Two Across is ‘love’ and he tells her so and she fills it in. He waits for her reaction; there is no reaction. The clue was ‘amorous sentiment’ and he solved it easily because he sits at the counter with her and the shampoo in her shower damp hair is redolent.
“One Down is ‘alas,’” she tells him, and she’s right, of course. He examines her half-pouting mouth, her furrowed brow; is she responding to him or simply doing the crossword?
“Alas,” she might say, “Love is the easy part.”
“Alas, many might love me equally.”
“Alas, love is never enough.”
For him, the crossword is a method of divination; the crossword is staring into flame or crystal; haruspicy’s linguistic cousin; a translation of the runes. A milieu of junctions, a set of meanings within meanings in which all implications enlace; everything is open, everything is something. Each set of boxes—like tiles of a mosaic, like the pictograms of the tarot—has a story to tell.
He places his fingers on his forehead, grinds his thumb into his temple and rubs circles. Tense; he is the type of man that never fully relaxes.
“Six Down,” crossing the V in ‘love,’ “is ‘avail.’” When he tells her this, he directs his thoughts at her. He has felt before that she’s understood them; he takes a word with both ghostly hands of his volition—an elaborate, daedal carpet—and unfurls it before her as a ribbon of consciousness.
Hear me, he thinks, I am asking. Is all of my love to no avail?
This is how it works, how it has worked for the past days and weeks. Covert questions, cryptic answers. This time—between three and five in the diner—is all they have left together. Every so often, this timid methodology strikes him as pathetic, but he hopes it will be enough. Hopes it is enough, hopes it is malleable, hopes it can be molded into the foundation of something new.
Without asking his approval or opinion, she scribbles in the answer to Four Across: ‘seizure.’
As in, “Give it a rest.”
As in, “I know what I’ve done to your heart.”
As in, “I remember what you did to mine.”
Seven Down—shot like the proverbial piercing arrow through the E in ‘love’ and the Z in ‘seizure’—is ‘red zone.’ The clue asks about the area between the twenty-yard and goal lines on a football field. He does not tell her this even though he knows.
This is more than a word puzzle, more than the Tuesday New York Times; there are things to be gained and lost. They alternate clue for clue, answer for answer; within the oscillation, they dance. Meaning for meaning, reading the words; he will not waste his chance to respond, to dance, by recalling such things for her. ‘Red zone’ would be an announcement.
“I have let myself go, spilled over the belt on my jeans while leaning in closer to watch the cheerleaders when they came on screen.”
‘Red zone’ would instigate recollection. It would be holophrastic; tantamount to exclaiming ‘remember me as Lousy Ex-husband!’ In conversation so Spartan, words must be chosen wisely.
He builds off of the R in ‘seizure’ instead. “Revenant,” he says. “One who has returned from the dead.” The pen stops, her eyebrows arch and she shoots a wink at him. “Wow,” she says. He concentrates, baring down hard on the tangible pulse of his thought.
Are you receiving me?
The version of him that she remembers is a great, grey expanse powered by some clenched, putrescent black fist of a heart. He wants for her to understand, for her to believe. I am a revenant. I have changed.
