8. Elise
— ? —
Elise
I wake up alone in the guest room and lie there for a while doing an inventory.
This is a thing I’ve started doing since March.
You wake up and before you move you go through it: where you are, what’s happened, what today requires.
It takes about four seconds and it’s the worst four seconds of the day, because it’s the gap where your body still thinks it’s living your old life and your brain has to go in and correct it.
Where I am: a cabin.
What’s happened: quite a lot, actually.
What today requires: getting a decade of somebody else’s belongings out of a house before Monday, while sharing that house with a man I was married to for three years and a man I had sex with on his grandmother’s kitchen table last night while he stood eight feet away making dinner.
I wait for the four seconds to get bad.
They don’t.
That’s the part I lie there thinking about while the light comes up.
Not the table. Not the fact that Simon put his phone flashlight on the wood afterward and stood there looking at it while I held my hands under the water.
What I think about is the absence, the specific hollow where a feeling should be and isn’t, and how long I spent last night poking at it before I gave up and went to sleep.
There’s a word for a person who does what I did.
I’ve been turning it over and it keeps not sticking to me. It’s like trying to be insulted in a language you don’t speak.
***
Rowan is on the porch with the coffee.
He hands me the mug without a word, which is the second time he’s done that in three days and is well on its way to being a thing we do. I take a mouthful and hand it back. The mist is in the low ground and the air tastes like rain that hasn’t decided yet.
“He was up at five,” Rowan says.
“Doing what?”
“Sitting in the truck.”
I look at him.
“With the engine off,” he says. “For about forty minutes. Then he came in and made coffee and went back to bed.”
The mug is warm through my palms.
“That’s not good.”
“No.”
“He didn’t say anything last night. After.” I don’t look at him when I say it. “He put a light on the table and then he got a beer and talked about the potatoes for another twenty minutes.”
“I know. I was there.”
“He always does this.” I can hear my own voice going flat, the way it does.
“It’s the same thing he did the entire marriage.
Something’s wrong and he can feel it’s wrong and instead of saying so he just gets very loud about something adjacent.
He’ll talk about the road, or the realtor, or his mother, and the whole time the actual thing is sitting in the room with us and he’d rather chew glass than name it. ”
“He hasn’t got the equipment for it,” Rowan says.
“That’s a generous way to put it.”
“It’s not generous, it’s diagnostic. He’s never once in his life had to say a hard thing out loud, because our mother has spent thirty years saying them for him or making sure he didn’t have to.” He takes the mug back. “He doesn’t know how. That’s not an excuse. It’s just true.”
We stand there for a while. Somewhere out past the trees something is making a noise like a hinge.
“Rowan.”
“Mm.”
“I’ve been lying up there for an hour waiting to feel bad about last night.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“I keep going in and checking,” I say. “The way you’d check a tooth. And it isn’t there, and I don’t know what that says about me.”
“What do you want it to say?”
“I don’t know. Something reassuring.”
“Then here’s what I think it says.” He sets the mug on the railing.
“You spent four months being the only person in your marriage who was still following the rules. You were faithful to a man who wasn’t, and polite to a family that never liked you, and kind to a woman who was laughing at you.
You did everything right and it got you nothing.
So you’re not going to feel bad about breaking a rule that only ever applied to you. ”
“That’s a very tidy explanation.”
“It’s the one I’ve got.”
“You’ve thought about it.”
“Elise, I have thought about very little else since roughly Monday.”
I laugh. It comes out cracked and surprises both of us.
***
We work.
That’s what the day turns out to be, mostly. There is an enormous amount of house left and a hard Monday deadline and the three of us have entered a kind of unspoken agreement that the work is the only safe subject in the building.
Simon is different.
Not dramatically. If you hadn’t been married to him you wouldn’t see it.
But he’s quiet in a way he’s never quiet, and he’s actually working for the first time since we arrived, hauling boxes without commentary, and twice I catch him watching me from a doorway with an expression I can’t read and don’t much want to.
Around eleven he comes into the front room where I’m wrapping crockery in newspaper.
“Can I ask you something?”
Everything in me goes cold and ready. “Sure.”
“Do you want any of this?”
He’s holding a box. Inside it, the ugly floral dinner plates his grandmother used every summer, that we ate off twice, that I have no feeling about whatsoever.
“No,” I say.
“Right.” He looks at them. “Me neither, really. But it feels wrong to bin them.”
“Then don’t bin them. Take them.”
“I don’t have anywhere to put them.”
“Then bin them, Simon.”
He stands there holding the plates for a second longer than the conversation supports, and I have the sudden unbearable sense that we aren’t talking about the plates, and that he has no map for getting from here to whatever he’s actually trying to say, and that we’re going to stand in this room until one of us leaves.
“Okay,” he says, and takes them out to the truck.
That’s the whole conversation. That’s the entire thing.
I sit down on the floor of the front room with a newspaper-wrapped gravy boat in my hands and think about how, four months ago, that exchange would have taken me apart. How I’d have followed him out to the truck. How I’d have spent the rest of the day working out what he meant and how to fix it.
I finish wrapping the gravy boat and put it in the box.
By four we’ve cleared the front room down to the furniture.
The furniture is the problem. There’s an armchair with a spring through it and a couch that needs two people and a doorway it does not fit through, and we spend forty minutes establishing this, and at the end of it Simon announces he’s going into town for tie-downs and beer and leaves without asking if anybody needs anything.
The truck goes down the gravel. The sound of it fades.
Rowan and I are standing in the front room holding opposite ends of a couch.
Neither of us puts it down.
“How long is the drive?” I ask.
“Twenty-five minutes each way.”
“And how long does it take to buy tie-downs?”
“That depends entirely,” he says, “on how much you want to talk about tie-downs.”
I put my end of the couch down.
He puts his end of the couch down.
We meet somewhere around the middle of the room and this time nobody stops anything.
Later, upstairs, in a bed that squeaks, in the middle of the afternoon with the window open and the sound of the trees coming in, I lie with my head on his chest while he does something absent-minded to my hair and neither of us says anything for a long time.
Which is when I notice that I’m afraid.
Not of Simon. Not of Monday, or the realtor, or the drive home, or the eight thousand practical things waiting at the bottom of this mountain.
I’m lying in a squeaking bed with my ear over this man’s heartbeat, in the middle of a Thursday afternoon, and what’s frightening me is how completely fine I am. How easy it is. How much it feels like something I could get used to.
I’ve done this before. I know exactly how this goes. You let yourself get comfortable, and then one day you’re four months into finding out he’s been calling somebody Bunny.
“Say it,” Rowan says, above my head.
“Say what.”
“Whatever’s just made you go stiff as a board.”
“I’m not stiff.”
“You are extremely stiff and you stopped breathing about thirty seconds ago.”
I lie there.
“This is fun,” I say.
His hand stops in my hair.
“Right?” I sit up on one elbow so I can look at him, and I keep my voice light because light is what I’ve got.
“This is fun. It’s this weekend. It’s a terrible house and a terrible situation and we’re both getting something out of it, and I think that’s fine, I think we’re both adults, and I’d rather we just said that out loud than pretended. ”
He looks at me for a second.
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay?”
“You’ve said what you needed to say.” He puts his hand back in my hair, perfectly calm. “I’m not going to argue with you in a bed.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” he agrees. “It isn’t.”
And downstairs, the front door bangs open, and Simon’s voice comes up through the floorboards calling somebody’s name.