Page 35 of Truth in the Treme

"I know you," she said. Not to him. To herself, the way a person names a thing they have always carried and only now found the word for.

"You do," he said.

He drew her closer and found the zip at the back of her dress and drew it down slowly, his mouth at her throat, her jaw, the soft place beneath her ear, and she tipped her head back and exhaled long and even, a sound that was nothing like patience and everything like trust. The dress went. He took his time. He had a hundred years of restraint to spend and he spent it learning her with his hands and his mouth, every place that made her breath change, every place she reached for him instinctively, the way her body had been keeping his name all along in the spaces between her ribs. She said his name and he heard three lifetimes of it, Charlotte's voice and Delia's voice and hers, all three of them folded into the same two syllables, and he pressed his mouth to her collarbone and held it there until the century of it settled back into the present tense.

She pulled him down to the bed and he went, and when they stretched out together he lay over her and looked at her face in the amber light for one long moment, making sure she was there, making sure she was looking back, making sure this was real and present and now and not a thing about to be taken. She held his face in her hands and waited for him to finish looking. She understood what he was doing. She had always understood him better than he had understood himself.

"I am here," she said.

"I know," he said. "I am learning to believe it."

"Believe it," she said, and drew him down.

He had made love to her before with care and heat and want, but always with one hand on the door, always with some last room in him shut against the full weight of it. There was no door now. He gave her everything he was, steadily, unhurriedly, the way he did everything when he finally stopped holding back — completely, without apology, with his whole attention and his whole self, nothing parceled out and nothing protected. She rose to meet all of it. She had always been the one willing to meet all of it, in the garden and the boarding house and the little apartment above the shop, every time the same soul arriving at the same door with the same open hands, and every time he had let her in as far as he dared and no further. He let her in all the way now. He let her all the way to the last room.

She moved under him and above him and against him and he went where she led him and led where she would follow and the whole of it was different only in this: that he was not somewhere else at the same time. For two hundred years he had lived behind his own life, watching it through the glass of his own grief. For the first time in all of those years he was inside it, all the way inside it, present down to the bone, and the room around them and the light going red in the shutters and the sounds of the city below and her voice saying his name were all simply real, not a thing he was watching but a thing he was living, and the difference was so vast it cracked him open all over again.

He said her name into her shoulder and meant all three of them and only her. She said his into the dark above him and meant every version of him she had ever known and only this one. When she came apart her hands tightened in his hair and she said his name again, and it rang through him like a bell struck true, and he followed her, and when he did he was not braced for anything at all. He was only there.

Afterward they lay tangled and still in the blue dark, her head on his chest and his hand in her hair and neither of them in any hurry to be anywhere else. The amber had gone from the shutters. The city had turned its evening shift. He could feel her heartbeat against his side, steady and present, and his own under her ear, and the two of them keeping time together in the cooling room, and it was the most ordinary thing in the world and the most extraordinary thing that had ever happened to him.

She traced a shape on his chest with one finger, idle and content, and he closed his eyes and let the silence be what it was.

They talked, after, in the low voices of two people with nowhere to be and no reason to sleep, and they did not talk about Heaven, and they did not talk about death, and they did not talk about a single fire. They talked about tomorrow. She lay with her head on his chest and asked him, idly, tracing shapes on his skin, what he wanted now, now that it was all over and the truth was told and there was nothing left to solve or hide or hunt.

He was quiet a moment, considering it honestly, and then he laughed under his breath, because the honest answer surprised even him. “I have no idea,” he admitted. “I have never once let myself think that far ahead. Two hundred years, and I never planned past the next loss, because I never believed I would get to. I do not know the first thing about what I want, because I have never been allowed to want anything.”

She lifted her head and looked at him, and smiled, and it was the smile that had been undoing him across three centuries. “Then I suppose,” she said, “we will just have to figure it out together.”

And he believed her. That was the thing that struck him, lying there in the dark with her weight warm against him. He believed her, all the way through, without a shadow of the old dread. There would be a tomorrow, and a next summer, and years of ordinary figuring-out with this woman at his side, and he was going to be there for all of it. He was allowed to want it. He had finally been given leave to want it. He held her while she drifted toward sleep, and he did not lie awake bracing for the end, and somewhere past midnight he slept too, deep and dreamless, a man at rest for the first time in two hundred years.

He woke once, near dawn, to find her asleep on his chest and the room gone gray-blue with the coming light, and he lay still so as not to wake her and let his eyes drift to the low table, where the small worn box sat exactly where he had placed it, closed, waiting. For more than a century he had carried that box because he could not make himself let go of the past, because it was the last hard proof of everything that had been taken from him. He looked at it now in the early light with the woman he loved breathing slow against his heart, and he understood that he had it backward, that he always had. He had never really been holding on to the past at all. He had been holding a promise. Tomorrow, he thought, watching the light come up. Tomorrow he would open it, not because he could not let go of what he had lost, but because he finally, after two hundred years, believed in what was still to come.

THIRTY-ONE

He woke before her, in the full gold light of a clear morning, and for once he did not reach immediately to check that she was breathing. He knew she was. He lay on his side and simply watched her sleep, her hair across the pillow and one hand curled near her mouth and the small scar above her eyebrow catching the light, and there was nothing braced in the watching at all. For the whole of his long life, waking beside her had been a thing shadowed by the certainty of losing her. This morning it was only a woman he loved, asleep in the sun, on the first day of the rest of a life he had finally let himself believe in.

He had done this a thousand mornings, watched her sleep. He had done it in a boarding house with a green door, in a dozen rented rooms across a century, in this very apartment through the worst weeks of his existence, and always there had been fear folded into it, the low constant dread of the morning he would wake and find her gone. There was no dread in it now. She had remembered everything there was to remember, and she had stayed. Whatever came, she would meet it beside him, and if she ever forgot again he would be there to remind her, and she would believe him. The watching was only watching now. It was a man, glad, looking at the woman he loved in the morning light, and it was the most ordinary thing in the world, and it was the whole of everything.

She stirred, and found him watching, and smiled with her eyes still half closed. “You're staring,” she murmured.

“I know.”

“Should I be worried?”

“Quite the opposite,” he said, and kissed her, and the day began.

He asked her to spend it with him, all of it, and he gave her no reason and no destination, and she agreed without needing either. And the day that followed was the most extraordinary of his two hundred years for the single reason that nothing extraordinary happened in it at all. They drank coffee at the little table by the window and argued cheerfully about the crossword. They wandered into a bookshop on Chartres and lost an hour in it, and she made him buy a novel he had sworn never to read, and he made her buy nothing and she bought three things anyway. They ate lunch outdoors and watched the Quarter go by. They walked with no route and no hurry through the streets he had haunted alone for a century, her hand in his the whole way, and for once he was not the grieving immortal moving unseen through a city of the dead. He was only a man spending an ordinary day with the woman he was going to marry, and the city held him gently, and let him have it. Twice in the crowds he caught sight of the other city he had always seen, a shade drowsing in a shopfront, a not-quite-living face in the window of a passing streetcar, and both times he noticed that he noticed them without any of the old weight, with mild interest and no fear at all, and let them go, and looked back at her. For a hundred years the unseen world had been his whole vocation and his whole loneliness, the thing that set him forever apart from every warm ordinary life going by on the banquette. Today it was only scenery. He had crossed over at last into the ordinary life he had watched from the outside for two centuries, and he found it was everything he had always imagined it would be, and more, because she was in it.

It was, he understood somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, the exact life he had planned once, in another century, on the bare floor of an empty apartment with a woman named Delia. The books and the small errands and the aimless hours and the plain, unremarkable, bottomless happiness of it. He had promised her that life and never gotten to give it to her. He was living it now, on a bright ordinary day on Chartres Street, with the same soul beside him in a new name, and the grief of the old promise and the joy of the new one had finally, after all this time, become the same feeling.

As the light went long and golden he walked her down to the river, out onto the levee where the water ran wide and slow and the far bank had begun to catch fire with the sunset. They leaned on the rail where they had stood before, where she had given him back his own words about the river remembering everything, and the talk between them was light and easy and carried none of the heaviness they had both been under for so long. Out on the water a tug pushed its barges up against the current, patient and enormous, and the last of the day gilded everything, the river and the far trees and her face turned up to the light. He had stood on this levee a century ago with a woman who wore this same soul and told her the river forgot nothing. He thought now that he had been only half right. The river remembered everything, yes. But it also carried it, all of it, downstream and out to the sea, and ran clean again the next morning regardless, and he thought that perhaps a man was allowed to do the same. To remember everything, and carry it, and still run clean into whatever came next. And then he went quiet, and she turned to look at him, and he reached into his jacket and took out the small, worn box, and his hands, which had held steady through wars and fires and two hundred years of grief, were not steady now at all.

He put the box into her hands. She looked at it, and then at him, and then she opened it.

The ring lay inside it exactly as it had lain for a hundred and more years, the small stone he had chosen on Royal Street in a year she had been alive and someone else, kept perfect through every decade of his exile. She went very still looking at it. And then her breath caught, because she knew it. Not because she had ever seen it in this life. Because she remembered it, from the other side of a fire, from a promise that had been coming toward her for a century and had never quite arrived.

“This is the ring,” she whispered.