Now playing: “First Touch.” The hands reach before he decides to reach.
The salve had to be made upstairs.
The Oratory’s cold seized the beeswax before she could work lanolin into it, so twice a week, Wednesdays and Sundays, Victoria carried the components up out of the ground and made them on the kitchen counter, in a white ironstone bowl Henri’s mother had bought for cream and delivered wrapped in newsprint with a note about grandchildren.
Eleven left of the twelve. The set had survived a wedding, two moves, a flood in the pantry, and a housemaid with opinions. The twelfth piece went off the edge of this counter at half past four in the morning, in November, three years ago, in the week Victoria was not writing anything down.
She ground the wax against the sides of the bowl with the back of a spoon. Four to one, wax to lanolin, worked warm, onto the seams at his jaw and throat. The smog got into a healed suture and dried it until the silk pulled, and he did not report it when it happened. He stopped turning his head, and she read the stiffness off him from across the room, and she made the salve. Below the floor the tube array held its note, the amber hum she no longer heard unless it changed, and it had run clean for six days. Six days of something going right.
Behind her, the page-turning stopped.
She marked it and kept grinding. He was reading the Wyndham, or the thing bound as the Wyndham, one of Henri’s volumes annexed off the poetry shelf in the study. He read the way he did everything, at a rate that had nothing to do with pleasure. Nine minutes for a signature. The pause went on. She gave it thirty seconds, then a minute, then stopped giving it anything and went back to the wax.
The chair took his weight going out of it. The floor registered six and a half feet of him twice. Then the displaced air arrived at the back of her neck.
He put a hand on her shoulder. Turned her around.
He could have done it roughly. That would have been simpler to document. He turned her the way a man turns a piece on a bench to catch the light, and then both hands came up and took her face.
