The day before that, he brought me flowers. Yellow tulips, which he carried in himself instead of palming the job off on the doorman. He arranged them in a vase, then stepped back to admire his handiwork like a kindergartner with a finished macaroni portrait.
And the touching.
God, the touching is what really has me ready to chew my own arm off.
His palm at the small of my back when we pass in the hall. A finger drawing a lazy line down the side of my neck last night while Anderson Cooper droned on about Davos, and then, the one that did me in: a tender pat on the cheek when I handed him his nightly scotch.
I’d take a beating any day of the week over this. I know how to be hit; I’m very, very good at that aspect of this marriage. There’s a rhythm to the whole production. Bruise, lie, ice, repeat. The blocking is choreographed. The script is dog-eared. We all hit our marks, no pun intended.
This new thing gives me that pins-and-needles feeling of waiting for bad news to arrive.
What kind of news that might be, I don’t know yet.
But I do know it’s coming.
He’s noticed I’m off my food, for starters. I caught him eyeing my plate at Le Bernardin last night. I’d taken three bites of the halibut and quietly given up because the smell of the beurre blanc had my stomach doing back handsprings. He didn’t comment on it, though. He just refilled my water glass and asked for the check to come early.
My body isn’t making things easy. For a microscopic dot, this baby is being abrat.It’s like, now that Matvei knows, the little one feels free to start tormenting me, way ahead of schedule.
I’m tired in a way I didn’t know I could be. Sleep-tired plus brain-tired plus a third, secretive, developed-in-an-underground-CIA-lab kind of tired. My boobs feel like they’ve been filled with concrete. I cried in the elevator yesterday because someone’s perfume in the lobby smelled like a gingerbread cookie, which reminded me of Christmases with my sister growing up.
This is going to be a long eight months.
IfI get eight months. Which is a big if.
Dani has been calling, but I haven’t answered. The last thing I need is my cousin’s bloodhound nose and prying questions. Never one to be ignored, she followed up with a text yesterday that just saidDO U EXIST.I’ll call her back when I’m a person again. Whenever that is.
It won’t be for a little while, though. Because the annual firm retreat is in eleven days.
That’s the number I’ve started running my life by. Eleven days until Raymond drags me and his entire staff upstate to some Tudor mansion-slash-hotel-slash-hunting-club in the Hudson Valley for two nights of golf, pheasant shooting, and old-money camaraderie. In that time, I need Mat to come up with a Plan B now that I royally screwed him out of our first window of opportunity.
I would love a hint about how he’s doing. A mere breadcrumb would suffice, anything at all. Instead, the burner stays dark behind the hatbox, and I have to make my peace with the fact that he’ll write when he writes and not a millisecond sooner.
In the meantime, I trust him.
I have to. It’s not like I have a whole lot of other choices.
Tuesday morning, Raymond announces he’s working from home.I’m staying in today. Got a stack of paperwork to slog through. Conference call at ten.Then he kisses my temple and disappears into his study with the coffee pot.
So now, I’m getting ready for a day I had not planned to spend under the same roof as him. Which is its own special hell, because the apartment becomeshisapartment with him in it, and every move I make has to be calibrated for a highly temperamental audience.
I take my time in the shower because the shower is the safest room in the house. The water gives me a sound buffer, behind which nothing I murmur to the blueberry-sized person living rent-free in my abdomen gets overheard by prying ears.
Lately, I have been murmuring a lot.
Hi, you. I know, I know. But Mama’s working on it.
I turn my face up into the spray and try to turn into a houseplant. Heat. Lavender. Steam. Those are safe thoughts. Totally neutral objects to meditate on. I’ll take anything other than a dead burner or the still-living man across the hall.
I wash my hair and shave my legs, then just sit on the floor for a while and zone out. When the water finally goes lukewarm, I shut it off. I wring out my hair and wrap up in the big white towel, then stand on the bath mat and eye the tile like I’m walking off a pirate’s plank.
I do not want to leave this bathroom. But sooner or later, I have to move. With a sigh, I pad out to the bedroom and round the corner of the dressing area toward my closet.
Then I stop.
Because Raymond is standing in my closet.
He’s in his white undershirt and pajama pants, barefoot. His thinning hair is still mussed from bed. His back is half to me, facing the little built-in shelf where I keep my purses lined up by color, and his hand is closed around something small and orange.
