The Unsettling. Peter Rock
had already read the first three chapters. It was a novel where all the characters were rabbits, but it was for adults. Thick. Later, he borrowed it, to catch up on the beginning.
Louisa wanted him to read to her in the bedroom, so she could lie down and imagine it all. She set a chair next to the bed, then took off her shoes and stretched out.
This isn’t right, she said, after a few pages.
The way I’m reading? Marco said.
She said it was strange, because she couldn’t see him. She said that his voice was kind of disembodied, and that distracted her from following what was going on in the story.
Is it all right if I reach out and touch you? she said. While you read?
They tried it for another few pages, but she still couldn’t get a sense of him.
What is it? he said.
Your clothes, Louisa said. It might be better if I didn’t have to feel you through them. Is this turning too weird? You don’t know what it’s like, like this; I start to need different things to feel anything, to understand.
At first it seemed it would be enough to take off his shirt, to strip down to his underwear. Part of it was to test her, maybe, to see if she was having him on somehow, and part of it was that it excited him.
Did she know you were all the way naked? I said, afraid to interrupt.
I believe so, he said.
He had never been involved in anything like that, he told me, never felt that way. He’d been married before, even, and this was different—he felt it in his heart, he said, knowing how ridiculous that sounded. And he never even touched Louisa, not once, yet sometimes, as the weeks passed, he’d wake up in the middle of the night because he’d been laughing in his sleep. He’d just lie there, smiling in the darkness.
Are you happy? Louisa asked him, a little later, that first night.
I guess so, he said.
She told him it seemed like an uneven trade.
Well, he said. I can see. I can read. I can see you.
Are the lights on? she said. Can you see well enough?
Yes, he said, except you’re wearing clothes. As soon as he said that, he was sorry, and he wanted to take it back. He wanted to say it was a joke, but it was too late for that. Louisa had already begun to answer.
One piece at a time, she took off her clothing, folded it, and stacked it at the foot of the bed. She lay back, her hand on his leg again. He knew he was not allowed to touch her, just as she could not see him.
Now, read, she said.
And that’s how it always was, after that. There was nothing showy about it, as if she was alone, unlacing her shoes, unbuttoning her shirt as he began to read. He turned the lamp up high and moved it closer to her; her shadow twisted low across the opposite wall, attached to his by her hand, checking that he was there. He flexed his bare toes on the cool floorboards.
Louisa’s skin was dark and smooth, solid, hiding her bones. She wasn’t skinny. Her thighs were heavy, a scar above one knee. Stretching and turning over, she’d laugh and hold a smile, showing her teeth, listening. She had a faded tattoo of a rose on her right hip, and a smaller, clearer one over her right nipple. Perfume rose from her skin as Marco read; sometimes he’d look up into the full-length mirror on the wall, and see her thin waist angling out to her rounded hips, and himself, the book in one hand and a glass of water in the other.
He drank between chapters, rested his voice. He counted the few hairs that circled her nipples, watched how her breasts slid across each other when she turned, enough space between them to hide a flattened hand. The hair under her arms matched that between her legs, where the edges, unshaven, were growing back. Her eyes stared and stared, shining.
Are you happy? she asked him.
He told me that she wore no jewelry at all, that there was nothing on her. Nothing. She and Marco hardly spoke, except for his reading, or deciding on the time they’d next meet. He never asked about her husband, and Louisa never brought it up. He felt there were many silent understandings between them.
Of course it took him weeks to tell me all this, and even in pieces the information was not easy for me to process. It was difficult to shake. Sometimes, even now, I set a glass of water beside me and I hold a book in one hand. I read aloud, my voice echoing off the tight walls of the room I rent, not letting my eyes wander from the page, and I imagine my other hand belongs to Louisa, and that she is listening to me, and that she can’t see a thing.
Marco’s story was farfetched, but I had never known him to lie. Still, I’d sometimes watch him at work, pausing with a book open in front of him, and I’d wonder if he was coming up with stories to tell me, or searching for something for her, or if he was just staring into the words without reading them, trying to think.
We both slowed as the weeks went on; he slacked off worse than I did, but I didn’t mind. Mostly, we spent our time reading. We were using the rubber sponges, then, so there was no longer the vacuums’ roar. The reflection of the face shields made it difficult to read; sometimes we let the hoods slump over our backs and wore only the ventilator masks with the HEPA filters, our eyes clear and uncovered. In the books where the fungus had really taken hold, it bled down into the pages in red and purple stains, blurring letters, eating words that we could not recover.
Louisa and Marco did not always meet at the same time. Once she’d called him at three in the morning, saying she couldn’t sleep, saying she could hear his footsteps and wouldn’t he like to come read? They finished the first novel, then went through another, and another. She liked books about animals, others where women took charge.
One of their understandings was that she had to come for him, and not the other way around; after all, he was doing her a favor. It was on a night when he waited—listening for the doorbell, the phone, her knock on the wall—that he heard the man’s voice. Next door, and it was not the voice of Louisa’s husband.
Marco was jealous, partly, but he also feared something was wrong. He took a can of corn from his own cupboard, so he could use it as an excuse, say he forgot to give it to her.
He tried the doorknob before the bell, and the door swung open. He stepped inside, the can of corn in his fist, ready to hit someone with it. In the dim living room he moved around the furniture as easily as she had that first day. He’d come to know her house that well.
In the hallway, closer to the bedroom, he listened; something about the man’s voice seemed strange, the rhythm too regular and Louisa never interrupting. He stepped to the doorway and looked inside.
She was stretched out on the bed, wearing a long flannel nightgown, her face turned to the ceiling. On the bedside table, a tape recorder was playing, and the man’s voice looped out from it, a hiss behind his words.
Marco took another step, into the room, and waited there, silently. He could tell she sensed him, that she knew he was in the room, and the fact that she said nothing made it all worse. As the taped voice looped around, Marco turned and walked back down the hall. He locked the front door and gently pulled it closed.
The next day, she told him the news. Her vision was returning; it was clearer each day. And the reading couldn’t be the same if she could see the shape of him, his slumped shadow and the words coming out. Closing her eyes wouldn’t work, when she knew she could open them. Awkward—that’s the word she used. Soon she’d be able to read, once again, on her own.
When he told me that, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. He’d been right—something in me wanted to find her, to hold her down until she saw some sense.
Marco never read to her again. He did find a place, though, where they made those tapes; he went there and volunteered, read a whole book into a microphone. He hoped Louisa might hear his voice, and remember, and have second thoughts. The sadness I felt, hearing this, was like I’d breathed in the spores and they’d thickened in my throat,