dust and desire

I've always been a watcher. That's the thing about me.

Not a creep, I would say, but okay, maybe I don't get to decide that anymore. Not after this year.

I'm twenty-four. I restore old books for a living, freelance, which means I sit alone in a small apartment with tweezers and wheat paste and a magnifying lamp, fixing other people's broken things. It suits me. Broken things don't ask you questions.

My last relationship ended eight months ago, badly, the kind of badly where you learn things about yourself you didn't want printed. Since then I've dated nobody. I've touched nobody. I've looked at plenty, though. Windows, mostly. Courtyards. Lives happening at a distance where nothing is my fault.

So yeah. A watcher.

I moved to this city in March. Third floor of an old brick walk-up, and across the courtyard there's another building, just as old, maybe forty feet of air between us. My windows face it. Her windows face me. I didn't think about that when I signed the lease.

I thought about it a lot later.

***

The telescope came from an estate sale in April. A brass refractor, 1930s maybe, on a wooden tripod, forty dollars because nobody at that sale cared about optics. I bought it because I restore things and it was broken and sad, and because I can't walk past a broken thing.

I spent a weekend cleaning the lenses and re-greasing the focus tube. Then I set it up by my window, pointed at nothing in particular, feeling very pleased with myself.

Here's where I tell you the honest part. I didn't buy it to look at the moon.

I'd noticed her before that. The woman across the courtyard. Late thirties, I guessed, and I was right about that later, thirty-eight exactly, though I didn't know it yet. Dark hair always pinned up. She kept a shop on the ground floor of her building, some kind of antiques place, and she came and went with boxes and a big old dog.

She moved like she had all the time in the world. That was the entire appeal, if I'm being simple about it. Everybody I know rushes. She didn't.

One night in April I had the telescope out and I was pretending to align it, and I found her window. Third floor, directly across. She was reading in an armchair with a lamp on, the dog flat on the rug beside her.

I stayed too long. I know I stayed too long because she closed her book, stood up, and pulled the curtain without hurry, like closing a shop at the end of the day.

I went to bed feeling like I'd stolen something small.

***

After that it became a ritual, and I'm not proud, but I'm not lying either.

Most nights. Not all. I'd wait until her lamp came on, then I'd sit at the eyepiece with the lights off on my side, and I'd watch. Reading, mostly. Sometimes she did calligraphy at a sloped desk, which nearly killed me, honestly. A woman who does calligraphy. Sometimes she danced, badly and alone, to something I couldn't hear, and I found out later it was Ella Fitzgerald and I found that out because she told me, over coffee, and my ears went hot.

I learned things. She drank tea, not coffee, from a cup with no handle. She talked to the dog in full sentences. On Sundays she laid out papers on the floor and paced around them like a general. She never had visitors.

And here's what I told myself, every night: she can't see me. It's dark on my side. I'm a shadow behind glass. This doesn't count if she can't see me.

That logic held for about three weeks.

***

The night everything changed was a Tuesday in May.

She came to her window with the lamp behind her, which meant I couldn't see her face, only her shape. She stood there. Then she reached out and, slowly, took down the curtain. All the way. Folded it over the rod.

I nearly fell off my chair.

She stood in the light then, in a plain gray slip, arms crossed, and looked directly at my window. Forty feet. A telescope pointed at her. There was no way she didn't know.

I should have ducked. Any normal person ducks.

I didn't duck. My heart was loud and my hands were sweating and I sat there like a rabbit in a headlight, watching her watch me.

Then she smiled. I could see it, even at that distance, even upside down through the old brass optics. She smiled like she'd won something.

And then, God help me, she reached up and took the pins out of her hair, one at a time, letting each one fall on her table where I could see it land. Dark hair coming down slow over her shoulders. She shook it out. Turned, once, a full slow turn, and looked back at me over her shoulder.

Then she blew out the lamp.

I sat in the dark for a long time after that. Maybe an hour. I couldn't tell you what I thought because I don't think I thought anything. My whole body was just one long question.

The next night her curtain was back up. The night after that, too. I started to believe I'd dreamed it.

***

The note came under my door on a Friday.

I almost stepped on it coming in with groceries. Cream envelope, heavy paper, my name on it in ink. Actual ink, with a fountain pen, the kind of writing they stopped teaching.

*Milo,*

*You have a very distinctive telescope in your window. I've been meaning to compliment whoever owns it, since it's clearly a Taylor, and those are rare.*

*Coffee. Tomorrow, ten o'clock, the place on the corner with the green awning. I'll be the one with the dog outside.*

*No pressure. But I'd come.*

*Iris*

I read it four times. I checked the hallway for cameras, like a paranoid. I checked the envelope for a trick. There was no trick. There was just a woman's handwriting and a word at the end that made my stomach do something complicated.

She knew. She'd known for a while, probably. And instead of calling the cops or leaving an angry note, she'd written me an invitation.

I didn't sleep much.

***

The cafe with the green awning is four minutes from my building. I got there at nine fifty, which is the move of a man with no dignity, and I got a table by the window so I could see the street.

She was already there. Of course she was.

She sat outside with the old yellow Lab at her feet and a newspaper she wasn't reading. Gray dress, hair up again, and I realized with a strange little shock that this was the first time I'd ever seen her in daylight, in full color, not through glass, not upside down, not far away.

She looked up as I came out. Didn't wave. Just looked, until I crossed the sidewalk and stood in front of her like a delivery guy with the wrong address.

"You came," she said.

"You said no pressure!"

"And yet here you are at ten sharp." She kicked the chair opposite her out with one heel. "Sit. This is Old Dog. He's old and he judges everyone, so behave."

I sat. The dog put his huge head on my knee and looked up at me with wet brown eyes.

"He likes you," she said. "That's annoying. It'll be harder to be mysterious about you now."

"Mysterious about me?"

"Milo, twenty-four, restores books, owns a 1930s brass refractor he claims is for stargazing, sits in the dark every night with his lights off." She stirred her tea. "How's my accuracy?"

Pretty much perfect. I picked up the menu and hid behind it for a second, which was cowardly, but she let me.

"How long did you know?" I asked.

"A month, maybe. You think a woman who does calligraphy by a lit window can't see a lens glinting in a dark window across the courtyard?" She smiled, and it was worse in person, that smile. Closer range. "I gave you a very good show, you're welcome."

"I'm sorry." It came out fast. "I know it was wrong. I kept telling myself you couldn't see, and then when you could, I just... didn't stop. That's the worst part. I didn't stop."

She was quiet for a moment. The dog sighed.

"You're the only person who's apologized to me for it," she said. "Most men, if they noticed I noticed, they'd have pretended it never happened. Or they'd have gotten worse." She set the cup down. "You sat there looking like you'd been caught stealing communion wine. It was charming. That's why I wrote the note."

"Why the note? Really."

"Because I was tired of performing for a window." She said it plainly, like ordering at a counter. "Because I'm thirty-eight and divorced and I don't do indirect anymore. Because I wanted to