The Lock of Her

The first time I saw Imogen Voss, I was already married to her in the way a house is married to its foundation—long before the ceremony, long before the word, in the dark where no one signs anything. She stood at the back of a lecture hall in Providence, not leaning against the doorframe but occupying it, and when her eyes found mine across sixty feet of bad lighting and folded chairs, she did not look surprised. She looked like a woman who had been waiting for a train she knew would come, and the waiting had cost her something she would never get back.

I was there to speak about the restoration of a Federal-era meetinghouse in Wickford, Rhode Island—my specialty, the careful undoing of other people's damage. I knew the audience: preservationists, conservators, the kind of people who can date a nail by its head and a room by its wainscot. I could feel their attention like a hand on my shoulder, steady and evaluative, as I described the process of stripping away two centuries of bad paint to find the original clapboard beneath. But Imogen was not taking notes. She watched me the way a restorer watches a painting she has been asked to clean, looking for the original beneath the varnish, and I felt that look as a physical thing—a pressure along my collarbone, a warmth at the back of my neck that had nothing to do with the room's inadequate heating.

Afterward, she found me by the water table, where I was pretending not to need a drink. I had been counting the cracks in the ceiling plaster, a habit I cannot break, and I had counted seven when I felt her approach—not heard her, felt her, the way you feel a change in barometric pressure before a storm. She said, "You speak about old buildings the way other people speak about lovers."

I should have found that strange. I found it true, and the truth of it unsettled me more than the strangeness would have. I turned to look at her, and I noticed the details the way I always notice details: the grey at her temples, precise as brushstrokes; the ink stain on her left index finger, blue-black and deep; the way her suit fit her shoulders as if it had been cut for her body alone, which it probably had. She was not beautiful in the way that asks for attention. She was beautiful in the way that assumes it.

"I've been told I'm too precise," I said.

"Precision is just longing with a straight back." She reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, and her fingers lingered at the nape of my neck, just below the occipital bone, where the hair grows fine and close. A cold thread pulled tight somewhere behind my sternum. I could not have said why. Her touch was warm, but the place she touched remembered something cold, something that had been waiting for the exact pressure of those particular fingers. My pulse slowed, then quickened. I did not step back.

"You cut it," she said, and the grief in her voice was too large for a first conversation, too specific for a woman who had known me for four minutes. It was not the tone of someone making an observation. It was the tone of someone naming a loss.

I laughed, the way you laugh when a stranger says something so intimate you have to push it away. "I've never cut it. Not since I was a child."

Her smile did not reach her eyes. "No," she said. "Of course not."

She said it the way you agree with a child who insists the moon is made of cheese—gently, and with the certain knowledge that the child will learn better. I remember thinking that I should ask her what she meant. I remember thinking that I should walk away. I did neither. I stood there by the water table, and I let her look at me, and I felt something in my chest open like a door that had been painted shut for years, and the cold air that came through it was the same cold that had touched the back of my neck.

The reception was held in the south gallery of the RISD Museum, beneath a ceiling that had been restored twice and still showed its seams if you knew where to look. I knew where to look. I had spent the morning of my wedding walking the perimeter of the room, cataloguing the hairline cracks in the plaster, the way the light fell on the marble floor, the exact shade of the hydrangeas—not white, not cream, but the color of old lace gone slightly yellow at the edges. I