Chapter 21 – Emily
Emily
The buzzer goes on a Tuesday, in the afternoon, in my hour.
I know it's my hour because the light has just come around to the wide window, and I've got the cello against me and the Bach open on the stand though I'm not really reading it anymore, I'm just letting my hands go where they've learned to go.
So when the buzzer sounds I do the new thing again, the thing I caught myself doing the day Ana came with the almond things.
I finish the phrase. I let the note ring all the way out into the room and I listen to the room give it back, and only then do I set the cello on its side and cross to the little grid of buttons by the door.
"Yes."
Static. Then a voice I have known for nine years, and it does what it does, it goes straight past my ears and lands somewhere lower, some old wiring that hasn't been told yet.
"It's me."
I don't say anything. I stand with my thumb near the button and I look at the cello lying on its side in the afternoon light and I think, absurdly, that I don't want him to see it, the lesser one, the one I bought myself because I couldn't afford the silence where the real one used to be.
"Emily. I'm not going to buy anything. I'm not here to. I have one thing to give you and then I'll go, and if you don't want me to come up you can say so and I'll leave it with whoever's at the door and never do this again. I mean that. But I'd rather hand it to you."
The old me would have pressed the button in the first two seconds, before he'd finished asking, apologizing already, so grateful.
I make myself count. Not to punish him. To find out what I actually want, down under the wiring, in the quiet place.
And what I find surprises me, the way refusing the boat surprised me.
It isn't yes and it isn't no. It's I want to see his face when he says it.
I press the button.
He takes a long time coming up. Eleven floors and no elevator that hurries.
I open the door and stand in it, and I do not fix my hair or change out of the sweater with the hole at the cuff, because I am done arranging my face, I decided that months ago at a window in a grey silk dress, and I am not going to undecide it for him.
And then he's at the top of the stairs, and he stops.
I almost don't know him.
It's not the weight, though he's leaner.
It's not the tan, though he's got one, the deep one you only get from being outside for a season and not a weekend.
It's his hands. He's got the case in both of them, and his hands are wrong, they're marked, there are stains worked into the knuckles that no manicure took out and a shine of old callus across the palms, and I look at Ben's soft dealmaker's hands turned into a workman's hands and I feel the first thing I did not plan to feel, which is off-balance.
"You look well," he says. His voice is wrong too. The warmth is gone out of it, the certainty, the assumption of the yes. What's left is smaller and I don't have a name for it yet. "Connor said you did. He was underselling it."
"You've been talking to Connor about how I look."
"I've been living off two sentences a week about how you look." He says it plainly, no wince, no softening. "Yeah."
I don't invite him in. He doesn't ask. He sets the case down between us on the landing, flat, and he crouches over it, and his marked hands do the latches, and I already know before the lid comes up, I know the way I knew he'd fired her, cleaner than the old weather-knowing.
But knowing it and seeing it are not the same thing.
The garden is gone. The fence, the blue, all of it.
The belly of it is amber and gold again the way it was the day he gave it to me in a rainstorm because he couldn't wait, and the varnish has that deep grained look that light is supposed to be the enemy of, and it is whole, it is more than whole, it has been brought back from a place things don't come back from, and I make a sound I don't decide to make.
It's the sound I made on the tile with my grandmother's bowl in my hands.
He flinches at it. He knows that sound. He's the reason I know it.
"I didn't send it," he says, still crouched, looking up at me.
"I want that to be the first thing. I didn't send it with a card.
I didn't have someone deliver it. I know what you thought about the peonies, and you were right, they were evidence, everything I sent you was me saying look how well I know you, look how much I paid, and none of it was for you, it was all for me, so you'd owe me a turning-around.
" He stands. He leaves the cello open on the floor between us like something we're both responsible for.
"This isn't that. I didn't buy this back.
I couldn't. The man who fixed it wouldn't take my money to go faster and I found out I didn't have anything else he wanted, so I stayed.
Since October. I washed his brushes and I clamped what he told me to clamp and I ruined four other people's cellos learning how not to ruin this one, and I did the ugly middle of it with my hands, and I'm not telling you that so you'll be impressed.
I'm telling you because it's the only thing I've ever made instead of bought, and it took eight months, and every single day of it I stood exactly where I put you.
Waiting on someone who wouldn't be hurried.
Not allowed to fix it with money. Just there. Holding still."
The light moves on the floor. Neither of us says anything.
"I called you cold," he says. "You were on your knees on the tile picking up your grandmother and I stood over you and I asked you when you got so heartless, and then I went down the hall to put a bandage on the woman who broke it.
I think about that every day. Not to feel bad.
I've noticed feeling bad is just another thing I do for myself.
I think about it so I don't get to forget what I actually am, which is a man who set his fork down all night exactly once, for the wrong person, and left it down for her, and never once, not one time in eight years, set it down for you. "
"Ben."
"I'm almost done. Then I'll go if you want.
" He doesn't step closer. That's the thing that undoes me a little, that he's learned the exact distance, that he isn't crossing it to make me deal with him crossing it.
"I'm not asking you to come home. There's no home to come to, I sold the glass house, I couldn't stand the way it ate the sound.
I'm not asking you to decide anything today or to decide anything at all.
I brought you your voice back. That's the whole errand.
Whatever you do with it, whether I'm anywhere near you when you do, that's yours.
You don't owe me a turning-around. You never did.
I just wanted, one time, to give you something you couldn't hear as a bill. "
And there it is, the moment the old story would turn, the man across the last of the distance, and I stand in my doorway in a sweater with a hole in the cuff and I wait for the old thing to lift, the reflex, the arm going out across the bed in the night.
It doesn't lift. That's not the same as nothing. Something else happens, slower, and I have to stand very still to feel what it is.
It's that I believe him. Not the words. Anyone can carry good words up eleven flights.
It's the hands. You can't fake eight months of turpentine into your knuckles.
You can't buy the particular way he's standing, the not-crossing, the letting me be the one who decides what the air does next.
He came into my world instead of building a bigger one to lure me back into his.
He learned to hold still, and he learned it the only way it takes, which is the slow way, hand over hand, with no term sheet and no date in ink.
I look at the cello on the floor. My cello. Alive again, and it was his ruin and his year and his hands that did it, and both of those things are true at once, and I have gotten good, this year, at holding two true things at once.
"Pick it up," I say.
He goes still. "What?"
"You said you wanted to give it to me. So give it to me. Bring it in." I step back from the doorway, not all the way, just enough. "You can put it by the window. That's where the light is, in the afternoon. That's my hour."
He gets both marked hands under it and lifts it slow, and he carries it past me into the bare room, and he sets it down by the window in the light as careful as I've ever seen him do anything. Then he steps back from it. He waits.
I don't go to him. I go to the cello. I sit down with it against me in the light, and I feel how it's changed, warmer, heavier with itself, and I put the bow to the low string and I draw it down, and the sound comes up enormous and grained and it fills the bare room and rolls off the plaster and comes back, all of it, every particle, nothing swallowed.
Across the room a man I used to be married to puts a marked hand over his mouth and sits down slowly on the floor, because I still have no proper chairs, and listens to me the way he never once did in eight years, all the way to the end of the phrase, and does not reach for his phone, and does not look at the door, and is simply, finally, there.
I don't know what we are yet. I know I'm not moving.
I know the loft is mine and the hour is mine and the sound in it is mine, and if there's a version of this where he gets to sit on my floor and hear it, it's going to be built the slow way, hand over hand, and he's going to wash a lot of brushes before I trust the weather of him again.
But he's here, in my world, holding still, and I'm playing, and the room gives it back.
"Don't stop," he says, very quietly, from the floor.
So I don't.