The long afternoon (1)

Vivienne was the one who ended the circle, and she did it with such economy that for a moment it was not clear that anything had happened.

"We are not obliged to sit like this for twenty-three hours," she said. "I would prefer that we didn't. Anyone who wants company should take it. Anyone who wants to be left alone should say so, aloud, once, and it will be respected without comment. We will find our way back to one another at intervals." She turned her head. "Beatrix will tell us the hour."

"I didn't offer," said Beatrix.

"You will."

Beatrix considered this. "Yes," she said. "I will."

That was all. Nobody rose at first; they had the look of guests at the end of a dinner, waiting to see who would stand. Then Rafaela was up and gone, at a jog, in a wide slow arc around the edge of the group. Idris said to Sophia, in his flat way, that he thought he would do better if someone kept interrupting him, and Sophia said that she was the best at that, honestly, it was practically a medical qualification, and off they went, her voice continuing for some time after her body had left. The man in the coat helped the painter to her feet and did not let go of her elbow. Emeric and Lucian rose together, as men do who have found the only two people in the room who have not shouted. Margo said "Come on," to nobody, and Adaeze followed her, already arguing.

Neiman found himself sitting alone in a circle that was no longer one.

It was not an unfamiliar sensation. There is a moment at every gathering when the room sorts itself into pairs, and a certain kind of man discovers that he had been agreeable rather than chosen. He had built a life on being pleasant company to whoever happened to be nearest, and it followed as a matter of arithmetic that when everyone moved, the nearest moved with them, and there was no one. He noted this without rancor. It was a fine thing about agreeableness that it made a man universally available and never once required.

He got up. It did not matter where. He went where there was talk.

---

They had settled some twenty paces off, Margo cross-legged with her forearms on her knees, Adaeze on her stomach with her chin in her hands like a girl at a sleepover, and they were in the middle of an argument in the manner of two people who have already decided to like one another.

"— touch," Adaeze was saying. "Taster. Old French. To feel, to handle, to try. Before it was something your tongue did it was something your fingers did. You pressed the plum."

"Course you did," said Margo. "How else."

"And the Latin. Sapere. To taste, and also to know. To have flavor and to be wise. Sapient. Savor. One word. The Romans thought the wise man was the one with the good palate."

"That's the only sensible thing a Roman ever said."

"Sal, salsa, sauce, salad, salary —"

"Salary?"

"Salarium. Salt money. Supposedly. Nobody agrees, which is the great pleasure of it."

"Supposedly." Margo made a face. "That's a word that smells off to me."

"Bitter," said Adaeze, flipping onto her back, "is bite. The same word, worn smooth. A bitter thing bites you. Ecco. Nobody had to be clever."

"It does bite," said Margo, and nodded, once, slowly, an assent a little heavier than the subject asked for. Then she looked up and saw him standing there and said, without welcome or reproach, "Sit. You're in my light. There isn't any light. Sit anyway."

He sat. Margo tilted her head and drew a long breath through her nose, frankly, like a woman opening an oven.

"Paper," she said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Not a complaint. You smell like paper. Not new; new's got a chemical on it. Not printed, either. Old. Drawer paper. The kind that got folded once and put somewhere." She sniffed again. "Everyone else in here smells of the one thing. Scared. Wet pennies, mostly. I could pick every one of you out of a crowd blindfolded, and there isn't a crowd, and I'm not." She sat back. "You're the only one I'd have to think about. You're not scared."

"I'm told I'm behind."

"Behind what?"

"Everyone. I'm sure it will arrive."

"Huh," said Margo.

"He's a novelist," said Adaeze, in the tone of a woman explaining a rash. "They're all like that. Paper, and then paper, and then more paper. — Say water."

"Water."

"Say bath."

"Bath."

"Now — no, don't, let me. Say water again."

"Water."

"Hm." She had propped herself on her elbows and was watching his mouth with an expression of pure, undisguised greed. "Non. Non, non, non. That isn't a place. That's a — Reise. A journey. That is five places, six, one on top of another. You've no home vowel. It moves. When you were talking to her you put the a there, and when you turned to me it slid. Just now. It slid across."

"I've lived in a few cities."

"Cities give you an accent. They don't take one away." She narrowed her eyes. "Where do you get it from?"

"Whoever's nearest, I expect."

"Ha." She sat up, thrilled. "A parasite of the ear. Nnọọ, that's the best thing anyone's said all day."

Margo said nothing, but she looked at him a fraction longer than she had looked at anything, and then away, as one looks away from a dish one cannot identify.

"Margo says words are slow," said Adaeze, settling.

"They are," said Margo. "You say a thing and by the time it's out the thing's changed. And you can put anything in one. Any old lie. Taste a thing, though, and you know. It's there. It's the thing. Nobody ever lied with their tongue."

"That's the argument of a woman who has never been lied to by a sauce."

"A bad sauce doesn't lie. It fails."

"I think," said Neiman, "that's more or less what most novelists confess to, in private. That the sentence is a thin, slow, unreliable version of whatever it was trying to say. A good deal of the profession consists of apologizing for that."

"Thank you," said Margo.

"Though I've always thought the trouble was the reader's, really. The sentence is perfectly all right. Everyone's just tasting a different soup."

"Oh," said Adaeze.

"That's the opposite of what you just said," said Margo.

"Is it?"

"You said the word's slow and rotten and then you said the word's fine and it's the person hearing it who's got the wrong soup."

"They can both be true," said Neiman. "It would be a poor art if they couldn't."

"That's two," said Margo. She said it without heat, counting on her fingers the way a cook counts eggs, and turned to Adaeze. "He's got two. I'll want to watch that."

"Je l'aime bien," said Adaeze, in the tone of one changing the subject with great care. "Don't look at me like that. I like a hearer who agrees. It makes the meaning so much easier to build." She rolled onto her side and pointed at him, as at a specimen. "In Igbo, ụtọ. Sweet, and pleasant, and delicious. It's one sound. Nobody in the language has ever needed to ask which one they meant. And persuade — do you know what persuade is? Suadere. To make a thing sweet to someone. The same root as sweet, the same as suave. Every time a man persuades you, he's sweetening you. Every time —"

"Umami," said Margo suddenly. "You know that one?"

"Nineteen-oh-eight! A chemist, tasting his wife's kombu broth, and there wasn't a word for it. Umami. Delicious-ness. He had to invent it. Imagine it. A whole taste, and no one had ever been able to ask for it."

"People asked for it," said Margo. "For a thousand years. They pointed at the pot."

"They pointed at the pot," Adaeze agreed, and grinned, and let it go; and for a moment the three of them said nothing, and the quiet had the ease of a table after the plates have been cleared.

"What did you cook?" said Adaeze. "Before. What was the last thing?"

"The last thing I made," said Margo, "was a stew. And I'd left it on the —" She stopped.

Neiman had been watching Adaeze, and so it was Adaeze he saw catch it: the small pause in her face, almost tender, the look of a person who has just heard a wrong note played by a friend.

"On a stove," said Margo. "Where'd you think. Forget it."

"Basta," said Adaeze softly. It was Italian, and it meant enough, and she did not say anything after it.

"Words, though," said Margo, after a bit, looking at nothing. "They're just so slow."

"Some of them," said Adaeze. "The trouble is that any word is a promise, and you find out you've broken it years later. Somebody's face tells you." She stopped. She had a light, quick way of talking, with her hands, and now one of them stopped in the air. "There was a word once — never mind. It has a cousin in every language and all of them are slightly wrong." Then, brightly, in a rattle of something that was not English: something about a lemon, and a knife, and how she'd give anything.

"That's not French," said Margo.

"It's not," said Adaeze, pleased. "Thank you for noticing."

---

Neiman left them at the point where being present would have required something of him, which was, by long habit, the moment he preferred to leave anywhere.

He heard the next pair before he saw them: a low, uncertain humming, and beneath it a precise, formal murmur, like a man reading out a will.

"— and it doesn't cross" Emeric was saying. "That's the wonder of it. At St. Paul's, in the gallery under the dome, you would think you'd have to shout across the gap. You don't. You whisper into the wall on one side, and someone on the other, a hundred feet away, hears you as though you were at their ear. But if you stood in the middle of the gallery, if you stood in the middle, you'd hear nothing at all."

"It creeps," said Lucian.

"It creeps along the wall. It clings. Lord Rayleigh worked it out. The sound hugs the curve, and skims it, and does not weaken, because it's not spreading. There's only the one direction it may go." Emeric had shut his eyes; he did that when he was happy, apparently, or when he was measuring, and perhaps for him these were not different. "One of the very few places in the world where a whisper is safer than a shout."

"And Gol Gumbaz. Do you know — in the — there's a dome in India, and it does it ten times. Ten. A whisper goes round ten times before it stops. I'd give anything. And the Echo Wall, in Beijing, the Temple of Heaven — and the tiled place in the station, at the — at the corner where the arches are, by the oyster place —" He hummed a phrase, a short bright ascent, and the phrase died at the end of the note and did not come back. His face changed. "But here it can't."

"No. Here it can't carry. It has nothing to cling to." Emeric opened his eyes and looked, with a kind of apology, out at the white. "No wall. No carry."

"So it just stops," said Lucian. "I make a sound, and it just — there's nowhere for it to go."

"It goes as far as you can hear it. It goes precisely as far as the person beside you. And then it stops."

"That's the loneliest thing I've ever heard," said Lucian, and hummed something lower, something to himself.

"Might I sit here?" said Neiman.

"Oh — please — please," said Emeric, half rising, and then, having risen, not knowing what to do about it, sat again. "It's easier to know a room with three. One can triangulate. Forgive me, that sounds cold. I only mean that it's a comfort."

"It's a comfort," Lucian agreed, and his hum shifted, subtly, into a slower, steadier pulse. Neiman, who had no ear at all, heard the change and could not have said what it was, except that a moment ago it had been a man tuning himself against a stranger and now he was tuning himself against Neiman, and doing it, apparently, without noticing.

"You're an arranger, are you?" said Neiman.

"A what?"

"I'm sorry. I don't know the word. Someone who works out how the pieces go together."

"Oh. Ha. No. I play." Lucian smiled, vaguely, at a spot to the left of Neiman's ear. "I listen, mostly. It's the same thing, if you do it long enough. You breathe in fours."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You. When you sit. You breathe in fours. It's quite steady. Like you're — like you're counting something, and you don't know you're counting." He tilted his head. "It's a nice pace. It's the pace of someone who's decided it's safest to be very slow."

"I'd hoped it was the pace of a man at his ease."

"Mm," said Lucian, kindly, and hummed the end of the sentence.

"He's rather astonishing," said Emeric, to Neiman, in a confidential tone, as though Lucian were not there. "I have been trying, this last quarter of an hour, to give this room some sort of a shape. It has none. It has no dimension I can find. I've tried every technique I have. I close my eyes and it is like — I beg its pardon — it is like putting my hand into a coat and finding that there is no arm."

"Is it wrong?" said Neiman. "The room. You said, to yourself. When you were kneeling."

"Wrong." Emeric considered it, with the care of a man handling a very good glass. "No. No, I don't think it's wrong. A wrong room is a room that has something in it that shouldn't be. A wall that's too thick, a cupboard that goes back too far. This isn't that. This is a room that has had everything taken out. It's — unfinished, I'd say. It hasn't been built yet. Or it's been very carefully unbuilt." He shivered, delicately. "I said good morning to it, you know. When I woke up. I always do. And it — there's always a — one always feels a sort of return. A room sort of takes note of you. This one did not."

"Then it isn't a room," said Lucian, dreamily. "It's a rest."

"A —?"

"A rest. In music. A bar where nobody plays. It's not silence, exactly, it's silence written down. Somebody decided it was there." He was smiling, but his eyes had gone wide and fixed. "It's a very long fermata. It's — that's the sign, the little — the little eye, over a note or a rest. It means: hold. For as long as the performer likes. Nobody says how long. It's not up to the — it's never up to the players."

"Then who," said Emeric, and stopped.

None of them said the rest of it.

"I should like," said Emeric, after a moment, in a slightly different voice, "to give the corners names. If you don't object."

"There are no corners," said Neiman.

"There aren't. No. But one feels a place should have. I think it's — it's a kindness. It's the sort of thing one does in an empty house. You say, that's where the piano was. You say, that's the good window." He turned, with grave courtesy, and pointed at the white, to the left and a little behind them. "That one, I'd say, is the north-east. It's a nice corner. It's got a lot of — it's good for morning. Lucian. Would you care for it? For a name?"

"It's kind to the room," said Lucian, softly.

"It's kind to us," said Emeric. "The room doesn't mind."

They named it. It took some minutes and a good deal of consultation. They agreed on the north-east and the south, and Lucian insisted on something called the sostenuto, which had no bearing on the compass, and Emeric, after visible struggle, allowed it. Neiman offered no names. He was asked once, and said that he wasn't good at that sort of thing, and was excused.

"Where did you grow up?" said Lucian, easily, in the pause after. He had been humming again, and the question came out of the hum like a thread from a hem, and had gone before either of the other men could catch at it. "Emeric. Sorry. It's — I'm sorry. I ask everyone. I like the sound of where people come from."

"Oh," said Emeric.

It was a very small syllable. It came out of him rather high, and stopped, and hung there. His hands, on his knees, did not move. Neiman had the impression, faint and unpleasant and quite familiar, of a man who has been asked a question and has looked at the answer and is calculating the cost of handing it over.

"There are a number of answers to that," said Emeric, at last, courteously. "I could give you eleven. I'm afraid it's a long story, and I wouldn't like to spoil the afternoon. Wherever the lease allowed, one might say."

"Right," said Lucian, quickly. "Sorry. I heard — you breathed in the wrong place. Sorry. I shouldn't. I'll — " And he began to hum, something bright and unfinished, in a key that seemed designed to make the previous moment not have happened.

Emeric shut his eyes.

He was, Neiman understood, counting something. He knew — Neiman did not know how he knew it — that the man could have said, without hesitation, in months and in days, exactly how long each of them had lasted. And that he had not been asked in the right way, and that the question would keep.

A little way off, Rafaela went by again at her steady jog, and Emeric said, without opening his eyes: "Forty meters. Precisely forty. Every lap. She's making a wall by running."

---

The painter had gone from the ground to the ring and from the ring, by degrees, to a sort of upright sprawl, and by the time Neiman drifted near her she had recovered enough to be indignant.

"Nobody told me!" she was saying. "I've been perfectly fine, you know. I've been the picture of health. I only — it ambushed me. One is not prepared to be looked at by fifty whites at once. They know things. They're every one of them a different opinion, and none of them are polite about it."

"Tell me a few," said Kenji.

He was sitting cross-legged, a courteous yard away, with one hand loosely around her wrist, though Neiman was fairly certain he did not know he was doing it. He had the untroubled air of a man who has been asked to guard something valuable and has nothing else to do.

"A few what?"

"Whites. You said fifty. I'd like to know what you can see."

Saoirse turned her head slowly and looked at him for a moment as at a pilgrim who has arrived at the wrong shrine. Then she smiled, and it changed her whole face, the way a light changes a room. "Oh, you dear man. All right. Chalk, that one, straight ahead. It's dry, it wants to be written on. Milk. Milk's just behind, it's the color of a thing that's been left out. Bone, but a bone that's been very well washed. Sugar, at the back, all crystal. The underside of a mushroom. A knuckle when the fist is tight." She stopped, and her voice dropped. "Fear. Fear's a white, you know. It's not a black, whatever they tell you. Fear's the white of a knuckle. And there's a great deal of it here."

"That's a very great deal of white," said Kenji.

"I've never seen so much of it. I've never had it all at once. It's like being in a choir with nobody to conduct."

"Ninety percent," said a flat voice, from just behind, "that she's fine, from now on. I'd say ninety, hedged, if the trigger was the density of —"

"Please," said Kenji.

He did not raise his voice. It was, if anything, a shade softer than before. But the word stopped Idris cold, mid-clause, with his mouth still shaped around the next syllable, and Idris, who had come up quietly and been standing there with his hands in his pockets, went red to the ears.

"Not about a person," said Kenji. "I'd ask you not to do it about a person. It's — I know that it's a habit. I'd only ask."

"Sorry," said Idris. "Sorry — I — it's not meant — it's how I —" He stopped. "I do it when I'm frightened," he said. It came out plain, without a single hedge, and as he heard it he looked so startled that Neiman almost felt for him.

From across the way, where she had been sitting with her hands folded, Vivienne turned her head. Her face did not change. But something in her posture eased by a degree, like a rope let out an inch; and when she spoke, her voice, though she pitched it for the whole circle, was gentler than any Neiman had heard from her.

"Thank you, Idris," she said. "That was well said."

"It wasn't well said. It was — a plain statement."

"Yes. That's what I mean."

Idris, flustered, looked at his shoes. Sophia, who had materialized at his elbow as if summoned by the silence, seized his arm and said, in a great rush, that it was the most normal thing she'd ever heard and she'd been terrified for an hour and she'd only gone quiet at all when she was ill on a plane once, in — anyway. They went off again. Neiman had watched all of it, and had found himself watching Vivienne while he did it, and had seen, not for the first time and not by accident, that the softening came only for the plain thing. That it was a currency she paid out for one coin and one only.

He put the observation away where he put things.

"Hospitals paint the walls green," Kenji was saying, when he could hear again. "Pale green, or blue. Shall I tell you why?"

"Please," said Saoirse, and lay back, and folded her hands on her stomach like a woman being read a bedtime story.

"A surgeon looks at red for hours. Red, and the inside of a body, and then he looks up at a white sheet, or a white wall, and what he sees is a ghost. The eye makes the opposite, you see. It sees a pale green shadow where the red was. It's very tiring. So a man some time back thought: well, put the green there first. Green gowns. Green drapes. Something for the afterimage to land on."

"That's lovely. It's like — a pillow for the eye."

"And the walls," said Kenji, "are chosen so that a person's color can be read. You'd be surprised. A yellow wall on a jaundiced patient, and he looks well. The wrong white makes a healthy man look gray. If you're going to be looking at people's faces to see whether they're dying, you want a wall that will not lie to you about it."

"Walls that don't lie," said Saoirse, dreamily. "What a thing. I'd have to lie down in front of one."

"You are lying down."

"So I am." She smiled at the nothing. "Do you know what I'd do? If I had them? The ceilings. Nobody paints the ceilings. People are in those beds for weeks. They look at nothing else. You'd have to be a monster to give a person a white ceiling and then say, there you are, get better."

"I'd not thought of that," said Kenji, and looked, for a moment, at the place where a ceiling would have been. "No. I don't believe I ever thought of it."

"Nobody does. It's the painters' thing. We're — it's only that we spend so long looking up."

"Do you write letters home?" said Neiman.

He had not known he was going to say it. Both of them turned to look at him, and he was aware of having intruded, as a man is aware of stepping on a stair that was not there; but Saoirse's whole face brightened, like a window in a house at dusk.

"Oh, constantly! Every week. Mam has a drawer of them. They're wonderful letters. I'm told they make people cry, the good kind." She lifted a hand to the white and drew a small arc, a long habit of a gesture, a brush on a wall. "I'll have to think what I'll say about this place. Dear Mam. It's very bright here. That's true, isn't it? It's terribly bright. Dear Mam, the studio has marvelous light."

"Is it a studio?" said Kenji, mildly.

"It's a place with light, darling. That's all a studio is." She closed her eyes. "Everything's very bright, in my letters. That's the whole point of them."

"Ah," said Kenji.

He said it gently, and let it go; and Neiman, who had said the sentence in the same tone a hundred times to a hundred different people, recognized the sound.

"Do you ever stop?" said Saoirse, without opening her eyes. "Checking. You've had my wrist for ten minutes."

Kenji looked down. He seemed genuinely startled. "I'm so sorry," he said, and let go, and there was a small silence. "I have tried. It doesn't seem to — I'd rather know. That's all it is. I'd rather know than not."

"That's very sweet."

"It isn't. It's a nervous habit."

"Nervous habits are very sweet. I have them in every color."

Neiman sat near them for some minutes longer, saying very little. He was aware that the two of them were, in some way that had nothing to do with talking, at ease: that the painter was pale and improbably luminous, lying on the white like a stain of color on a canvas that wanted to be looked at, and that the doctor sat beside her like a man who has spent his whole life in a room with the door open. They had each of them a thing. A thing you could hold up and be seen by. Neiman looked at his own hands, which were still, and which knew how to hold a pen, and felt something rise in him, brief and bright and unattractive, that in a better-designed person would have been jealousy.

It was nonsense, of course. Jealousy required the belief that the matter was negotiable, that the ledger might be reopened, and nobody who had read as many novels as he had believed that. He examined it, briefly, with a professional's contempt, and found it thin: a piece of business, a beat the author had put in to make the average man human. He let it go by. It went. It usually did. That was the gift, if it was one.

"Four hours," said Beatrix.

She had come up from nowhere, hands folded before her, and she said it in the tone of a woman reading a meter. "Four hours, eleven minutes, and some seconds. You asked me to say the hour."

"I did not," said Neiman.

"Someone did," said Beatrix. "It was implicit."

"That's hours?" said Saoirse, opening one eye. "It's felt like days. It felt like years. Are you sure?"

"I'm sure."

"I'd have said six," said Lucian, from a distance, faintly. "At the least. I'd have said six — the length of it —"

"Three and a bit," said Idris's voice, from farther off. "Roughly. Possibly three and a half. I'd hedge —"

"It's four hours and eleven minutes," said Beatrix, to the air, with a kind of weary tenderness, "and thirty-three seconds."

"Forty-one," said someone, and it was the doctor, smiling, with two fingers pressed lightly to his own wrist. "By my count. I'm afraid it's not the same thing."

"It never is," said Beatrix. She turned her plain, clear face and gave Neiman a look that had no particular meaning in it; the look of a woman who has entered a fact into a ledger and is now checking that the ledger is still there. "You've spoken with four people. You have not asked any of them anything."

"I asked Saoirse about her letters."

"That's one. And it was the first thing you asked." She said it without reproach, as one gives the time. "I keep records. It was an observation."

"I see."

"Do you?" said Beatrix.

It was the same question she had asked him hours ago, in the ring, in the same voice. He knew that. He had the uncanny feeling that if he answered exactly as before, in exactly the same words, she would be able to tell him to the syllable which of them had been the first.

"No," said Neiman. It was a strange thing to say, and it came out sounding, to his own ear, almost like an honest answer.

"Goo d," said Beatrix. She nodded, once, as at a sum that has come out. "Then we can begin."

And she sat down next to him, folded her ankles, and looked out at the white, in which nothing had changed in four hours, eleven minutes, and forty-one seconds; and for a moment, though neither of them said a word, it seemed to Neiman that the white was listening.