4. Willow
— ? —
Willow
I had a list, and an order to say it in, and I closed his laptop while he was still looking at it.
“Willow, why?”
“Two minutes.”
“I’ve got a meeting in twenty minutes.”
“Then I’ll take two of the twenty.”
Michael sat back and put his hands up. He was at the kitchen table in yesterday’s shirt with his glasses pushed up into his hair, and he gave me his whole face, which he still does, which is the most dangerous thing about him.
When Michael Folger decides to pay attention, there is nowhere in the room to hide from it.
“Go on.”
“You’re never here.”
“That’s not a list, that’s a headline.”
“Let me get to it.” I sat down opposite. “Archie built a pile on your chair. He does it every time you’re late. He collects the things he loves and he puts them where you sit, and then he waits, and then you don’t come.”
Michael went still.
“I didn’t know that.”
“You cleared it off to sit down. The whale. The truck. Duck. You moved them all and you never asked why they were there.”
“It’s just-”
“I’m not doing that to hurt you. I’m telling you because you asked me what the list was and that’s on it.”
“All right.” He took his glasses out of his hair and put them on the table, carefully, the way he does when he’s making room for something difficult. “What else?”
“You’ve missed everything since the season started. His swimming, the thing at the nursery, my birthday, which you did remember, and then you did it by phone from a car.”
“I sent the-”
“I know what you sent. It was beautiful. It came from an office. There was a card with handwriting on it that wasn’t yours.”
He did not argue. He is at his best when he does not argue, and it makes everything harder, because I cannot fight a man who is busy agreeing with me.
“Anything else?”
Here it was.
“I want you to keep it professional with Krystal.”
The room changed temperature. He did not shout. Michael has never once shouted at me and I have sometimes wished he would, because a man who shouts is a man you can shout back at. Being quiet means you are being unreasonable, and he is now waiting for you to hear yourself.
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning she was in our hallway at ten o’clock at night.
Meaning she does your schedule and your travel and now apparently your sleep.
Meaning I found out the name of the person who runs your life from the person who runs your life, standing in my own home, calling me by a nickname I haven’t heard in years. ”
“She’s my chief of staff.”
“I know what she is.”
“You knew her before I did.”
“I did. That’s the point. You know that I know her yet you didn’t say anything about it when you hired her.”
“So what am I actually being asked to do here?”
“Keep it professional.”
“It is professional. Sorry I’m confused.
” He leaned forward and took both my hands across the table, and his thumbs went over my knuckles, and his voice came down into the register he uses for people who are upset.
“Willow. Look at me. There is nothing there. There has never been anything there. You know that.”
“I didn’t say there was.”
“You’re asking me to fire the best hire I’ve made in years because she came to the apartment with an annex.”
“I didn’t say fire her.”
“Then what are we doing?”
“I’m telling you it makes me feel-”
“I know.” He squeezed my hands. “I know it does. And I hate that you feel insecure about this, I really do, because you have got no reason to be. None. You’re my wife.”
I had walked in with a list about a chair and a swimming lesson and a hallway, and in under two minutes it had stopped being about any of that and started being about the shape of my character. Not a thing he had done. A thing I was.
And he was holding both my hands while he did it, gently, in total good faith, looking right at me with those eyes that have been getting him out of rooms since he was seventeen.
“I’m not insecure,” I said.
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I know you didn’t. That’s worse.”
“How is that worse?”
“Because if you meant it you’d be picking a fight, and I could have a fight. You’ve told me what I am and then been kind about it, and there’s nowhere to stand in that. You’ve made it so the only way to keep going is to agree that the problem is me.”
“I’m trying to reassure you.”
“I didn’t ask to be reassured. I asked for one thing, you’ve handed me a completely different thing, and now you think we’ve dealt with it.”
“Then tell me the one thing again.”
“Keep it professional.”
“I said yes to that.”
“Then it costs you nothing to keep it that way.” I took my hands back. “If there’s nothing there, this is the cheapest thing I have ever asked you for in my life.”
He looked for an answer.
“Say it back to me. Say what I asked you for.”
He thought about it. He genuinely tried. I could see the effort, which made it worse when he got it wrong.
“You asked me to be around Archie more and Krystal should be around me less.”
“That isn’t what I asked. The amount of time you have with Krystal isn’t the-”
He looked at his laptop.
“I’ve got Rotterdam.”
“You have.”
“Let me make it up to you.” He stood and kissed the top of my head on the way past. “Tomorrow. The window table. Just us.”
“Just us.”
“Just us. I’ll put it in the calendar myself.”
He did put it in the calendar himself. I checked, later, when it mattered, and it was there in his own hand, and he had blocked the whole evening, and he had written for two of us.
***
The window table takes a season to get and everybody on that list knows it. You look straight down the avenue and the whole street comes at you lit up, and they do a bread with hazelnuts in it that they only bring if they like you.
He was early. He was early, and he was phoneless, and he was funny.
“There’s a captain in Halifax who has hated me for years,” he said, “over a parking space with no sign on it.”
“No sign at all?”
“None. I checked. I went back and I photographed the ground.”
“You did?”
“I photographed the ground, Willow, because I am a serious man with a serious job and I will not be slandered by a man in a hat.”
“And what did the captain say?”
“He said the sign fell down in the eighties and everybody should already know by now. The entire population of Halifax has apparently been briefed on this parking space except me.”
I laughed until I had to put my glass down, and he watched me do it with his chin on his hand and an expression I had not been given in a long while. Soft. Present. The way he used to look at me on the boat.
“There she is,” he said.
“Don’t.”
“I’m allowed to look at my wife.”
“You’re allowed. You’re just not allowed to comment on it like I’ve been somewhere.”
I had the green dress on. It is the only one I own that I did not buy in a hurry.
Then the ma?tre d’ came across the room carrying a third chair.
I watched it come the whole way. There is no version of that where the chair is for anybody else, because the chair arrives before the person does, which means the person rang ahead, which means this was always going to happen.
Krystal came through the tables with her coat already off and a folder under one arm.
“I’m so sorry. This is unforgivable. Twenty minutes and then I’m gone and you’ll never see me again.”
“Sit down,” Michael said.
“I’m not sitting down. I’m standing here and doing three pages and going.”
“You’re already blocking the aisle. Sit down.”
“Willow, tell him I tried.”
“You tried,” I said.
“Thank you. That’s on the record.” She sat down.
“They called ahead about the chair,” I said.
“They what?”
“The chair. It came before you did. You must have rung.”
“I rang the restaurant, not the table,” Krystal said, easily, already opening the folder. “I’d never crash your night. He’d have had to sign these in a parking lot at midnight otherwise, and then he’d have been foul about it tomorrow and I’d have got the brunt.”
“She would have got the brunt,” Michael said.
“I always get the brunt. It’s in my contract. Page forty-seven. Brunt absorption.”
I looked at my husband and waited for him to notice that nobody had asked me whether I minded.
He was reading page one.
The waiter came. Michael opened his mouth and Krystal said, “He’ll do the lamb. No crumb, they do a crumb on it now, he won’t say anything and then he’ll leave it on the side of the plate and pretend he’s full.”
The waiter wrote it down.
Michael laughed. “That’s true. That’s completely true.”
“I’ve watched you do it three times. It’s physically painful.”
I have watched him not eat a crumb for the length of a marriage. It has never occurred to me to say it out loud to a waiter.
The bread came. Hazelnut, still hot, and Krystal’s hand went out and took the end piece, the one with the cluster of nuts baked into the crust, and put it on my husband’s plate without looking up from the folder, because she had clocked the hazelnuts before the basket hit the table.
I had my hand halfway to the basket.
I put it back in my lap.
They worked. She was excellent. She was quick and she was warm and she never once excluded me. She kept turning to bring me in and every single thing she brought me in on was theirs.
“Willow, help me out. Tell him the Halifax thing is not a hill to die on.”
“I’ve never heard of the Halifax thing.”
“He hasn’t told you? Michael. This has been consuming him.”
“I told her tonight.”
“Tonight,” Krystal said. “He’s been at it for weeks. He photographed the ground.”
“He mentioned the ground.”
“Did he mention he sent me the photographs? Nine of them. Of tarmac. At one in the morning. With annotations.”
“He didn’t mention that.”
“Ask him about the captain’s letter.”
“There’s a letter?”
“There is a letter,” Michael said, “and it is a masterpiece of passive aggression, and I’m having it framed and mounted in the office.”
They went off into it, back and forth, finishing each other’s sentences, and I sat with my hand around a glass and heard the shape of it. A whole thing that happened to my husband over weeks, delivered to me in a restaurant by somebody else, with prompts.
“You’ll like this,” Krystal said, turning to me. “The year the ferry froze. Michael took a Boston Whaler out in it.”
“It didn’t freeze,” I said.
“Sorry?”
“The ferry didn’t freeze. It got canceled for weather. The harbor iced at the edges and the boats stayed in, but nothing froze solid. I was there.”
Krystal put her hand up. “You’re right. You’re completely right, I always say it wrong. I’m an idiot.”
“Willow was there,” Michael said. “She’d know.”
“Of course she would.”
And then, “Anyway, the Whaler,” and it went on, and the room closed over the top of me like water. My own history, told back to me by a woman who had got it wrong, corrected by my husband as though I were a footnote.
Twenty minutes became the meal.
At the end she stood, and got her coat, and said, “I’m a menace, don’t answer that,” and squeezed my shoulder on the way past with real warmth. There was nothing false in it. That was the problem.
Michael watched her go and turned back to me with his face open.
“That was good,” he said. “Wasn’t it? That was a good night.”
“It was.”
“Just us, in the end. Mostly.”
“Mostly.”
In the cab he held my hand the whole way and told me about the Whaler again, all of it, from the beginning, as though I had not been standing on that dock in the wind watching him push off into the sleet while I screamed at him to come back.
At home I got the green dress off and stood with it in my hands for a while.
Then I put it back in the closet, in the middle, with the ordinary ones. There was no point keeping it separate anymore.