I’ll take it easy, I tell myself that same night, when I hear his key turn in the lock.
And taking it easy, right now, tonight, in this bed, means the only thing it can possibly mean. It means pretending. It means lying still when he comes to me in the dark and letting myself believe, just for the length of it, that he still loves me the way I once was so sure he did. It costs me nothing he hasn’t already taken from me, and it might cost me everything if I let thetruth in while my heart is doing the uneven stumbling thing it’s started doing, so I shut the door on the truth and I let the pretending carry me off.
He kisses me awake the way he always does, and I let the old story write itself right over the top of the new one. This is my husband, who chose me, I tell myself as his mouth finds mine in the dark. This is the man who had four blankets delivered before I’d finished saying I was cold, who read me the worst of the sports pages in that terrible deadpan until I laughed, who held me through every ugly night after Dad. I pour all of it into the dark behind my closed eyes and I let it gild him head to foot, and when he gathers me in against him I let myself pretend the gathering still means what it used to mean, that I am wanted and not merely used, cherished and not merely required to produce.
He takes me the way he always has, like a man with something to prove and no patience at all for proving it slowly, and I answer him the way I always have, because my body has never once learned how not to. But tonight I fold the lie in on purpose, the way you’d stir sugar into something that’s gone bitter, and for a little while it actually works. For a little while, with my eyes shut and his heartbeat going under my palm, I can almost taste the marriage I thought I had. I can almost let myself believe that the man moving over me in the dark would, if only I asked him to, stay.
I don’t ask him. I’ve learned at least that much.
And when it’s over and he rises in the dark to dress, I keep my eyes shut and my breathing slow and even, and I tell myself a brand-new lie to replace the one that’s just worn out, and the new lie goes like this: he’s only leaving because he’s coming down with something. I heard him cough this morning over his coffee. He doesn’t want to pass it to me, not now, not when I need to keep well for the baby we’re trying so hard to make. That’s all this is. A considerate husband sparing his delicate wifea fever in the night. I build the whole small shelter of it in the time it takes him to find his shirt in the dark and button it, and I crawl all the way inside, and I almost, almost don’t hear the door close behind him.
That is how I learn to take it easy, and it turns out I have a real talent for it. It goes on like this for two months.
When he isn’t at the breakfast table in the mornings, I tell myself he’s only busy. I make the coffee anyway, the good kind, from the machine with opinions. I set out two cups on the pale stone counter, and I drink mine standing up looking at the full untouched one across from me, and I narrate his morning to myself in cheerful detail, the early meeting, the call with the coast that had to start before dawn, the quarter that won’t go and close itself. I’ve gotten very, very good at reciting his schedule. I have never in my life been less sure of where he actually is. I butter a single slice of toast I don’t especially want and I tell the empty chair across the counter that he’ll be home for dinner, and some mornings I very nearly believe the chair believes me.
When there are nights he doesn’t come home at all, I tell myself he’s still just busy. Men like Trey keep impossible hours; my father did, and my father loved us to his last breath. A dark apartment and a cold half of a bed don’t have to mean anything at all. I lie in the farthest guest room, the small one at the end I never did move back out of, and I listen for a key in a lock that doesn’t turn, and I tell myself that an empty side of a bed is only an empty side of a bed and not a verdict handed down. I’ve gotten so practiced at the telling that I can almost manage it now without crying. Almost.
And when I’m standing in the kitchen one grey afternoon with the television murmuring to itself for company, and I glance up to find my husband’s face filling the screen, and beside his face a woman’s, some elegant dark-haired stranger caught coming out of the same restaurant he’d just come out of with thesame car idling at the curb for them both, and underneath the two of them a caption with a question mark in it doing a truly enormous amount of ugly work, I tell myself it’s only gossip. The city invents these things for sport. The city once spun a whole fairy tale out of me and Troy from nothing but proximity and a good jawline, didn’t it, so surely it can conjure a woman for Trey out of one coincidence and a slow news day. Only an idiot believes gossip. I switch the television off and I tell myself, firmly, that I am not an idiot, and I make myself a cup of tea I then don’t drink, and I do not, I do not let myself stand there and wonder whether the considerate husband with the cough has been busy being considerate somewhere else these two months.
That is what it costs me to take it easy. I simply keep on lying to myself, one fresh lie laid down carefully over the last one before it has time to cool and set, an endless gentle mortar of untruth, because if the lies are the only wall left standing between my heart and the strain that could stop it for good, then I will build that wall just exactly as high as it needs to go, and I will live the rest of my life behind it if I have to.
She’ll keep lying to herself, the girl in the bathroom mirror, if lying to herself is the only way left to protect her heart.
And she does keep it up, right up until the morning the lying finally runs clean out of road, when Trey and I end up standing side by side in the cold quiet of that same bathroom, waiting in a tense ringing silence for a small plastic stick laid on the marble between us to decide something about the rest of my life.
He’s the one who picked it up when the little timer on his phone went off. He’s the one holding it now, turned away from me toward the window so I can’t see his face. I can’t take my eyes off the small white window in the plastic where the answer is slowly surfacing, and I’m doing the breathing Dr. Meyers taught me a lifetime ago, in for four, out for six, easy, easy, take it easy,while my whole future arranges itself one developing line at a time, and oh, oh, oh, the line?—
“You’re not pregnant,” he says. He calls it out first, before I can read it for myself, and his voice gives away absolutely nothing.
I can’t look away from the test in his hand. “I guess I’m not.”
“If this keeps on,” he says, “perhaps I’ll have to find another woman to give me an heir after all.”
And then he’s gone, the way he’s always gone these two months, except this time he doesn’t even bother to leave quietly. He walks out, and the bathroom door slams shut behind him hard enough that I feel it come up through the marble into the soles of my feet, and the sound of it is the truest thing that’s passed between the two of us in two months.
I want to take it easy. I want to, I want to, I have been trying so hard, I have built such a high and beautiful wall.
But I just can’t.
And as I start to cry, standing there alone in the cold quiet bathroom with a piece of plastic in my hand that says I’ve failed at the one single thing keeping me here, I try to pretend that I don’t feel my heart begin to ache, slow and wrong and worsening by the second, in a way that frightens me more than anything Trey has ever said to me.
Chapter Eight
This morning is hell, and it’s the same hell it has been every morning for two months running.
I wake wanting my wife. That’s how it begins, the way it’s begun every single day since she carried her things down the hall to the farthest room in my home, my body reaching across the cold expanse of the bed for a warmth that isn’t there, that hasn’t been there in two months and won’t be there again, and the half-second before I remember why is the only peaceful half-second I’m allotted in a day, so of course it’s the one that costs the most when it ends.
She used to be here. That’s the thing I can’t seem to teach myself to stop expecting, no matter how many mornings prove it wrong. Six months of waking up to her, and the habit doesn’t care in the slightest that the marriage underneath it has rotted clean through. The showers we used to share, the long ones that made us both late for things that genuinely mattered and left neither of us the least bit sorry, gone. Breakfast across the small kitchen table while I read her the worst of the sports columns in the worst voice I could put on, just to watch her laugh into her coffee and scold me for it, gone. Kissing her at the door on my way out. Making her tell me who she belonged to and standingthere listening to her say it back soft and shy with the color climbing up her throat. All of it filed away now under a heading I can’t make myself look at straight on, the life I had before I learned what she was.
Everything is different because she wants another man. I wake up into that knowledge every morning the way you’d walk face-first into the same wall, and by the time the car has carried me downtown and the express car has carried me up, I’m in a mood the entire floor can read off me from clear across the bullpen. No one meets my eyes in the corridor. The assistants discover urgent reasons to be on some other floor entirely. A man learns, running a building this size, that there are days his people quietly widen their orbit around him, and they are never once wrong about which days those are.
There’s a report sitting at the top of my inbox when I drop into the chair, and the sight of the sender’s name does nothing at all to improve the morning.
Nolan. The subject line reads, with his usual economy,Day 1 findings.I make a mental note to have Bills wire him a bonus, because this is fast even for Nolan, and Nolan is the fastest man I know at this. Then I open it, and the speed stops mattering at all, because the speed was never the point. The attachments are the point. High-resolution, time-stamped, more of them than I want and exactly as many as I’ve earned for asking.
My jaw sets, and it stays set.
There she is. My wife, in the soft grey coat I bought her, at a café table with Barrymore leaning in low across it toward her. My wife on a park bench at his side, her face turned up to his, the same upturned face from Raymond’s folder. My wife outside the gates of her own father’s cemetery with the golden boy standing a respectful, intimate half-step too close to her in the cold. The dates run down the corner of each frame in neat white type, and I read them the way I’d read a balance sheet that’s justconfirmed in black and white the fraud I’d only suspected, every line another small cold confirmation of the same rot. She has met him again, and again, and again across these two months. I never once asked where she went with her afternoons. I told myself a possessive man always knows where his wife is, and I never thought to turn that possessiveness toward the empty hours she spent away from me, because some last foolish corner of me did not want the answer it has now received.
