Chapter 29 – DAMON
DAMON
Iread her message standing at my office window and had to sit down to read it again.
I'm in town. I can meet you Sunday, preferably somewhere that's not the house or your office.
In town. I'd been braced to fly anywhere on the planet on an hour's notice.
I had a bag in the closet at the house, packed, passport in the side pocket so I could go before she changed her mind, and the whole time she was here.
In this city. Sleeping somewhere inside the same skyline I was staring at, walking streets I drove, breathing the same gray river air, and I'd felt nothing.
No instinct stirred. No husband's radar went off.
For eight years that woman had known where I was every hour of every day.
My flights, my dinners, my doctors, which suit I'd be wearing and which cufflinks went with it.
I had never once known where she was, because I'd never had to know, because the knowing arrived on my calendar each morning, prepared invisibly by the person I wasn't tracking.
I didn't know my wife was in the city. I didn't know my wife.
The first fact was the second one wearing today's date, and both of them were mine, built by me, one inattentive day at a time.
How long had she been back? Days? Weeks, maybe.
The show, of course, the gallery wall with her name going on it, the life she'd built that ran on its own power and didn't file its movements with my office.
There'd been a version of me who could have found out in one phone call, a security retainer, a flight manifest, and I'd fired that version somewhere over the winter.
Not knowing was the price of becoming a man she might answer.
I'd paid it without understanding I'd feel it like this.
I typed and deleted for ten minutes. Everything I drafted asked for too much or apologized in a register I'd promised myself I'd save for her face. In the end I sent one line.
How about the Sheridan Hotel, 8 o'clock?
The dots came up. Stopped. Came up again. I watched that gray ellipsis the way men watch a doomsday clock.
All right.
Two words, and I sat in my office chair with my heart going like I'd taken the stairs, and I thought, this is the last chance you will ever get, and you have until eight o'clock Sunday night to deserve it. Make it count.
The Sheridan had come to me before I could think it over, and underneath the suggestion was a memory with a date on it.
The rooftop. The spring it opened she'd read about it at the kitchen island and turned the magazine around to face me, the terrace with the lemon trees in copper planters, the whole skyline laid out past the railing, and she'd said, can we, and I'd said absolutely, soon, and had Patricia hold a table.
I canceled it for the Singapore call. Patricia rebooked, and the second date I simply forgot, and I learned later that Maddie had gone anyway, alone, gotten as far as the lobby, and turned around and come home and never mentioned it again.
The magazine stayed in the kitchen drawer.
I'd seen it there for two years and never once understood I was looking at an unkept promise with a fold down the middle.
I called the hotel and asked for the manager.
It took eleven minutes and a sum I won't write down to clear the rooftop for the night.
Every table. The manager kept trying to upsell me sideways, champagne on arrival, a violinist, roses done some way they apparently do roses, a gift box at the place setting, and I said yes to all of it but the gift, because I'd promised I wasn't going to try to buy her forgiveness again, and the violinist because I wanted to say what I had to say to her with as little interference as possible.
The televised apology had been very public. This one had to be private.
The upsells were just background, though.
I'd play it by ear, feel out whether she even wanted gifts.
But I knew what she had wanted when she first saw that terrace.
She'd wanted the lemon trees and the railing and the city, two years ago, with her husband across the table and his phone in his pocket.
The place itself was the thing. All I was buying was the absence of everyone else in it, one table out of forty, so that when she stepped off that elevator the restaurant she'd waited two years for would be hers alone, no crowd to manage, no room to read, nothing up there that needed her except me.
And I did need her. I needed her in a way I had never needed anyone or anything, not Emily or any other woman, but that didn't give me the right to ask it of her.
I didn't even have the right to ask her for a chance, but I was going to. And I promised myself it would be the last selfish thing I ever did in our marriage.