The Lovebird by Natalie Brown Page B

you’ve helped yourself to my clothes—”
    “We look the same.” I giggled.
    “—and to some breakfast.” He snapped the end off each word as he uttered it.
    I didn’t know what to say. He had asked me what my favorite type of cereal was as soon as I had moved in and had been faithfully bringing it home from the supermarket ever since.
    “The garden looks amazing.”
    A full minute of silence passed. I tried not to chew too loudly. Then he said, “This is close to how she kept it.”
    He didn’t say anything else, just stood back and studied a lavender bush from which he had removed a handful of dead flowers. He was without sunglasses, and his eyes were full of the pain I had, until that moment, always sensed but never seen.He squeezed the dried lavender blooms hard in his hand and then uncurled his fingers to let them fall to the ground. Their smell, old and herbaceous and so very different from our rich and moony jasmine, wafted up to me. I went inside.
    I TRIED TO BECOME AS UNOBTRUSIVE as possible. I knew Simon waged a perpetual and private battle against moodiness. And it had been his talent for temperance, for avoiding extremes of happiness or unhappiness, that had charmed me when I had been nothing but his admiring student—the way he walked a tightrope between the two extremes, so his smiles were always dry and wry, his laments always tinged with amusement.
    I waited, outwardly patient and uncomplaining, for Simon to regain his equilibrium. I occupied myself with a Jane Goodall book. I didn’t ask any questions when he stopped joining Annette and me for dinner. I switched on my book light to continue my reading when, after finishing his increasingly vigorous nighttime ablutions, he turned off the lamp, fell into bed, rolled over, and pretended to sleep.
    I thought about all the nights we had lain, after talking and touching, with our backs turned to each other, and how a feeling—a mutual, tender uncertainty, the uncertainty of lovers—would paralyze us. I would lie wondering,
Does he still want me?
And he would lie wondering, I suspected, the same. And then one of us—it was always impossible to tell which one—would slightly shift and begin to turn, and the other would, at almost the same moment, also turn, and in a second we’d be facing each other again, our hands searching for each other and damply clutching, our arms encircling shoulders and waists, saying without speaking,
Yes, I do still want you, yes
. How many times had it happened? Four? Six? Sixteen? We had met. We had met in that sliver of a place, a sweet place.
    And now there were only aching nights when Simon, after brushing his teeth and sliding under the sheets, lay with his back to me and I lay with my back to him, and then I began the turn and he did not follow it. He stayed still, and when I turned all the way around he still did not move, and even when I rested my fingertips against the back of his neck where his straight hair stopped and the skin was soft as a boy’s, he remained where he was, and the hours passed, and we did not meet.
    A couple of weeks after Simon first groomed the garden and brought it to a condition of such order and formality it rivaled the famous Roman Gardens of Lucullus mentioned in
Wheelock’s
, I made my way down the hallway toward his study with a tray bearing dinner. I wore an apron I’d sewn with some of the fabric he had bought for me. It was printed all over with seashells. I hoped he might notice it. But instead of stepping right in to say, “Here you go, handsome,” and smilingly setting down his plate, I stopped at the threshold.
    Simon had his elbows on his desk. His eyes and forehead were crushed into the palms of his hands. He was encased in a box hammered together by his own thoughts. His back muscles twitched tensely beneath the fabric of his shirt, and he exhaled a deep, long sigh.
    Watching him, I had the disturbing sense of almost-knowing, the feeling that comes when a