The sitting with this went on for longer than he would, at any other point in his adult life, have permitted himself to sit with a piece of information that contradicted a plan he'd just produced.
Then the thing he always did got done. He told himself that his wife was acting from the position of a woman who'd, very recently, been very badly injured by him. The position of a woman who'd been very badly injured wasn't a position that held permanently. The sentence through counsel was a sentence of the moment. Time would dilute the position. The position his wife held today wasn't the position his wife would hold at the end of the month he'd hopefully bought.
He told himself these things in the voice he'd been using his whole adult life. The voice had always, in the end, been right before.
It had to be correct now.
CHAPTER 20
NOELLE
The bookshopon Clark Street had been closed for eleven days when Noelle called the number on the realtor's sign in the window.
She'd walked past it again the morning after the sidewalk with Elias — the green trim, the secondhand hardcovers, the handwritten sign that saidOPEN — COME IN — WE HAVE WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR. She’d stood on the sidewalk with her coffee, looked at the dark interior and seen, for the first time, that the sign had been taken down and a realtor's card had been taped to the inside of the glass. The woman who'd known the Burgundian gardens book was gone. The shelves were still there.
She'd walked past it again the next day. And the next.
On the fourth day she'd written down the number.
On the fifth she'd called.
The realtor was a woman named Jean who had a small office on Halsted and a way of talking about commercial leases that reminded Noelle, in a way she couldn't quite place, of her grandmother: direct, unhurried, unimpressed by the address on Noelle's driver's license. Jean had walked her through the storefront on a Wednesday morning. The space was narrowand deep, with pressed-tin ceilings and oak floors that had been under carpet for a decade and needed refinishing. The back room had a utility sink, a half bath, and enough square footage for receiving and storage. The front windows caught the morning light on Clark Street from the east, and by afternoon the whole room turned gold.
"The previous tenant was here for seven years. Good foot traffic. The neighborhood's getting younger but the readers haven't left yet."
Noelle stood in the middle of the empty rooms and looked at the shelves the previous owner had left behind: old library shelves, solid, shelves a person built a room around rather than the other way around.
"I'd like to see the lease," she said.
"The lease is clean," Jean said. "Five years, renewable. The landlord's reasonable."
"I'd like to see it today."
"All right."
Henry had confirmed, in a call that had taken less than a minute, that the funds from her trust were available. The lease was signed by the end of the week. The keys, two of them, brass, old-fashioned, went onto her keyring beside the key to the Mathieus' apartment. She stood on the sidewalk on Clark Street with the keys in her hand, looked at the green trim of the storefront, the dark windows, the shelves inside, and let herself for the first time in many weeks want something without immediately examining whether the wanting was going to cost her.
It was going to cost her. She was ready to pay it because the alternative to paying it was to go on sitting in the Mathieus' library reading other people's books in other people's rooms.
She was going to need a room of her own.
This was going to be the room.
The weeks that followed were weeks of work. The oak floors got refinished: she chose the stain herself, a warm honey that caught the afternoon light the way she'd wanted it to. The tin ceiling got cleaned and sealed. An electrician came and rewired the overhead fixtures, and she chose pendant lights with brass fittings that threw warm pools down onto the shelves. A plumber fixed the utility sink in the back. She painted the back room herself, on a Saturday, in a pair of old jeans and a sweater she'd bought at a thrift store on Division because she hadn't owned a piece of clothing she was willing to get paint on in years.
The books came next. She drove to estate sales in Evanston and Oak Park and bought boxes of hardcovers from the libraries of women who'd died and whose children didn't read. She bought the inventory of a retired professor in Hyde Park who'd spent forty years collecting various editions of books.
She shelved them herself. She spent evenings on Astor Street with the Mathieus' dining room table covered in books, sorting them into the categories she was building — gardens, art, architecture, travel, biography, fiction. She carried them to Clark Street in the morning in canvas bags and put them on the shelves in the order she'd decided on, which was not alphabetical and not by subject but by something else, a logic of adjacency that put the Morisot biography next to a book about Giverny and the Giverny book next to a memoir about a woman who'd restored a farmhouse in the Luberon, because the books belonged together the way certain conversations belonged together. If a customer picked up one she wanted them to see the next.
She was building a room. The room was hers. The building of it was the first sustained act of creation she'd performed in her adult life. It was making her, in increments so gradual she could only see them when she looked back across the span of a week, less afraid.
Noelle was still afraid. She was still, underneath, a woman who ached for a man she'd told herself she was done with. The aching came at night, mostly. It came when she was lying in the Mathieus' guest bed looking at a ceiling that wasn't hers. It came when she heard a voice on the street that sounded, for a fraction of a second, like his. It came when she was shelving a book and her hand passed over a spine and she thought, without meaning to,he would've liked this one.
She let the aching come. She didn't fight it. Fighting it would've required the attention she was spending elsewhere. She'd made a decision about where her attention was going, and the decision was holding.
Her mother came to see the shop on a Sunday.
Noelle hadn't invited her. Her mother had called that morning and saidI'd like to see what you've been doing,in the voice her mother used when she'd already decided to come and was extending the courtesy of phrasing it as a request.
