A black-and-white film settled on the screen. Cary Grant in a suit.
“You ever seen this?” Heath asked.
“Yes.”
“You like old movies?”
“I like precision,” I said. “Old movies tend to have it.”
He considered that. “He looks like he knows what he’s doing.”
Onscreen, Grant was lying to a woman with calm efficiency, smiling like the lie was a courtesy.
“He does,” I said.
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“I am. He always knows what he’s doing.” I watched Grant cross a room without wasted motion. Every gesture deliberate. Nothing extraneous. “That’s the appeal.”
Heath shifted on the couch, one socked foot nudging mine. “You move like that. On the ice.”
“Not really.”
“Yeah, you do. Like there’s a right version of everything and you’re already in it.”
Onscreen, Grant paused just long enough to make the room wait for him.
Heath glanced at me. “Is that a learned thing, or a born thing?”
I watched the screen for another moment.
“Learned,” I said.
At some point, I started talking about octopuses. I don't remember what triggered it, probably nothing at all. I was three minutes into explaining how the mimic octopus impersonates lionfish and flatfish before I realized Heath had put his book down and was watching me with an expression I couldn't read.
"What?"
"Nothing. Keep going."
"You're looking at me like I'm —"
"Like you're excited about something. Yeah." He picked his book back up. "It's a good look. Keep going."
I kept going. Talked for another ten minutes. Heath read, or pretended to, and asked a question now and then that proved he was listening. When I finally wound down, he said, "So they just become a different animal when they're stressed?"
"When they need to, yeah."
"Sounds familiar."
He said it mildly and turned a page. I didn't respond. I wasn't sure which one of us he meant.
Midafternoon, Heath got up to make tea. Filled the kettle and set it on the burner.
A few seconds later, a song started playing from the small speaker on the windowsill—Modern English, "I Melt With You." His parents' music, I assumed, the way certain songs get passed down like recipes.
He didn't sing along exactly. He hummed the verses and caught fragments of the chorus —I'll stop the world and melt with you— off-key, doing violence to the melody with cheerful incompetence.
While the kettle built toward boiling, he shuffled across the linoleum in his socks. A slow, aimless circuit of the three feet between stove and refrigerator. Hips moving. Shoulders loose. No rhythm to speak of, and no self-consciousness.
