The Open Frame

The bell buzzed instead of ringing, and the buzz went up the stairwell like a complaint. Ramona stood on the landing with her forehead almost against the door and one hand deep in her bag: a tram ticket, a pen with no cap, a balled-up tissue, the roll of coins she kept meaning to spend. No keys. She tried the side pocket, then the same side pocket again. Behind her the stairs smelled the way they always smelled at that hour, boiled cabbage and wet concrete, and on the second floor somebody had a radio going so low it was only a mood.

She rang again, shorter.

Steps inside, not hurried. The lock turned twice.

Bogdan had a pencil behind his ear and ink on the side of his thumb. He looked at her as if he had expected anyone but her, and then his face did the small thing it did, not a smile exactly, a loosening.

“Thank God,” she said. “Keys. They were in this bag at eight, I swear.”

“I thought it was upstairs. They ring the wrong bell all the time.”

She leaned in and he leaned in. Left cheek, right cheek. Hers was still cold from outside and his was warm and smelled of soap and, faintly, of whatever oil he had used for lunch. He did it exactly: his mouth landed where the cheek was, a half second after hers, the way you set down a full glass. She was too relieved to notice, or she noticed the way you notice a tap dripping in someone else’s flat.

“Is he back?”

“Since noon, about. Went straight to bed.”

“Asleep?”

“Like something dropped. I dropped a pan and he didn’t move.”

She laughed once, through her nose. She stepped on the heel of one shoe with the toe of the other, then the second, and left them side by side on the mat, a little damp at the toes. The linoleum was cold through her stockings. Her bag went over the back of the nearest chair in the kitchen doorway, where it always went, and the strap slid halfway down and stayed there.

The flat was too small to cross on purpose. She went down the hall anyway, six steps, as far as the open frame of their room.

The chipped corner was at the height of her shoulder. She put her fingers on it without thinking, the way you touch a banister in the dark. Inside, the room had the flat afternoon light that came through the lace and lay on things without warming them: the chair with his jeans, the training bag half unzipped, the shape of the bed. A long shape under the sheet. And his breathing, slow and even, a little rough at the top of each breath, like something being sanded.

That was all she needed. The room smelled of sleep and of car heater, a thick, closed smell. She did not go in. She did not look at the rest of him. He was there, he was in one piece, he was out cold, and she was starving.

She turned around. Bogdan was already at the fridge with the door open and the light on his face.

The fridge hummed louder with the door open, as if it resented it. Bogdan brought things to the fold-out table with the practiced efficiency of someone who knew the shelves by feel: a platter with thick breaded chicken cutlets pressed cold under foil, a bowl of garlicky meatballs firm from the chill, two tomatoes, a red pepper, and half a loaf of country bread.

He didn’t ask what she wanted; this was what there was, and it was good. He set to work with the knife, slicing the pepper into crisp, thick ribbons and cutting the tomatoes into wedges that bled clean juice onto the board.

“Here,” he said, sliding the plate toward her.

“God, yes.” Ramona pulled out the chair, the one without the string bag, and sat. She didn’t wait for a fork. She took a cold cutlet with her fingers—the breading was dense, cool, and peppery, the chicken tender and salty from the pan. She took a bite, then wedged a meatball into a thick heel of bread with a slice of pepper.

She chewed with the honest, ravenous focus of someone who had walked across Copou on an empty stomach. When juice from the tomato ran down her wrist, she caught it with her mouth without thinking, then took the napkin he pushed across the table.

Bogdan leaned against the counter, cutting himself a wedge of tomato and a piece of bread, eating standing up the way he usually did.

“Good?” he asked.

“Very.” She took another bite, the tiredness in her shoulders already softening into something manageable. “If you weren’t home, I would have had to break the lock.”

“He circled the date,” she said. She had a meatball halfway to her mouth. “In the margin. In red. I wrote the date the way everyone writes it, and he circled it, and then he gave me the point anyway.”

“Was it right?”

“The answer? Obviously. The whole answer. But he had to circle the date first. So everyone could see it’s circled.”

“He does it to the whole row,” Bogdan said. “Not only you. Radu had a circle on his name last week.”

“On his *name*.”

“He’d written it too small.”

She stopped chewing to enjoy that. “Handwriting man. He should be teaching penmanship to six-year-olds.” She ate the meatball. “And the other one. The clock.”

“Oh, the clock.”

“I got there on the bell. *On* the bell, the bell was still going. And he’s standing in the door like this.” She tilted her head, put her chin up, and aimed her eyes at an imaginary wristwatch. “And he lets me in. But he looks. You know the look? ‘I’ll allow it.’ I wanted to put the door through his teeth.”

“Five minutes,” Bogdan said. “After five minutes you’re a stranger. He says that in the first lecture, remember? Like a rule from a war.”

“He was a different man before he got tenure.”

“He was the same man, with fewer chairs.”

That one she laughed at properly, with her mouth full, and put her hand over it. A crumb went somewhere. Down the hall the sheet did not rustle. Tudor did not stir. The two of them talked at a normal volume in a flat with no doors, and the sleeper slept, because he always had.

“And she was there again,” Ramona said, after a bit. She had slowed down; the plate had gone from a thing to a leftover. “The one in the front row. Blonde, the pen with the feather on it.”

“The notes.”

“Her hand was up before he finished the question. Before he finished it. He said ‘Can anyone tell me why the—’ and her hand was already up, like she’d been told in advance.” She took a pepper strip and bent it in half without eating it. “She even had the right answer. That’s the worst part. If it was wrong I could sleep.”

“Her notes are always done,” Bogdan said. “Even when the seminar is a disaster. I’ve seen them. Colored margins.”

“I know. Everybody’s seen them.”

They left it. It wasn’t a subject, it was just the weather of the faculty. She put the pepper down, wiped her fingers on the napkin one at a time, and realized she was no longer hungry in the way she’d come in. She was tired instead, a warm dull tiredness behind the eyes and in the backs of her knees. Bogdan collected the ends of the pepper onto the saucer with the remnants of the meatballs, tidying a thing that had not been messy.

“I’m going to wash my hands,” she said, pushing back her chair.

Bogdan nodded, already stacking the plates.

The cistern in the bathroom was loud enough to be an opinion. He heard the pipes shudder, then the cold tap running into the basin. Water splashed against the porcelain as she scrubbed the grease and street dust off her hands and splashed cold water on her face. The pipes went quiet.

He stood in the kitchen with the dish towel, listening to the flat settle.

The string bag was on the other chair. He lifted it by the loops. It held an orange and a folded newspaper and nothing else, light as a coat. He put it over his wrist.

The bathroom curtain rustled as she pushed it aside. He was already moving toward his own room, bag in hand, as if he had decided to put something away. She passed him in the narrow hall, sleeves still pushed up to her forearms, her face clean and cool from the tap.

“Thanks for the food,” she said and kept going into their room.

He stopped by the hook.

The hook in the hall was empty most days. He hung the string bag on it, and adjusted the loops so they sat evenly, and then he did not go to his room. He stayed. He turned his shoulder half toward the wall, as if reading something stuck there. From where he stood, if he stayed still, the open frame of their room gave him the foot of the bed, the bed, and the strip of floor beside it, not the whole room, and not her face if she looked toward him. The angle was nothing anybody had arranged. It was only where you ended up if you stopped there.

He kept his hands where they were. He didn’t touch himself. The flat made small noises around him, the fridge, a drip in the bathroom, the radiator ticking somewhere behind the wall, and he let them be the only noises. The light came through the lace, flat and gray-gold, and lay across the end of the bed.

Ramona walked into the room, her blouse still buttoned to the second button.

This time she looked.

Tudor lay on his back with the sheet down to his hips and one arm flung above his head, the other at his side with the hand open. His chest rose and fell slowly. He had the kind of shoulders that kept their shape even when he was asleep, the stomach flat and hard under the skin, a little line of dark hair running down from the navel and disappearing under the sheet. His mouth was slightly open. He was naked under there, she knew that without lifting anything, the way you know the temperature of a room. And the sheet showed what the body had done on its own while he slept: thick, flushed, heavy against his stomach, resting there like something that belonged to a different, more awake person. Nothing in his face matched it. He was a long way down.

She smiled, the small private one, the one she did not do for anyone else.

Then, without turning her head, she let her eyes slide to the doorway. Toward the hall. They didn’t land on anyone. She checked the way you check a gas ring: the angle was the usual one, the light was the usual light, and the thing at the edge of the frame was as still as a coat on a hook. She looked back at the bed. She hadn’t looked.

On the wall above the headboard, a poster was pinned crooked at one corner: a camel standing in a wash of yellow sand, a cigarette held in a hand cut off at the wrist, and some red lettering underneath, small enough that nobody had ever had to read it. It was already curling at the edge from the damp. It had been there since before she’d started staying.

Her hand went to the second button of her blouse.

The radiator ticked. Somewhere upstairs a door slammed and meant nothing. She stood there a moment longer than she needed to, with her fingers on the button, and looked at him.