The Way You Close a Laptop

The phone creeps across the glass, and from below Simon sees the light fall across Jacob’s face and “the face close in that light. Not abruptly. The way you close a laptop.” “One second” — and he leaves, pulling the door shut “to the click,” and answers only on the other side of it. The walls in this house hold sound. Simon sits on the edge of the sofa: “His body had gone back to being a guest. It always knew when it had stopped being held.” Then Jacob comes back, puts the phone down screen-down, and says: “You definitely have nothing to worry about.”

This is how a double life is built: not a lie to your face but a door pulled shut, and a room in which the other person does not exist. Simon hears “definitely” — “an extra part in a familiar mechanism” — and chooses not to ask: the questions “came to weigh less than that” — than the person who came back and sat right up close. It is an important and very human bargain: warmth in exchange for not knowing. It is neither bad nor good; it is expensive, and the one who pays is the one sitting in the room without the phone. The frozen picture on the screen — Jacob hit pause, so he meant to come back — is all that trust rests on in this minute. Simon “noted this the way he noted everything — without drawing conclusions.”