CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Mine
The apartment had a living room with two tall windows facing the street, a narrow galley kitchen, a bathroom with a claw-foot tub and no shower curtain, and a bedroom with a mattress still wrapped in plastic lying in the middle of the floor, delivered that morning by a company that had left it exactly where the doorman had pointed.
That was everything. No furniture, no rugs, no lamps. My footsteps echoed when I walked from room to room.
I stood in the center of the living room with my coat still on and understood that I had absolutely no idea what came next.
For seven years, every day had arrived with its schedule already built.
Somebody needed something, somewhere I had to be, a call to return, a menu to approve.
Here, there was nothing. The silence of the apartment had nothing in it that needed me.
I cut the plastic off the mattress with my car key because I didn’t own scissors.
I unpacked the first suitcase onto the closet floor and discovered I’d packed three cashmere sweaters, two pairs of jeans, my Flemish portraiture book, and not one single pair of socks.
No toothbrush either. No phone charger. I sat down on the closet floor and laughed, a short startled sound that turned partway through into something wetter, and I let it be both, sitting there among sweaters with bare cold feet and a phone at eleven percent battery.
I ordered dinner from a Thai place three blocks away, because it was the first result on my phone, and ate it sitting cross-legged on the hardwood with my back against the radiator.
The pad see ew was too sweet. I ate all of it anyway.
There was no one to ask how it was, or whether I wanted to sit at the table, or whether I’d remembered that Dante’s father preferred we not serve anything with peanuts when he visited.
The only person in the room was me, and I didn’t care about peanuts.
Around nine, I walked to a drugstore on the corner and bought a toothbrush, a charger, a three-pack of athletic socks, and a shower curtain printed with lemons because it was the only one they had.
The cashier, a teenager with a nose ring, rang me up without looking at me.
I walked back to the apartment in the dark with the plastic bag swinging against my leg, and at the corner I stopped under a streetlight because it occurred to me that I hadn’t told anyone where I was going.
I hadn’t needed to. No car had followed.
Nobody would call in twenty minutes to confirm my location.
It should have felt wonderful. Mostly it felt strange, the way it feels when you stand up too fast and the room tilts.
I hung the lemon shower curtain and took a bath, and then I lay down on the bare mattress with the single blanket I’d thought to pack and a sweater folded under my head for a pillow, and I listened to the building.
Pipes knocked somewhere below me. A television murmured through the wall. Somebody laughed on the street.
Twice that night I woke and reached across the mattress for Dante. Both times my hand found cool empty sheet, and both times I lay there afterward with my palm flat on the fabric, waiting for the ache to ease enough to sleep again. It took a long time. I didn’t pretend it didn’t.
I woke at six fifteen, listening for the bird with the rusted-hinge call in the oak outside our bedroom window.
There was no oak. There was a garbage truck and a man shouting cheerfully at another man in Spanish.
I lay there for a while, disoriented, trying to remember what I was supposed to do first, and then understood that nothing was first. No one was waiting for me downstairs.
No one expected me at breakfast. No florist, no caterer, no Elena calling at eight to remind me of something she’d already reminded me of twice.
I made coffee in the one mug I’d bought at the drugstore, drank it standing at the window, and felt the entire empty day stretch out in front of me with nothing written on it.
For almost an hour I simply stood there.
I had spent so long responding to other people’s needs that I’d forgotten how to begin a morning that was only mine.
Eventually I texted Luca. I’m settled. I’m safe. Please don’t give him the address.
His reply came within a minute. Wouldn’t dream of it. Proud of you, V.
I read it twice, then put the phone face down on the windowsill and went to buy furniture.
* * *
The used furniture store was on the other side of the neighborhood, a warehouse with a hand-painted sign and aisles of other people’s sofas.
I walked there, forty minutes, because I could, and because I didn’t yet know how to be in a car that wasn’t driven by someone who reported my location to someone else.
I found the chair in the back corner. It was an old wingback armchair upholstered in a green velvet worn pale at the arms, somewhere between moss and sage, with a small repaired tear on the left side where someone had stitched the fabric back together by hand.
It was not beautiful. Dante would have walked past it without slowing down, and Elena would have asked, with real puzzlement, why anyone would pay money for something that had clearly already been loved by somebody else.
I sat in it. It was the most comfortable chair I had sat in for seven years.
The salesman, an older man in a cardigan, wandered over. “That one’s been here a while. People like to look at it, then buy something newer.”
“How much?”
He named a price that would have covered perhaps one of the dinner napkins at Uncle Sal’s party.
I sat there another full minute anyway, weighing it, and noticed that I was waiting for someone to tell me whether it was the right choice.
I was waiting for the second opinion, the reasonable objection, the voice that would say it didn’t go with anything.
There was no such voice. There was just me and a worn green chair and a question nobody else was going to answer.
“I’ll take it,” I said.
“Delivery’s extra. Your husband going to want to see it first, or...?”
“No,” I said. “Nobody needs to see it first.”
I bought a small oak kitchen table with two mismatched chairs, a floor lamp with a brass base, and a bookshelf with one slightly uneven leg that the salesman promised a matchbook would fix.
The total came to less than the monthly flower budget at the house.
I paid with the debit card in my own name and signed the receipt, and my signature looked, to me, slightly unfamiliar, as though my hand had forgotten how to write my name for itself.
The furniture came the next afternoon. I put the green chair beside the window facing the street and sat in it with a cup of tea and watched people walk dogs past the building, and something in me settled for the first time in weeks.
That evening the bathroom sink started dripping.
At the house, I would have mentioned it to the property manager and forgotten about it within the hour.
Here, there was no property manager. There was a super named Hector who, according to the note on the vestibule wall, took calls between nine and five.
I found a wrench in a kitchen drawer the previous tenant had left behind, watched two videos on my phone, and lay under the sink with a flashlight in my teeth.
The first attempt made it worse. The second made it stop.
I sat on the bathroom floor afterward holding the wrench, absurdly pleased, and it occurred to me that nobody in the Moretti family would ever have imagined me doing this. I hadn’t imagined it either.
My neighbor across the hall introduced herself the next morning, an older woman named Carol with a wiry terrier on a red leash.
“New to the building?”
“Just moved in. Sorry about the noise yesterday. Furniture.”
“Noise means somebody’s living in there. That unit sat empty all winter.” She scratched the dog’s ears. “This is Pickles. He barks at the mailman and nobody else, so don’t take it personally if he loves you.”
Pickles sniffed my shoes and decided, apparently, that I was acceptable. It was such a small exchange. I thought about it for the rest of the day anyway, the pleasure of being known only as the new woman in 3B, nobody’s wife and nobody’s hostess.
* * *
Priya Raman’s office was two floors above a dry cleaner on Delancey Avenue, one room with a window unit air conditioner, a ficus that needed water, and a bookcase crowded with family law treatises.
We had spoken once by phone before I left, a brief intake call in which I’d mostly cried and she’d mostly listened.
This was the first time we sat across a desk from each other.
She was perhaps forty, with reading glasses pushed up into her dark hair and a legal pad already half filled with notes. She poured me a glass of water from a pitcher on the windowsill without asking whether I wanted one, and I found that I did.
“Before we talk about anything else,” she said, “I want to ask you a question, and I want you to take your time with it. What do you want?”
I opened my mouth and closed it again.
“From the divorce,” she added. “From him. From the next year of your life. Take whatever part of that question you like and start there.”
“I want...” I stopped. The silence stretched. I could hear the air conditioner rattling. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. That’s ridiculous. I’m twenty-nine years old and I should know what I want.”
“It isn’t ridiculous. Most people who sit in that chair after a long marriage have the same trouble. When was the last time somebody asked you that and actually waited for the answer?”
I thought about it. My father at twenty-two, informing me the marriage was arranged. Dante over coffee, announcing that Alessandra was coming. Elena with her annual instructions for Easter, and Grant at the gate explaining the protocol.
“I don’t think anyone has,” I said. “Not since I was in college.”
“Then let’s start smaller. Do you want his money?”