She stood near the bed and looked at him oddly, almost shyly.
I’ve turned on the heat, he said. He pointed toward the hissing radiator. So it should warm up.
Good, she said. Thank you.
He drew back the golden bedspread, revealing the white pillows and sheets it had covered. It was like layers of skin, he thought, one lying atop the other, and somewhere far beneath them all the bones, the blood. He patted the blank space he had revealed. Get in, he said.
No, she said.
It’s cold, he said. He could see the blunt points of her nipples interrupting the smooth silk outline of her underwear. You’re cold. Get in.
No. Wait.
What’s wrong?
Nothing is wrong, she said.
She reached out and touched his face. Don’t you see? We’re here. We made it. So nothing is wrong. Everything is good. This thing we’ve wanted, and planned for, suffered for, this thing we thought we would never have, never share, will soon be ours. I’m amazed. Aren’t you?
Things could still go wrong, the man said. I don’t want to jinx it.
No, she said. Don’t think like that. Believe it now.
I do, he said. I didn’t before, but now I do.
I love you, the woman said. And I’m grateful. I know I forget that sometimes, but I am. Grateful for everything you’ve done for me. Not just now, not just this, but everything. From the beginning.
I love you, he said.
I love you, too, she said. Will you get into bed with me, now? Will you get into bed and hold me?
Yes, he said.
She slid into the bed and moved toward its center. He began to get in beside her but she said, No. Get undressed. Please.
Oh, he said. He undressed beside the bed, aware of her watching him. He let his clothes drop onto the floor, onto the horrible shag carpet. He stood for a moment in his long silk underwear and then began again to enter the bed, but once again she stopped him.
No, she said. Take those off. I want to feel your skin. Please, she said. It’s warm in the bed.
Is it?
Yes. It’s deliciously warm.
He took off his underwear and slid quickly into the bed beside her. He pulled the sheets and coverlet over him. It was freezing in the bed.
It’s freezing, he said. You tricked me.
Wait, she said. Be patient. It will get warm. She pulled him close to her and he held her body tenderly against his own.
When he was sure she was sleeping he carefully slid out of bed. He stood and watched her for a moment. Sleep was a refuge for her, it returned her to a former, undamaged self, and so he liked to watch her sleep.
The room was warm now and so he knelt again beside the radiator and twisted the knob, and it sputtered fiercely at his interference, as if he were throttling it. He persisted and twisted it into silence.
The lobby was deserted; the woman behind the reception desk was gone and the lanterns the gryphons held no longer glowed.
Because it was now darker in the lobby, the light in the bar that lit up the red glass beads of the curtain seemed brighter than before. The man crossed the lobby and paused for a moment just outside the entrance, and then pushed his hands through the hanging beads and lifted away a space through which he entered.
The bar was as small and intimate as the lobby was cavernous and grand. It was a long, low-ceilinged wood-paneled room, and for a moment the man felt himself back on the train, for in shape it was exactly proportional to the carriage. The bar itself, which stretched across the length of the room, was inhabited by two people, one at each end, as if carefully placed there to maintain balance. At the end of the bar nearest the door the bartender stood, leaning back against the dimly illuminated shelves of liquor, staring far ahead of himself, although the room was very shallow and there was no distance to regard unless it was inside himself. At the far end of the bar, at the point where it curved to meet the wall, at that last and final seat, a woman sat gazing down into her drink in the same rapt way the bartender looked ahead.
The placement of these two people at either end of the bar made clear the position the man should take, and so he sat on a stool midway between them. For a moment neither of them moved, or responded in any way to his presence, and he felt that by positioning himself so correctly he had not upset the equilibrium of the room, and they would all three continue to maintain the quiet stasis he had feared to interrupt, as if he had assumed his given place in a painting, or a diorama. This notion affected him with a debilitating stillness, as if one’s goal in life was simply to find and occupy a particular ordinate in space, as if the whole world were an image in the process of being perfectly arranged, and those who had found their places must not move until the picture was complete.
He gazed through the regiments of bottles that lined the mirrored shelves behind the bar at his reflection, which peered back at him with an intentness that seemed greater than his own, and for a second he lost the corporeal sense of himself, and wondered on which side of the mirror he really sat. In an effort to reinhabit himself he reached out his hand and patted the copper-topped bar, and the touch of the cool metal against his fingertips flipped the world back around the right way, but the bartender interpreted this gesture as a summons and unfurled his leaning body away from the wall, walked over, and placed a napkin on the bar in front of the man, in the exact spot he had patted, as if were applying a bandage to a wound.
The bartender was a young man, tall and dark, vaguely Asiatic and remarkably stiff, as if he had been born with fewer joints than normal; he seemed unable, or unwilling, to bend his neck, so he gazed out over the man’s head and spoke to the alabaster sconce on the wall just behind them. The foreign words he uttered meant nothing to the man; in fact they did not even seem like words. He remembered how for a long time as a child he had thought there was a letter in the alphabet called ellemeno, a result of the alphabet song slurring L M N O together (at least in his mother’s drunken rendition).
He assumed the bartender had asked him for his order, but what if he had not? Perhaps he had told him the bar was closed, or insulted him, or was merely inquiring as to his well-being. The idea that language worked at all, even when two people spoke the same one, seemed suddenly miraculous; it seemed like an impossible amount for two people to agree upon, to have in common.
It was the woman who saved them. She abruptly looked up from the depths of her drink and said, quite loudly: English, English! No one speaks your bloody language, you fool.
The bartender flinched, and waited a moment before speaking, as if he wanted to put a distance between the woman’s admonition and his words, and then said, in perfect English: Good evening. What could I get you?
The man was unsure of what to order. The constellation of bottles was arranged on the glass shelves of the bar in a pattern that seemed to him as intricately undecipherable as the periodic table, and to choose a liquor seemed as daunting as picking one element out of the many that comprised the world. The man shifted his head a bit so he could look around the bartender at the bottles behind him, hoping one bottle would call out to him—he wanted scotch, a large glass of scotch, neat, that he could warm between his palms and sip, he wanted the liquid gold of scotch, the warmth of it, but he had lost some fundamental confidence in himself over the course of the journey that made it impossible for him to ask for what he wanted—but once again, the woman at the end of the bar, apparently displeased with his indecision and the bartender’s inertia, apparently wanting to make something, anything, happen, said, Have you tried the local schnapps? It’s made from lichen, which sounds horrible, but it’s not, I promise you, it’s one of the loveliest schnapps I know. Lárus, give him some schnapps, let him see if he likes it. I think he will like it.