Watching Petra

The lock on our bathroom door had been broken for three years, and I had meant to fix it for approximately two years and eleven months of that. This is the kind of thing I keep meaning to do. It lives on a list in my head next to reorganizing the photo drives and getting Petra's tripod repaired, and like everything else on that list, it waits.

It waited until the third Tuesday in July, which was the hottest day London had produced in years, when Petra went in for a shower at six in the evening and came out of the bathroom about ninety seconds later in the sense that she did not come out at all.

"Sam." Her voice came through the door flat and calm, which I know from twenty-six years of marriage is her most dangerous register. "The lock's jammed."

"Jammed how?"

"Turned the little button and now the little button will not unturn. I'm stuck in here in a towel and I'm sweating already and if you make one joke I will lose my mind."

So naturally I made a joke. I said something about how at least the flat finally had a walk-in closet, and I heard her forehead meet the door with a soft thump, and I got up from my desk feeling, if I'm honest about it, vaguely useful for the first time that week. I work from home. I analyze IT systems for a mid-sized insurance firm, which means I spend my days in a chair in the corner of our living room listening to the building breathe. And our building breathes a lot, because the walls in this Brick Lane flat are about as thick as a cracker. You get to know the neighbors whether you want to or not. You learn their schedules, their taste in television, the fact that the couple upstairs argues on Sundays and makes up loudly on Sundays as well.

I fetched a paperclip from the drawer in the hall, the one full of dead batteries and cables for phones we no longer owned, and I straightened it out into something vaguely professional looking, and I knelt at the lock like a man who had watched too many films and retained none of the technique.

"Status report," Petra called.

"The paperclip is deployed. Morale is high. I've also got a butter knife on standby."

"A butter knife."

"And a chopstick. We have options. We are a resourceful household."

"You are a resourceful household, I'm naked in a sauna." She wasn't naked, she'd said towel, but the towel had a way of becoming nominal in that heat. I could hear her fanning herself with what I guessed was the magazine that lived on the back of the toilet. "How's it going?"

I had the paperclip in about a centimeter, poking hopefully at the mechanism. The mechanism, as far as I could tell, had never had a working day in its life and did not intend to start now. "It's going," I said. "This is a delicate operation. You wouldn't understand the technical side."

"I presented at a security conference in 2008, Samuel. I know what a lock looks like."

"You presented on photo archiving. At a tech conference. Where you also met me, incidentally, so I'd watch the tone."

She laughed at that, a real laugh, and something in my chest unclenched a little, because I hadn't heard that laugh in a while and I had noticed its absence the way you notice a draft. Not sharply. Just a coolness in the room you couldn't source.

Here is the thing about our marriage that I have never quite known how to say out loud, which is ironic given what happened next. Petra is fifty-two, I am fifty-four, and we have been married since she was twenty-six and I was twenty-eight, which is the sort of math that makes you sit down. She shoots buildings for a living. Beautiful, cold, deliberate buildings, all glass and negative space, and she is away more and more, in Copenhagen or Manchester or wherever the interesting staircases are, and I am here with the servers and the thin walls. Some weeks we pass each other like well-managed colleagues. I don't blame either of us for it. I blame the flat, mostly, in the way you blame a thing you can't afford to leave.

The paperclip was not going to save anyone. I was pushing it deeper with the confidence of a man defusing nothing more dangerous than a jammed bathroom lock, which is what it was, and I said so.

Then the wall went off.

Three heavy thuds from the neighbors' side, the flat shared with ours at the shoulder, so to speak. The Osei-Nevilles, Nathan and Marguerite, who keep to themselves and also, apparently, do not.

"Was that the wall?" Petra asked.

"That was the wall."

"Are we being loud?"

"You're in a bathroom talking through a door. I'm kneeling on the floor talking to a door. I don't know how we could be quieter."

Another thud. Then, muffled through four layers of plaster and one cheap door, a voice, Nathan's I think, saying something that had the shape of sorry but the melody of not really.

And that was when it landed on both of us at once, the way these things do, arriving fully formed. The thuds weren't about us. Two nights ago, Sunday, the heat had started early, and the flat had been an oven by ten, windows open because we had no choice, and the neighbors had been, well. Audible. Petra had been home that night, one of her rare ones, and we had lain in our bedroom listening to Marguerite enjoy herself at considerable length and volume, and we had said nothing about it, we had lain there like two polite people at a funeral, staring at the ceiling, and at some point I had pretended to be asleep and I believe she had done the same, and that had been the whole of our response.

"Sam," Petra said slowly. "They could hear us being embarrassed about them."

"I think they could hear us being embarrassed about them."

"Oh my god!" There was a genuine cackle in it now, the laugh she does when something is so awkward it loops past awkward into comedy. "We lay there like mummies. You did your fake sleep-breathing. I know your fake sleep-breathing, it's too regular, nobody breathes like a metronome."

"I'm a disciplined man."

"You're a terrified man. We should have just knocked on the wall and said good on you."

"We're not nineteen, Petra."

"No," she said, and I couldn't read something in her voice for a second. "We're not."

The paperclip had achieved nothing except bending into a shape suggesting despair. I straightened up, knees cracking like the rest of the building, and pressed my forehead against the door the way she had earlier, so that we were separated by forty millimeters of cheap pine and the entire accumulated silence of about four years.

It was Petra who broke it, and she broke it in a strange direction, which is unlike her, or maybe more like her than anything else she does.

"Tell me what you remember," she said.

"About the lock?"

"About me. My body. What you remember of it." She said it lightly, the way you'd ask someone to describe a film they'd seen, but her voice had dropped a register and I felt it in my sternum like the wall-thuds. "We've been married twenty-six years and I've been thinking, while stuck in here marinating, that I can't remember the last time you looked at me. Properly looked. I do my job by looking at things all day and nobody looks at me."

The honest answer was that I look at her constantly, in the sideways way, the way you look at weather, but the honest answer was also too big to fit through a bathroom door, so what I said was, "That's a very strange thing to ask a man kneeling with a paperclip."

"Samuel."

"Fine. You want a description through a locked door in a heatwave." I sat back on my heels. "You're five foot six, though you claim five seven on forms, which I have never understood because I filled in the forms."

"Five seven and a half."

"You're five six. Your hair is going silver at the front in a way that I have secretly liked for about six years and never said, because I thought it would come out wrong, and here it is coming out wrong anyway."

There was a pause through the door. "Go on."

"Your shoulders are from carrying camera bags up scaffolding for thirty years. You have a scar on your left forearm from a boom pole in Rotterdam that you tell people was exotic and was actually a bicycle. Your hands are, I don't know, incredible. They're the first thing I noticed at that conference. You gestured when you talked and I couldn't follow a word of your slides."

"That's not what I meant and you know it." Her voice was soft. "You're cataloguing me like a customs form. You know exactly what I'm asking."

And I did, and the trouble was that the true inventory was not the public one. It was the one I had no right to have kept so carefully, the private one, the shape of her hips under my hands on ordinary Wednesday nights, the exact weight of her breasts, which are heavier than they look, the way her nipples sit, the particular small lines on her stomach from fifty-two years and one pregnancy we decided against continuing, which we never speak of, the crease at the top of her thigh where her skin goes from pale to almost tan, the mole on the inside of her right knee that I have, over two and a half decades, kissed more times than I have said her name.

I could not say any of that through a door. So I said, "Your knees are ticklish. The right one worse. There's a mole there."

Silence. Then, "You know I have a mole there."

"Petra, I have known about that mole since the second week of our marriage. I've been meaning to tell you for a while."

Through the door came a sound I could not immediately classify, and then I understood she was crying, briefly and angrily, the way she does, and then it turned into a laugh halfway through, which is also the way she does.

"Samuel Lowe," she said, "get this door open or get the chopstick, because I cannot have this conversation through pine."

* * *

So I got the chopstick. I actually got the chopstick, because she asked, and because a man who has kept a private inventory of his wife's body for twenty-six years will do a surprising amount of household improvisation when she uses that tone. I slid it through the gap under the door like I was feeding a document to a sealed courtroom exhibit and she said something through the wood that I chose to interpret as thanks.

It didn't work. Obviously it didn't work. The lock on that door has been dead for three years and no chopstick on earth was going to resurrect it, and I think both of us knew that, and I think that was partly the point. What she wanted wasn't the door. What she wanted was for me to keep talking, and the door was the excuse, and we are both old enough and married enough to know when an object is standing in for something else.

So I sat down on the hallway floor with my back against the wall opposite, which is a sightline to the bathroom door if not to her, and the flat ticked around us. The pipes. The fridge. Downstairs on Brick Lane somebody was arguing about a delivery, or possibly about love, it's the same tone. The heat had gone from aggressive to