The aching hadn't stopped. The aching was going to be with her for a while yet. She thought about the book, about his handwriting. She thought about the sentenceI didn't go in. I won't.
There was a part of her, she admitted to her traitorous heart, that wanted him to come in.
CHAPTER 21
ELIAS
The extension motioninitially bought him thirty-two days.
He'd asked James for time. James had produced time, and the time sat on his desk in the form of a court filing that did nothing except postpone the date by which he'd be required to respond to his wife's petition. Thirty-two days. He'd thought, the night he'd asked for them, that thirty-two days would be enough to produce an instrument. He'd thought that the way he'd always thought about time: as a resource that, once secured, generated options.
The days didn't generate options. They generated something else, which was a progressively more detailed picture of a man sitting in rooms where his wife wasn't, waiting for a version of the future to present itself that the future had no interest in presenting.
The first week he worked on the sentences. He'd written them the night of James's call — sentences that named what he'd done — and he'd spent the subsequent days refining them the way he refined contracts. Adjusting a word here, tightening a clause there, until the sentences were, by any professional measure, the most precise and well-constructed sentences he'dever produced. They sat in his desk drawer. They were excellent sentences.
They had no one to be said to.
The second week he worked on the room. The private conversation he'd identified as his second instrument required a room. The room required conditions, the conditions required his wife's consent to be in them, and his wife's consent had been, through her counsel, definitively withheld. Every approach he constructed ran into the same wall, which was the wall Feldman had built with a single sentence about harassment. The wall was, he'd come to see, not Feldman's wall. It was Noelle's. Feldman had just been the one she'd asked to pour the foundation.
By the third week, the sentences in the drawer had begun to seem, even to him, like documents from a country he no longer lived in.
He saw her on a Thursday.
It wasn't planned. He'd been in the car on the way back from a meeting in Lincoln Park: a meeting whose proximity to her therapist's office on Clark Street he hadn't, he told himself, been aware of when he'd agreed to take it. The car had turned south on Clark, and Elias had looked out the window at the street, and he'd seen her.
She was standing on the sidewalk in front of a storefront with green trim. She was wearing jeans he'd never seen, a sweater he'd never seen and boots he'd never seen. Her hair was down, she was talking to a woman in a grey coat who was holding a clipboard, and the two of them were looking through the front window of the storefront at something Elias couldn't see from the car.
The light changed. The car moved.
He didn't ask the driver to stop. He didn't ask the driver to go around the block. He sat in the back of the car and watched the storefront recede in the window, and he watched his wife recedewith it. The image of her on the sidewalk in the jeans and the sweater with her hair down — the image of a woman he'd never seen, a woman who was not the woman he'd been married to, a woman who looked like someone who'd been released from a thing she'd been held inside of — sat in him for the rest of the drive. The rest of the afternoon. The rest of the evening.
She'd looked, he thought, standing at the window of his study at the end of the day, like herself.
He hadn't known what that looked like. He'd been married to her for months and catalogued her in a hundred rooms. He hadn't, at any point, known what she looked like when she was being herself. The woman on the sidewalk on Clark Street had been being herself, and the being-herself had been visible from the back seat of a moving car at thirty feet. He'd recognized it instantly without ever having seen it before.
Elias saw her again the following week.
This time he'd been walking on Clark Street because he'd been walking on Clark Street a great deal lately, which was a thing he was not examining too closely. The storefront was at the same address. The green trim was the same. The door was open, and through the door he could see movement: a ladder, a box of books, the warm light of new pendant fixtures throwing gold down onto shelves that had been, the last time he'd passed, empty.
The shelves weren't empty anymore.
He stopped on the far side of the street and looked across the traffic at the storefront. Through the window he could see her moving inside the room: lifting books out of a box, reading the spine of each one with an attention he recognized from the chair by the window in his living room, placing them on the shelves in an order he couldn't, from across the street, determine. But he could see, from the way her hands moved, was an order she'd decided on and was committed to. She was building something.She was building it with the same quiet sustained attention she'd brought to his apartment in the first months of the marriage. The same attention he'd catalogued as adaptation and which he now saw, from the sidewalk across the street, for what it had been.
It had been who she was.
She'd been building a life inside his apartment the same way she was now building a life inside this storefront. Building was the thing she did, and the thing she'd been doing the whole time he'd been watching her for evidence of something else.
He stood on the sidewalk for a long time. She didn't see him. At some point he turned, walked north and went back to his office. He sat at his desk and he understood that his wife was becoming someone. She was becoming someone without him.
She was becoming someone who wore jeans he'd never seen and chose paint colors he'd never approved and shelved books in an order he didn't have access to. The becoming was happening on a street he could walk down and in a room he could see through a window, and he was not, at any point in the becoming, going to be invited in.
The nights were the hardest. The apartment had acquired, in the weeks since the gala, a quality of silence he'd come to think of as permanent, the silence of rooms that had been emptied of the person who'd given them a reason to be warm. Maura came in the mornings and did the work Maura did. The apartment was maintained, the coffee was made, the flowers were replaced on the entry table on their usual schedule, and none of it meant anything. The machinery ran. The machinery had always run. The machinery had been running before Noelle had arrived and it was running now that she'd gone. The running of it, which had once been the texture of his life, was now the texture of her absence.
He ate at the club most evenings. He sat in the library. He read. He didn't, as the weeks went on, construct any further instruments to lure his wife back.
He thought about her. He thought about her at his desk, in the car, in the library of the club and at the window of his study in the late evenings, and the thinking wasn't strategic anymore. The thinking was the thinking of a man who'd lost a woman and was beginning, in the wreckage of the losing, to understand what the woman had been.
She'd been the thing in his life that had been alive.
