The Closed Coil

Keir lost the green turn again, though there was no green turn left to lose.

His hand kept reaching for it. Eleven years of a movement did not cease because he had knowingly let the movement go. At the west bridge he drew the thread too low, tried to correct it and scattered a pale curve across the water.

A passer-by applauded.

He wanted to throw something.

Instead he smiled, gathered the course and started again.

By the time he finished, Blythe would be waiting. They had agreed he would come for the last of the stew. She would have completed her own work, set the table, begun some small task to avoid admitting she was listening for his knock.

He knew that listening now. He did it when she came to him.

He could go home. Keep his word about the hour and accept that the course would be rough tonight. But a rough place left untended became a different rough place tomorrow, and he had already used three evenings trying to settle this one.

Or he could bank the long outer turn.

The thought had come before. He had dismissed it as something he might consider when he was not tired, hungry and impatient to see a woman. This seemed a sound rule, right up until he wanted to break it.

The outer turn held almost an hour of each evening. It was not essential to the rest. It was beautiful. A broad falling sweep, white at the edge, built from years of walking the high road in different weather. Losing it would make the course shorter. The remaining turns might even move better without the weight.

He had thought that last part for months, before Blythe. He had told nobody because it sounded ungrateful to a work that had made his name.

Now the thought came conveniently attached to her warm kitchen.

He stood on the bridge, holding the thread between both hands.

There was no urgency. No danger. He could wait.

He banked the outer turn.

The white sweep folded into the coil and went dark. For a moment he felt only relief. His hand unclenched. The work no longer pulled toward the high road.

Then he understood that he could never walk that particular road inside the light again.

He stood until the relief and the loss stopped trying to replace each other.

When he reached Blythe’s house, he was only a few minutes late.

“That was quick,” she said.

“It settled early.”

The lie came out small and easy.

She smiled, pleased for him, and he had his first clear opportunity to correct it.

He kissed her instead.

· · ·Scene break

For four evenings the arrangement worked.

That was the humiliating part. If it had failed at once, he could have regretted a foolish act and told the truth with the failure as his excuse. Instead he finished early. He ate supper while it was hot. Once he and Blythe walked to the upper terrace after both their circuits and watched ordinary cloud pass over the moon.

She leaned against the wall beside him, her hand inside his coat pocket with his because she had forgotten her gloves.

“This is possible,” she said.

“What is?”

“Evenings. I had begun to think we could only have the edges.”

He felt the words land on the lie.

“Some evenings,” he said.

“Some is good.”

It was good. That was true. He had chosen to change his own work, and he did not regret every part of the choice. He could have told her all of that.

Instead he worried she would look at the lost turn and think he had begun the very thing she feared: making a gift she would later be asked to repay. So he kept the loss private, as though concealment could remove the implication.

On the fifth evening she came to watch him.

He knew as soon as she asked that he should tell her before they left the house.

He did not.

They walked to the west bridge. The course moved lightly now, without the long white sweep. He shaped a smaller curve, gave it a little extra space and hoped the change would look like ordinary development.

Blythe watched in silence.

At the corner where he usually turned toward the high road, he went left.

“Aren’t we going up?” she asked.

“Not tonight.”

“Where is the white part?”

He kept his eyes on the thread.

“I banked it.”

She stopped walking.

He gathered the light and closed the coil. The sudden ordinary darkness made the oil lamp at the corner look harsh.

“When?” she asked.

“Last Thursday.”

“The night it settled early.”

He nodded.

Blythe looked at the high road. He could see her remembering what she had watched, the falling sweep she had stood beneath without speaking.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought you’d think I’d done it for you.”

“Had you?”

“Partly.”

He wanted to improve the answer. He made himself stop there.

“Partly because I wanted the time. Partly because I was tired of carrying a turn I no longer knew how to change. Those were both true.”

“Then why tell me something else?”

“Because I didn’t want to have the conversation.”

She looked back at him.

It was not a good answer. It was the first honest one he had given.

A cart rattled around the corner. They moved aside together, as practiced already in small accommodations as people who had known each other much longer. That ordinary ease hurt him.

“I don’t need permission to change the course,” he said.

“I haven’t asked for that.”

“I know.”

“Do you? Because I can hear you preparing to defend against something I haven’t said.”

He put his hands in his pockets, then took them out again. There was nowhere useful to put them.

Blythe went on, her voice low.

“You let me believe the old arrangement had become easier. I was deciding what I could keep, what I could change, with you beside me pretending nothing had moved.”

“I wasn’t pretending nothing had moved. I—”

“You told me it settled early.”

“Yes.”

There was no way around that sentence. He had meant it as a small protection and used it to make her wrong about her own life.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She looked tired suddenly.

“I would have listened.”

“I know.”

“No. You didn’t trust that.”

He could not deny it.

She pushed her hands into her coat pockets. He had wanted to kiss her at their first supper. He wanted to now, and understood that wanting gave him nothing to do about it.

“I’m going home,” she said.

“May I walk with you?”

“Not tonight.”

He stepped back.

She took two steps, stopped and turned.

“I am not asking you to put it back. I know you can’t. I am not asking you to regret having evenings. I want you to stop deciding which truth I can be allowed near.”

“I will.”

“Don’t make it easy by saying it quickly.”

She left him at the corner.

Keir stood until she was out of sight, then walked home the long way, up the high road he no longer needed for the course.

At the top he could see the windows of the city. Hundreds of ordinary rooms, each holding people who probably also believed they were making sensible decisions until someone they cared about repeated their own words back to them.

He wanted the white turn.

He wanted the four evenings.

He wanted not to have lied to obtain both the evenings and the appearance of having lost nothing.

Two of those wants could still be part of his life. The third would have to become something he did differently.

At home he set the coil on the table beside the bent spoon. The house looked as it had before Blythe came: the cup on the sill, the lamp by the chair, the unfinished bird.

Nothing had been taken away.

He had not known a room could feel so full of an absence he had made himself.