Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
“Find out what they’re all up to,” I tell him. “Every one of them. I don’t care how small it seems.”
“How fast?”
“Yesterday.”
He’s gone without a goodbye, which is the single best thing about him and the reason I keep paying him what I pay him.
After that I make myself go back to work. There are contracts on the screen that need my eyes and a quarter that will not close itself, and I sit in front of the whole of it and get absolutely nothing done, because every time my attention slips its leash it goes straight back to the same place, the low leather chair, the folded hands, the coat she never took off, the face that flinched when I said farce and broke clean apart when I said someone like you. An act, I tell myself again, and the word has a little less power over me every hour that passes, because I have sat across this desk from a great many people performing for their lives and not one of them has ever once looked the way she looked.
If it was an act, it’s the only act I’ve ever watched that made the performer bleed.
The thought rides with me through every wasted hour of the afternoon, down in the elevator, into the back of the car, home through traffic I don’t see a foot of, and it’s still sitting beside me at eight that evening when I let myself into the apartment and find it dark and silent in a way it hasn’t been since the night before our wedding. No music. No lamp left on for me in the hall. None of the small ordinary sounds of another person somewhere in the rooms. My own room, when I reach it, is exactly as I left it this morning, the bed made and untouched, the air gone cold and impersonal, scrubbed clean of every small warm trace of her I’d stopped noticing because I’d let myself believe they would simply always be there. Her things are gone from the top of the dresser. Her side of the closet stands open and bare, the hangers pushed to one end. And for one absurd, lurching second some part of me is certain she’s run after all, deal or no deal, straight out the door and into his car.
Then I understand. She hasn’t left the apartment at all. She’s only left me.
Fine. As though I’d make any kind of scene about it. As though I’d go knocking down my own hallway like a boy locked out of his own house, demanding to know why my wife won’t share a bed with the man who spent this morning telling her to her face that he was tired of her. She has done exactly the thing I told her this morning she was free to do, every part of it short of the one thing I forbade her, and if she wants to put a wall and a length of corridor between the two of us tonight then she is more than welcome to the wall and the corridor both.
I tell myself all of that very firmly, standing alone in my cold immaculate room. And then I go and find her anyway, down the dark hall past one empty guest room and the next, all the way to the last and farthest one, the small room at the end with the window that never gets the morning, the exact room a person would choose if the thing she wanted most in the world was distance from the man who’d put her there. The door’s open a few inches. She’s curled on top of the made covers with her shoes still on, fallen asleep the sudden hard way people fall asleep when crying has simply worn them all the way down, and the tracks of it haven’t dried yet on her face.
I stop in the doorway and I don’t go in, because going in is not a thing the man I’ve spent all day pretending to be would ever do.
She looks so small. She looked small this morning too, in the chair, and I told myself then that it was strategy, that the smallness was aimed at me like everything else. But standing here now in the dark with no cameras and no board and no audience of any kind, with no broad desk to put between us and hide behind, I can’t make the lie hold its shape. There’s no one here to perform for. There is no reason on this earth for her to be lying asleep and tear-streaked and undone in the worst and farthest room in my home unless the grief is real, unless I am the one who did this to her, unless the thing I broke apart this morning to keep was a thing that had somehow, impossibly, against every term of every contract, already been mine.