I put my fingers on his face, but I was careful not to touch the scar.
He unfastened all the buttons. He opened my shirt and laid the white cloth against my arms. He kissed me from my neck to my stomach. Dry lips. Light kisses. He rolled me away from him, pulling my shirt down below my shoulders. He lay behind me, encircling me, pressing his palms into my stomach. My arms were pinned beneath his, and I felt his breath on the nape of my neck. He pushed himself hard against my thigh. I bent my head slightly forward, letting go, letting this happen to me, to us, and I felt his body stretch with mine. I felt his tongue at the top of my spine.
Sometime later that night, I was awakened by a ragged moan. Thomas, naked, was sitting at the edge of the bed, the heels of his hands digging angrily into his eye sockets. I tried to pull his hands away before he injured himself. He fell back onto the bed. I turned on a light.
“What is it?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing,” he whispered. “It’ll pass.”
His jaw was clenched, and his face had gone a sickly white. It couldn’t simply be a hangover, I thought. He must be ill.
He raised his head off the pillow and looked at me. He seemed not to be able to see me. There was something wrong with his right eye. “This will pass,” he said. “It’s just a headache.”
“What can I do for you?” I asked.
“Don’t go,” he whispered. “Promise me you won’t go.” He reached for my hand, catching my wrist. He gripped me so tightly, he raised welts on my skin.
I prepared him an ice pack in the tiny kitchen of his apartment and lay down next to him. I, too, was naked. It’s possible I slept while he waited out the pain. Some hours later, he rolled over, facing me, and took my hand. He placed my fingers on the scar. His color had returned, and I could see that the headache was gone. I traced the long bumpy curve on his face, as I was meant to do.
“There’s something I want to tell you,” he said.
In the morning, after our long night together, after the migraine, the first of dozens I would eventually witness, I persuaded him to get up and take me out to breakfast. I made him pose for a photograph at the front door of the apartment house. At the diner, he told me more about the scar, but the language, I could hear, had already changed, the telling of it was different. I could see that he was composing images, searching for words. I left him with a promise to return in the late afternoon. When I came back, Thomas had still not showered or changed his clothes, and there was an unmistakable exhilaration about him, a flush on his face.
“I love you,” he said, getting up from the desk.
“You couldn’t possibly,” I said, alarmed. I looked over to the desk. I saw white-lined papers covered with black ink. Thomas’s fingers were stained, and there was ink on his shirt.
“Oh but I do,” he said.
“You’ve been working,” I said, going to him. He embraced me, and I inhaled in his shirt what had become, in twenty-four hours, a familiar scent.
“It’s the beginning of something,” he said into my hair.
In the restaurant in Portsmouth, Thomas turns slightly and sees that I am watching him.
He reaches across the table. “Jean, do you want a walk?” he asks. “We’ll go up to the bookstore. Maybe we’ll find some old photographs of Smuttynose.”
“Yes, that’s right,” says Adaline. “You and Thomas go off for a bit on your own. Rich and I will take care of Billie.”
Rich stands. My daughter’s face is serious, as if she were trying to look older than she is — perhaps eight or nine. I watch her smooth her T-shirt over her shorts.
“Fat repose” Thomas says. He speaks distinctly, but there is, in his voice, which is somewhat louder than it was, the barest suggestion of excitement.
At the next table, a couple turns to look at us.
Adaline reaches around for a sweater she has left on the back of the chair. “Spaded breasts” she says.
She stands up, but Thomas cannot leave it there.
“Twice-bloated oaths on lovers’breath”
Adaline looks at Thomas, then at me. “The hour confesses” she says quietly. “And leaves him spinning.”