Hopped Up

He had not slept in three days. The room moved when he stood. The drink was on the table and it was already half gone.

She came in from the bedroom with her hair down and her face washed and she looked at the drink first and at him second, the way she had started doing in the spring.

“You should eat.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You should sleep.”

“I can’t.”

She sat down across from him. The chair was the chair her father had given them when they had taken the apartment. The chair was the only thing in the room that was good, and the only thing in the room that was hers.

“What is it tonight.”

“Nothing.”

“It is not nothing.”

“It is not anything I can tell you.”

She watched him. She had a way of watching him that had used to feel like being held and had begun, somewhere around February, to feel like being read.

“The gin again.”

“Yes.”

“And the other thing.”

“Yes.”

“You said you were going to stop.”

“I am stopping.”

“When.”

He did not answer. The drink had the green herbal bitterness of the hops on top and the cool round vermouth underneath and it tasted, tonight, like a hallway he had walked down once as a child and could not now remember the end of.

“My mother called.”

“All right.”

“She wants us to come for Easter.”

“All right.”

“Will you come.”

“Yes.”

“Will you really come.”

He looked at her. He looked at her for the first time that night, properly, with both eyes, and he saw that she had been crying earlier, in the bedroom, with the door closed, and that she had washed her face so he would not have to see it, and that she had come out anyway, because she was a woman who came out anyway, and that this was the last time she was going to.

“No,” he said.

She nodded. She nodded the small nod of a person who has just been told something they have been preparing for, for a long time, and who is grateful, in a small bad way, to no longer have to prepare.

“All right.”

She stood up. She went to the closet. She took down her coat, the grey one, and she put it on, and she buttoned it slowly, from the bottom up, the way her mother had taught her.

“Where will you go.”

“My sister’s.”

“Tonight.”

“Tonight.”

“It’s late.”

“I know.”

She stood at the door. She did not slam it. She closed it gently, the way you close the door on someone you have decided about.

He finished the drink. He poured another. He did not move from the chair until morning. In the morning the light came in flat and grey over the table and the glass and his hands, and his hands were steady, which surprised him, and his chest was not, which did not.

He thought about the chair. He thought, for a long time, about the chair, and about her father, who had been a kind man, and who had given them the chair on a Sunday in autumn with both hands, and who was dead now, and who had liked him, and who had been wrong to.

He stood up. The room did not move.

He sat down again.

The room moved.

He laughed, once, the dry laugh of a man who has caught himself in a small joke nobody else will ever hear, and then he was quiet, and the apartment was quiet, and the day went on without him.