He'd been paying attention. The attention no longer surprised her; it had always been the thing he was best at. What surprised her was that the attention was, for the first time, pointed at what she wanted rather than at what he was trying to determine about her.
They didn't speak during the film. His hand was on the armrest, her hand was in her lap. The distance between the two hands was perhaps six inches, and neither of them closed it.
When the film ended and the lights came up, they sat for a moment in the emptying theater.
"I wanted to say something," she said. “I saw the Corton gala. Someone filmed it. My mother sent me the video."
He didn't answer immediately. She could see him deciding how to hold the information.
"I didn't do it for — "
"I know you didn't." She looked at him. "Today is a film. Today is not a reconciliation, or a conversation about reconciliation, or the first step toward anything. Today is two people who used to be married to each other sitting in a movie theater on a Saturday afternoon and finding out whether they can be in a room together without one of them getting hurt."
"All right."
"I need you to hear that."
"I hear it."
She looked at him for another moment. His eyes were the hazel she'd learned to read at close range.
"Can I call you?" he asked.
The question landed in her the wayI miss youhad landed on the curb on Clark Street. In a place she hadn't reinforced. She'd reinforced against apologies. She hadn't reinforced againstcan I call you.
"Yes," she said, the words out before she could stop them. "You can call me."
He called the following evening. They talked about the film: she'd liked it more than she'd expected. He'd listened the way he listened now, which was differently from the way he'd listened during the marriage. During the marriage, his listening had been the listening of a man cataloguing. This listening was the listening of a man who wanted to know what she thought and had no second purpose for the knowing.
He called again two days later. That conversation lasted longer.
The courtship — because that was what it was, and she wasn't going to pretend it wasn't — began the way courtships began between two people who'd already been married to each other and divorced and were now, against every reasonableexpectation, trying to find out whether there was a version of their lives in which the marriage hadn't been the whole story.
He sent books. He kept sending books, but now the books came with flowers. Flowers a man had chosen himself. Ranunculus from the florist on Clark. A bunch of dahlias wrapped in newspaper. Once, a single peony — white, open, ridiculous — tucked into the front cover of a volume on Japanese garden design with a note that said onlythis reminded me of your mother's wedding photograph. E.
She'd held the peony, stood behind the counter of the bookshop and let herself feelgiddy.
More films followed. A Sunday matinee at the Music Box, a documentary about a woman in the Scottish Highlands who'd spent twenty years restoring a crumbling walled garden on her family's estate, which she suspected he'd found by searching some combination ofwoman rebuilds garden documentarybecause the film was obscure and he wasn't a man who watched documentaries. A Wednesday evening showing of something she'd mentioned wanting to see in one of their phone calls and which he'd, without comment, bought tickets for. An afternoon at a revival house in Wicker Park where they'd watched a black-and-white film about a bookshop in New York. She'd turned to him in the dark and whisperedyou chose this on purposeand he'd whispered backI chose everything on purpose, Noelle.She'd let the sentence sit in the dark between them without answering it.
Lunches. He came to her neighborhood. He didn't ask her to come to his. He sat across from her at tables that seated two and asked her about the shop, the books she was reading, about the customers who came in and what they bought. He listened, and the listening was still the new listening.
She showed him the bookshop on a Saturday morning before opening.
She'd been thinking about it for a week. She'd been thinking about it because the bookshop was the thing she'd built in his absence, and showing it to him was going to be — she was honest with herself about this, sitting in the bathtub on Astor Street the night before — the most vulnerable thing she'd done since the gala. The shop was hers in a way nothing in her life had ever been hers, and inviting him into it was inviting him into the one room she'd built without his shadow in it.
He came at nine. She let him in through the front door, and he stood in the middle of the honey floor, looked at the room the way she'd wanted, without knowing she'd wanted it, for someone to look at it.
"You did this," he said.
"I did."
"The floors."
"I chose the stain. The color is honey."
"It's — " He stopped. Pride shone in his voice. "Noelle."
"Yes?”
