Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

He read to me for three and a half hours, pausing only to sip at a lukewarm glass of water. I listened. I listened hard, trying not to be distracted by the pop and thump of the fireworks, by the celebrating students, whose laughter occasionally rose and broke, by the low bass notes that emerged from someone’s tape player and moved through the ground and up the hill to me until I felt them in my back. I listened, knowing I’d have to ask intelligent questions when he was done. Wanting to ask those questions — the work was good, it was interesting, part of it was mine. All of it was what I thought I wanted to do.

Walter finished reading just before midnight. ‘Well?’ he said. His face was tired and drawn, but he looked happy.

‘It’s wonderful,’ I said, and it was. It was original and interesting and well-written. It wasn’t hard to praise.

‘Really?’ he said. ‘Really?’ He slid down the couch to the end where I’d draped my legs, and he touched me shyly on the shin. I raised myself up on my elbows and looked at him.

‘Really,’ I said. ‘This is wonderful stuff.’

He reached for my leg just as the students galloped up the hill and pounded on the door. Each night after supper, they all came to the trailer for a general meeting, to discuss the plans for the following day. But they had never burst in like this before. Walter glared at the door, his fingers an inch from my leg. I scrabbled to my feet and went to intercept the students. There they were, the six of them, and in the front stood the dark-haired one named Tony, whom I had sometimes stared at. I was twenty-four then, no older than most of them; Walter was thirty-six and old for his age.

‘You guys ,’ Tony said, peering through the door at Walter surrounded by his papers. ‘I can’t believe you’re still working .’

‘We’ve been going over the new manuscript,’ Walter said stiffly.

‘Come on,’ Tony said. ‘It’s a holiday. We’ve got some beer down there, and some barbecued chicken, and some tunes …’

‘I can’t,’ Walter said. ‘But thanks for asking. You enjoy yourselves.’

My hand was resting against the doorframe and Tony covered it with his. ‘What about you?’ he asked, so softly that Walter might not have heard him. ‘You don’t have to stay — just come down for a while, get high, relax a little …’

I turned my head over my shoulder and saw Walter, watching me intently. I turned my head back to Tony, who was smiling. Whose hand still covered mine. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, more drawn than I wanted to admit. ‘Maybe …’

‘Yeah?’ he said. ‘Great.’

But when I turned my head again I saw that Walter’s face was stricken. We hadn’t finished talking about his paper; we’d only barely begun. He’d read to me for all those hours and I’d hardly given him anything back. ‘Um, actually,’ I said to Tony, ‘maybe not. Or at least not till later.’

Tony laughed and made a curious face, almost a smirk, almost a leer. One of the students behind him whispered something to another and then both of them giggled. I realized, for the first time, that they all assumed Walter and I were sleeping together.

I shut the door. I sent them away. For an hour I told Walter, in great detail, how good his paper was, and then we went to our separate beds and Walter had one of his frequent nightmares, which he never discussed but which I knew about because he sometimes called out in his sleep. That night, while I lay awake listening to Tony and the others party on the stretch of sand below us, I heard Walter make his broken cry; he sounded so unhappy that I crept across the corridor to his room and woke him up. I led him gently to the living room and made some coffee, watching as the still invisible sun began to lighten the sky. Walter sat heavily in his striped pajamas, his face droopy and fogged.

‘I dreamed I lost my research grant,’ he said. ‘That I had to go back and work for my old advisor. As a technician. Jesus.’

The window in the living room was half-hidden by a pair of ugly fiberglass curtains framing it on either side. We kept it open for the breeze, even though the screen had long since rotted away. Walter had talked about fixing it for weeks, but the plague of bugs we’d dreaded had never materialized, and so he kept putting it off. Because the window faced the woods, I had never drawn those curtains closed. I had never touched them until that morning, when I tugged at the drawcord and tried to open them wider, so the dawn could lighten Walter’s clouded face.

The curtains hardly moved at all. When I pulled the cord again, we heard a noise. ‘What’s that?’ Walter asked. I heard a tiny scritching sound, like toenails on glass.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. I moved to the center of the window and grasped a fold of curtain in my hand, peeling it away so I could examine the rod. Rusted hooks, maybe. I rolled the fabric over and then froze, staring at what I held in my hand. The curtain was lined with tiny brown bats, a solid mat from edge to edge and floor to ceiling, like a moth-eaten moleskin coat. The bats hung upside down by their claws with their wings wrapped around them like shawls and their small faces, cross with interrupted sleep, peering out at me. I screamed when two of them moved, and Walter rushed to my side.

‘Jesus!’ he said. ‘This is fantastic! A whole colony, probably sleeping here every day after they finish feeding for the night …’ He turned back the other curtain, which was similarly lined, and at that second touch the bats stirred themselves, the whole mass shifting and unwrapping their wings. When I started crying, they poured out the window in three streams that looked like smoke.

Walter put his arm around me, genuinely puzzled. ‘What are you afraid of?’ he asked softly.

What makes you cry in your dreams? I wanted to ask him that, ask him why he’d kept me up in this trailer, listening to him, while everyone else played below; why he’d let me live in his house for a year when he didn’t travel all that much and had no plants to water, no pets to feed.

‘They won’t hurt you,’ he said, his hands stroking my hair. ‘There’s nothing scary about them. They’re like spiders — very friendly and smart. Useful. They eat bugs — that’s probably why we’ve been so comfortable here without the screen.’

Stroke, stroke; very calm and rational, as if he were afraid of nothing in the night. I hated spiders almost as much as I hated bats, and I wasn’t comforted. The bats had been there all summer, roosting secretly after their nighttime expeditions, and I had never noticed them. They could have nested in my hair. I couldn’t stop crying.

Walter stroked the back of my neck and then my back and then my hips. I’d lost thirty pounds since I’d started school and so I didn’t feel I had to fling his hand away. Gently, he closed the curtains and led me to the couch, where the manuscript he’d read to me still lay in a yellow heap.

‘Ssh,’ he said, laying me down among the papers. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.’

The bats made a whispering noise as the last of them left, and we made love surrounded by fish. People gave these to Walter, because of the work he did: fish pictures and fish statues and fish cups and vases and bowls; fish lapel pins and cufflinks, fish ties, fish hats. Walter had arranged these along the shelves and walls, and all summer I’d smiled at this evidence of something warm and boyish in him. I thought any man who’d keep these things and display them so proudly must have a sweet inside. Walter was shy, I thought. The fish eyes glinted at me. Walter was reserved. But I knew him better than anyone, I could find what was hidden in him.

‘You’re so soft,’ he said to me later, and his clumsiness told me he meant it. ‘So smooth.’