F A Y I Z

She came to the studio after work.

This was new. The studio had been a Saturday place. A portrait place. A special-occasion place. It was not a Thursday-evening place. Thursday evenings she went home. He went home. They existed in separate flats on separate streets and the distance between them was the distance they'd always maintained, the booth distance, stretched across the city, the understanding that proximity was a language they were still learning the grammar of.

But she'd texted at 5:30. Can I come over? Four words. The most casual detonation of his entire day.

He'd cleaned. Not the December clean, not the portrait-session clean. A faster clean, the clean of a man who had forty-five minutes and a dog who was unhelpfully lying on the one thing that needed to be moved. He'd put away the paintings. Most of them. The portrait was on the wall now, hung where Rifa's had been. He'd taken Rifa's down two weeks ago, not thrown away, put in the closet, face-in, the way Mollie had done with the diner painting during the three weeks. Not destroyed. Retired.

She arrived at 6:15. She'd come from work... still in the dark clothes, the funeral-home uniform, the professional armour. She looked tired. The work tired, the one he could identify, the shoulders, the slight compression of the posture, a woman who'd spent the day holding other people's grief and hadn't yet put down her own.

Theodore met her at the door. The lean. She knelt. Pressed her face into his fur. Stayed there for a long time.

He made tea. His mother's way: with cardamom, the green kind, crushed with the flat of a knife. The apartment filled with the smell. She sat in the one good chair, coat still on, and he brought the cup and she held it the way she always held things: with both hands, like it might be taken.

They talked. About the day. About a family who'd come in to discuss arrangements for a grandmother who had lived to 102 and whose funeral instructions included a jazz band and a specific request that no one wear black. "She wanted red," Mollie said. "Red dresses, red ties, red flowers. She said black was for people who hadn't lived and she'd lived plenty."

"I like her," Fayiz said.

"You'd have liked her. She was..." Mollie paused. Looked at the tea. "She was the kind of person who made death sound like a punctuation mark instead of an ending. Like the sentence kept going even after the full stop."

She was looking at the portrait. She'd seen it when she walked in... he'd watched her see it, watched her eyes find it on the wall, watched something move across her face that he couldn't read. She hadn't commented. She'd looked at it and then looked at Theodore and then knelt down and pressed her face into the dog's fur and that had been her response, not words, just the act of getting closer to the ground, the act of holding something warm.

Now she was looking at it again.

"You hung it where hers was," she said.

An observation.

"Yes."

"Where is hers?"

"Closet. Face-in."

She looked at him. The look that was not the assessment and not the mask and not the wall but the thing she'd been letting him see since the portrait session, the face underneath all the faces.

"Thank you," she said. For the third time. The same word, different canvas.

They were quiet. The evening light was different from the morning light... warmer, lower, coming through the west-facing kitchen window instead of the north-facing studio windows. The light turned the apartment gold. It turned the tea gold. It turned the paint on his hands gold.

She took off her coat.

This was a thing she did. He'd seen her do it a hundred times... in the booth, at Christmas, in this studio. She took off her coat the way she put on her scarf: deliberately, with the awareness that she was removing something, that the removing was an act of trust, that the person underneath the coat was less protected than the person inside it.

She draped it on the chair. She was sitting on the floor now... she'd migrated there without deciding to, the way she had at Christmas, the way she went to floors the way water went to the lowest point. Theodore arranged himself beside her. She put one hand on his back. The other was holding the tea.

Fayiz sat down across from her. Cross-legged. On the paint-stained floor of the studio where he'd spent three weeks painting her face from memory. The distance between them was small. Not the booth distance. Closer. The distance of two people on a floor with a dog between them and a cup of tea and an evening that had no destination.

"We burned a napkin today," she said.

"We did."

"In a diner. At eight-thirty in the morning. With a dollar-store lighter and a forty-three-year-old ashtray."

"Ritual is important."

"That wasn't a ritual. That was arson."

He laughed. She watched it. The thing she always did, watching his laugh arrive, tracking it from his chest to his face to his eyes. But she didn't look away this time. She stayed with it. Let the looking hold.

"What are we now?" she said.

Quiet. The question she'd been carrying since the waterfront, since the fog, since the booth where they'd held hands across a table. The question that had no answer because the answer required a word and the word didn't exist and they'd agreed it didn't need to.

"We're this," he said. Gestured at the floor. At the tea. At Theodore between them. At the portrait on the wall. At the studio, the apartment, the city outside, the evening light. "We're this. Whatever this is."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only honest one. I tried having answers. Answers are what my father gave me. Answers are what Rifa was supposed to be. Answers are the thing I've been trying to have my whole life and every answer I've ever had turned out to be someone else's question." He paused. "This is the first thing I've ever been that doesn't have an answer. And I think that's, I think that's what makes it real."

She looked at him. The evening light. The gold on his hands. The paint in the creases. Theodore breathing between them, slow, steady, the metronome of a dog who had no questions and no answers and was simply, completely, there.

"You know," she said, "Charlie would have called this a mess."

"Is that bad?"

"Charlie loved messes. Charlie was a mess. He said messes were the only honest thing about people. He said clean was a performance." She paused. Looked at her tea. "He'd have liked you. I've said that before. But he'd have liked this specifically. The not-knowing. The mess. He'd have said..."

She stopped. Her throat closed around whatever she'd been about to say and she pressed her lips together and looked at the floor and he could see the grief there, always there, the permanent resident, the thing that lived in her the way paint lived in his knuckles: ground in, part of the surface, impossible to wash out.

"What would he have said?" Fayiz asked.

"He'd have said: stop thinking, Molls. Just be in the room."

The sentence hung in the air. The studio held it. Theodore's breathing held it. The evening light, going gold, going amber, held it.

She put down the tea.

He put down his.

The distance between them was the length of a dog. Theodore was asleep, fully asleep, the deep sleep of an animal who trusted the room so completely he had abandoned all vigilance. His body rose and fell between them like a bridge, like a shoreline, like the narrow strip of sand between the ocean and the land.

She moved first.

Not fast. Not the foghorn moment, not the hand that lifted and dropped. She moved the way she'd moved in the portrait session, slowly, with the awareness that she was doing something, that the doing was a choice, that the choice was the most deliberate thing she'd done since saying not fall in love with you on a waterfront in March.

She leaned across Theodore. Her hand found the floor beside his knee. She was close now. Closer than the fog. Closer than the ice on the waterfront. Closer than the hands on the table. She could see the paint on his forearms, the ochre, the blue, the stubborn red, and the individual hairs on his jaw and the small scar above his left eyebrow she'd never noticed from the booth because the booth was too far away and she'd never been this close.

His hand came up. Slowly. The way a brush approached a canvas, the moment before the colour touched the surface, the moment when everything was possible and nothing was committed. His fingers touched the side of her face. Just his fingertips. Just the pads. Barely. The way you touched a painting that was still wet, to know what it was, to feel the texture, to confirm that the thing you were looking at was real and not just light.

She closed her eyes.

He'd never touched her face. In seven months of breakfasts and walks and fog and ice and three weeks of absence and the hand on the table and the portrait where he'd looked at her for three hours, he had never touched her face. His fingers were warm. They smelled like turpentine and cardamom. They rested against her cheekbone with a weight that was less than a brush and more than anything she'd ever felt.

She opened her eyes. He was there. Close. The closest face. The face she'd asked to be painted by, the face she'd almost touched in the fog, the face she'd been looking at across a table since October. And the face was looking back and the looking was the same looking from the portrait session, total, devoted, the full weight of a man who had spent his whole life seeing things and was now seeing the one thing that mattered.

She kissed him.

Not the way kisses happened in the stories she'd read or the films she'd watched or the lives she'd imagined. Not the dramatic kind. Not the certain kind. She kissed him the way you placed a brushstroke you'd been thinking about for months, carefully, with commitment, knowing that the mark would change the canvas permanently and choosing to make it anyway.

His mouth was warm. His mouth tasted like cardamom tea. His hand was still on her face and the other found her waist and the contact was so new, so specific, so entirely unlike anything she'd experienced, because she had kissed women and this was not that and this was not less than that and this was not a category, this was a person, this was Fayiz, this was the man who said okay and because it's Thursday and yours, that her brain stopped trying to name it and her body took over and her body had no confusion, her body had no taxonomy, her body just knew what it knew, which was: this. Here. Him. Now.

Theodore slept through it. Theodore was a dog of great wisdom and impeccable boundaries.

They pulled apart. An inch. Two. The distance of a breath. She could feel his exhale on her lips. His hand was still on her face. His eyes were open. Hers were open. They were looking at each other from the closest distance they'd ever occupied and the distance was not the booth and not the table and not the fog and not the painting but here, the actual here, the physical reality of two faces an inch apart on the floor of a studio in Newfoundland with a dog between them and the evening light going from gold to amber to the deep, warm orange of a day that was ending and beginning at the same time.

"Oh," she said.

Not a word. A sound. The sound of a person who had just done something she'd been terrified of and had discovered that the terrifying thing was also the simplest thing, the way the simplest brushstroke was sometimes the one that finished a painting, the way the simplest word was sometimes the one that said everything.

"Oh," he said. The same sound. The same discovery.

She laughed. The real one. The snort. The involuntary one she'd been trying to hide since October and had given up hiding somewhere around January. It came out against his mouth because they were still that close and the laugh landed on his lips and she felt him smile into it and the smile was the real one and the laugh was the real one and none of it was the performance.

"Well," she said.

"Well."

"That was..."

"Yeah."

"Cardamom."

"Cardamom."

She sat back. Not far. Not the retreat. The settling. The way you settled after something big, not away from it but into it, the weight redistributed, the body finding its new centre of gravity.

Theodore opened one eye. Assessed the situation. Closed the eye. This was, as established, the closest Theodore came to approval.

The studio was dark now. The evening light had passed through gold and amber and was settling into the blue-grey of late April dusk. The portrait was on the wall. The green scarf was on the hook. The floor was paint-stained and cold and the two of them were sitting on it with a dog between them and the taste of cardamom and the knowledge that something had shifted, the last thing, the thing that had been waiting since October, since the first breakfast, since a man and a woman sat across from each other in a booth and agreed to die together and had instead, slowly, impossibly, over seven months of Tuesdays and Thursdays, chosen to live.

She leaned against his shoulder. He let her. The contact was simple. Warm. The weight of a person choosing to rest against another person because the other person was there and the being-there was enough.

Theodore sighed. Resettled. Went back to sleep.

They sat in the dark studio with the portrait on the wall and the evening outside and the contract burned and the napkin gone and the future, for the first time, the future, ahead of them. Not behind. Not counting down. Ahead. Open. Undefined. The way a canvas looked before the first stroke: full of everything, committed to nothing, waiting.

"Thursday," she said. Into his shoulder. The word she'd been saying for seven months. The word that meant us. The word that meant again. The word that meant I'll be here, and you'll be here, and the being-here is the whole thing.

"Thursday," he said.

And Tuesday. And Wednesday. And every other day that came after, unnamed, unnumbered, stretching forward into a life that hadn't been planned because the plan had been something else and the something else had burned in an ashtray at 8:30 in the morning and what was left was not a plan but a possibility, and the possibility was warm, and the possibility was enough.

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