CHAPTER SEVEN
THE THICK knot of worry in Arthur's stomach refused to ease. Martin wasn't at his desk. He hadn't been all day. When he hadn't shown by tea, Arthur was going to pop downstairs and check his parking spot, except that's when a flood of work dropped into his inbox. There was a coup or something going down somewhere and the Agency was involved somehow, he was sure. It was one of the more frustrating parts of the job. It wasn't seeing puzzle pieces without the whole picture, it was only seeing individual close-up glimpses of a single piece. That didn't mean that those pieces didn't have to be analyzed right then and there.
He sent off his twelfth analysis for the day, then stood up to stretch his back. He peeked into Martin's cube, knowing full well it would be empty. All around he could hear fingers frantically flying over keyboards. He sat down and followed suit.
IT WAS 8:30 in the evening and he knocked on Martin's door for the third time. His car was in the building lot, so if he was somewhere else, he hadn't left by those means.
He knocked again. "It's me, it's Arthur, can you let me in? Or can you just come to the door so I know you're all right. I'm trying to not be weird and stalkerish about this, I'm really not." He pressed his ear to the door but only heard silence. "Okay, I'm going to let myself in just to make sure you didn't pass out in the shower and crack your head open. If you're fine, now is the time to tell me to screw off."
He waited and listened another minute before sliding the key into the lock.
"Hello?" he called out as he slowly pushed the door open. He heard nothing in return. "Hello?" A combination of panic and frustration began to build. He slid down the short entry hall and stopped. Sitting at the small table was Martin. From the back, he couldn't tell if he was breathing, or if it actually was Martin as he had seen far too many horror and noir films in his life. His heart was racing and he fought to keep his breathing steady.
"Martin?" He kept his voice soft as he slowly walked around the table. It was Martin sitting there. His eyes were open and Arthur could see the slight rise and fall of his chest. In the middle of the table was a fine china teacup and a large bottle of gin. The cap was on and the seal was in place. He leaned into Martin's field of vision. "Martin?" Martin's eyes flicked to his for a fraction of a second then went back to staring at the gin bottle.
Arthur let out a long and ragged breath, the worst of the panic receding back to general worry. "Okay, you're not dead on the floor of your shower. This is good."
Martin didn't acknowledge him. Arthur took a sniff. There was no smell of alcohol so he had probably just been staring at the bottle all day.
"I'm just going to take this and put it aside, okay?" He plucked the bottle off the table, receiving no objections, and put it in the kitchen. There was a black plastic bag, the kind distributed by liquor stores, and a receipt on the counter. He picked up the receipt. The time said 09:57. So Martin had gotten up, showered, dressed, possibly eaten his oatmeal, then something happened to get him to skip work, buy alcohol and then sit and stare at it for ten hours.
He was still staring at the place the bottle had been.
"Do you know it's after eight, at night?"
He didn't move for nearly a minute before giving a tiny shake of his head.
'Nonverbal but responsive. I can work with this. Maybe.'
"And I'll bet you haven't eaten, drunk, or possibly moved since sometime this morning."
This time it only took half a minute for Martin to shake his head.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
He got another head shake, this one almost instantaneous.
"Okay."
This was not a scenario he had planned for. He'd expected Martin to be missing, injured, or worst case, dead. He looked around the apartment trying to find anything else out of place, some clue as to what could be wrong, but everything was just as he'd seen it last time: barren, except for a print of a cancan dancer so out of place. He got up and walked over to it. The dancer, painted with red hair and a smiling face, her legs spread into the splits, was the only witness to anything that may have happened in the room.
As he stared at it some details came into focus. The thickness of the paper, the slight fading of the colors, the simple but careful framing. "Is this real?" He turned to Martin. "I mean, is this original? Like an original Lautrec."
Martin raised his head from the ghost of the gin bottle. "Yes." There was a rough scratch to his voice that Arthur had never heard.
"Wow. Where did you find it?"
"She was my great grandmother, many times over."
That pulled Arthur up short. He hadn't actually expected Martin to answer, and if he did, he wasn't expecting an answer like that. "She was very pretty."
"Yes." Martin had gone back to staring at nothing.
"Okay," Arthur clapped his hands together coming to a decision. "Due to my fondness for film noir, I know every retro, hipster movie theater in the area that serves good food and has late screenings. So, you are going to get up and I am going to take you someplace where you will eat, then sit in the dark and have the feelings you need to feel without engaging in alcohol poisoning or having people worrying that you slipped and died in your shower."
Martin blinked at him and, for possibly the first time, Arthur recognized confusion in his face.
"I'm serious. Your doctor told me you were twenty-five pounds underweight and you're not that tall. I will throw you over my shoulder and walk out of here," Arthur bluffed. He'd never been terribly strong in his upper body and would not be surprised if Martin could whip out super-secret ninja moves.
With a twitch of the lips, that might have been a smile, he began to stand only to crash back down to his chair. Arthur rushed to his side and slung an arm around him. "Easy. Let's try this again."
Martin leaned against his side and slowly pushed himself to his feet. His legs wobbled and he visibly winced. Arthur kept an arm low around his narrow waist as they took small steps around the table. He was still limping on both legs when he pulled himself from Arthur's side but didn't look to be at risk of falling over.
"Come on, grab your wallet and keys." Martin gave him a closed look like he was about to claim that he was fine, needed no assistance, and would send Arthur away. "Nope." Arthur preempted any argument. "Out the front door. Right now. Empty walls and gin are not healthy."
"You don't need to do this."
Arthur crossed his arms. He knew he didn't need to do this. For all of Carol's teasing and what he might have said to the doctor, Martin was still very much a mystery. He'd known more about the lives and background of casual acquaintances than he knew about Martin Grove, but those little slivers were something Arthur was coming to treasure. Not the information, but the trust that came with it. Martin might have been half delirious with fever when he first extended that trust, but he had done nothing to rescind it and Arthur had been careful to keep it.
"Your doctor didn't believe we were involved because I didn't know how thin you were. He wanted to hospitalize you but the best he could do was keep you overnight to get liquid vitamins into you, and I have no doubt you are smart enough to know that. Everyone needs someone to check in on them, even if it's just to make sure they haven't tripped and cracked their head open. And as much as you might want to argue with me, you know it to be true and necessary or you would have taken back your apartment key. You might be stubborn and scary and I've got no way of knowing what's really going on in your head, but you are in the amateur leagues compared to my sisters or my dad's mistress, and she can break a chicken down to pieces in under 20 seconds, and completely debone it in less than a minute. On a technical level, I don't need to do this but as a reasonably functional human who actually enjoys your company, yes I do."
Martin blinked at him. There were the same slight twitches around his eyes and mouth that had followed the first taste of that summer roll. It was well over a minute before his face settled back into stillness.
"Go get your wallet and your keys. We're going to go find a movie."
THE GLORIA Revival Theater had couches instead of seats and a second-rate sound system. What it also had was a quality kitchen and a 9:15 showing of Gilda. Not Arthur's all-time favorite of the genre, but not bad. Truthfully, it was way too late to be out when they both had work in the morning, but Martin needed to get out and Arthur wasn't about to take him clubbing.
He handed Martin a menu. "Pick something."
He hadn't said a word on the drive, only stared out the window. His eyes jumped over the menu, but he looked more confused than anything. How does someone, in American society, get to whatever miscellaneous age Martin might be, and seem totally perplexed by the simplest of menus? There was pizza listed. Yes, there were plenty of people who didn't, wouldn't, couldn't cook, but unless Martin had been raised in some secluded cult (a theory Arthur was willing to consider) he must have an opinion on pizza toppings. The lights blinked, announcing the start of the movie. Arthur sighed. "Antipasto plate for two and two chocolate milkshakes," he ordered.
The lights were left a little brighter than most theaters so people could see their food and drink. It also made it easier to see Martin. He kept his eyes on the screen, impassive at first, showing only his usual distance, but in the half-darkness his lips twitched into a smile when Rita Hayworth made her famous appearance with a grand toss of her hair.
And he ate, without prompting or pushing from Arthur. A full day with nothing was enough to break even his control. It wasn't much. A few cubes of cheese, a couple of olives, a little prosciutto, his face gaining animation as the film flickered on the screen.
Arthur knew there was a good chance he would never be told what had frozen up Martin that day, but with every little flicker of emotion, he felt better about his own actions that night.
Before the lights went up, Arthur was sure he saw a single tear slip from Martin's eyes. If a quirk of the lips was uproarious laughter, then that tear would have been heaving sobs on anyone else. He didn't comment, or acknowledge it, or make any intimation that he'd seen it at all.
MARTIN HADN'T spoken on the drive home any more than on the drive there. Arthur had been tempted to try to tuck him in, but he'd pushed the boundaries enough that night and Martin had opened up far more than he'd expected. Instead, he wished Martin a good night at the door and encouraged him to get some sleep.
Arthur went home and, instead of taking his own advice, stared at the ceiling over his bed. He was used to being entrusted with secrets beyond his job. His entire childhood had been keeping one giant secret, but it was a secret everyone knew. It was less keeping a secret and more not punching the kids who teased him about it. He'd also kept secrets about himself, but those were less deep and dark and more just not wanting to deal with the shit storm of acknowledging what everyone knew or at least suspected.
The secret of Martin was different. It lay quiet in his chest. It felt sacred, as if he had born witness to an ancient rite, rather than taking a depressed friend out for a movie. But the word 'friend' seemed not to fit. It was too vague and common. What he felt was more complicated than a word tossed about by children or achieved through a click of a mouse.
Maybe there was a word in old English, lost to modern ears. Martin let him see the cracks that night and the smallest hint of what lay beyond. He wanted to know what was truly beneath those cracks but also knew he would fight anyone who tried to break Martin open. For that feeling, he knew of no words.
Merlin and Arthur, Arthur and Merlin. Merlin appearing young yet wise, his lives flowing in reverse; but Arthur was no king past, future, or otherwise. Maybe one of those children who looked up at him with wide eyes and open minds had the making of a leader of legend. But not him.
He flipped over and yelled into his pillow. Becoming lunch buddies with the weird kid was not supposed to become this complicated, but not for one second did he feel like stopping.
ARTHUR MANAGED to drift for a few hours before his alarm went off. It hadn't helped. Instead, his mind had tossed up a recurring stress nightmare that had started when he was twelve. Walking into Hanh's kitchen and finding that none of the prep work had been done and his sisters weren't there and for some reason his eyes wouldn't focus so he couldn't read the order slips while he frantically tried to cook.
He woke up with a headache and a craving for really greasy pizza. He also woke up with a bit of an idea. Martin obviously had a first-class academic mind, but Arthur was no slouch and education did go both ways.
HE WASN'T surprised to see Martin at his desk working away. After all, the man had tried to drag himself into work half-dead with the flu. Arthur was tempted to pop his head in, to ask how he'd slept, how he was doing, but the office wasn't the place for that conversation, not between the two of them.
Martin got up for tea right on schedule and Arthur popped across the row. He'd had to dig around a few boxes of books that were never unpacked, but he finally found an old copy of The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy. Everyone should have an opinion on pizza toppings and he would drag Martin through the history of Italian cooking if he needed to.