The Returned Gaze

The first thing I noticed was the way my wife held the phone away from her ear, like it had suddenly gotten hot. She was standing at the kitchen counter, the one we'd argued about for three months before buying, the marble one that cost more than my first car. Her knuckles were pale around the edge of the case.

"You're joking," she said. Then, after a pause long enough for me to put down the knife I was using to cut limes, "No. No, of course. Bring him. Bring everyone."

She turned to look at me. Not at me exactly. Through me. That look she gets when she's already somewhere else, planning something, arranging furniture in a room I haven't seen yet.

"Fernanda," she said, and the name landed in the kitchen like a dropped glass.

I knew the name. Of course I knew the name. It was the name that came up when we were twenty-three and stupid and sleeping on a mattress on the floor of an apartment in Pinheiros with a leak in the ceiling that dripped into a bucket every forty seconds. It was the name that came up less and less over the years, until it stopped coming up at all.

"Fernanda," I repeated.

My wife hung up. She set the phone down on the marble, face-first, like she didn't want it looking at her.

"She's coming Saturday. With her husband. They're passing through on their way to the coast."

"Passing through from where?"

"Lisbon. They moved back six months ago. She said she tried to find us on Instagram but couldn't."

"We're not on Instagram."

"I know."

She picked up the knife I'd put down and started cutting the limes herself, even though I hadn't finished. She cut them wrong, too thick, the way she always did when she was thinking about something else. The juice ran across the cutting board and onto the counter and she didn't wipe it.

"Eight years," she said. "Maybe nine."

"Nine."

"You kept count."

"I didn't keep count. I just know."

She looked at me then, really looked, and there was something in her face I couldn't name. Something between a question and a warning. Then she smiled, that quick smile she has, the one that closes a door before you notice it was open.

"Help me with the guest room," she said.

---

The guest room was where we kept everything we didn't know what to do with. Old yearbooks. A broken exercise bike. Boxes of books we'd moved four times without opening. My wife stood in the doorway while I dragged the bike into the hallway, and I could feel her watching the back of my neck.

"We should paint it," she said.

"It's Saturday. Today's Thursday."

"So we paint it fast."

We painted it a color called Morning Mist, which was white with a hint of something else, something you couldn't quite see unless the light hit it right. We painted until eleven at night. She worked the roller and I did the edges with a brush, and we didn't talk much, and when we did it was about the trim, the tape, whether we had enough drop cloths. Normal things. The kind of things you talk about when you're not talking about anything else.

At some point she went to take a shower and I stayed in the room, sitting on the floor with my back against the wall, waiting for the second coat to dry. The window was open and I could hear the city, the traffic on Faria Lima, someone's dog barking three floors down. I thought about Fernanda.

Not in the way you're probably thinking. I thought about her laugh, which was loud and unselfconscious and always slightly too much for whatever room she was in. I thought about the way she used to call my wife "bicha" as a term of endearment, which made no sense and which nobody else was allowed to say. I thought about the night the three of us drove to the beach in a car with no air conditioning and got there at sunrise and Fernanda took off her clothes and walked into the water without saying a word, just walked in, and my wife laughed and followed her, and I stayed on the sand, watching, twenty-three years old and certain I understood something about my life that I didn't understand at all.

My wife came out of the bathroom with wet hair and a towel around her shoulders.

"You're still in here," she said.

"Waiting for the paint to dry."

"It's dry."

She walked past me into the bedroom. I heard the bed creak when she sat down. I stayed on the floor a few more minutes, listening to the city, and then I got up and closed the window and turned off the light.

---

Friday she cooked. All day. She made feijoada, which takes hours and which she never makes, not even for holidays, not even for her mother. The apartment smelled like bay leaves and pork and something darker underneath, something that had been simmering since Thursday night.

I came home from work and found her at the stove, stirring, her hair pulled back with a clip I hadn't seen in years.

"You're making feijoada," I said.

"I'm making feijoada."

"For Fernanda."

"For everyone."

She didn't turn around. I stood in the doorway of the kitchen and watched her shoulders, the way they moved when she stirred, small and precise. She's always been precise. It's one of the things I love about her. It's one of the things that scares me.

"Do you want help?"

"No."

I went to the living room and turned on the TV and didn't watch it. I thought about calling my brother, who lives in Curitiba and who I talk to maybe twice a year, and saying nothing in particular, just to hear a voice that wasn't hers. I didn't call him. I sat there with the remote in my hand and the sound off and the feijoada smell filling the apartment, and I tried to remember the last time I'd seen Fernanda.

It was at a wedding. Whose wedding? Someone from college. I remember a hotel ballroom with bad lighting and a band playing covers of songs that were already old. I remember Fernanda in a red dress, dancing with a man I didn't know, and my wife watching her from across the room with an expression I couldn't read. I remember leaving early. I remember my wife being quiet in the car. I remember asking her what was wrong and her saying nothing, and me believing her, because I was young and because believing her was easier.

That was nine years ago. The man in the red dress, I assumed, was the husband. The one coming Saturday. The one passing through on the way to the coast.

I turned off the TV and went to the kitchen.

"Tell me about him," I said.

"About who?"

"Fernanda's husband."

My wife tasted the feijoada from the wooden spoon. She made a face, added salt, tasted again. Then she said, "I don't know anything about him. I've never met him."

"But you know his name."

"Of course I know his name."

She didn't say it. She put the spoon down and wiped her hands on her apron and looked at me, and for a second I thought she was going to tell me something, something real, something that would explain the feijoada and the guest room and the way she'd said Fernanda's name on Thursday like it was a door she was opening and closing at the same time.

Instead she said, "Go take a shower. You smell like the office."

---

Saturday morning I woke up before her. This never happens. I lay in bed and listened to her breathe and watched the light come through the curtains, that gray São Paulo light that never quite commits to being morning. I thought about the guest room, painted Morning Mist, the bed made with the good sheets, the ones we got for our wedding and never use. I thought about the feijoada in the fridge, waiting. I thought about the man I'd never met and the woman I hadn't seen in nine years and the wife beside me who had spent two days preparing for something she wouldn't name.

She stirred. Her hand found my arm, then my chest, then rested there, warm and heavy.

"They're coming at noon," she said, without opening her eyes.

"I know."

"Are you nervous?"

"Why would I be nervous?"

She didn't answer. She pulled her hand back and turned over, away from me, and I stared at the ceiling and listened to the city waking up outside the window. At some point I got up and made coffee. At some point I showered and shaved and put on the shirt she'd ironed for me without being asked. At some point the doorbell rang.

I was in the kitchen. She was in the living room. I heard her footsteps, quick, and then the door opening, and then a voice I hadn't heard in nine years, loud and unselfconscious and slightly too much for the room.

"Bicha!"

And then my wife's voice, quieter, saying something I couldn't make out. And then footsteps, two sets, coming toward the kitchen. And then Fernanda in the doorway, older, still in a red dress, looking at me like I was the one who'd been gone.