Babylon and Other Stories

Babylon

Robert fell in love for the first time when he was twenty-nine, and he was vastly relieved. He'd started to think that he wasn't capable of it, that in his soul — or heart, or brain chemistry, or wherever the center of a person was located — something essential was lacking. Over the years he'd dated enough women to know he was straight, and he'd cared for some of them a lot; in college, he and his girlfriend Marisa had even tossed around names for potential children. But when Marisa suddenly got sulky their senior year, stopped laughing at his jokes, and eventually announced she'd been nursing “a thing” for his roommate for almost a year and had recently found out he had “a thing” for her, too, that she was therefore breaking up with him and would love to still be friends although she'd understand if he couldn't handle it, he wasn't shattered. Pained and irritated — especially when forced to listen to them having loud, panting sex at all hours of the day and night on the other side of his dorm-room wall — but not shattered. This, he thought, was where he failed. He never felt himself split open like a melon, offering all his vulnerable fruit to the world.

Then he met Astrid at a wedding in Babylon, Long Island. He'd worked with the groom, a financial analyst, for years — the bride was an analyst, too, as were many of the guests, and the reception was full of tedious jokes about the marriage being productive and cost-beneficial—but they rarely saw each other outside the office, so he sat at a table in the corner, dateless, making small talk about global markets with a woman from Morgan Stanley while she picked at her Chilean sea bass. The main thought on his mind was that once dinner was over he could go home. In the back of the room he saw a thin blond woman lingering uncertainly, as if she, too, were anxious to leave. She had the bad posture common to many taller women, and kept scanning the room vaguely, as if she'd lost whomever she came with. But after watching her for a few minutes, nodding and grunting through the conversation at his table, he decided she wasn't looking for anybody at all; she was just looking. Lying about needing to visit the men's room, he excused himself and walked over. Up close she had wide, clear blue eyes and delicate wrinkles that sprayed out from them. Even her nose had three little wrinkles on either side.

“Are you tired of all the market jokes, too?” he said.

She jumped as if he'd touched her, and when she glanced over her shoulder, he realized that she'd felt invisible. For a second he considered going back to his table but then saw the Morgan Stanley woman glowering in his direction, having figured out that he'd lied to her in order to go talk to a blonde. Men, he could practically see her thinking.

And then she smiled. “You're not into…markets?” she said.

“Well, I'm a computer guy, so I shouldn't complain. Our weddings are much, much worse,” he said. “When we have them, anyway.” He told himself to stop talking. Her blue eyes were fixed on him. Her skin was very pale, almost translucent, blue veins visible at her temple. Her smile broadened even further, and he understood that he was staring. He felt very warm.

“I'm Astrid,” she said. “I have to leave now, but would you like to have dinner sometime?”

“God, yes,” he said.

The band began to play. She wrote down her phone number, a Manhattan exchange, and walked out of the room as the happy couple began their first married dance together. All my life, he thought, I'll remember this day.

He waited two days to call, not wanting to appear too eager, also not wanting her to forget who he was. As he was dialing he realized she didn't know his name, and almost hung up, but she answered just as he was about to put down the receiver, catching him off-guard. “Hello?” she said, her voice cool and placid.

“This is Robert?” he said squeakily. “We met at Marcy and Brian's wedding last week in Babylon. The really boring one with all the financial humor, if that's not an oxymoron. Financial humor, that is.” To all this she said nothing, and he wasn't even sure she was still there. He closed his eyes. “I was wondering if you still wanted to have dinner.”

“Oh, of course,” she said. “Why don't you come over here?”

The immediacy of this response violated every precept of dating in New York. He pictured her blue eyes, her white skin. She wasn't beautiful but there was something about her, some dim, pale radiance, that made her looks extraordinary.

“That sounds great. I don't want to put you to any trouble, though.”

“I like to cook,” she said. “Can you come tomorrow?”

“Oh, of course,” he said. On the other side of the phone he could hear her exhale in a smile that echoed his. After she told him where she lived, they got off the phone. The easiness of it made him all the more nervous; made him want her all the more.

At the appointed time he showed up at the apartment with flowers, wine, and chocolate. This was overkill, he knew, but she didn't seem the type who'd read too much into it, although he hardly knew what type she was at all. She opened the door wearing a white button-down shirt and jeans, an outfit that on another woman might have looked studiedly casual, yet on her looked simple and relaxed. Her blond hair, which had been swept up at the wedding, fell loose and straight to her shoulders. He kissed her on the cheek, and she blushed, pink seeping into her white skin like a watercolor.

“Come in,” she said.

Entering, he smelled food cooking and another smell beneath it, maybe of flowers. Her apartment was feminine without being fussy: a blue couch, a matching armchair and a brown jute rug, a bookcase with a stereo, framed black-and-white nature photographs on the walls. The living room was, if anything, a bit abstract, like a picture in a catalog. Then again, she'd probably cleaned up before he got there.

There was an awkward flurry of gift-giving and putting the flowers in a vase and drink offering, and then they were sitting next to each other on the couch, wineglasses in hand.

“What are you making that smells so good?” he said.

“Chicken Mirabella,” she said. “My mother always used to make it for guests. Do you mind having chicken? I know it's not very exciting.”

“Of course I don't mind. Do you want any help?”

“There isn't room for more than one person in the kitchen, but thanks anyway.”

“Thank you,” he said, blushing, “for cooking.”

“It relaxes me,” she said.

And she did look relaxed, sitting there on the blue couch in her white shirt, her long fingers cupping the base of her glass. She made him feel as though ordinary rules didn't apply. So he leaned over and kissed her, once, on the lips. When he sat back he was trembling a little.

“Thank you,” she said. “I'd better go check on the food now.”

While she was in the kitchen he walked around the room. Her apartment faced a courtyard where a small tree grew wizened and stunted in the permanent shade. He could see a man on the other side watering the plants in his window. He wandered over to her stereo, thinking to put on some music, but she seemed to have only classical, and he decided against it. Then, on a bookshelf below the stereo, he saw a sculpture of a woman's breast— just the breast, and so lifelike that for a second he was afraid to touch it. It had pale brown flesh and a darker brown nipple, which was erect. Picking it up, he discovered it was floppy and cool to the touch. He stood there frowning, holding it carefully in both hands, wondering why on earth such a thing was in this blue, abstract apartment.

“It's from my work,” Astrid said beside him, and he turned guiltily, not having heard her come back into the room.

She held out her left hand, palm up, and he placed the breast on it like a child surrendering chewing gum to a teacher. But she took his right hand in hers and guided his index and middle fingers to the surface of the breast. “I'm a physician's assistant in a women's clinic,” she said. “This is to teach women how to look for lumps.” Her hand was warm, and the breast was cool. She moved his fingers around the breast in a circle from the outside to the center, pressing inch by inch, stopping to make sure he could feel the lumps, little pits as hard as seeds. Rather than looking at him, she was gazing down at the breast, concentrating. When they got to the nipple she said, “You have to pull on it to see if there's any discharge.” Then she dropped his hand and put the breast back on the shelf, and it dawned on him that he'd been holding his breath. He exhaled. “Let's eat,” she said.

They ate in the living room, and over dinner she told him more about her work. Originally she'd thought she might want to be a doctor, but had decided against giving up that much of her life to medical school and residency. In her current job she felt like she was helping people and could still get home in time for dinner every day. She asked about his work, and he made self-deprecating jokes about how boring it was, and she laughed at them. The food was excellent, he told her, and she blushed. After dessert, a homemade apple pie, he stood up, his head swimming a little from the wine, and insisted on doing the dishes. When she wanted to help, he said, “There's only room for one in the kitchen, right? Go sit down and relax.”

She smiled, and from the kitchen he could hear her moving through the small apartment to the bathroom. He washed all the dishes and placed them in the drying rack. Like everything else, the kitchen was small but well organized. He was whistling. Scraping the last few scraps of chicken out of the pan, he saw the garbage can was full, so he tied the bag and pulled it out, then looked in the pantry for a replacement. Instead he found a stack of empty containers from Dean & DeLuca, all the courses of their dinner matched by the labels: the chicken Mirabella, the mesclun salad, the apple pie. She must have transferred the food into pots and pans to look as if she'd cooked it. He stood there staring at the containers, amazed that she'd lie about cooking; but then, suddenly, it made her more human to him, more endearing. Didn't he want to seem perfect to her, too?

He started seeing her every weekend, then every few days, and before long he was sleeping over at her apartment almost every night. Most of the time they ate out, or he cooked; she never did, and he never mentioned the containers from Dean & DeLuca. Every night she fell asleep at ten o'clock, exactly; even if they were at a movie, out with friends, or in a restaurant, he would see her eyelids drooping like a child's, and she'd lean her head on his shoulder. In sleep her body grew even more attractive to him. She slept on her back, one arm flung over her head, her breasts flattened against her chest like the model he'd handled that first night. Her breathing was regular and deep. Often he willed himself to stay awake and watch her, feeling how deeply in love he was.

When they had sex she wrapped one leg around him, one arm around his back, so he was half-captured and half-free. Her skin grew hot to his touch, her hips rocking violently against his. They had sex in her apartment, in his, in a restaurant bathroom, in Central Park under a blanket. When she came she said his name over and over, in a low, throaty murmur he found unbelievably sexy.

During the day they never spoke. She said the clinic was a women-only space (“Even the phone?” he said, and she nodded), and that she was usually too busy to talk on the phone anyway (“Even at lunch?” he said, and she nodded). If he had something urgent to tell her, he left a message on her cell phone, which she'd check while eating lunch at her desk or before leaving. At first this annoyed him, but after a while he came to like it: at dinner they each had a full day's worth of anecdotes and gripes to share. She complained about the arrogance of some of the doctors and said women were harder to work for than men, since they were threatened by things she said or by patients who liked her. Sometimes, as with the breast, she brought items home from work: a medical smock, a pamphlet about ovarian cancer. Once, in a Chinese restaurant, when he asked if she had change for a tip, she fished around in her purse and emptied the contents onto the table — keys, lipstick, tissues, her wallet, a long thin silver object he picked up and examined. “What's this?” he said.

Astrid opened her wallet and took out some ones. “It's a speculum,” she said calmly.

“A what?”

“They use it to take tissue samples.”

He stared at her for a second, the instrument cold in his hand. “Why do you have it?” he said. “Are you planning on doing something once I fall asleep?”

She shrugged and started loading things back into her purse. “I don't know. There's something about it that fascinates me, I guess. Not so much the equipment but what they do with it. How far they go into your body, how much they know.”

“Maybe you should go to medical school.”

“No way,” she said, sliding the speculum into her purse. “I couldn't handle it.”

This was the one thing about Astrid that frustrated him: she put herself down all the time. No matter how much he tried to talk her out of it, she always said she could never be anything other than an assistant in an office. She, on the other hand, encouraged his vague plan to quit his computer job and go to graduate school in public administration. He had an idea about working in a hospital, streamlining care, and in his most elaborate fantasies Astrid worked in the same hospital and they commuted to work together and ate lunch together in the cafeteria, and he always knew where she was, every second of the day.

She loved him too. He could feel it glowing out from her, in the warmth of her skin, in the way her voice changed when she spoke to him. It was like the first time he did coke, in college. He closed one nostril, inhaled, and, within seconds, thought, So this is what everybody's talking about.

A year after they met, he proposed to her in Central Park, and she said yes.

“I guess it's about time you met my family,” Robert said that night in bed. “Let's fly to Chicago. For the weekend. And we can go to San Francisco whenever you want. Thanksgiving, maybe?” She'd grown up in Oakland, an only child, in a two-bedroom house he'd seen pictures of.

“We won't have to,” she said calmly. She was in her sleeping pose, eyes closed, arm flung up, about to drift off. It was a quarter to ten. “They're here now.”

“What do you mean, they're here?”

“In Babylon.”

“Your parents live on Long Island? How come you never told me?”

“We aren't close.”

“Astrid, this is very weird.”

“Look,” she said, an uncharacteristic edge in her voice. “Not everybody comes from a perfect family. I'm not even sure I'll want them at the wedding.”

He put his arm around her. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

The next weekend, at his insistence, they went to Babylon to meet her father, Dr. Henglund, a podiatrist, and her mother, Barbara. Driving out, he tried to get her to talk about them, but she just shrugged and looked out the window. Looking back, he could hardly remember her mentioning them at all.

Dr. Henglund was very tall and very thin. He wore a white button-down shirt and light brown slacks and exuded an air of distant, medically enhanced menace, like Laurence Olivier in The Marathon Man. His white hair was cropped very close to his balding head. Barbara was a slightly wrinkled version of Astrid, with the same placid blue eyes, the same very pale skin. Her hair was also cut short and fitted her head like a sleek, gray-blond hat. Unlike Astrid she had no stoop, and she greeted Robert with formal politeness, shaking his hand. They all sat down in the living room, on separate chairs, and Barbara served white-wine spritzers without offering any other choices.

“This is a beautiful house,” Robert said, although in fact it was plain, sturdy, and underfurnished, with very little on the walls. “Astrid and I met out here in Babylon. At a wedding. I'm sure she told you.”

“Indeed,” Dr. Henglund said.

Astrid said nothing. Since stepping into the house she'd adopted the posture of a young girl: sitting straight in her seat, knees together, hands clasped in her lap. She looked around ten years old. Whenever her father spoke, she fixed her gaze on the floor.

Everybody was quiet. He couldn't smell anything cooking. When Astrid told him they were expected at five o'clock, he'd assumed there would be dinner, but now he wasn't sure. He felt a sharp pang for Astrid, for having to grow up with these people, and he felt a great heat too, knowing that his family would enfold and enclose her, that together they would have a life completely unlike this one, whatever the hell it was.

“Do you miss California?” he asked Barbara.

She looked at him and frowned, seemingly almost puzzled. “Well, no,” she said.

“Astrid tells me you're in computers,” Dr. Henglund said.

“Yes, though maybe not for long,” Robert said. When he was nervous he talked too much and too fast. “I might go back to school. Astrid's really supportive, and I'm trying to convince her to go back to school, too. She's too smart to be just a physician's assistant, but she just tells me not to be so pushy.”

Again Barbara gave him a puzzled look. It was like he was speaking a different language. He turned to Astrid for help, but she was gazing out the window at the yard, where a row of rhododendrons burst with loose, open flowers.

There was no dinner. After another ten minutes of minimal conversation, Astrid stood up and said they'd better be going. They drove through suburban streets back toward the highway, and she asked him to stop by a park.

“Now you know why I don't see them very much,” she said. “They're cold. They're the coldest people on earth, I think.”

In the warm interior of the car he turned and held her, and she lifted her pale face and kissed him hard, smashing her mouth against his, her hand groping his pants. She climbed on top of him awkwardly, pulling his shirt loose, her nails scraping against his chest. Things got out of hand and they had sex in the car, and then he drove home with Astrid leaning back in the passenger seat, her eyes closed.

The visit to Chicago went much better. His parents and sisters, as relieved as he was that he'd finally found someone, loved Astrid. His sisters teased him that she was out of his league, and the family took up this joke and kept insisting that he'd better schedule the wedding as soon as possible, before she wised up and changed her mind. Once they got back to New York his mother was calling twice a week — not to speak to him but to Astrid, conferring over every detail of the wedding. If Astrid regretted not having these conversations with her own mother, she never said so. A hall was reserved; invitations were engraved and addressed. He took one in to work to give to Brian, wanting to tell him personally. They hadn't socialized any more regularly since Brian's wedding than they had before, so Brian hugged him and said, “I didn't even know you were with someone, man! Congratulations!”

“Thanks,” Robert said. “I owe it all to you, in a way.”

“How's that?”

“Astrid. I met her at your wedding.”

“You did? Astrid who?”

“Henglund.”

Brian frowned. “Must be a friend of Marcy's,” he said.

At home that night, when he asked Astrid about it, she said that she'd been there as someone's date, a guy she didn't know well and never saw again. “As soon as I saw you,” she said, “I knew.”

A week later his secretary told him a woman was there to see him, and for a moment his heart lifted. (This was another fantasy he had, about Astrid surprising him at work, wearing a trench-coat with nothing underneath it.) But it was Barbara Henglund, who stood for a minute examining his office — the picture of him and Astrid on the desk, the black-and-white photograph of Central Park she'd given him on the wall — and then sat down with her purse in her lap. “I got the invitation,” she said.

“Oh,” he said, smiling at her, but she didn't smile back. “I hope you'll be at the wedding,” he tried.

“Astrid hasn't had a lot of boyfriends,” she said.

He didn't know what to say to this. “And?”

“I don't think you know her very well,” she went on.

Robert sighed. He didn't know what was wrong with these people and didn't much care, except that he was glad Astrid had gotten away from them. “I know everything I need to know,” he said. “Astrid works in a clinic, she's from California, we've been together almost every day for a year, and we'll be together for the rest of our lives. I'm sorry if you find it hard to accept, but that's how it is.”

Barbara Henglund nodded several times, quickly, as if in agreement. “Astrid is troubled,” she said slowly. “She's been alone a great deal.”

“She isn't alone now.”

“She also isn't from California. She's from Babylon. She grew up in that house. We've lived here for thirty years. And she doesn't work in a clinic. She's a paralegal. Her office is only ten blocks from here.”

He stared at her for a long moment, and finally shook his head. “That makes no sense,” he said.

For the first time, Mrs. Henglund's expression seemed to soften. “She used to only lie about small things. Whether or not she'd cleaned her room. Where she was going with her friends. Then she went off to Barnard. We liked the idea that she was close by. Her transcript came after the first semester. All Fs. We found out she'd been going to NYU, lying about being enrolled there. In all those classes she had straight As.”

“That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard,” he said.

“She was in therapy for years,” Mrs. Henglund said. “I thought it was over.”

When she stopped talking the world was soundless. He looked over her shoulder at the clear glass wall of his office. In the corridor people were strolling past, papers in hand, chatting. None of it was possible.

“I thought you should know,” Barbara Henglund said, then stood up and turned to go.

“I don't believe you,” he said.

She looked at him, pity distending her lips into an expression that was almost, but not quite, a smile. “Dustin, Rawlings & Livermore,” she said. “Forty-seventh Street.”

At five o'clock that afternoon he was waiting outside the building. It really was only ten blocks away. He told himself this was crazy, that he'd go home and never tell her about the vicious lies told by her crazy mother, that they'd sever all contact with her family and never go to Babylon again. Crowds of office workers streamed past toward the subway. The day was rainy and gray.

Then he saw her unmistakable blond hair. As if in a dream he reached out and grabbed her arm. In movies, he thought, a guy searches for the girl he loves in a crowd, runs after her, and when she turns around it's never really her.

But Astrid turned around. “What are you doing here?” she said.

He looked at her. “What is this? What are you doing here? What are you?”

Her expression didn't change. “How funny to run into you,” she said. “I was just doing an errand.”

He dragged her to a nearby bench, people on the sidewalk frowning at them, wondering if they ought to intervene. “Love,” he said, “your mother came to see me. She says you work here as a paralegal, that you're from Babylon, not California. Just tell me she's crazy, okay? Tell me who the guy was that you went with to Brian and Marcy's wedding.”

Astrid was wearing gray trousers, and when she crossed her legs on the bench she looked, for a moment, as composed as ever. Then her eyes met his, and he saw the tears and knew his life was over. “I used to like to go to weddings,” she said. “I was … lonely. There are weddings every Saturday at that hall.”

He put his head in his hands, felt her arm wrap around his shoulder, then stood up and shook off her touch, feeling like he was choking. Her hair was in the corner of his sight as he walked away, not knowing where he was going.

It turned out everything was a lie. Her job, her background, even her name — which was Sophia, though she preferred to call herself Astrid after a favorite aunt. That evening in her apartment, relentlessly questioning her, he stripped away lie after lie, and Astrid, sitting on the couch where she'd first lied to him about the dinner she hadn't cooked, admitted to all of them, tears always trembling in her eyes without ever seeming to fall: yes, she'd lied about her job; no, she couldn't explain why. There were lies upon lies, lies without sense, lies without end. There was no reason why being a physician's assistant was better, worth lying about, than being a paralegal. There was no reason why California was preferable to Babylon. He kept asking her what the point was, and she kept shrugging. He grabbed the model of the breast from her bookcase and shook it at her, its rubbery flesh cold in his hand. “What about this?”

“I can't explain it,” she said.

For the first time in months he slept in his own apartment. In the morning — from work, where he was calmer — he called his parents. His mother made arrangements to fly in immediately from Chicago, and when she arrived she set about canceling all the plans that had been made for the wedding. He didn't call Astrid and didn't hear from her. He thought she must be too ashamed, and that she deserved it, for the magnitude of her be trayal.

It was over.

A week went by. His mother called everybody who'd been invited and explained that the wedding was off. He worked all day, and at night his mother gave him some Valium, which he took obediently, just as he'd taken antibiotics from her as a child, and he'd be asleep before eight.

Then one evening he came home and his mother told him she thought he needed help. She'd made an appointment with a therapist for the next morning, without asking, and he was too tired, or sedated, or will-less, to protest. In the office he explained what had happened mechanically, as if it were somebody else's story. The therapist, a scholarly looking man in a green cardigan, listened to him and nodded slowly. “Recovering from this shock will take you some time,” he said.

“Thanks for the tip,” Robert said sharply. The therapist nodded again, and Robert sighed and rubbed his forehead, where there seemed to be a permanent pain. “What gets me is why. Why would she make these things up? They were such useless lies.”

“Often this kind of behavior is related to a childhood trauma or abuse,” the therapist said. “Although of course I can't say for sure, not without seeing her myself.”

Abuse. Into Robert's mind came the vision of Dr. Henglund, the podiatrist, the coldest man in the world. He'd sensed evil in him as soon as they had met. He thought of Astrid fingering the rubber breast, pocketing the speculum that probed the female body. How far they go into the body, how much they know, she'd said. It was the invasion she found fascinating, Robert thought, a vulnerability of the body that must have spoken to her of her own.

He thanked the therapist and, that afternoon, drove out to Long Island, to Henglund's office.

On the wall in the waiting room was a poster showing crippled and deformed feet, hammer-toed, misshapen, archless. On the opposite wall, another poster displayed happy feet, unconfined and lacking bunions, romping in a field as if they'd never once needed shoes. He ignored the nurse and walked right into the examining room, where Henglund was crouched before a woman's foot, holding it like a prince with a slipper. Seeing Robert, he straightened up and excused himself to the patient, a middle-aged woman with red lipstick and enormous hair, then led him into an office and sat down behind the desk.

“Astrid is home with us now,” he said solemnly, leaning forward with his hands clasped, his flesh sallow against his white coat. “We are taking care of her.” His air of menace was even stronger now.

“I can't prove it,” Robert said, “but I believe this is all your fault.”

“Indeed,” Dr. Henglund said. “Your response is understandable, I suppose. One always looks for others to blame when confronted with a difficult situation.”

“Fuck you,” Robert said. “What did you do to her?”

Henglund raised one white eyebrow behind his glasses. His eyes were blue and eerily pale. “This is no longer your concern,” he said.

“If she stays with you, it's the end of her,” Robert said. “You made her what she is.”

Henglund touched the tips of his long fingers together. “It's been my experience,” he said, “that we make ourselves.”

Robert left the office in disgust and drove to the Henglunds' house, parked on the street, and walked up the driveway. Through the front window he could see Astrid sitting on the living-room couch reading The New York Times. Her expression was calm. When she lifted her head, he thought she'd heard his approach; but then she said something in the direction of the kitchen, and he knew she must be talking to her mother. As he watched her he felt himself disintegrating, dissolving. He understood then why people with broken hearts killed themselves. It wasn't the pain so much as the nothingness, the formlessness of the days and months and years to come, that was unbearable.

Without her there was nothing. Yet he had no idea who she was.

As he stood there watching her through the window she turned and saw him, fixing him with eyes that were, he now realized, the same as her father's. Her hair hung limply to her shoulders, unwashed for days. He saw how tired she looked, how miserable, how bereft. Then she smiled sadly, tightly — a smile that said she knew she'd betrayed him, that in so doing she'd betrayed herself.

Without thinking, he beckoned to her, and she put down the newspaper and came outside. He didn't even know what to call her.

“Will you take me home?” she said.

He nodded. In the car, driving back, she put her hand on his knee, and he let her. After a while she moved her hand up to his thigh, and he let her do that too. He walked with her upstairs to her apartment, and in the living room she thanked him for taking her away from Babylon. Without thinking, the same as the first time, he kissed her, and she kissed him back, pushing her tongue into his mouth, running her hands up his back. He grabbed her and took off her shirt. A button popped and landed on the floor. She pulled him down on the couch, and he pulled down her pants and then his own and thrust inside her, one foot braced on the floor. “Robert,” she said.

Afterwards they took off the rest of their clothes and moved to the bedroom, where they slept for a little while, his arms around her. The room was dark when he woke up, alone in bed. He could hear her moving softly around in the kitchen, opening the fridge door, it sounded like, pouring a glass of water. The sheets smelled like her. He lay there in the dark, waiting for his love to come back.