You are in Love
Blair House was quieter than she had expected.
She had been in grand houses all her life, had slept in palaces and castles and the kind of historic residences that carry the weight of centuries in their walls, and she had learned to read the particular quality of silence that each one produced. Some silences were cold, institutional, the silence of places that had never quite learned to be homes. Some were heavy with self-importance, the silence of rooms that knew they were being looked at.
Blair House had a different quality. It was the silence of a house that had absorbed a very great deal of history and had decided, on balance, to be dignified about it. The guest quarters were warm, softly lit, furnished with the kind of American comfort that managed to be both grand and genuinely welcoming. Outside the tall windows, Pennsylvania Avenue was a distant murmur, the city going about its business with the cheerful indifference of a city that has seen everything and is no longer surprised by any of it.
She stood at the window for a while, looking out at the lights. Washington at night had a particular quality, the white marble of the monuments glowing against the dark sky, a city that had been designed to impress and largely succeeded. She had been here before, in different configurations, at different moments in their long, complicated life together. But never quite like this.
She heard him behind her, the soft sound of his movements as he prepared for bed, the familiar domestic choreography that she had come to know so completely that she could map its entire geography with her eyes closed. The sound of the bathroom tap. The quiet rustle of him setting things on the bedside table. The particular creak that meant he had sat down on the edge of the bed.
She turned from the window.
He was sitting exactly where she had known he would be, in his pyjamas, his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead in the way they always ended up, regardless of where he had started the evening with them. He was looking at her with the expression she had been seeing on his face all day, all week, really, since they had arrived in this city: a look of such open, unguarded warmth that it still, after all these years, had the power to make her breath catch.
She was still in the silk slip she had worn beneath her dress, a bridal white that skimmed her figure and caught the warm lamplight. She had not yet changed. She had stood at the window in it, without thinking, and now she was aware of his gaze on her with the particular, focused quality that she had known for fifty years.
"You were looking at the city," he said.
"It's rather beautiful at night," she said.
"It is," he agreed, though he hadn't looked at the window once.
She crossed the room and sat beside him on the edge of the bed, close enough that their arms touched. He reached out immediately and took her hand, his thumbs tracing the familiar geography of her knuckles, the bones beneath the skin. It was a gesture she could not remember him beginning; it was simply something he had always done, as natural and unremarkable as breathing.
"You're tired," she said.
"I'm perfectly fine," he said, which was what he always said, and which she had learned to translate with some precision over the years. It meant: I am tired, but I am not ready to admit it because I am still thinking about the day and whether there is anything I should have done differently.
"The day went well," she said, answering the unspoken question.
He looked at her, the slight, surprised warmth in his eyes that she still loved, even now, the fact that she could still occasionally catch him off guard with her directness. "Do you think so?"
"I think so," she said. "You were wonderful." She paused. "You're always wonderful. You just don't always notice."
He made a sound that was not quite a laugh but was adjacent to one. She knew all his almost-laughs. She had catalogued them over fifty years. "You are catastrophically biased," he said.
"I am," she agreed. "Entirely and without apology."
He reached out and took her hand, turning it over in both of his, his thumbs tracing the familiar geography of her knuckles, the bones beneath the skin. "You, however," he said, "were genuinely extraordinary today. The way you handled Melania this afternoon—"
"I simply talked to her," she said.
"You did considerably more than that," he said. "You found the person inside the occasion and talked to her. You always do that. It is one of the things that makes you so very good at all of this." He looked at her steadily. "And it is entirely your own. Nobody taught you that. It is simply who you are."
She was quiet for a moment, absorbing this. She had learned, over the years, to receive his compliments without immediately deflecting them, which had required a considerable effort of will and was still, on certain days, a work in progress.
"You understand that instinctively. I have to push myself."
She looked at him. "You understand it perfectly well," she said. "You simply have to work harder to show it. Which is not the same thing at all."
He smiled, a real smile, the private one. "You have always been very fair to me," he said. "Even when I did not deserve it."
She said nothing to that, because there was nothing useful to say. The past was the past, and it had made them, and she had long since made her peace with the parts of it that had hurt.
"I saw you today," she said instead. "At the reception this evening. You were talking to a senator's wife, the one with the extraordinary hat."
"The hat was remarkable," he agreed.
"And you looked over at me," she said. "Twice. Three times."
"Did I."
"Yes." She looked up at him. "You looked at me the way you've always looked at me. Like you couldn't quite believe I was there."
He was quiet for a moment, his thumbs still moving over her hand. Outside, a car passed on Pennsylvania Avenue, its headlights sweeping briefly across the ceiling.
"I can't," he said. "Still. After all this time." He paused. "I look at you in a room full of people and I think: there she is. There is the person who makes sense of everything." He looked down at their hands. "I have thought that since I was twenty-three years old, and I have not stopped thinking it since, and I have absolutely no expectation of stopping."
She felt the familiar, particular warmth move through her, the warmth that was specific to him and to what he said and to the way he said it, without performance or embellishment, as a simple statement of a fact he had long since stopped being surprised by.
He looked at her in the silk and the lamplight, with the particular expression that was desire and love so thoroughly intertwined that neither could be separated from the other. "You are," he said quietly, "extraordinarily beautiful. You were the most beautiful woman in every room we entered today."
She laughed softly. "Now who is catastrophically biased?"
"I am entirely serious," he said, and the tone of his voice confirmed it. He reached out and touched the thin strap of the slip at her shoulder, his fingertip barely grazing her skin. "I have been thinking about getting you out of this since approximately this morning."
The familiar warmth moved through her, deep and unhurried. "Have you," she said.
"Since approximately the moment I saw you in it," he confirmed.
She reached up and covered his hand with hers, where it rested at her shoulder. "Then perhaps," she said, "you should stop thinking about it."
He looked at her, his eyes dark and warm, and the expression in them was one she had been reading for half a century: the particular look that was desire and love so thoroughly intertwined that neither could be separated from the other.
He reached behind her, his fingers finding the small hook at the back of the slip, and undid it with a deliberate, unhurried care. The silk loosened. He pushed the straps from her shoulders and let it fall, and she was bare in the warm lamplight of their room in Washington, and the way he looked at her was the way he had always looked at her, with an attention so complete and so reverent that she had never, in all the years, grown entirely accustomed to it.
"Come here," he said softly.
She helped him with his pyjamas, her hands moving over the buttons with a practiced ease, and he shrugged out of them, and they lay back against the pillows together, bare skin against bare skin, the most fundamental and ancient form of closeness.
She pressed herself against him, her lips at his throat, his collarbone, the warm skin of his chest. He made a low sound of deep contentment and held her, his hands moving over her body with a tenderness so profound it was almost aching, tracing the lines of her, her shoulders, the curve of her waist, the soft warmth of her hips.
She knew, without anything being said, the particular landscape of what this evening would be. They had navigated the changed terrain of his body with honesty and with love, without shame and without pretence. The illness had, on some days, changed certain things, in ways that the doctors had explained with clinical precision and which she had absorbed with the pragmatic, fierce determination she brought to everything. It did not diminish him in her eyes. It had never, not for a single moment, diminished him in her eyes.
But she wanted him. She had always wanted him, would always want him, and the wanting was not diminished either. On some days, it had simply found new expressions, new languages, new ways of saying what it had always said.
His mouth was on hers now, a deep, slow kiss that she felt in the whole of her body, and she kissed him back with everything she had, her hands in his hair, his hands mapping the warm length of her. When he drew back to look at her face, his expression was one of such unguarded love that it stopped her breath entirely.
"You are extraordinary," he whispered.
"You are," she replied, "the love of my life."
He kissed her again, and then his mouth moved lower, along her jaw, her throat, the soft curve of her shoulder. His hands were slow and knowing and entirely devoted to her, every touch a declaration, every caress a word in the private language they had spent fifty years constructing between them. He knew her body with the deep, intimate knowledge of a lifetime, knew exactly where to press his lips and where to let his hands linger, knew the geography of her pleasure with the precision of a man who had always paid the most exquisite attention.
She gave herself over to him entirely, her body opening to his hands and his mouth with a trust so absolute it was indistinguishable from love itself. She was aware of everything: the warmth of his skin against hers, the sound of his breathing, the particular quality of his attention, which had always been, even from the very beginning, the thing that undid her most completely.
The pleasure built slowly, deeply, in the way that only he had ever been able to build it, a long, sustained wave of warmth that radiated outward from his touch. She felt herself beginning to come apart at the edges, the way she always did in his hands, and she held onto him and let it happen, let the wave build and crest and break over her in a long, shuddering release that left her trembling and breathless and utterly, completely his.
She lay in the warm aftermath, her head on his chest, his arms around her, both of them still and quiet. She could feel the steady beat of his heart beneath her cheek. She pressed her lips to his skin.
"Darling," she said softly.
She moved against him, her hands and mouth gentle and unhurried, wanting to give back the tenderness he had given her, wanting to reach him in the ways that were possible today, to tell him with her body what she felt in her soul. He made soft sounds against her hair, his hands moving over her with a gratitude and a love so palpable she felt it like warmth from a fire. Today, it was not the same as it had been, and they both knew it, and neither of them said so, because it did not need to be said and because what it was, what it still was, was so far beyond adequate that the word barely applied.
It was simply them. It was simply love. In a room in Washington, in the dark, with the city murmuring outside, completely and entirely themselves.
Afterwards, she lay tucked against him, her head on his shoulder, her arm across his chest. He held her with both arms, his chin resting on her hair. The room was very warm and very still.
"I love you," she said, into the quiet. She said it without preamble or occasion, simply because it was true and because she wanted him to know it, tonight, in this room, in this city.
"I love you," he said, his voice low and rough and entirely certain. "More than I have words for. More than I have ever been able to say properly, and you know that I have spent more than fifty years trying."
She smiled against his shoulder. "You do alright," she said.
He pressed his lips to her hair, her temple, the top of her head. Small, quiet kisses, the kind that meant everything and asked for nothing.
"This was wonderful," she said. "Tonight was wonderful."
"Yes," he said simply. "It was."
She felt him begin to relax into sleep beside her, the gradual, familiar loosening that she knew as well as her own name. His breathing slowed. His arms remained around her.
She thought of the day, of all the rooms and all the faces and the particular quality of his hand at the small of her back as they walked, a touch so habitual that neither of them registered it consciously anymore, but which she had been aware of all day, a steady, warm pressure that said everything it needed to say without saying anything at all.
She thought of the look he had given her at the reception. The one that was just for her, that no camera had caught or could catch, because it existed in the private frequency between them that had been broadcasting for fifty years and had not once lost its signal.
You can hear it in the silence, silence You can feel it on the way home You can see it with the lights out You are in love, true love You are in love, she thought, the words arriving with the quiet certainty of something that has always been true and always will be.
Not in the trembling, uncertain way of the beginning. Not in the desperate, clandestine way of the middle years. But in the deep, settled, whole way of two people who have been through everything together and have arrived, against considerable odds, at this Tuesday night in Washington.
In a warm room. In each other's arms. Deeply, completely, irrevocably happy.
She closed her eyes.
His heart was very steady under her cheek.
She fell asleep to the sound of it, deeply and completely, as she intended to keep falling asleep to the sound of it for as long as there were nights left to count.
