Silk Slip in a Crown Heights Apartment, Night

Outside, a car passed with its bass turned up, and the sound moved through the wall the way sound always moved through this wall — low, blunted, intimate in its muffling. She had lain in this same bed at twenty-two and listened to the same street and thought she was learning something permanent about herself. Maybe she had been right.

The silk slip had pooled at her waist when she sat up earlier to open the window, and she hadn't straightened it. Now it lay across her hips at an angle, the hem resting against the top of her left thigh — cool where the night air had touched it, and warming slowly where her skin was warming it back. She noticed the exact line of it. She always noticed the exact line of things.

She was thirty-nine. She had slept in this apartment for six of those years, the last three alone. The bed still creaked at the upper left corner of the frame, the same corner, the same pitch. She had stopped noticing it for a long time and then started noticing it again.

The rabbit sat on the nightstand where she'd set it an hour ago, when she'd first thought about this, and then read a book instead, and then stopped reading. She was honest with herself about most things. She knew what the hour of reading had been.

She lay back. The streetlight came through the curtain at its usual angle, striping the ceiling, and she watched the stripe the way she always watched it — not looking for anything, just orienting. The ceiling was the same ceiling. The light was the same light, or close enough that the difference didn't matter.

What she remembered about being twenty-two was the quality of her own attention. How new everything had felt as information. His hands, the specific weight of them. The way she had catalogued every sensation because she hadn't known yet that she would remember it anyway, involuntarily, for seventeen more years.

She was still a cataloguer. It was just that now she had more to compare.

Her right hand moved to her sternum without her deciding to move it. She felt her own heartbeat there — steadier than she expected, or maybe exactly as steady as she should have expected. The silk shifted with her hand, cool and then not cool, the charmeuse catching the light for a moment before settling. Her left hand stayed where it was, open against the mattress, not gripping anything.

A bus groaned past on the avenue. She let the sound move through the room and out the other side.

She thought about the first time. She thought about the last time before that relationship ended, which she had not known at the time was the last time. She thought about the years arranged between those two points like rooms she had walked through, each one lit differently.

Her right hand moved lower. Not far. To the place where the slip's hem had settled — that cool-then-warm line across her thigh — and rested there, the fabric between her palm and her skin.

She held her breath without meaning to. Then let it out, longer than she'd taken it in, a sound that was almost nothing, almost a word.

Her knees were together. The slip lay across both of them, light as a reminder.

She reached for the nightstand.

Outside, the street kept on — bass from somewhere, a voice, the ordinary noise of a borough that did not know or care that she was in this bed again, in this body, about to find out what she remembered.