We Do What We Do in the Dark

by Michelle Hart

The woman kissed the same way she wrote: tender and terse. The economy of the kisses left Mallory wet with want.

Mallory realized this was how the woman was: she at once withheld and invited. The woman fulfilled so many of Mallory’s wants but left so many wants unfulfilled that the feeling of wanting in and of itself became desirable. There was an untouchable intensity, or an intense untouchability, to keeping a secret, to having a continuous crush, that Mallory wanted never to lose.

Whenever she wasn’t with the woman, Mallory was by herself in the library. She believed she had to be alone, since solitude was what made her available to the woman in the first place.

With the woman, Mallory had the endless sense of teetering on an edge; she was always on her best behavior. She expended a lot of energy on what to say and do. Mostly, she enjoyed this feeling, an extreme carefulness, like drawing without an eraser and with only one piece of paper.

That she was sleeping with a married woman closer to his age than her own was an act of such deviancy that she had the sense of having been parted from her previous life completely. Now, in the car, he called her “kiddo,” which felt unendurably gracious, like being given a gift by someone she hadn’t bought anything for.

The woman looked wistful, her face filled with the flush of girlhood. In this moment, Mallory thought she could make out the shape and color of the woman’s youth, though she wondered whether that youth had included other girls, another woman.

Mallory followed along with the lecture, which was on Twilight of the Idols. She chewed on her pen, taking it out of her mouth on occasion to underline the aphorisms she thought spoke to her own life: “The perfect woman indulges in literature just as she indulges in a small sin; as an experiment, in passing, looking around to see if anybody notices it—and to make sure that someone does.”

She worried her motherlessness, which Joseph knew about and had maybe relayed, was stamped across her forehead.

Mallory had the growing sense that Joseph wanted something from her that she was unable to give; both his asking and her lacking irked her. Any initial sympathy she experienced for him dissolved into an annoyance so red-hot it made her sweat.

He started to tell a story about another coworker of his who had, earlier that evening, before he got sick, wronged him in a small way that to him felt catastrophic. Mallory did not know or care about this person. It was a pleasant day outside, still chilly but the sun shone bright. As he spoke, she became aware of how little daylight there was left. His story filled her ears the way music from a radio punctures a peaceful reverie on the beach. She couldn’t wait to be back in her room, alone with her own thoughts.

The woman looked at her then. “Listen,” the woman whispered, which made Mallory worry she herself had been talking too loudly. “You and I understand one another in a way that, you will learn, is very rare. These last few months have not been easy for me. I’ve missed the way you look at me.” Mallory looked up at the woman, feeling how wide her own eyes were, wanting to take in whatever the woman wanted to offer. She imagined she watched the woman the way a child looks at someone who is reading her a book. “Yes,” the woman said, “like that. You have to know how good that feels. You have to know how horrible it is not to have it.”

Hannah ran to the dog, squatted, and held Wednesday in her arms. For a moment, Mallory imagined herself as the dog, how good that kind of devotion would feel from a girl her age.

Hannah’s family had moved to New Jersey from Buffalo; it had been her father’s shirt. After O. J.’s acquittal, her father had wanted to burn it, but Hannah, who was seven at the time of the trial, began wearing it to bed instead. She also, Mallory knew, kept a cache of the crime-scene photos on the family computer in a folder marked “Boring Homework.”

That she became privy to something before Hannah, who was a year older, made her think she would be more successful later in life.

The cloth in Mrs. Allard’s hand showed the smeared remnants of blush and eyeshadow, the detritus of everyday womanhood. It was a marvelous allowance, Mallory saw then, to be given a glimpse of what another woman kept hidden.

It was as though time had slowed, or stopped, and Mallory thought then of what the woman from college had once said about misery: that it was pleasing in its ability to make things stand still, which was why miserable people often did things that extended their misery.

Before they went over to Mallory’s spot, the woman poured milk into her coffee cup. Mallory, who had learned back in college that the woman typically drank her coffee black, asked her about it. The woman stirred in the milk. “Black coffee yellows the teeth,” she said. “I went out with a man a few weeks ago who kept looking at my mouth and running his tongue over his own gums. He told me that my teeth had a tint. Can you believe that?”

It felt nice to stroll alongside the woman in public, as if they were friends, perhaps equals. But then Mallory wondered whether their being equals would make her less interesting to the woman. The woman already had a lot of friends.

Recently, though, there were times when she wondered what her life would be like without the possibility of the woman in it, times when she wished the woman’s voice in her ear would quiet, when she wished she could look at herself without trying to see through the woman’s eyes, could take a step without wondering what the woman would do and how she would do it.

She had once gotten so much pleasure thinking of herself as a character in the woman’s life, as if she weren’t really a person at all but words on a page awaiting further instructions, yet in the years since their affair she just felt blank.

Breakfast was a soft-boiled egg, served in a shot glass, and buttered toast, which the woman had cut into strips. The woman offered milk for Mallory’s coffee, but Mallory told her she still drank it black. They ate on the patio. It was another sunny day in Salem. They were quiet. Mallory didn’t know how to eat a soft-boiled egg. She didn’t know what she was doing there or why she had come. She didn’t know anything.