging a world in which he no longer occupied his own place.

It should have angered him first.

Instead he felt, with shameful clarity, a kind of wonder.

He had not known they could proceed.

Nelly put her hand over the paper before he could unfold it. Her fingers were long and damp. On one finger she wore a thin gold ring he did not remember giving her, though he had given her many things he did not remember. The ring made her hand look both married and unpromised.

“Don’t go down into their little language,” she said.

He swallowed.

“Nelly.”

“No. Listen.”

The word made the house listen. The staff were gone now, or had made themselves indistinguishable from columns and curtains. The recorded finches did not start again. Even the pumps seemed to lower their labor.

Nelly leaned closer.

“There is no body,” she said. “There is no grave. There is no widow unless she wants the costume. There is no dead man. There is you, here, breathing badly in my pool.”

He almost smiled. She had always had that gift: to insult him so intimately it felt like being kept.

“They can do what they like with the name,” she continued. “Names are for mail. Names are for checks. Names are for children who want someone to blame at dinner. You can let them have it.”

Virgil looked at her hand on the paper.

“And what would I be?”

She laughed softly.

It was not amusement. It was a warm blade drawn from silk.

“What you are when you stop performing injury for people who enjoy it.”

He felt the sentence enter him. He wanted to reject it, but she had placed truth inside it, and truth made lies difficult to remove cleanly. There were people who enjoyed his injury. There were people who fed on his abasement, who wanted him returned not healed but available for punishment. There were children, perhaps, who had grown into the shape of accusation because he had left them no other inheritance. There was a wife — no, not yet, not the word wife in front of Nelly, not with that paper under her hand — there was a house, somewhere in the old life, where his name still hurt the furniture.

Nelly watched the effort of substitution pass across his face.

She smiled again, but the smile had narrowed.

“Say it,” she said.

He looked up.

“Say what?”

“The word you’re trying not to say.”

A lizard moved along the warm edge of the pool and vanished between two tiles.

Virgil lowered his eyes to the paper.

“I’m not trying not to say anything.”

Now she touched his face.

Not gently enough to be comfort. Not roughly enough to be accusation. Her thumb moved along his cheekbone, down through the wet gray at his jaw, and came to rest at the corner of his mouth. She had touched him there in bedrooms, in cars, in the hot blue dark of the grotto, in rooms full of people while talking to someone else. The touch knew him better than his conscience. It asked nothing and reminded him of everything.

“You always think silence disguises you,” she said.

“I’m trying to answer carefully.”

“Because I’m stupid?”

“Because you are not.”

That pleased her. He saw it before she hid it. A small loosening at the eye. A softening so slight it might have been light.

He took the chance.

“You kept me alive,” he said.

She withdrew her hand.

“No.”

He stopped.

She stood.

That quickly, the scene changed. Her body rising made vertical law in the morning. The robe fell around her; one shoulder slipped bare and stayed bare, not accidentally, not theatrically, but with the insolence of a country showing its flag. She looked down at him now from the stair, and because he was seated wet on the pool edge, shivering though he did not feel cold, the difference between them became nearly comic: goddess and salvage, girl and old king, jailer and nurse, lover and weather.

“No,” she said again. “Do not thank me like a hospital.”

Virgil closed his mouth.

The page on his knee lifted at one corner in the breeze. Nelly’s eyes flicked to it. The paper settled.

He understood then that the danger was not that she would scream. It was that she might become exact. Her wrath, if it came, would not first be noise. It would be arrangement. A gate not opening. A phone missing. A servant giving the wrong answer. A car delayed until afternoon. A pill offered with the wrong glass of water. A message to someone below. A kiss at precisely the moment he needed will. A sweetness so complete it would make departure look vulgar.

She had made an island. What was one man’s route against that?

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She looked almost disappointed.

“Don’t be ordinary.”

He nodded, once. A schoolboy’s nod, absurd in him.

The city brightened another degree below them. Los Angeles had begun giving off the smell of hot metal and exhaust, though perhaps he only remembered that smell. Up here, the air remained orange, wet stone, chlorine, Nelly.

“I don’t know what I am down there anymore,” he said.

Nelly did not move.

“That is the attraction?”

“No.”

“It sounds like the attraction.”

“I know what I am here.”

Her face changed again. Not softened. Alerted.

“What are you here?”

He should not have entered this passage. He knew that as soon as the question opened. There were answers that would flatter her and doom him. There were answers that would free him and wound her beyond repair. He had lived too long by finding the middle path between injury and pleasure, apology and seduction, confession and craft. He searched now with the old instinct, the conniving grace that had saved him from creditors, enemies, editors, children, women, rooms, mornings.

He could say: a man.

Too small.

He could say: yours.

Too true in the wrong direction.

He could say: alive.

That was her word, her territory.

He said, “Unfinished.”

For a moment she gave him nothing.

Then she laughed under her breath, and the sound seemed to warm the stone.

“Oh,” she said. “That is very good.”

He looked down.

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“That never stops you.”

The cruelty was light, almost affectionate. He accepted it because it let them keep speaking.

Nelly stepped from the stair onto the pool ledge. She sat beside him, close enough that her thigh touched the wet fabric of his trousers. She did not seem to mind the water. She never seemed to mind what came from him: water, wine, ink, sweat, bad faith, tears. She had the obscene generosity of the young toward decay when decay still entertained them.

She took the paper from his knee and unfolded it.

This time she let him see.

The words were smaller than their force. They lay on the page in dead black rows, official and faintly ridiculous. His full name appeared twice. Georgia appeared once. Atlanta appeared in an address. Absence. Presumption. Petition. Next of kin. Hearing. Notice. A date that was too close.

His eyes stopped on the phrase concerning disappearance.

Disappearance. As if he had been an accident in the woods.

He had not disappeared. He had been visible every day to fountains, staff, mirrors, Nelly, delivery men, gardeners, certain guests, two doctors, one tailor, a man who came monthly to tune the piano no one played, and the white peacocks who had watched him age without curiosity.

But perhaps that was disappearance.

Perhaps disappearance was not concealment. Perhaps it was being seen only by those with no claim to summon you.

Nelly watched him read.

Now her beauty came at him without mercy, because it had become argument. The wet hair against her throat. The slight drowsiness still at her mouth. The robe parted at her knee. The sun on her collarbone. The fact that she was close enough to touch and had chosen not to touch him. She was offering not merely herself but the abolition of every room where he had failed. Her body said there was still a country where he was not late. Her eyes said the country had borders.

“Let them finish,” she said.

He kept looking at the page.

“Finish what?”

“You.”

The word moved through him. Not loudly. Deeply.

She took the page back and pressed it flat against the stone between them, smoothing the crease with her palm.

“They can bury the husband. The father. The signature. The man on school forms. The man who promised to be at tables. The man who owed Christmas to people who grew teeth waiting for it. Let them. Let that one go into the ground if they need a ceremony.”

Virgil shut his eyes.

There it was: not mockery, not merely temptation, but the terrible kindness of her offer. She would let the failed man die. She would keep the part of him that still warmed in water, still made language, still wanted her, still could be looked at without footnotes.

“And here?” he asked.

“Here you are not late.”

He opened his eyes.

She had turned toward him fully. The robe had fallen open at the throat. Her skin held the morning like a flame seen through milk. He felt his whole body’s old obedience, ridiculous and devout. Desire moved through him with grief tangled in it, because desire had always promised him rescue from sequence: no before, no after, only the body’s bright interruption.

Nelly put one hand in the water.

Ripples moved outward from her fingers and touched his reflection. The face there broke, reassembled, broke again. She watched the water work on him.

“You think going down there is courage,” she said.

“I don’t know what it is.”

“They will make you smaller than you are.”

“I am smaller than I was.”

“No.”

The word came sharp enough that he looked at her.

Her eyes were wet now, though no tear had fallen. The wetness did not make her fragile. It made her luminous in a more dangerous way. Pain entered her beauty and strengthened it, the way stormlight strengthens the sea. He understood, with a fear that cleared him, that she did not merely want to keep him from guilt. She wanted to keep him from measurement. She had loved, or needed, or invented him at the scale of the island. If he went down into forms and kin and hearings and old rooms, if he became a missing man corrected by paperwork, if he became husband again, father again, defendant, corpse-in-error, signatory, fool — then the creature she had ruled here would be reduced, and with him her kingdom.

“You are not smaller here,” she said.

“No.”

It was the safest answer. Agreement, not surrender.

She heard the caution inside it and hated him for it.

What they are burying

For the first time that morning, something in the house failed.

A fountain above the grotto coughed, spat air, and stopped. The sudden absence of water made the terrace enormous. The staff, wherever they were, did not come. The peacock cried once, a sound ugly enough to belong to the world below.

Nelly did not look away from Virgil.

He felt the gate of the island closing inward. Not visibly. In the nerves.

He placed one hand over the fax paper.

“I need to see what they’re burying,” he said.

Nelly stared at him.

He had said it badly. Too plainly. Or perhaps no sentence could have been careful enough once it moved toward departure.

“What they are burying,” she repeated.

He tried to repair it.

“What I left.”

“That is uglier.”

“Yes.”

She leaned close. Her mouth came near his ear, near enough that her breath moved the wet hair against his skin.

“If you go to be punished,” she said, “they will oblige you. Don’t confuse that with being wanted.”

The sentence found him. He almost bowed his head under it.

Then, because he was Virgil, because even ruined men retain their oldest skills, because survival had taught him to flatter the god before stealing the fire, he turned his face slightly toward hers and did not kiss her.

That restraint cost more than a kiss would have.

“I have never been wanted anywhere the way I was wanted here,” he said.

Her breath paused.

He had given her the crown, and both of them knew it.

Then he added, softly, before the crown could become chain, “That is why I stayed too long.”

Nelly drew back.

For several seconds she was completely still.

All her beauty gathered, not diminished but organized. The loose robe, the throat, the wet hair, the bare knee, the eyes bright with unshed water, the morning on her skin, the whole overripe island behind her — pools, terraces, clocks, grapefruit, false columns, fish, curtains, sleeping rooms, old messages, white animals, hidden machines — everything seemed to flow toward a single expression on her face.

Not rage.

Recognition.

She saw that he had found a door inside the compliment.

Virgil saw her see it.

Below, very far away, the dark car remained at the service turn. The man beside it shifted his weight. On the security monitor, had anyone been watching, he would have looked like a small flaw in a perfect system.

Nelly folded the fax paper again.

This time she folded it carefully, exactly along the crease.

“Then don’t say I kept you,” she said.

He could not answer.

She placed the paper in his wet hand and closed his fingers around it one by one. Her touch was tender enough to make refusal feel monstrous.

“Say you preferred it.”

Then she stood and walked away from him, up the stairs, through the white morning, past the stopped fountain and the peacock and the breakfast no one had eaten, carrying nothing now but the certainty that the island had been insulted by a man still sitting in its water.

Virgil watched her go.

He thought, with the old stupidity of men who mistake delay for mercy, that he had survived the conversation.

The fountain above the grotto began again behind him, harder than before, striking the stone with a sound like applause.