Savannah

The night her voice goes home, and a man who is never unreachable turns off the phone.

The Piazza

The faster route would have been the bridge straight south.

The car went the long way instead, a black sedan with a driver who knew the district and did not need to be told. He eased through the traffic on Bay Street at the speed of a man easing into water he knows is warm. He did not press the accelerator. He did not look at the clock. He moved us south and west into the squares, and the squares took us in one at a time, and the live oaks closed over the roof of the car like a hand closing over a small flame.

The pace was the first thing the city said, and it said it before we had gone three blocks.

The heat at this hour had the weight of a thing that had been gathering since late morning, settled now into the brick of the curbs and the iron of the fences and the high crowns of the oaks. We passed square after square through the open window, each one a low green room walled with houses, a monument or a fountain or only a stand of oaks at the center, the benches empty and the paths raked and still. The Spanish moss hung from the crowns in long grey-green falls that did not move, and the small wind off the river moved between them without troubling them, the way a hand moves between the strings of an instrument that is not being played. The light came down through the moss already broken and soft, the gold of it lying in pieces on the brick walks and on the hoods of the parked cars and on the pale faces of the houses, their shutters closed against the afternoon, their ferns hanging still on the porches. A woman on the corner of Drayton was talking to another in a register I could place within a hundred miles of where it had been raised, the vowels slow, the consonants given their full sound and not hurried off the tongue. Through the cracked window came river damp and warm brick and cut grass and, faintly, something blooming I could not name.

Her Highness was looking out the window and had not said a word since the bridge. A sleeveless linen dress the color of cream, low sandals, the thin bracelet at her right wrist, nothing else. Her hair was loose and gold at the temple where the last light found it. The window was cracked an inch and her hair lifted once and settled.

There was a phone in the breast pocket of my jacket, over the left side, that I had not looked at since the airport. Not the phone by which the ordinary world reaches a man. The other one, the flat black one that has only ever carried weight. It had been quiet for three days, and a thing that has been quiet for three days is not resting. It is deciding. I had left it in the pocket on purpose and was aware of it there the way you are aware of a stone in a shoe you have decided not to stop and empty.

I had brought her to a place she did not have to be taught. I could see that in her before we reached the inn.

The inn was a Federal house off Forsyth Park, three stories of pale stucco over brick, black shutters, a double piazza the length of the front. The innkeeper met us at the iron gate, a small woman in linen as pale as her hair, who took my hand in both of hers and did not shake it so much as receive it.

“Your room is ready,” she said. “There is no rush. Whenever you would like to go up.”

She did not show us up. She told us where it was, the door at the top of the stair on the right, and handed me an iron key old enough to need its own respect, and went back into the house, and left us to find our own way.

I carried the bags up. She walked behind me with one hand on the rail. The stair turned at a small landing and turned again, the wood giving a little under our weight, the air of the house cooler at the top than the bottom, and the door on the right stood half open.

The room was simple the way only careful rooms are simple. A four-poster in dark wood, a small writing desk under the window, a wing chair, a clock on the mantel that ticked slower than my pulse. The piazza door stood open and the ceiling fan turned at a speed that did not move the air so much as acknowledge it.

She walked to the piazza door and stepped through, put her hands on the railing, and looked out into the live oaks where the moss hung heavy and still. She breathed in once and let it go without hurry.

I set the black phone face down on the writing desk, screen to the wood, and I did not turn it off. Turning it off is a decision a man in my life is not permitted to make. Face down is the most he is allowed.

In every city of our life I have been the one to walk first. To the elevator, the car, the table. The one who moves first sees the room first, and I have moved first so long I had stopped feeling it as a choice. She had matched my stride in Cairo and in the cities before it and never once shown me the seam of the effort.

Her Highness did not turn or call me out to her. She put one hand on the railing and waited.

I went out to her.

The air on the piazza was the temperature of skin. Below us Forsyth Park ran off into its oaks, the gas lamps along the paths not yet lit, the white fountain at the center too far to hear. Somewhere close a single bird made one sound and stopped, and further off a lawn mower ran and quit and left the quiet deeper than it had been. The brick under my shoes had been worn smooth at the threshold by a hundred and fifty years of people standing where I stood, and the railing under her hands had been painted black so many times the paint had gone soft at the edges, warm where the late sun had been. The moss hung down over the rail close enough to touch, and it moved once in a breath of air off the river and settled.

“It is slower here,” she said.

“It is.”

“You will see.”

She turned her head to me on the last word and did not need to smile.

I poured two fingers of bourbon, neat, from the bottle the innkeeper had left, the good Lord’s intention, and drank it in one steady pull, and set the tumbler by the iron key and the face-down phone, and did not pour another.

The clock ticked. The fan turned. We dressed for dinner the way we always do. Not required. Expected.

The Dressing

The closet was small; I had brought less than I bring. A summer-weight suit, stone-grey wool so fine it would not hold a wrinkle across an evening, cut by my tailor with the shoulder line my shoulders have known for years. A white shirt with a soft collar, not the crisp spread I wear north; the South asks a different register and the shirt knew it. No tie, the first button open. Mother-of-pearl at the cuffs in place of stones, because Savannah is not a city for diamonds at dinner.

I dressed at the small mirror by the door, old enough to carry a faint silver tarnish and to give the room back a half-shade warmer than it was. In the glass, over my shoulder, the black rectangle lay face down on the desk. I made my eyes go back to the collar and the line of the shoulder and let the suit do its work.

Her Highness came out of the bathroom in green silk. A long slip dress the green of moss where the sun catches the top of the oaks, cut on the bias, no sleeves, the back open from the nape to the waist. A dress a designer in Milan had built around her shoulders one season, kept and brought south for an evening that did not require it and would receive it anyway. Her hair up in a loose knot, gold at the crown where the lamp reached it. No earrings. The single gold chain at her throat I had given her in a city I will not name. Her feet bare, the sandals by the door.

She did not adjust the dress. She did not turn for me to see her in it. She walked to the desk and set her hand flat on the wood an inch from the phone, and did not look at it and did not move it, and went to the door and put on the sandals and put one hand on the iron handle and waited.

I went to her. I took the hand that was not on the handle and lifted it and put my lips against the inside of her wrist, where the skin is thinnest and the pulse sits close beneath it. The fragrance she wears, the one I have stopped trying to name, met me at her pulse and held there, warmed by the heat of the house. Through the half-open window the light had gone from gold to amber and lay along the floorboards in a long bar, and the linen curtain lifted into it once and fell. The green silk moved when she breathed. She let me look until I had finished looking.

“Ready?” she said.

I opened the door. Behind me the phone lay dark, and I closed the door on it and turned the iron key.

The stair was darker now, a single sconce throwing a warm oval on the wallpaper below. At the bottom the innkeeper sat in the small parlor with a book in her lap and looked up.

“He will know you,” she said. “I called ahead. Walk slow.”

She gave us a small folded card with a name in pencil and tucked it into my hand the way you tuck a key into the hand of a friend.

“Walk slow,” she said again.