The Safekeep(5)

It was gaudy. Eva had hung red gauzy fabrics from the ceiling to drape over the bed like a canopy, pulled them through to the rest of the room: over the cabinet, over the chair. There were too many carpets on the floor, overlapping. On the wall she’d installed several clumsy paintings of abstracted faces.

“Aren’t they nice?” she said. “A friend of mine painted them. A secret genius, wouldn’t you say?”

“Oh,” Hendrik said, nodded excitedly, squeezed Isabel harder. “Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.”

There was not really anywhere to sit. Louis took the armchair. Hendrik and Isabel sat on the edge of the bed. Eva brought a stool from the kitchen, and then drinks, all poured in assorted glasses. They all stayed in their tightly stretched silence. Eva’s furious blush was back. Louis was flipping through a book he’d left by the chair’s leg. Then Eva said, “Music!” and went to put on a record. Too loud at first, she had to go back to lower the volume. Then, reinstalled, she began with a—

“So Louis tells me all three of you grew up in—”

“Do you live here now?” Hendrik interrupted, looking around him. “In this room? With Louis?”

“Oh, I,” she started, and Louis said, “We’re looking for a new place.” And Hendrik said, “Together?” And Louis said, “What of it, together? Of all people who are you to—”

Hendrik turned sharp. “?‘Of all people,’ what does that mean?”

“Not so loud,” Isabel said, looking at the wall, and Louis huffed and said, “Maurice is not home, Isa, you are saved from social embarrassment,” and Isabel, not wanting to reply to the comment but still wanting to push back, said, “I don’t like that man,” at which point Eva jumped in with an “Oh really?”

They all looked at her. Isabel said, “I don’t.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“I just don’t.” Isabel wasn’t often asked to explain her likes, her dislikes. Isabel was not often asked anything at all, between the house and the shops and weekly calls with Hendrik. Who was there, to ask her anything? She said, “He acts—suspicious.”

Something glimmered in the way Eva considered her now. That flash: there it was. She was sitting up straighter, just a fraction. She said, “Suspicious how?”

“He skulks.” One time Isabel had waited for Louis in the hallway, and Maurice had stood there with her the whole time: eyes blank on a bit of the wall just above her shoulder.

“Skulks?” Eva said it like she had never heard the word before.

“Oh, who cares about Maurice,” Louis said, louder than the both of them, and Isabel blinked. Took a breath, looked away. Sat up straighter now, too. Eva went to fiddle with the music again. Her blush was gone. The back of her neck looked brown against the yellow of her hair.

When Hendrik and Isabel left, she was small and saccharine again: standing by the door, short and leaned into Louis, arm around his waist, waving, waving. Saying, “So lovely! So lovely! We’ll see you soon!”

When she’d leaned in to say goodbye to Isabel earlier, she’d briefly steadied herself with a hand to Isabel’s waist. Squeezed, quick but sure. Isabel felt the weight of that touch as they walked back down the boulevard—pressed her own hand to it. To Hendrik she said, “I don’t like her.”

Hendrik laughed very loudly. “Didn’t you, now? I hadn’t a clue.”

“No, I mean,” she began, reordered her thoughts. “No, I mean, I think—there’s something, I don’t think she’s—”

“God, the gauze,” Hendrik said, lips tight around a cigarette, trying to light it against the sea wind. Night had fallen in full. The sea hissed on the beach below. “I thought I was going to cry, oh my God, and Louis just let her—the carpets! I can’t believe it. He is never going to live this down, he is never going to—”

“Wait,” Isabel said, but it was very quiet, and carried away by the wind. Hendrik didn’t hear it. He continued on, listing moments: When she—! And did Isabel see when she—!

Isabel thought of the quick widening of Eva’s eyes when she said, Oh really? The flare of her nostrils. The line of her spine. That pinch of goodbye at Isabel’s waist. How Louis went a little slack when Eva touched him. Don’t obsess over this, Hendrik had said earlier that night. He said it at least once every time they met. Over the phone, too, in his letters: to not obsess over money, to not obsess over the way the maid cleans the windows, to not obsess over Johan and his intentions, the way he stared, the way he put his hand to Isabel’s waist—fingers fanned out.

Isabel worried the skin on the back of her hand. Hendrik noticed, midspeech, pulled her hand away, took it in his instead. He wavered in his walk, unsteady. They were nearing his car.

“I’ll drive you,” she said.

“Noooo.” He leaned his head into her shoulder. “I’m fine!”

“I’m driving you.”

“Isa,” he said. “Your train! Your train times!”

“I’ll take the tram to the station.”

“Sister,” he said now, trying to wrap his arms around her, locking her at the elbows. She didn’t like this kind of touch, the kind that restricted, and he knew it, did it with all the purpose in the world: too heavy, too tight. Drunk. “Och, sister sister sister!” She struggled against him. He laughed some more, let her go.