Saturday, His Pocket, Her Dress

His hand is in his jacket pocket. It has been there for four minutes. She knows because she stopped tracking the conversation about co-op boards somewhere around minute two and has been watching his pocket instead, the way the wool pulls slightly where his fingers rest around something she cannot see but can feel — low, precise, a hum that is almost polite in its restraint.

It was her idea. She knows that. She knew it Tuesday when she said it, flushed and certain over a second glass of Barolo, and she knows it now, sitting across from Marcus and his wife at a table in the West Village where the candles are the kind that drip, the wax collecting in slow ridges down the brass holders. She has been watching one candle in particular — the one nearest his elbow — because it gives her somewhere to look that is not his face, not his pocket, not the tablecloth's edge pressing against her thighs.

The tablecloth is white linen. It is cold where it rests across her knees, and she is not cold. That contrast arrived around the time the bread did and has not left. Her dress, wool crepe, holds its shape the way good fabric does — it does not shift when she shifts, does not give her anything away. She is grateful for this and furious at it in equal measure.

Marcus is saying something about square footage. His wife is nodding. Her wine glass is perfectly still in her hand because she decided, at some point she cannot locate, that the glass would be her measure of control — if the wine doesn't move, she is fine, she is present, she is a person at a dinner table and not a person whose body is conducting its own separate negotiation without her full authorization.

The wine doesn't move.

Her thighs are pressed together under the tablecloth, the fabric of her dress caught between them, and the pressure is hers — she is the one holding herself like this, which is the part that makes her jaw tighten slightly. She is doing this to herself. He is only holding a remote.

A breath goes out of her, longer than the one that came in, and she covers it by lifting the glass. Takes a sip she doesn't taste.

His hand shifts in his pocket. Just a shift — she sees the wool move, just the adjustment of fingers finding a better grip — and the hum changes, briefly, a quarter-step up, then settles back. The sound that came out of her almost wasn't a sound at all. She turned it into the beginning of a word, a small affirmation directed at no one, and Marcus's wife smiled at her across the table as if she had said something agreeable about Tribeca.

She had not said anything about Tribeca.

The candle near his elbow gutters once in a draft she doesn't feel, and she watches the flame recover, straighten, burn. His hand is still in his pocket. She presses her knees together and holds the wine glass level and waits for him to decide what comes next, hating that she is waiting, hating more that she already knows what she wants the answer to be.