The Nearest Heart

March arrives in a house the way it arrives in a neighborhood — quietly and without announcement, just a degree or two of warmth that wasn't there the week before. Sneaking in after February darts out early, it can seem to last much longer. Emmy feels it before she properly registers it, standing at the bedroom window in the early morning with the blanket still around her shoulders, watching the back garden do something slightly different in the light than it had been doing in February.

Downstairs, the kettle lets out steam, a long sigh before relief from the heat. Emmy knows the next steps down to the second, the repeated ritual, the certainty.

She goes.

#

The house on a Sunday morning has a specific quality that she has been accumulating like vocabulary — learning it the way you learn a language, by total immersion, by hearing the same phrases until they become your own. The stair that gives under the left side of the fourth step. The hallway in morning light, the particular distance from the front door to the kitchen. The living room on the right, the teal throw where she left it on her chair, the bookshelf with its two languages standing side by side. She moves through all of it without thinking, the way she moves through things that have become, and maybe always had been, hers.

The bookshelf: she glances at it. The hairbrush between the Wittgenstein and the developmental psychology. It has not moved since June. It will not move. She passes it with the familiar warmth of something that no longer requires acknowledgment to be felt.

The back room door is on the left, past the kitchen entrance.

She slows. She's not sure when she started doing this — slowing at this particular doorway, the way she sometimes slows at the entrance to a room in a clinical building to prepare herself for what's inside. There's nothing inside this room that requires preparation. A few boxes still to sort through, a chair that hasn't found its purpose, a windowsill that catches the morning light better than almost any other surface in the house. It is simply a room that is not yet anything.

Emmy looks at it for a moment.

She sees what she sees. She does not say it.

She moves on.

#

The kitchen: Juliet at the Chemex, second pour. The grounds behaving. The back garden through the window, and March doing something tentative with the frost — not quite gone but considering it. Juliet does not turn around when Emmy comes in. She does not need to.

"It's warmer," Emmy says.

"Three degrees warmer," Juliet says. "Which is not warmer. It is less cold."

"That's what I said, Mr. Heatmiser,” Emmy grins. Emmy has long found out that one of the hidden hatreds of Juliet is cold. Cold is the antithesis of being present, because all it does is take you out of the moment as you try to warm yourself. Cold can be tolerated in small amounts, but like her coffee, Juliet prefers heat.

She pours Emmy’s cup without comment. This, too, is Sunday.

Before sitting, Emmy goes to the hall table, where she put the package two days ago and has not yet done anything about. The leprechaun is small, printed on laminated card, cheerful in the specific way of something that was designed to be cheerful and succeeded beyond its natural capacity. It is early-March. In three weeks it will be St. Patrick's Day, and this is a house that, in Emmy's considered opinion, needs a leprechaun.

She finds the adhesive strip and takes the leprechaun to the kitchen wall beside the doorframe, which is where it has always, apparently, been going.

The sound Juliet makes is almost nothing. A very small adjustment of breath. Emmy steps back and considers the poster — the green hat, the buckle, the expression of irrepressible good cheer — and finds it entirely correct.

Behind her, Juliet is quiet for a moment with the quality of someone conducting a private assessment.

"Well," she says finally.

"Well," Emmy agrees.

Another moment.

"You're good for this house," Juliet says. Not as though she has just decided it — as though she is confirming something she has known for a while and has simply not had occasion to say. Her voice has its usual precision, and the precision includes the warmth; the two are not in conflict. "It needed this. It just didn't know."

Emmy turns to look at her. Juliet is looking at the leprechaun.

"He's going to stay up," Emmy says. "Just so we're clear."

"Obviously he is," Juliet says. She moves to pour the coffee into the travel mugs. Emmy is good for the house. Emmy is good for the person who lived the in the house.

#

They take the long way to the park. This is also Sunday — the long way rather than the short, Marlowe Street before the residential streets rather than after. The air this morning is the thing Emmy said it was: actually warmer, the specific threshold crossed from cold with occasional breaks to the first morning that doesn't require you to brace. Juliet has her coat on anyway, a charcoal wool that she chose deliberately when she chose it, because Juliet chooses most things deliberately. Emmy has her cobalt blue jacket — the one she's had since the first year of university and which fits exactly right despite everything — and her ungloved hands wrapped around the travel mug.

Marlowe Street on a Sunday is a different street than Marlowe Street on a Wednesday. The rhythm of it changes: quieter, the particular hush of closed storefronts and the occasional person moving through with the specific ease of someone not on their way anywhere in particular. They fall into the walk the way they fall into most things together — without coordination, simply in the same direction at the same pace, which is more or less how their whole life works. It’s almost too easy. Friends have commented on it. Emmy and Juliet have discussed it. How it differs from the classic portrayals of married life. There is little bickering. There are no jokes or comments at the expense of the other. There is mutual respect and love. Their courtship did not live up to any stereotypes, why should their marriage be any different?

The bookshop is dark in its windows but lit from the back, the way it always is on Sundays. Mags does something in there on Sundays that is not, as far as Emmy has ever been able to determine, the thing the shop is for. She has asked Mags about this. Mags has given her an answer that was technically responsive and practically uninformative, which is very much Mags.

"She's always in there," Emmy says, nodding toward the light.

"Yes," Juliet says.

"What does she actually do on Sundays?"

"She reads," Juliet says, which is a bookshop owner's answer and not a complete one, and Juliet's expression suggests she is aware of this.

They stop at the window of the florist — still closed, the Sunday tulips visible behind the glass in their buckets, yellow and white and a very assertive orange. The florist on Marlowe Street has opinions about orange. Emmy has come to respect this.

"Orange," she says.

"Every Sunday," Juliet says.

"Do you think she chooses them herself?"

"I think she knows what she likes. Us opinionated women are always sure of our preferences.”

Emmy blushes slightly in hearing Juliet use the plural noun. Two years earlier, so much was different.

They walk. The coffee is good — Juliet made it correctly, as she always does, and the travel mug has retained its heat despite the morning air, which feels like a small and specific victory. Emmy is aware, as she often is on these walks, of the particular pleasure of being somewhere familiar with someone who makes familiar things feel freshly chosen. This is not something she has a word for. She's looking for one.

#

The park is ten minutes from the house and two from Marlowe Street, through a residential block that has the sleepy quality of a neighborhood in the middle of its Sunday. They have come here enough times now that the route has its own texture — the corner with the large oak that holds its leaves late, the house with the extraordinary window box — but the park itself is not yet entirely theirs. It is in the process of becoming theirs. It has been since the first time they came, which was October the first year they dated, which was the evening that still lives in Emmy with the quality of something that reorganized her sense of how things could go. That was the day Juliet had surprised her so deeply it still resonated the moment they crossed the entrance threshold.

That day in mid-fall, with parkgoers watching a play and a special bench. The park full of its own light. Juliet in a dress that Emmy can still describe with precision if asked, which she would not be, but she could. The conversation that went where it went. The walk home in the dark that felt like a conclusion and a beginning at the same time.

This morning the park is its March self: the trees bare-limbed still but with something decided about their posture, the grass pale and deliberate, a few early people with their dogs doing the same circuit. Emmy and Juliet take the longer path around the pond, which is what they always do when they have time, which on Sundays they always do.

"The Meinong paper," Juliet says, mid-thought. She has been mid-thought since they left the house.

"Tell me."

"He has this concept — the Meinongian object, the object that exists in some sense outside of real and not-real. The thing you can describe properties of without committing to its existence. A round square. A golden mountain that isn't anywhere."

"Okay."

"And I keep thinking it's not sufficient. The problem isn't just where the object lives. The problem is what we do about the gap between the description and the thing." She's looking at the path, her hands around the mug, and she has the quality she gets when she is working out something real — not performing the working-out but actually in it. "If I can have a complete and accurate description of something that doesn't exist —"

"— then what does accurate mean," Emmy says.

Juliet looks at her. "Yes." A beat. "How do you do that, Emerald?”

"I listen to you talk about philosophy, gemstone.”

"That's not —" But there's a small smile, precisely placed. "It's not that simple."

"It never is. But that's what I do."

They walk the bend around the pond. The water is still with the particular February-leftover stillness, patient and flat. A duck does something unimpressive near the edge. Juliet still appreciates the duck’s actions. Emmy drinks her coffee.

"I'm going to write that the concept is useful but incomplete," Juliet says. "He gets us to the problem. He doesn't solve it."

"Do you?"

"Not yet." She says this without distress. Juliet's relationship to unsolved problems is like her relationship to the pour-over: she trusts the process will deliver something if attended to correctly. "But I will."

Emmy does not doubt this. She notes it alongside everything else.

#

They come home through the short route, back through the residential block, the large oak, past the house with the window box that has snowdrops in it now — something has happened to the window box since their last walk, and they both stop to look at it, and neither of them says anything, because the snowdrops are enough.

The green door. The small step up. Inside.

The leprechaun is on the kitchen wall where Emmy left it, which was forty-five minutes ago, and it is not less cheerful for the intervening time. Juliet hangs her coat and looks at it again on the way past.

"Still there," Emmy says.

"As you said it would be," Juliet says.

#

In the afternoon the light does something to the living room that it doesn't do in winter — comes through at a different angle, lands on the bookshelf in a way that catches the hairbrush and the gold-lettered spines, fills the teal throw with a warmth that wasn't there the week before. Emmy is on the sofa with the secondary reading for her Tuesday seminar, and Juliet is on the floor with the Meinong, which is apparently the proper place for Meinong, and the house is doing its Sunday work of simply being, keeping up its 100 plus year track record.

Emmy looks up from the reading. The living room. The fire unlit but present, the photographs on the shelf, the wall with the wedding photo — the two of them in August light, Gerald saying something, both of them mid-laugh and still slightly surprised. A beautiful photograph. The wall around it is otherwise bare.

"We should really do something about that wall," Emmy says. She has said this before. They have said various things about it and not committed to any of them.

Juliet looks up from the floor. She considers the wall with the quality she brings to things that require honest assessment. "A tapestry," she says.

"We've talked about a tapestry."

"We have," Juliet agrees. "I still think a tapestry."

"What kind of tapestry."

"The kind that suits the wall."

Emmy waits. Juliet's expression suggests that this is the full answer available at this time.

"We could paint it," Emmy says. "A different color."

Juliet looks at the wall. It is currently the color it has always been — an inherited off-white that came with the house and has not been changed. "What color."

"I don't know. Something that goes with the photo."

"The photo goes with everything. That's what makes it a good photograph."

This is true. It is also not an answer about the wall. The wall remains open, which is where it has been since June, which is where it will apparently remain for another Sunday at least.

"We'll figure it out," Emmy says.

"We will," Juliet says.

She goes back to the Meinong. Emmy goes back to the secondary reading. The March light continues its new angle across the room. Outside the window, the back garden is doing something careful with the afternoon — the frost gone now, the ground deciding. In a month there will be things growing back there that weren't growing before.

The house on a Sunday in March. Coffee that was exactly right. The first walk without too much chill. The leprechaun on the kitchen wall, where it belongs.

Emmy turns a page.

* * *