Persona-lity Novel | Part 4, Chapter 20: Un Oeil au Beurre Noir

The Fighter is on the phone when Raul looks up from his laptop.

He is standing by the counter, one hand flat on the surface, the other holding the phone to his ear. His face is doing the waiting thing; the specific patience of someone who has been on hold long enough to stop expecting it to end soon. Raul watches him from the table without making it obvious he is watching.

The call goes to voicemail.

The Fighter looks at the phone for a moment. Then he dials again.

Voicemail.

He puts the phone on the counter. Looks at it. Picks it up and types something; a message, probably, the kind you send when you have called twice and don't want to call a third time and also need an answer before tomorrow. Raul watches him type it and watches him put the phone face-up on the counter so he will see when the reply comes and then watches him go to the couch and sit down and pick up his own phone and look at nothing in particular.

Raul looks back at his lecture notes.

He has a highlighter in his hand that he has not used in twenty minutes.

The apartment is quiet in the way that means both of them are waiting for something and neither of them is saying so.

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The door opens.

It is an ordinary afternoon, the kind that doesn't announce itself, the kind you forget the texture of immediately after it's over.

Then Elena comes through the door.

They both look up.

They both go still.

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Her left eye is swollen shut. Not fully; there is a thin line of visibility at the bottom of it, the specific narrowing of a face that has been hit hard and recently, the skin around it already darkening into something purple and wrong. Her bag is not on her shoulder. Her hands are empty. She is standing in the doorway in her coat and she is looking at a point somewhere between them and the wall, her face doing the thing it did; the thing the Fighter had described once, to Raul, late at night after too much of something, as "the face she makes when something is too big for a face."

The highlighter falls out of Raul's hand.

Neither of them moves.

One second. Two.

Then they both move at once.

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Raul reaches her first because he is closer. He doesn't touch her; he knows better, has always known better, the specific knowledge of someone who understands that after certain things the body needs to be asked first. He just gets close. Puts himself in her line of sight.

"Elena."

She looks at him. Her eye; the good one, the open one; is dry. She is not crying. She is something past crying, something that has moved through it and come out the other side into a flat, cold place where the anger lives but hasn't decided what shape to take yet.

The Fighter has come off the couch. He is standing behind Raul, slightly to the left, and Raul can feel the particular quality of his stillness; not calm, the opposite of calm, the stillness of something under very high pressure.

"Come in," Raul says. Gently. Like she might be standing on something fragile.

Elena comes in. She sits on the couch; not where she usually sits, somewhere slightly different, like her body had made a small wrong calculation and she hadn't corrected it. She puts her hands on her knees. She looks at the floor.

The apartment is very quiet.

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"Your bag," the Fighter says. Quietly.

She doesn't answer.

"Elena."

Nothing.

Raul goes to the kitchen. He fills a glass of water, brings it back, sets it on the table in front of her. She doesn't look at it.

The Fighter crouches in front of her. Not touching. Just down to her level, in her eyeline, waiting. Raul has seen him do this before; the specific patience of someone who learned in the ring that the worst thing you can do is fill a silence that needs to stay empty.

She looks at him.

Her jaw moves. Something working itself out, somewhere behind her face.

"There was a man," she says. Flat. "On the street. He had his phone out."

The Fighter's face does not change. Raul watches it not change.

"He said—" She stops. Starts again. "He had the article. He showed me the article on his phone. He said—" Another stop. Her hands press harder against her knees. "It doesn't matter what he said."

"Elena—"

"He took the bag." She says it like a fact being filed. "I fell. He ran." A pause. "The bag had the supply money in it. The canvases. Everything I was going to buy today."

The room holds this.

Raul thinks about the article. About early attachment disruption and this reporter and four months alone in a house at age seven, published and shared and available now on any phone on any street for any man who recognized her face.

He thinks: Delaney Schulz put her on the street. She didn't touch her and she put her on the street.

He does not say this out loud.

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The Fighter stands up.

He goes to the window. Stands there with his back to the room, looking at the street below, both hands at his sides. Raul watches his shoulders. He watches them the way he watches everything the Fighter does when the volume is off; for what the body says when the voice isn't saying anything.

The shoulders are very still.

That is the worst kind of still.

"I'm going to make something," Raul says. To no one in particular. To the room. It is the only thing he knows to do right now that is useful and real. "Something warm."

Elena looks up at him. Just for a second.

"Okay," she says.

He goes to the kitchen. He hears, behind him, the couch shift; the Fighter coming to sit next to her, close, not saying anything. He hears nothing for a while and then he hears Elena say something very quietly in a voice he can't make out, and he doesn't try to, because that is not his to have right now.

He finds the onions.

He finds the garlic.

He turns the heat on and lets the kitchen fill with something warm and real and his, the only thing he has to give, and he stands at the stove and he does not think about the article or the man on the street or the bag that is gone or the canvases or the money.

He thinks about the Fighter's phone face-up on the counter, waiting for a doctor who hasn't called back. He thinks about the empty cabinet. He thinks about the man on the street with the article on his phone and Elena's face when she came through the door.

He stirs.

He thinks: we don't hide. We don't conform. We burn their labels.

He thinks: tomorrow we refuse their script.

And then, quieter, underneath all of it, the thing he does not say out loud but allows himself to think because he is alone at the stove and the apartment is not looking at him:

This is not enough. What I am doing right now is not enough. The onions and the garlic and the warm kitchen and the thing that will be ready when they need it; it is not enough. It has never been enough. I have been cooking for two years and it has never once fixed anything and I have known that and I have kept cooking because it was the only honest thing I had and I do not know what else to do.

He stands with that for a moment.

Then he stirs again.

Behind him, the apartment holds what it holds. The Fighter and Elena on the couch. The window. The city outside doing what it does.

The kitchen smells like something good.

He knows exactly what it is and what it isn't.

He keeps going anyway.

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The onions and the garlic. It's not enough. He keeps going anyway.