Without Threshold

It is twenty past nine. He said nine. I have not turned on the overhead light because the overhead light would mean I am a person who turns on overhead lights for him, and I am not, yet, that.

The kitchen has the two lamps going and the candle I lit at eight forty-five with the kind of casualness that took me twenty minutes to rehearse. The wine is open. The wine has been open long enough that I can smell it from across the room, which is either correct or a small disaster, depending on who you ask. I am not asking anyone. I am alone in my apartment waiting for a man who is twenty minutes late and counting, and the counting is the part I would like to stop doing and cannot.

I have arranged myself three times. Once on the couch, reading, which felt like a stage direction. Once at the window, which felt worse. Now at the counter, doing something with a lemon I do not need to do anything with, because my hands have started to require employment.

What I am waiting for is not him, exactly. He is the occasion. What I am waiting for is the moment the apartment stops being mine alone and becomes the room where this happens, whatever this turns out to be. There is a threshold somewhere between his knock and his coat coming off, and I am waiting to cross it, and the waiting is a country I did not know I would have to live in for this long.

My phone is face down because face up would be worse. Face down means I am not checking. Face down means I am the kind of woman who is not checking. The phone has not made a sound. He is not the kind of man who texts to say he is running late. He is the kind of man who arrives, and the arriving is the apology, and you accept it because by then you are no longer in a position to do otherwise.

I think about what I am wearing. I think about it the way you think about a sentence you have already sent. The dress was a decision made at six forty, after two other decisions. It is the dress that says I did not try, and I have tried, in this dress, for nearly three hours. The earrings were a concession to vanity I am now embarrassed by and unwilling to remove, because removing them now would be a different kind of decision, a worse one.

There is a particular quality to waiting for someone you have already slept with once. The body remembers and the body is impatient and the body has begun, in the small hot way bodies do, to make its requests known. I can feel my own pulse at the inside of my wrist when I rest it against the cool of the counter. I keep resting it there. It is the most honest thing in the room.

Nine thirty. The candle has done that thing where the wax forms a small pool and I can see my own face, very faintly, in it, upside down. Good, I think, with a meanness I did not know I had with me tonight. Good, let her be upside down. Let her wait.

I consider, briefly, the possibility that he is not coming. I let myself sit inside that possibility the way you sit inside cold water at the edge of a lake, to know what it would be. It is bearable. It is a furnished room. I could live there for a night. I would drink the wine. I would eat the cheese I cut at eight thirty and have not touched. I would take off the earrings and the dress and put on the t-shirt and I would be, in the morning, a woman who once waited and was not met, which is a thing many women are, and they keep on being women, and the world keeps on.

The knowing of that calms me, oddly. It loosens something in my shoulders. I pour another half glass. I stop counting the minutes for the first time in an hour.

And then, of course, the buzzer. Of course. The body knew before the ear did; I am already moving when the sound arrives. The dress moves with me. The earrings catch the lamp. I press the button without speaking and I hear, three floors below, the heavy door give in to him, and I hear his step on the first stair, and I understand that the country of waiting is closing behind me, and that I have, in some small permanent way, been changed by having lived in it, even briefly, even alone.