The Return Ticket

Felix arrived in Copenhagen on a Thursday carrying one small bag and no apology for the time it had taken him to come.

I met him at the station. He stepped off the train, looked past the signs he couldn’t read and found me by the clock. The sight of him among strangers gave me a moment’s shy pleasure. I knew him in London, where the streets had known us as friends before we knew ourselves as anything else. Here I could take his hand without the city having an earlier version to compare it with.

“Was the journey all right?” I asked.

“Yes. Dad sent a message from my aunt’s place. He wanted me to know he got there without my assistance.”

“Was he offended you asked?”

“He sent a photograph of his ticket. I think that’s an answer.”

We walked to my rented room. I had cleared one shelf of its notes and left him half the narrow wardrobe. He put down his bag and studied the two halves of the blue plate on the windowsill.

“You haven’t glued it.”

“I haven’t decided what to use it for.”

“Fair.”

He turned toward me. I had imagined several things I might say when we were finally alone. None survived the small room, his hand finding mine or the tired, delighted line at the edge of his mouth.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked.

“You’ve spent months asking me through a screen.”

“That wasn’t an answer.”

“Yes.”

He kissed me. I felt the day’s travel in the way he leaned against me for a moment and let me hold him. We had spent so much of our time apart speaking carefully that the weight of him came as a relief. I took his coat off. He caught my wrist and pressed a kiss to the inside of it, just above the place I measured a sleeve. I wanted to show him the studio, the market, the path beside the water. I wanted to keep him here until morning.

“We can go out later,” I said.

“I hoped you might say that.”

We went to the bed together. I stopped once to ask if he wanted to rest. He said he wanted me, then asked me to come closer. The rest of the afternoon passed behind a closed door, with all the time we had actually chosen.

· · ·Scene break

On Friday Mette let me show him the studio after the workrooms had closed. Nothing on the benches was ours to photograph or handle; I kept him in the corridor and showed him the light, the cabinets and the long table where we wrote records. He listened when I described the dark mend on the scarf and asked why I had kept the first photograph. I told him how much I had learned from being made to account for my error.

“You like being answerable here,” he said.

“I do. I like that it isn’t only my judgment.”

We passed the notice for the continuing role on a board near the door. It was open now. I had printed the application questions and answered half of them, then stopped.

“I haven’t submitted it,” I said.

“I can see that you’re still deciding.”

Earlier that day I had taken him along the street where I bought my bread. The woman at the counter had learned my order and none of the rest of me. Felix had pointed to a pastry neither of us could name, and we ate it on a bench by the water. He brushed sugar from his coat with the seriousness he gave sawdust. I had expected him to admire the city on my behalf. Instead he asked which turns I took when I was late, which window I looked for from the tram and whether the bakery ever sold out before I arrived. He wanted to know the life I had made here, not a collection of sights he could take home.

It made the notice harder to ignore. I liked that he could stand beside me in Copenhagen without turning it into a foreign place I had to explain. I also knew he was here for days, not for the years a continuing job would ask of me.

“If I apply and get it, I’ll have to tell Rafi she cannot plan on my coming home. I don’t want her waiting while I see whether I can win something here.”

“Then give her a date for your answer. You can still apply before you know what she’ll do.”

I shook my head. “It would feel like holding two rooms until one of them chooses me.”

“You’re allowed to look at two rooms. You aren’t allowed to pretend they both stay empty for you.”

I had heard him speak that way to customers choosing timber: plain about what could be kept and what would be gone when the boards were cut. I did not want him to solve this as a carpenter. I wanted him to tell me whether he could bear what I was considering.

We walked outside. The evening was cold enough that I put my hand in his coat pocket beside his. At the corner he stopped.

“I can’t move the workshop here,” he said. “Not for the next few years. I have the library work and the clients who come back to me. Dad is happy living where he lives, and I want to be near him. I could visit. I could learn how to do that well. I can’t promise to become a man with a shop in your city.”

It was the answer I had expected. Hearing it where the studio windows stood behind us made it newly painful.

“I didn’t ask you to,” I said.

“I know. I didn’t want you to have to ask before I told you.”

“What if I stay?”

“Then I will have to decide whether I can keep doing this with you. I won’t make that decision for both of us tonight.”

I felt anger rise, more at the limits of the answer than at him. He had crossed a sea to see me; I wanted his arrival to make the question smaller. Instead he had given me the shape of the life he could offer. I took my hand from his pocket and kept walking.

At the crossing I said, “I don’t want to choose London because you’re there, then resent you each time a job here would have been easier.”

“I don’t want that either.”

“I also don’t want to stay because this place would let me postpone failing on my own.”

“You might not fail.”

“That’s the trouble. I don’t know.”

The light changed. He waited while I crossed, then followed. I stopped on the far side and looked back at him.

“I love you,” I said. The words were awkwardly timed and exactly true. “It isn’t an argument for either city. I needed you to know it before I decide.”

He came close enough to take my hand if I offered it. “I love you too. I have for a long time. The length of it doesn’t give me an answer to your work.”

“Good,” I said, though I was crying. “I would hate it if it did.”

He took the hand I held out. We found a place to eat and stayed until the tables around us emptied. We spoke about the food, his father’s ticket, Rafi’s new mirror. Neither of us tried to turn the declaration into a contract. When we went back to my room, I moved the job application from the desk so there was space for our supper receipt. The papers would be there on Monday when he had gone, and so would the choice.