The First Time
She did her hair three times before it stopped looking like her.
The first two times it still fell the way Morgana's hair had fallen in every photograph, heavy and to one side, shading an eye. The third time she pulled it back into a low knot at her neck, plain, the way a woman wears it to an office. She wiped off the dark mouth and put on a pale one, a colour Morgana had bought once for a shoot and never worn again. The glasses had clear lenses. Theo had found them, and she hadn't asked how.
The blouse was cream silk, buttoned to the wrists and to the throat, and it covered everything on her arms. A loose strand of hair hid the script behind her left ear. The small dark marks on her knuckles stayed where they were; there was nothing to be done about those.
The woman in the mirror looked like someone who worked at a gallery and went home at a reasonable hour. Naru could have passed her in a hospital corridor without feeling a thing.
At nineteen, in a city where nobody knew her, Morgana had gone out alone with forty dollars and a borrowed dress. She had danced until four and taken the bus home in the blue light with her shoes in her hand. It was one of the memories that came back most often, unasked, the way a smell does. Nobody had wanted anything from her that night except to dance somewhere near her.
Naru wanted that night. She had wanted it for weeks.
Her phone lit up on the dresser. Car's downstairs. Twentieth floor. Staff are good. Nobody's been told anything, that's the point. Text me if
He hadn't finished the sentence. She read it twice for the missing end of it and put the phone in her bag.
The lounge took up the top of a hotel: a long bar of dark wood, low lamps, and windows full of the city. In the corner a trio played without hurry, piano and upright bass, and a drummer working the cymbals with brushes so the sound came out like rain on a roof. Forty people, maybe fifty. Nobody turned when she came in.
She sat at the bar. The bartender had silver rings on every finger and asked what she'd like. Naru didn't know. Morgana had always drunk whatever was in a can backstage. She asked for whatever the bartender liked best and got something with gin and grapefruit, very cold, in a glass so thin she was afraid of it.
Then people did turn, and that surprised her more.
In the old clothes, people had looked at the clothes. Their eyes caught on the boots and the lace and the silver and stopped there, judged, and moved on without ever reaching her. Tonight there was nothing to catch on. A man at a table near the windows looked up, looked away and looked again. A woman by the piano let her eyes run down the cream blouse and come to rest on Naru's face, where they stayed a moment longer than polite. The room's wanting turned toward her, loose and warm, like a current changing direction in a bay.
"Sorry," said the woman on the next stool. She was leaning in, holding up her own glass. "Is that grapefruit? He keeps ordering me things I hate."
"Eleven years," said the man on her other side, "and she still won't tell me what she likes."
"I've told you."
"You've told me what you don't like. That's not the same."
Naru laughed. She hadn't meant to. They turned to her, pleased, the way people are pleased when a stranger laughs at the right moment, and after that it was easy. She asked how they'd met, and they told it badly and interrupted each other. She asked what he'd ordered her that first night, and he couldn't remember, and his wife never forgot it, and that started them off again. Naru felt the two of them warming to her, and she liked them back. They had no reason to like her, and it was the best thing she had felt in a body.
The trio had moved into something slow. Naru knew it from somewhere in Morgana. She found her lips moving with the words before she noticed, and stopped.
She laughed again at something the husband said, hard enough that her eyes ran, and took off the glasses to wipe them.
Two stools down, a man in a grey suit looked straight into her eyes.
She felt it land in him. First came a small sharp click, the click of a man finding the right drawer. Then pleasure, of a particular kind: the pleasure of knowing something about a stranger that she'd rather he didn't. She put the glasses back on. It made no difference now.
He leaned over to the man beside him and said something. The friend looked over, slower and less careful. Then the friend's phone came out below the edge of the bar, the screen tilted toward the suit, and the two of them looked at it together.
Nothing happened after that, really. When the friend ordered his next round, he said something to the bartender too low to hear, and the bartender's eyes went to Naru for less than a second. When she came back to ask Naru if she wanted another, her voice was exactly as polite as before and a degree cooler. The husband had seen the friend's phone over his shoulder. Naru watched his face change and felt his liking for her go out quietly, like a lamp in another room. His wife touched his arm. A minute later she remembered the babysitter. It was a perfectly good reason. She paid, said it had been lovely, and didn't look at Naru while she said it.
Nobody asked her to leave. Nobody said anything at all. The room had simply rearranged itself around her, the way water closes around a stone.
The man in the grey suit took the wife's stool.
He was good-looking and knew it. He had broad hands, an expensive watch and the easy weight of a man who had never once been told no in a hotel bar.
"You look different," he said.
"Than what?"
He smiled at her. He didn't need to answer that, and they both knew it.
"Let me buy you the next one."
"I'm fine."
"I'm on fourteen." He said it the way you mention the weather. "Better view than this."
Her body leaned toward him a quarter of an inch before she had decided anything.
That was the worst of it. She wanted him. The wanting was plain and physical, the heat of a man sitting close, those hands on the bar, and it came up through her the way it always did now, quick and simple, before she could get between it and herself. She looked into him and found what he wanted, and it went the same way hers did. Under it, though, was the click from before. He wanted to have had the woman from the films. He wanted to tell his friend about it over breakfast, and his friend to laugh. He wanted a story with her in it as the punchline.
Her want and his contempt pointed in the same direction, and for a moment she couldn't find the seam between them.
She held on to the edge of the bar.
"No."
He shrugged, unbothered, as if she'd said not yet. He took a card from his wallet, wrote four numbers on the back with the bartender's pen and slid it under the base of her glass.
"In case," he said, and went back to his friend.
The card sat there and soaked up the ring from her glass. She didn't touch it. A little later the bartender took the empty glass away and wiped the bar around the card, carefully, and left it where it was.
At the break the pianist came to the end of the bar for water. He was the only one in the trio who hadn't worn a jacket, and his sleeves were rolled to the elbow. He sat down on the stool beside her and nodded at the card with his glass.
"Want me to get rid of that?"
"Leave it."
"Okay." He drank. "You were singing. Third song."
"I wasn't."
"Under your breath. You had the harmony, not the melody. Nobody takes the harmony."
She looked at him. He was looking at the city in the windows, not at her.
"I saw you play," he said. "Two, three years ago. Upstairs room of a club downtown, maybe sixty people. You did that old song and slowed it down until it hurt." He turned the glass in his fingers. "I stole the arrangement. I play it here sometimes. Nobody's ever noticed."
She looked for the rest of it in him, and found it. It was there in the drawer with everything else everyone knew, the video and the films and the night at the Marlowe. He knew all of it. He just didn't take it out. What he took out was a small room upstairs in a club and a song slowed down until it hurt.
He wanted her. That was in him too, as plain as in the man in the grey suit, warm and unhidden. Under it, though, was a different want, and it was the larger one. He wanted to hear her sing it.
"Daniel," he said, and held out his hand.
"Morgana."
His hand was dry and warm, and there was ink on the side of his thumb.
He played it in the second set. He didn't announce it and didn't look at her while he played, until near the end, once. She didn't sing. She sat at the bar with her eyes closed and let it go through her, slowed down until it hurt, the way he had heard her play it in a room she couldn't remember, through a mouth she had never used.
When they finished, the lounge was half empty. Daniel folded the music into a battered case and came back to the bar with his jacket over his arm.
"I'm going to get something to eat," he said. "There's a diner a few blocks over that's open all night. Or I live ten minutes from here. I can't cook, but I have eggs."
She went with him. It was easy. She didn't decide anything; she found herself in the back of a taxi with his shoulder against hers and the city sliding past, and she didn't look out of the window once. She looked at his hands on his knees. The ink on his thumb. The way the fingers of his right hand kept moving a little against his leg, playing something she couldn't hear.
His apartment was small and full of paper. Sheet music stood in stacks on the floor, on the windowsill and on the lid of an upright piano that took up most of one wall. He moved a pile off the couch so she could sit and then stood there holding it, looking for somewhere to put it, until he gave up and set it on the floor beside the others.
He really did make the eggs. He made them badly, too fast, in a pan that was too small, and they ate them standing at the counter at two in the morning off the same plate because the other plates were in the sink. She laughed at something he said with her mouth full and had to put her hand over it. He watched her do it and smiled at the floor.
She kissed him. She was the one who did it, against the counter, with the taste of salt and butter still in both their mouths. He went very still for a moment, the way he had gone still at the piano before the last song, and then he put the fork down without looking where it went.
His hand found the back of her neck and the knot of her hair, and he worked it loose slowly, one pin at a time, as if each of them were a small question he was asking her. She felt her hair come down over her shoulders the way it fell in all the photographs. For once she didn't mind. He took the glasses off her face and looked around for somewhere to put them, and put them on top of the nearest stack of music.
Then her body began to do things she hadn't asked it to.
It knew where the light in the room was. It turned her face a few degrees toward it without her deciding, toward the better side. It arched where it had learned to arch. A sound came out of her throat that was pitched to carry, and she heard it as if from across the room. It was Morgana's sound, made for a microphone on a boom just out of frame and for a man saying good, that's good, sweetheart, hold that. The body had done this for so long, for so many people who weren't there, that it didn't know how to do it any other way.
Daniel stopped.
He didn't move away. He leaned his forehead against hers and stayed like that, breathing, and she felt him listening the way he'd listened at the bar when she'd been singing without knowing it.
"Hey," he said. "Slower. I'm not going anywhere."
She didn't know what to do with that. She stood there with her hands on his chest and let the body go quiet, the angle and the arch and the sound, all the things it had been taught. Underneath was something she didn't know yet. She felt for it the way you feel for a step in the dark.
What she found first was him. His want had been in him all night, plain and warm, and it hadn't changed. It didn't grab or reach past her for anything. It stayed where she was, steady as a held note, and waited for her to meet it. When she went looking for her own want, she found it already there, and it was the same shape.
Afterwards she couldn't have said how they got from the kitchen to the bed. She remembered his hands on her arms when the blouse came off, and how he went still again at the sight of all that ink after the cream silk. He ran his thumb along one line of it, from her elbow to her wrist, as if reading it, and asked her nothing.
The sheets were cold and he wasn't. That was the first thing: the cold of the cotton along her back and the heat of him along her front, and her own skin caught between them, finding out it could feel both at once.
He took his time. Every time she reached to hurry it, out of the old reflex of the body to get to the part the camera wanted, he slowed it down again. He did it without a word, with a hand on her hip or his mouth somewhere unexpected: the inside of her wrist, the hollow under her ear where the script was, the place on her shoulder where the ink stopped and plain skin began. He kissed that border as if it interested him.
She learned that her body had a map she had never read. She learned it from his hands. The long muscles of her back answered when he pressed his palm flat between her shoulder blades. When he bit, gently, the soft place where her neck met her shoulder, her breath went out of her all at once, and she heard herself make a sound that wasn't pitched for anyone. It was small and surprised, and it was hers. He made one back, low in his chest, and she felt it more than heard it.
Wanting, from the inside, was nothing like she had imagined. She had felt it in others for so long, the bright small currents in every flicker of the world, that she had thought she knew its shape. She hadn't known it was heavy. It pooled low in her and pulled, the way the moon pulls water. It made her hands do things she hadn't planned: hold on to his shoulders, then his hair, then the edge of the mattress. It made her arch, and this time nobody had taught her the angle. It was simply where her body needed to be to get closer.
He said her name once, the human one, against her throat. She didn't correct it. In that moment it was as true as the other.
The rhythm came, and she knew rhythm. She had come back into the world through a man counting compressions on her chest, and she had lain awake for months listening to her own heart keep time. This was time too, his breath and hers falling into it, then losing it, then finding it again, slower. His forehead was against hers and his eyes were open. She kept hers open too, because she wanted to see his face doing this, and it was the face from the piano: lost in it, and careful at the same time.
It built in her like weather building over water, slowly, then less slowly. She felt it coming from a long way off, the way she always felt things coming. For one moment, the habit of an age, she went still and went looking for the bottom, afraid of what might rise with it.
What rose was only her.
It broke over her and through her, and there was nothing under it. No dark, no pressure, no long patient shape coming up from below. It was all surface: light on water, heat, her own voice, his hand gripping hers on the pillow hard enough to hurt. She came up out of it gasping, the way she had come up off a bathroom floor at the Marlowe, except this time nobody was hammering on her chest to make her stay. She wanted to stay.
He followed her a little after, with his face in her hair, saying something that wasn't a word.
Then they lay there in the wreck of the sheets, breathing. The cold came back into the cotton slowly. Somewhere outside a truck went by and the windows hummed, and neither of them moved to do anything about anything.
He fell asleep first, on his stomach, one arm across her. She lay awake under the weight of it in the dark and listened to him breathe. It was slow and even, and after a while she found she was counting it, the way you count time in a song.
She woke a little after five. He was asleep on his stomach with one arm hanging off the bed. She dressed in the grey light and found her glasses on top of a stack of sheet music. At the door she stopped with her hand on the latch and thought about leaving a note. She couldn't think what she would write, so she didn't.
The street outside was one she had never seen.
She had come in a taxi and watched him, not the city. Her phone said three percent. The map on it showed a blue dot and a tangle of grey lines, and when she turned, the lines turned with her. She couldn't make them mean anything. She walked anyway. She chose a direction because it was downhill, then turned at a corner because the light looked better that way, then turned again. She passed a laundromat with a cat asleep in the window. Twenty minutes later she passed it again. The cat hadn't moved.
She could have called Theo. He would have answered on the first ring and had a car there in fifteen minutes. She kept the phone in her bag and walked.
Somewhere along the way the air changed. It grew colder and wetter and carried a smell she had no word for in any language she now spoke, and she knew it anyway. She stopped thinking about turns. Her feet found the way, the way water finds downhill. The buildings got lower and older, and then the street simply ended at an iron railing. Beyond it lay the harbour, flat and grey, with the cranes standing in the half-dark across it like long-legged birds.
She put both hands on the railing and leaned into the wind coming off the water.
The sky over the cranes went from grey to the colour of the inside of a shell. Somewhere across the city a man she had given something to was waking up, and a little of him came to her the way it did every morning, small and warm, like a hand set briefly on her back. Gulls were already out, arguing over something at the waterline. A boat was going out past the breakwater, early, its wake opening behind it in a long pale V that took a long time to close.
She watched it until it was very small.
Her phone buzzed in her bag. '?' said Theo. It was 06:04.
She sent him her location with the last of the battery, and the screen went dark in her hand. She put it back in her bag and stayed where she was, at the rail, with the wind in her face, and watched the boat go out.