Notes on Promise

"Are you alone," he says, before hello, and I think: that is the question this whole thing has always been.

"Yes."

"Where."

"Kitchen."

"Go somewhere else."

I go. I take the phone and I go down the short hall to the bedroom and I close the door behind me even though there is no one in the apartment to close it against, and the closing is for him, is the small theater of obedience he asked for and I, apparently, am happy to mount.

"Done," I say.

"Lights."

"Off."

"Sit down."

I sit on the edge of the bed. The streetlight does the room in long pale stripes through the blinds. His voice is very close in my ear because I have the phone pressed there, and very far because he is in a hotel in another time zone, and the discrepancy is its own pleasure, has always been, this is what we do.

"Tell me about your day," he says.

Which is the worst question, because today was nothing, today was meetings and a sandwich and a long walk past the canal where I thought about him at three different points and pretended, the third time, that I was not thinking about him. I tell him a version. He listens. He is good at listening; it is one of the unfair advantages he has and uses without remorse.

"The walk," he says, when I get there. "Tell me what you were wearing."

I tell him. He is quiet. I can hear, faintly, a television somewhere in his room, the low murmur of a country I have never been to talking to itself. I can hear the small sound of him shifting against a pillow.

"And right now," he says.

"The grey thing."

"Which."

"You know which."

"Say it."

I say it. He makes a sound that is not a word and that I will be thinking about on the train tomorrow, on the platform, in the small useless minutes between things, for days.

There is a long pause. The kind we have learned how to have. He is not in a hurry. He has never been in a hurry with me, which is part of what is wrong with him, part of what is wrong with this. The pause is full of the things we are not saying and the things we have, at various points in two years, said and then unsaid by morning.

"Are you going to tell me when you're back," I say, finally.

"Don't."

"Don't what."

"Don't make this that call."

"What call is this."

He is quiet for a beat. "This is the call where I listen to you breathe," he says, "and you let me, and tomorrow we don't talk about it."

Which is, of course, the contract. Which I signed a long time ago and keep signing, in small print, in the dark, when no one is looking, not even me.

I lie back on the bed. I do not say I am lying back. He knows from the sound of the sheet, from the small shift in the way my voice arrives at him. He says my name once, the way he says it, the way no one else does, the consonants soft.

"Tell me," he says, "what you wanted on the walk."

"You."

"Be more specific."

I am. I am specific in the dark to a man four thousand miles away in a hotel I will never see, and he listens, and he does not interrupt, and the only sounds he makes are the ones I have learned to recognize as the ones he makes when he is paying attention, which is its own currency, which he spends on me, sometimes, when he can be bothered, and tonight he can be bothered, and I take it, because the taking is the whole arrangement.

After, neither of us says anything for what must be a minute. The television in his room has gone off, or he has muted it. I can hear him breathing. He can hear me. We are, briefly, just two breaths in two rooms, and the line between us, and the dark on either end.

"Sleep," he says.

"Okay."

"I mean it. Sleep."

"I will."

I won't. He knows that. He says good night anyway. He always says good night. It is the one piece of tenderness he permits himself, the one thing he gives me that costs him something, and I take that too, and I hold the phone after he has gone, and I listen to the small empty hum of the line that is no longer a line, and I lie in the stripes of streetlight in the dark and I do not, for a long time, move.

---

The hotel had given us the wrong key, and we did not tell the desk. For one entire night we lived inside a room that wasn't ours, in a city neither of us was supposed to be in, and used the wrong towels with a thoroughness that felt, by morning, like a vow.