The Colophon

Chapter 1 - Ask

Ben Calder had tuned organs in colder rooms than Ruth Kade’s office. That did not make the kneeling mark in the rug easier to look at.

“You wrote to the press address,” Ruth said. She did not stand. A stack of unbound signatures sat at her elbow, cream paper, black ink still smelling like work. “Most men who write that address want an introduction to a magazine. You asked for the roster and also asked not to be written about. Say that second part again without the polite padding.”

Ben sat when she pointed. The chair took his weight and complained.

“I read your last essay,” he said. “It was good. It was also a room I recognized and I am not offering myself as your next example. I want to be trained for service in this house. Kitchen, body, silence, pain if you mean it. I do not want to become a paragraph.”

Ruth’s mouth almost moved. Approval or warning; hard to tell.

“Bindery House is not a magazine,” she said. “It is a press and a roster of four. I write in the mornings. I run the house in the afternoons. If those bleed, I am failing, not being profound. Word is colophon. You say it, we stop, we write what happened in the house book, not in an essay. If I ever put your hands in a sentence you can identify, you may walk and take the book of your hours with you.”

“Yes, Ruth.”

“Limits.”

He gave them. No public display to her readers. No scenes built from churches he still had keys to. Impact, restraint, sexual use, domestic service: yes. She wrote it in a cloth-bound ledger that looked like it had outlasted two apartments.

“Strip in the workroom,” Ruth said. “I inspect what I train. Then you dress in the canvas the apprentices wear and you glue endpapers until your neck hurts. If you cannot take an order about glue, you cannot take an order about your cock. I am not interested in men who only kneel when it is interesting.”

Chapter 2 - Bind

The workroom smelled like hide glue and paper dust. Ben took off the jacket that still had loft grit in the seams. Ruth walked around him with a binder’s attention: shoulders, old burn on a forearm from a soldering iron, the fact of him unromantic and available.

“Kneel.”

He did. The floor was wood, not theater. She lifted his chin.

“You look like you could carry this press down the stairs,” she said. “Good. You will still fetch tea on a tray without making it a joke. Canvas on the hook. Joss is on boards. You take Joss’s stack.”

Joss was twenty-six and unimpressed. Ben glued what he was told. At five Ruth tasted the stew he had been pointed at between signatures and said, “More salt. Then my office. You have earned a use, not a myth.”

In the office she had him kneel beside the desk while she marked a proof. Twenty minutes in she set the pencil down and put her heel on his thigh.

“Hands behind. You are not holding a pipe chest.”

His shoulders tried to square. She tapped one until it dropped. When she finally said, “Mouth,” he understood it was not a reward for the glue. It was the next task. Ruth opened her skirt with no speech and set him to work with her fingers light in his hair. She came quietly, as if a good paragraph had closed. She did not thank him like a lover.

“Stand. Desk. I am going to use you. You do not steer. You do not look at me as if I am about to publish you.”

He bent over the proofs. She took him with a condom from the drawer and a pace that ignored his attempt to be useful with his hips. When she finished she reached under him, two precise strokes, and said, “Now.”

Ben came onto paper she had already decided was scrap. His laugh afterward was helpless and ashamed.

“Wash,” Ruth said, pulling her skirt straight. “Then attic. If you need to make this into a metaphor about organs and stops, do it silently. I have heard that one.”

He washed. He did not make the metaphor. The attic cot smelled like paper dust and was enough.

Chapter 3 - Press

A week made a shape. Ben learned the press’s creak. He learned that Ruth’s cane was Sunday and her hands were whenever the proof pile allowed. He learned to kneel at her chair during supper if she tapped the glass, forehead toward her knee, while Joss talked about grain direction as if a man twice his size was furniture. It should have burned. It settled.

On the eighth night she took him to her bedroom, which was books and a window on an alley. She used a strap across his ass until he was loud, then opened him with oiled fingers while he held the headboard and kept his voice because she had said silence was how he disappeared into lofts.

“You like this,” Ruth said, not unkind.

“Yes.”

“You like it enough to make it mean I have found my subject.” Her fingers crooked. He swore. “I have a subject. It is attention. You are not the subject. You are the man in my bed. Say it.”

“I’m the man in your bed.”

“Again.”

He said it until his voice broke, and then she replaced her hand with the harness and took him slow enough that the distinction held. When he was allowed to come he did it with his face in her pillow, large and exact and unwritten.

After, she read a page of someone else’s translation aloud. Not about him. He slept.

Chapter 4 - Essay

The failure arrived on paper, which was honest of it.

Ruth left a draft on the office table - sloppy of her, or a test. Ben was sent to fetch a pencil and should have fetched only a pencil. His name was not there. His hands were: the builder’s palm, mapped with burns, set against the page as if prayer had learned a trade.

He stood in the workroom with the pencil and the draft and felt the loft in his chest, the place where he was always the expert being looked at.

He went back in.

“Colophon,” Ben said.

Ruth looked up from the press. The house changed temperature. Joss found somewhere else to be.

“Show me,” she said.

He set the page down. She read. Her face did not perform shock. It performed a woman catching her own leak.

“Yes,” Ruth said. “That’s you. I told myself it was general. It isn’t. We stop.”

They sat. No cane. Tea because tea was what the house did when a word had been used correctly.

“I want the paragraph gone,” Ben said. “I want to know if I can stay without being useful to the morning work.”

“You can stay.” Ruth folded the page once, then again. “The essay can live without your burns. I got greedy for a clean image. That is my vice, not your service. Twenty-four hours off personal use. Kitchen only. If you come upstairs tonight I will send you down. The stop has to remain a stop.”

Ben slept in the attic and hated how much he wanted the desk anyway. In the morning he salted the eggs and did not ask to be seen.

Chapter 5 - Correct

At dusk she found him in the alley breaking down cardboard like it had offended the press.

“Personal roster resumes if you want it,” Ruth said. “New line in the ledger: no identifiable body in the prose. If I slip, you colophon and I cut. I would rather publish a weaker page than run a dishonest house.”

Ben wiped his hands on canvas. “I want the roster. I also want you to keep using me like labor, not like a footnote you got fond of.”

“That is the job.” She tipped her head toward the door. “Come in. You’re cold, and I don’t train statues. If you want the cane you ask. You do not get it as apology from me. Apologies are sentences. I already said mine.”

He asked two nights later, in the office, after glue. She gave him six, clean, Sunday-shaped even though it was Tuesday, and then she sat on her own desk and had him eat her until her composure finally made a noise. Afterward she pulled him up and kissed his mouth, which she had not done the first week.

“That isn’t publication,” she said. “That’s me off the clock.”

“I can tell the difference,” Ben said. “Now.”

Chapter 6 - Mark

Spring went out the door in a wrap and twine. Ben read the essay in the kitchen because she put it in front of him instead of hiding it. Attention. Burns. No trade. No palm he could swear was his.

“All right,” he said.

“All right is not praise,” Ruth said. “It is the standard.”

That night she took him over the work table between two dry stacks, skirt up, canvas at his knees, facing the press so he would remember which machine he was not. When she came she let him hear it. When he was allowed he followed with his forehead on cream paper that would not take his name.

She left a finished book beside his hand, last page open: printed and bound at Bindery House. No other names.

“You get the hours,” Ruth said. “The book gets the house. If I get greedy again, you still have the word.”

Ben laughed into the wood. “Yes, Ruth.”

In the morning Joss told him which stack to glue. He glued it. When Ruth passed she touched the back of his neck once, a mark that would not typeset, and kept walking toward the press like a woman who had work.