Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
HAPPILY EVER AFTER
Bancroft
We've spent hours talking about it now. Fuck, I've spent hours before now, having the same conversation.
Averaging about two hours a week, for the last year, excluding some scheduling conflicts, holidays, and the days I decided to talk about everyone's favorite related therapy topic outside of one's love life, daddy-issues, that brings the total hours I've paid to discuss this to a whopping hundred hours of someone nudging me forward towards making a decision.
The decision, the logistics, even covering the guilt.
And when Dr. Harvey asked what was holding me back most, it was the fear of this conversation. How do you tell someone who loves you so much that it's time you leave him behind? That all the walls of this house feel like a museum of what we lost. That you stayed long after you should have gone, watching him try to preserve everything exactly as it was, while you were suffocating under the weight of all that preservation. That if you don't leave now, you'll both be trapped here. You've tried so hard to be enough. But this isn't supposed to feel like obligation. Even when it's kept you tethered to this city far longer than you should have stayed.
Of all people, I should have come to him, knowing who he is, that this way of hiding my problems from him has only ever backfired. It's embarrassing really, because if he loves me as unconditionally as he's always said, will this really change that? Transcendent of circumstance. He has proved that in the past.
Being here now, it feels like home. The way my thumbprint is pressed into the mug from all the times it's been in my grip before.
He turns away from me, facing the sink, and I can't see if he's looking out the window, I imagine he is. So much time was spent in the garden, and so much of it is overgrown, the basil overtaking the back corner, and I think of the few clippings that were tucked into my bouquet.
He stands there washing his own mug, and I can see it, I can hear it, the faintness of Elton John playing in the back of my mind, the shape two people so many years ago formed at the kitchen sink. Two people so in love dancing with soapy hands.
The rarest love and even that has proven impermanent.
He turns around grabbing a dish towel to dry his hands. No one is dancing today. He's been alone in this house since I left, maybe he figured I would come back. No clue what he could be thinking now as I tell him I'm taking a job three thousand miles away.
"Isn't it hard for you to be here by yourself?"
"Sometimes more than others," he says somberly.
"It's hard for me." I say, and I wish it wasn't true. I wish I was braver but sitting at this island like nothing is different feels like a lie. Like the happy couple that lived here doesn't haunt the home and overwhelm my senses. Maybe I should be grateful, but it's hard not to have resentment when that love is such a memory, and no longer graspable the way it once was. The way he seems to stand just a little less tall indicates he feels it too, like gravity has gotten stronger, weighing more than it used to.
“Let’s go somewhere else then,” he says as if it's that simple to run away.
"Hey Mack, do you mind if we–" He smiles and gestures beyond the security guard who recognizes the request immediately.
"For you? Of course, Mr. Sterling," he says as he unclips the velvet rope meant for keeping out museum patrons and lets us pass through. "I haven't seen you in a while, Ms. Bancroft," he adds as we take steps into the galleries.
"I know, I've been away," my partial reply offering very little detail, but how much do I really owe anyone.
"Well, Ms. Bancroft, he looks happy to have you back." I look over and I'm not sure I'd say the same. He looks... something , but happy isn't the word I would use. Especially because, I'm not 'back' beyond organizing the remaining logistics of my life.
"Thanks, Mack, you on duty all night? I'm not sure how long we'll be," he asks.
"Take your time, I'll be here." With that, Mack walks off, likely to continue rounds. It's not lost on me how uncommon a privilege this is, being here without the hoards of people. Perks of the old job I suppose.
The magnitude of this space has always matched the magnitude of him.
Maybe that is why this was his favorite place to come. Despite it being his job for so long, the passion he found in the arts was beyond worldly, beyond logic.
The grandiose works on the walls, massive pieces by masters, commissioned memories, biblical references, historical retellings. But our favorite spot in this entire building is in the center of the room, the wood bench that feels at the center of our universe, with a small gold plate engraved with a memory.
Take seats together as strangers and stay long enough to fall in love like we did.
I look at him, as he stretches his legs out in front of him, and I do the same. Maybe I was right, he's shrinking in that house. His body stretches to a full long length, leaning back on his palms, like his spinal cord isn't compressing him in this room, he can be his full self here.
"Hey stranger," he says, "now, let's talk about you leaving."