Chapter 11 – Emily
Emily
The restaurant is called Falconer's, and we came here first when Ben had exactly enough money to bring me somewhere that made him nervous.
I remember the way he studied the menu that night as though it might turn on him, the way he ordered the second-cheapest thing because ordering the cheapest felt like admitting something, the way his hand shook, just slightly, when the sommelier asked if he'd like to taste the wine and he said yes as if he'd been asked whether he wanted to defuse a bomb.
I loved him so much that night I thought my ribs would give.
I loved the terror in him, the wanting, the way he kept looking at the room like he was memorizing the height of a wall he intended to climb.
He climbed it. He owns three of the walls now.
And I am sitting alone at the table by the window where we always sat, the good table, the one Marco holds for us out of a loyalty that has outlasted whatever it was we came here to be, and there is a second place setting across from me that no one has touched, and I am on my second glass of the Barolo, and it is nine years, eight years, however you count it—it is our anniversary, and my phone has said nothing all day.
Nothing.
I keep turning the word over. It's a strange thing to hold.
Anger has a shape you can grip, and grief has a shape, and even humiliation has edges you can run your thumb along until you know its whole circumference.
But nothing—nothing is the absence of a shape, and I have spent the whole of this dinner trying to work out how a person responds to it.
How you answer a silence. What you could possibly say back to a man who has not spoken.
I dress for it, is the thing. That's what makes me want to laugh, or something adjacent to laughing.
I put on the grey silk he used to love, the one that matches my eyes, and I did my hair the slow way, and I sat at the mirror and drew the line of my mouth with a steadiness I didn't feel, all of it a message sent to no one, a performance for an empty chair.
I told Marta I'd be out. I did not tell her why.
I drove myself here in the dark with the radio off, past the Hendersons' topiary and the lake where the swans have gone in for the night, and I let myself believe, the whole way, some soft impossible thing—that he'd remember at the last, that his car would be here when I arrived, that he'd be sitting at our table with that old terror in his hands and I'd forgive him everything before I'd even sat down.
His car was not here.
Marco poured the first glass and did not ask. That's the kindness of a man who's watched a marriage for years across the same forty feet of dining room. He knows the shape of things. He set down the second glass anyway, out of habit or hope, and I haven't had the heart to tell him to take it away.
I'm rehearsing, is what I'm doing. I've been doing it for two hours.
If he texts—when he texts, because some animal part of me still believes he will—what do I send back?
Do I match the silence with silence, give him nothing for nothing, let him feel the exact weather I've been standing in all night?
Do I tell him the truth, plainly, the way Ana would, it's our anniversary, Ben, and you forgot, and watch the three dots come and go while he decides how to make that my fault too?
Or do I say nothing at all and simply come home late and let the not-saying be the loudest thing I've ever done?
I've drafted a dozen versions. I've deleted them all.
I am, apparently, still the woman who stands at the counter reading the whole menu twice and then orders whatever the person ahead of her got, except there is no one ahead of me now, there's just the empty chair and the untouched wine and the question of how you answer a man who hasn't spoken.
The phone lights up at nine-forty.
Are you planning anything?
I look at it for a long moment. And God help me—God help me, I feel it, that old traitor thing, that lift under the sternum, because for one whole heartbeat I think he remembered.
I think, there you are. I think it the way I thought it in the study doorway with the phone against his ear, the way I thought it on the wooden bridge in Kyoto, that same helpless hope arriving on schedule like a train I keep meaning to stop meeting.
He remembered, and this is him circling toward it, this is the beginning of I'm on my way, don't move, I'm so sorry, I'll be there in twenty.
Even the hope is a kind of humiliation now. Even the hope has learned to hurt on arrival.
I type carefully. I make my hands be still.
Planning what?
The dots come almost at once. He's on his phone, then. He's somewhere with a signal and a free hand, somewhere he could have been for eleven hours, and he's answering me faster than he's answered me in weeks.
For the celebration of the Osaka deal, obviously. Tara said she told you about it last week. Honestly surprised you haven't pulled something together already, it's a big deal, people are expecting something.
I read it twice. Then I set the phone face-down on the white cloth, gently, the way I set down the pieces of my grandmother's bowl, because I have learned that the things that hurt most want to be handled slowly, want you to feel the whole weight of them going down.
Obviously.
Honestly surprised.
I sit in the window of the restaurant where he shook with wanting me once, on the anniversary of the night he could not wait for a reservation, and my husband has reached across the whole dark distance of the day not to say where are you, not to say I remember, not even to say I'm sorry, but to ask why I haven't yet begun throwing a party for a deal he never told me existed.
A deal I learned about from Tara, in my own kitchen, over my grandmother's china, on the morning she broke it.
He is annoyed with me. I can feel it coming off the phone, the particular temperature of his displeasure, the reasonable man being reasonable at a woman who has once again failed to be useful in the specific way he required without asking.
The old me would have folded here. Would have felt the shame of it, the failure of it, would have typed of course, I'll sort it, I'm so sorry, leave it with me, and driven home in the grey silk and stayed up till two making lists, because being needed in the wrong way has always been easier for me to bear than not being needed at all.
But the wine is warm in me and the chair across from me is empty and something in me that has been swallowing for a season, for a year, for eight years, has finished. Not broken. Quieter than broken. A decision, arriving from very far down, walking up toward the light.
I pick the phone back up.
Since Tara has such a handle on it, I type, and I watch my own thumbs move as if they belong to a braver woman than the one who dressed for an empty chair, why don't you ask her.
I send it before I can delete the true part. I don't delete the true part anymore.
The dots come, go, come. Come and go for longer than the words could possibly need, and I imagine him choosing between the version of himself that softens and the version that hardens, and I already know which one wins, I've known for months, I knew on the hill that first morning when I followed his laughter through the cold house like a fool following the smell of bread.
Fine. I will.
That's all. Two words, and the dots don't return, and the phone goes dark in my hand, and across the table Marco's second glass of Barolo sits ruby and untouched under the candle, and somewhere out in the night my husband is turning, right now, to the woman he's always chosen, asking her to plan the party for the deal he closed while I slept, and she'll say of course, she'll say whatever you need, she'll say it in the voice she takes from mine, and he'll feel, God, he'll feel relieved.
He'll feel the way you feel when you finally hand a chore to the person who was always going to do it better.
Let him.
Because I know now. Sitting here in the grey silk in the window of the first place he ever wanted me, I know exactly what I'm going to do, and the knowing is so clean and so quiet and so entirely without shrinking that I have to press my fingers to my mouth to keep from smiling at the empty chair.
It isn't a happy smile. It's the other kind.
The kind that arrives when you've finally stopped running toward a thing and turned, at last, to face the shape of it.
I lift my glass. I finish the wine. I catch Marco's eye and I ask him, in a voice that does not get swallowed, that fills the little candlelit space and stays there, for the check.
I just have to plan it.