Making Room

On the afternoon of their first dinner alone, Laura nearly called Michael to postpone.

A client had arrived with papers that should have reached her a week earlier, and by five o’clock the work had spread across her desk. She had enough time to go home and change, provided she left immediately. Instead, she picked up another page.

For several minutes she read without absorbing much. She was considering the telephone call she could make, the apology Michael would probably accept, and the evening of work that would follow. Then she put the page down, told her assistant where the file belonged, and left.

Michael was waiting outside the restaurant when she arrived. He had come directly from his office too. She noticed the faint crease where his sleeves had been rolled up.

“I thought about canceling,” she admitted after they sat down.

“So did I.”

She looked at him.

“Not because of you,” he added.

“I was hoping that was understood.”

He smiled, and the awkwardness she had carried from the parking lot eased.

They ordered before discussing work. Laura had expected this to require discipline, but Michael asked about the place where she had grown up, and she found herself describing a horse who could identify an apple concealed in almost any pocket. He asked questions that kept her there: what the country looked like, how far she rode, whether she had been afraid.

“Sometimes. Usually afterward.”

He laughed and told her about a bicycle descent he had enjoyed considerably more before discovering how hot the wheel rims had become.

By the time their food arrived, she knew that he had grown up in a household where everyone talked at once, that he disliked being indoors through an entire weekend, and that he could cook three dinners reliably. He claimed a fourth, but only when the fish cooperated.

She liked the way he watched her when she spoke. At work, attention often came with an expectation attached. Someone wanted a decision, reassurance, a reason to stop worrying. Michael seemed willing to let a story take as long as it needed.

They were among the last to leave. Outside, neither moved immediately toward a car. He asked when he could see her again, and this time she named an evening before consulting all the reasons it might be difficult.

There were difficulties anyway.

A dinner became a late supper after Michael was delayed at the hospital. A Sunday walk disappeared beneath work Laura had believed she could finish Saturday. Once, she waited at a restaurant long enough to become embarrassed by the waiter’s kindness before Michael called the desk to reach her. He could not get away. She understood the reason and still drove home angry.

The next morning he called.

She let him apologize without relieving him of the need to do it. When he offered to come over that evening, she told him she had already made plans.

“All right,” he said. “When would suit you?”

It was a small exchange, but she remembered it. He neither argued with her disappointment nor behaved as though his work made it unreasonable.

A week later she did much the same thing to him.

He arrived at her office to find her still at the desk, jacket off, a sandwich untouched beside a stack of papers. They had intended to see a film. Laura glanced at the clock and began explaining how the afternoon had escaped her.

Michael pulled a chair closer.

“How long?”

“Twenty minutes.”

He looked at the sandwich.

“Have you eaten?”

“I’m going to.”

He sat back and picked up a magazine.

Forty minutes later she closed the file. He had read the magazine, returned it to the table, and was looking out the window.

“I’m sorry.”

“I believe the film has started.”

“We could still go.”

“I’d rather see the beginning.”

There was enough dryness in his voice to make her smile, though she could see he was annoyed. She put on her jacket, took the sandwich with her, and suggested a place still serving dinner.

Over the meal, they talked about making plans neither of them treated as provisional. Laura could hear how simple that sounded and how often she had failed to do it. Her own practice had taught her to regard an unfinished task as a claim on whatever time remained. She was less accustomed to recognizing an evening with someone as a claim of equal standing.

They began more modestly. One evening each week, arranged ahead. Calls when plans changed. No promise that a free Saturday meant the whole day was available, and no assumption that being busy meant the other person had nothing to do.

Within those arrangements, they became less careful.

Michael discovered that Laura could remain absorbed in a newspaper article while answering a question she had not heard. Laura learned that he became hungry well before admitting it, and that his tolerance for indecision declined accordingly. She began keeping something to eat in her bag when they went walking.

He had a habit of suggesting a short extension to any outing. There was another path, a viewpoint, a road that ought to bring them back. Laura, who might have objected to the planning, usually wanted to see what was there too. They once returned to the car in darkness and stood eating crackers over the open trunk.

“This was the short walk?” she asked.

“It was when we started.”

She handed him another cracker.

The first time he cooked for her, the fish did not cooperate. He stood over the pan with an expression she imagined his colleagues rarely saw. Laura opened a window while he tried to detach dinner from the bottom.

“I thought this was the fourth reliable meal.”

“The fourth was always conditional.”

They ate the portions he could rescue, along with bread and a salad large enough to suggest foresight. Afterward she helped wash up. His kitchen was orderly in the way of a room used by one person: the same plate within reach, one good knife, several cupboards containing things he apparently never needed. She dried a bowl and asked where it belonged.

He opened a cupboard, considered it, then moved something to make space.

Later, on the sofa, she rested against him while he told her about a patient who had argued for months about taking a holiday and then sent a postcard from Italy. Michael could not tell the story without smiling. Laura listened with her hand resting over his.

She had known affection before, and attraction. What surprised her was how quickly she had begun to want the ordinary account of his day. She liked hearing that he had lost an argument with a receptionist or found a better route home. She found herself saving things to tell him, small incidents that would have passed out of mind if she had not imagined his response.

Still, she sometimes needed an evening alone.

The first time she said so, she explained too much. There was laundry, a book she wanted to finish, things around the apartment. Michael listened until she began adding work to the list.

“Laura. Stay home.”

“You don’t mind?”

“I have things to do too.”

She believed him more easily after she called the following evening and learned he had spent most of it taking a bicycle apart in his living room. He seemed pleased with what he had accomplished, though she could not understand why a bicycle that worked needed to become several separate objects.

When she visited a few days later, it stood reassembled near the window. She lifted it by the saddle and was surprised by its weight.

“That’s all there is to it?”

He came over and held the handlebars while she examined it. The tires looked narrow, the saddle unpromising.

“You’d enjoy riding,” he said.

“I ride.”

“I meant one of these.”

She gave him a look. He smiled.

They did not arrange a ride that evening. There would be time for that later. He put the bicycle aside and took her coat, and she followed him into the kitchen, where dinner was proceeding without smoke.

By then, Helen had stopped asking whether they had seen each other. She asked what they were doing on Saturday, as though their plans had become a joint concern.

Laura noticed the change and said nothing. She had stopped regarding an invitation to Michael as something that needed to be fitted between the more permanent parts of her life. There were evenings when she left work unfinished because they had agreed to meet, and evenings when she stayed late because she chose to, then called him from the office. The distinction mattered to her.

One Friday, he arrived at her apartment carrying groceries. She was barefoot, sorting papers on the floor, and had forgotten to turn on a lamp as the room darkened.

He stepped around the papers and set the bags in the kitchen. A moment later he came back with two glasses.

“Are these in order?”

“They were.”

He looked down at his feet.

Laura laughed and moved a stack to clear a place beside her. He lowered himself carefully, handed her a glass, and asked which pile he was allowed to touch.

“None of them.”

“Useful to establish that.”

She leaned against his shoulder while he inspected the arrangement. For a little while neither of them moved. Then he set down his glass and held out a hand for the pages she was straightening.

“Tell me where these go.”

She gave him half the stack.