The Sea Came in at Midnight Read Online Free PDF

instructed and lay on the bed, where she waited three hours in the dark until he finally came for her. Don’t pretend, he said, because you think it will please me. I would rather you said nothing at all. I would rather you showed no feeling whatsoever. So she refined her impassivity. She was naked on her bed most of the days that followed, industrial rave and Liszt’s “Transcendental Etudes” playing in the background, viscera twinkling along the flesh horizon of her body like the lights of the Hollywood Hills. Through the open window of her room she could smell the eucalyptus and the smoke of the city. Some nights he took her to his own bed, always dismissing her when he finished except once when he drank too much and, unable to perform, passed out and she fell asleep next to him. In those first few weeks he often came to her in the dark early-morning hours when she was still asleep. She would stir awake to find he had slipped into her soundlessly, pinning her to the bed by her wrists as if afraid she would run away, even though she was barely conscious.
    Up and down the house stacked against the hillside in three narrow stories, she wandered aimlessly, standing naked for hours in the large windows overlooking the city, while he vanished into a room on the bottom floor that he always kept closed and locked. Be ready in an hour, he would tell her before disappearing for three or four, commissioning her to her room to wait on her bed, in the dark, in her daydreams.

T HEY DIDN’T CONVERSE AT all. Everything about his manner discouraged conversation. After a couple of days she couldn’t remember whether she had even told him her name, and once when she almost blurted, I’m Kristin, he looked at her as though he knew exactly what she was about to say and adamantly didn’t want to hear it.
    They didn’t eat together or pass time together otherwise, and the house became more hers than his, since he confined himself to the locked room on the bottom floor. He had no hours or daily clock, from what she could tell, his days and nights running together. He never slept, as such; rather he just passed out now and then from exhaustion or drink or terrible headaches that plagued him on a regular basis. Sometimes the headaches incapacitated him, sometimes he seemed to draw energy from them as though the pain radiating from behind his hot blue eyes propelled him through the day and his work. Sometimes he would lie on the sofa or his bed holding his head in his hands, his unblinking eyes focused straight ahead of him as though he was staring into a piece of blue sky lodged in the ceiling above, waiting to catch sight of something. “Are you all right?” she asked one afternoon, finding him like that in the living room.
    She didn’t know which startled him more, the question itself or just the sound of her voice. “Yes,” he finally answered quietly through his clenched teeth. He lay there with his eyes closed a few more minutes before opening them to see her still there: “It comes and goes,” he added, more as a dismissal of her than an explanation.
    Oh, excuse me, she almost answered, did I cross a line? Did I overstep my bounds, trying to relate to you as a human being? But she bit her tongue and came over and knelt down on the floor beside him and began to rub his head.
    “What are you doing?” he asked.
    “Rubbing your head.”
    “Why?”
    She nodded. “Good question.” She stood and turned and walked away, stopping at the stairs only when she thought he might say something. But he’d already forgotten her.
    Downstairs, when he was inside the locked room below her, she could hear the vodka bottles rolling around on the floor. But he never sounded or smelled or staggered like a drunk man, the way her uncle did back on Davenhall Island, and he never became violent with her like a drunk man, though the sounds that came from the locked room were often violent, hoarse cries of desperation, either from the headaches,