The Appointment Read Free Page A

after all, he’s doing his job. He rolls up his sleeve and glances at the clock. The time is easy to see, but not what I’m thinking. If Paul can’t see what I’m thinking, then certainly this man can’t.
    Paul sleeps next to the wall, while my place is toward the front edge of the bed, since I’m often unable to sleep. Still, whenever he wakes up he says:
    You were taking up the whole bed and shoved me right up against the wall.
    To which I reply:
    No way, I was on this little strip here no wider than a clothesline, you were the one taking up the middle.
    One of us could sleep in the bed and the other on the sofa. We’ve tried it. For two nights we took turns. Both nights I did nothing but toss around. My brain was grinding down thought after thought, and toward morning, when I was half asleep, I had a series of bad dreams. Two nights of bad dreams that kept reaching out and clutching at me all day long. The night I was on the sofa, my first husband put the suitcase on the bridge over the river, gripped me by the back of my neck, and roared with laughter. Then he looked at the water and whistled that song about love falling apart and the river water turning black as ink. The water in my dream was not like ink, I could see it, and in the water I saw his face, turned upside down and peering up from the depths, from where the pebbles had settled. Then a white horse ate apricots in a thicket of trees. With every apricot it raised its head and spat out the stone like a humanbeing. And the night I had the bed to myself, someone grabbed my shoulder from behind and said:
    Don’t turn around, I’m not here.
    Without moving my head, I just squinted out of the corners of my eyes. Lilli’s fingers were gripping me, her voice was that of a man, so it wasn’t her. I raised my hand to touch her and the voice said:
    What you can’t see you can’t touch.
    I saw the fingers, they were hers, but someone else was using them. Someone I couldn’t see. And in the next dream, my grandfather was pruning back a hydrangea that had been frost-burnt by the snow. He called me over: Come take a look, I’ve got a lamb here.
    Snow was falling on his trousers, his shears were clipping off the heads of the frost-browned flowers. I said:
    That’s not a lamb.
    It’s not a person, either, he said.
    His fingers were numb and he could only open and close the shears slowly, so that I wasn’t sure whether it was the shears that were squeaking or his hand. I tossed the shears into the snow. They sank in so that it was impossible to tell where they had fallen. He combed the entire yard looking for them, his nose practically touching the snow. When he reached the garden gate I stepped on his hands so he’d look up and not go wandering off through the gate, searching the whole white street. I said:
    Stop it, the lamb’s frozen and the wool got burnt in the frost.
    By the garden fence was another hydrangea, one that had been pruned bare. I gestured to it:
    What’s wrong with that one.
    That one’s the worst, he said. Come spring it’ll be having little ones. We can’t have that.
    The morning after the second night, Paul said:
    If we’re in each other’s way, at least it means we each have someone. The only place you sleep alone is in your coffin, and that’ll happen soon enough. We should stay together at night. Who knows the dreams he had and promptly forgot.
    He was talking about sleeping, however, not dreaming. At half past four in the morning I saw Paul asleep in the gray light, a twisted face above a double chin. And at that early hour, down by the shops, people were cursing out loud and laughing. Lilli said:
    Curses ward off evil spirits.
    Idiot, get your foot out of the way. Move, or do you have shit in your shoes. Open those great flapping ears of yours and you’ll hear what I’m saying, but watch you don’t blow away in this wind. Never mind your hair, we haven’t finished unloading. A woman was clucking, short and hoarse like a