The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [116]
She turned to find Lucjan, his eyes open, beside her. He had been waiting for her to wake. He drew his hand through her hair, drew her hair tight against her scalp, a gesture an observer might have mistaken for pure desire. Then, lowering his head to her belly, he slipped his arms beneath her, held her so tightly her breath went shallow. He did not let go, but held her this way, as if he would break her in half, the grip of a most painful rescue.
– Please, Janina, he said, whispering against her. Please get dressed and go home.
His words turned her cold. But he did not let go.
He did not let go, and gradually she felt her longing was not separate from his. The slow, impossible, surrender to what was true. He did not let go, and in this union, his confession of aloneness was as close to love as all that had yet passed between them; as close as love is to the fear of love.
With utmost gentleness, slowly Lucjan enclosed Jean in her underclothes, her thick tights, her sweater-dress, her coat and boots. With each item of clothing, a deepening loss soaked into her.
They stood by the front door, the house in darkness, except for the small light above the stove. Every detail now achingly familiar, a world that was also hers.
He took her arm and quietly they walked north, past the landmarks they had claimed together, through the city, toward Clarendon Avenue. The snow gave light to the ground. When they reached Jean's apartment building, Lucjan said, I only meant to walk you home, but now that we're here, Janina, I would like to stay.
They rode the small lift together and, for the first time, Lucjan lay with Jean in her own bed.
Just before midnight, the following night Jean stood at the front door of her flat on Clarendon. She had been almost immobile with thought, most of the day.
The past does not change, nor our need for it. What must change is the way of telling.
She did not want to disturb Lucjan, but perhaps he was awake too. She would walk there and see. This walking, she realized, was one of his gifts; this city inside the city, any hour of day or night, this walking. The snow from the previous night had melted away and the streets shone wet in the darkness.
There were no lights on in Lucjan's house except for the light in the upper window, his bedroom.
On its own it meant nothing, but Jean, standing at the gate of his house, recognized instantly the single fact that made the truth visible. She understood everything – a recombination of all she'd known – the way history is suddenly illuminated by a single “h.”
She saw – leaning against Lucjan's fence, with its plastic flowers wound around the handlebars – Ewa's bicycle. Jean saw what bound Lucjan to her, and what bound him – with the friendship and loyalty of decades – to those closest to him.
The word love, he had said, is it not always breaking down into other things? Into bitterness, yearning, jealousy – all the parts of the whole. Maybe there's a better word, something too simple to become anything else.
But what word could be so incorruptible? she had asked. What word so infallible?
And Lucjan, to whom words were a moral question, had said: tenderness.
The next morning Jean phoned Lucjan and told him she'd seen Ewa's bicycle at his gate. She heard the anguish in his silence. Then he said:
– Please, Janina, I want you to understand.
And, almost as if his words were from her own mouth, as if all along she had known he would come to speak them, he said:
– Perhaps Ewa can help us.
She walked to Ewa and Paweł's. It was two in the afternoon. The front door was open. Jean looked through the screen door, through the house to the back porch, where she saw Ewa bending over one of her projects. Jean called to her and Ewa looked up.
– Jean, come in … Come out …
Jean walked through the narrow house, past the flowered bicycle in the hallway and a pile of scarves and mittens on the floor. Now the children's wall was a green field with horses. She stepped over a stack of newspapers by the back door.
Ewa was making papier-mâché boulders with