Chapter 11 – MADDIE
MADDIE
The show had been up for two days, and on the second Ellie put out cheap wine and good cheese and let the gallery fill with whoever wanted to look again. I'd come at six. I hadn't planned to stay long but I kept staying.
I talked to the brass-animal sculptor for half an hour about a commission he had no intention of taking.
I watched a woman stand in front of the empty-pool photographs until she had to wipe her eyes.
Someone asked what I thought of a piece and listened to the answer.
At the Sterling parties I'd worked the room like a job, because it was one.
Here I just stood in front of things and let them work on me.
I'd lost the knack for that somewhere, and it was coming back.
There was a new piece up since the opening, a small oil of a kitchen window with the blind half down.
I stood in front of it longer than was polite.
Whoever made it had caught the late light going thick and gold through a dirty pane.
Standing there, I wanted to go home and ruin a canvas trying to do the same.
The wanting was sharp, and it surprised me.
Someone asked which pieces were mine. I had to say none and felt more regret than I'd expected. I told myself by the time Spring rolled around, I'd have no regrets left.
Kellan found me in front of his bus painting, the one I'd told him to lead with. There was a red dot on the card now.
"It sold," I said.
"Some collector. Buys nothing but sad paintings, Ellie says." He stood next to me and looked at it with me. "You were right about the order. I hate that you were right about the order."
"They're good, Kellan. The bus especially. You painted the tiredness in the back of the man's neck. Most people would've painted the bus."
"That's the nicest thing anyone's said about it, and a stranger paid me real money for it tonight."
"Take the compliment and the money."
"I'm taking both." He refilled my glass without asking. "So what are you making? And don't say nothing. You've had that look all night, like you keep almost talking about it."
"A window. I always come back to windows." I turned the glass in my hand. "The one in my studio at home. The afternoon light comes in wrong, and every time I try to paint it, it keeps going flat on me."
"The wrong light's the whole painting. Don't fix it. Whatever's flattening it is you trying to make it nice." He shrugged. "Nice is the enemy. You should know that better than anyone."
"What's that supposed to mean."
"You spent eight years being nice for a living. I've heard about the dinners." He said it without any cruelty in it. "It leaks into the work, that's all."
"Ellie tells you a good deal about my life, does she?"
"Enough," he said with a glint in his eyes.
"And I have to admit, I looked you up after we met.
The tabloids told the rest. Madeline Sterling, trophy wife to the most powerful name in pharmaceuticals.
Artist turned socialite, who turns her practiced eye for perfection on canapes and dinner parties. "
I sniffed. "Points for honesty, I suppose."
"Wasn't a judgment, just an observation."
"So how do I un-flatten it?" I asked, and meant it.
"You stop painting the window you wish you had and paint the real one." He shrugged. "Or ignore me. I sell sad bus paintings to strangers, what do I know?"
"Sometimes the sad paintings are the most honest ones," I murmured.
"You keep looking at the door," he added. "Every few minutes. You expecting someone?"
"No. Habit. I used to have to be home by ten." I heard how it sounded and laughed. "Well, I suppose have isn't the right word. It was expected. Now I'm not sure anyone else ever noticed."
He was quiet a second. Then he stepped in, close enough to be a question. "Come use the back studio with me. I'll keep the music down. Mostly."
"I'm still married, Kellan." I held up my hand and let the ring catch the light. "Still not decorative."
He put his hands up and stepped back, easy about it. But he didn't quite let it go.
"Fair. I'll behave." He looked at me a beat longer than behaving.
"I'll say this once and then drop it. If I had a wife who looked like you and saw things the way you see them, I would not leave her standing alone at a party often enough for some other guy to keep getting the chance.
That's all. Whoever's got you isn't paying attention. "
I didn't have anything to say back. He saw that, looked briefly sorry, and went to find someone else's glass to fill.
Ellie appeared at my elbow with a bottle. She'd watched the whole thing from across the room.
"He's harmless," she said. "Mostly. He flirts with the paintings too."
"He's not wrong, though. That's the problem."
She didn't ask wrong about what. She topped up my glass and let me not explain.
I finished it and got my coat. The line rode home with me in the back of the hired car, past every stoplight. Whoever's got you isn't paying attention. I'd known it for years. It took a near-stranger at a party to make me stop pretending I didn't.
The lights were on when I got in. Damon was in the kitchen in his work clothes, a glass of something in front of him he wasn't drinking. He'd been home before me, which hadn't happened in weeks. He'd waited up. That was almost worse than the dark house would have been.
He looked up. "Where were you?"
"The gallery. Ellie's show." I set my keys on the counter.
"You've been out every night this week."
"I've been out three nights. I'm surprised you counted." I hung my coat by the door. "I'm surprised you noticed at all, honestly. You've been at the office past midnight since Emily started."
He set the glass down. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means what it sounds like. You hired your college girlfriend, you didn't tell me, I found out in a room full of reporters, and now you're there until one in the morning and you want to stand in our kitchen and ask me where I've been?"
"Emily is a colleague."
"I didn't say she wasn't."
"I have been at the office," he said, "because this is the worst month the company has had in ten years.
A competitor tried to burn down our lead product, I'm running a trial to prove they lied, and if I get it wrong, two thousand people lose their jobs.
That is where I've been. Meanwhile, you've been ignoring calls.
Do you have any idea what's going on with this company? "
"I know about the trial. I know about Brighton.
" I almost laughed. "You want to know how?
The same way I found out about Emily. The news.
My husband's company is fighting for its life and I read about it on my phone like everyone else.
You'll tell two thousand strangers before you'll tell me.
You don't even talk to me and yet you expect me to just keep up with everything.
You don't even ask, you just complain when I finally take a step back from all the responsibilities you impart on me by osmosis to do something for myself for once. "
Something went still in his face. Damon always had an answer ready. He didn't this time.
He let out a long breath. "What do you want, Maddie? Tell me what you want and I'll do it. You want the studio redone, a gallery, a show of your own, name it and it's done. Just tell me the thing and I'll fix it."
"You can't buy your way out of this one. That's what you've never understood. There's no vendor for it."
He didn't like that. For a second he looked lost, like I'd handed him a problem with no line item to spend against. Then his jaw set.
"There is nothing going on with Emily." He said it flat and certain. "Nothing. So if that's what this is, if you're punishing me for a hire you didn't like and I didn't run past you, then say it, and we'll deal with it like adults."
My eyes were hot and I stopped bothering to hide it. I'd promised myself I wouldn't cry in front of him again, and I was about to lose that too.
"You think I'm jealous."
"Aren't you?"
"It was never about Emily." I had to stop and breathe to keep my voice under me.
"Emily is just the first thing in eight years too big to walk around.
You found out I hadn't answered a text, and your first move was to call Reese about the seating chart.
Not to wonder where I was. Not to wonder if something had happened to me.
" The tears came and I let them. "I run your whole life, down to the cufflinks, and you couldn't find ten seconds to tell me Emily was coming.
I feel invisible, Damon. I've felt invisible in this marriage for years, and I kept calling it the deal I signed.
It isn't. And the worst part is you didn't even notice I'd gone quiet, because you were never looking at me to start with. "
For a second I thought I'd reached him. He looked at me like the next thing out of his mouth might not be the wrong one. I watched him stand at the edge of it. I waited. I'd have taken almost anything.
Then he stepped back from it. He rubbed his eyes, slow, like I was the last thing on a long agenda.
"You're tired. You've had wine. We are not solving eight years of anything at midnight in the kitchen." He picked the glass back up. "We'll talk when you're calmer."
Calmer.
There it was. I wasn't a wife with a point. I was a mood, and he was going to wait it out.
I picked my keys back up, then set them down, because I had nowhere to go and we both knew it.
"I'm sleeping in the guest room," I said.
"Maddie."
I was already moving.
"Maddie. Don't be dramatic. Come to bed."
I didn't turn around. I went up the stairs and down the hall, past our room, to the guest room at the end. I shut the door, and I turned the little lock in the handle, which I had never once done in eight years.
He called my name one more time from the bottom of the stairs. Then I listened to him not come up.
The guest room smelled like a room nobody used.
I lay on top of the covers in my clothes and waited to feel like I'd done something terrible.
It didn't come. What came instead was quiet, the first real quiet I'd had in that house in a long time.
I lay in it. At some point I noticed I wasn't dreading the morning. I was almost curious about it.
I thought about texting Ellie and didn't. I wasn't ready to hand it to anyone yet. I lay in the dark with the lock turned, listening to my own house, and somewhere past two I fell asleep without meaning to.