Chapter 14 Julian
The air inside my apartment is stale. I have been gone two weeks.
Everything is where I left it, including the mug on the counter that I forgot to put in the dishwasher.
I wasn’t expecting to be gone that long.
I thought it was going to be an overnight trip.
I was going to meet the omega at the Bureau office and come straight home. So much for that.
I walk through to the kitchen and I open the window over the sink.
The first thing I get is a wall of traffic noise off the cross street six floors below: horns, a bus pulling away, then a man shouting at another man in a language I do not speak.
Then, under all of it, the bass thump of something being unloaded at the loading bay of the building opposite, the metal gate going up and down and up and down.
No birds.
I had not known I was listening for them until I did not hear them.
I close the window.
There’s not much in the fridge other than a bottle of white. I open the wine and I pour a glass and I drink half of it standing at the counter with my coat still on.
There is no quilt on any bed. There is no second pair of boots by any door.
I finish the wine. I pour another.
I take the suitcase to the bedroom and I lay it flat on the bed and I unzip it. The clothes inside still smell faintly of his house. Not of him directly — I do not let myself think of him directly — but of the kitchen, and stew, and the soap from the bathroom.
I take the clothes out and I put them in the laundry basket. I close the lid of the basket.
I stand in the middle of the bedroom and I breathe through my nose and the apartment smells of nothing.
On Monday morning, I am at my desk at seven forty-five.
I do the morning. I do the meeting. I sit at the head of the table and I take Richard through the waterfront revisions.
I answer the structural engineer’s questions and I make a joke at one point that is apparently hilarious because the room laughs, and I notice myself laughing along with the room.
I’ve still not got used to having him not somewhere nearby and that is absolute madness because I barely know the guy. It was two weeks. This is why those bastards at the Bureau make us do it.
After the meeting Richard walks me back to my office.
“Good to have you back.”
“Good to be back.”
“How was it?”
“Fine. Glad to leave,” I say, lying.
He nods. He does not press. Richard does not press on personal matters. Richard considers my personal life to be about as interesting as the wallpaper, and on most days I have been grateful for that. I am grateful for it now.
“About the partnership conversation,” he says, with his hand already on the doorframe. “We’ll take it up properly when waterfront’s at planning. You’re on track.”
“Thanks, Richard.”
He goes. I close the door and I sit down at my desk and I look at the harbor for a minute. The water has whitecaps on it from the wind, and a ferry is crossing.
I should be relieved. I am back. The job is here. The partnership is on track. The cohabitation is over. Life is back to normal.
I am not relieved. I am not anything in particular. I am a man at his desk on a Monday morning.
I open my email and I work.
Three days later I call Wyatt.
I do it from my office at half past six. The juniors have gone home. Richard has gone home. The cleaner is doing the floor at the far end of the corridor and I can hear the hum of her machine.
I have Wyatt’s number on a piece of paper in my wallet. I take the piece of paper out and lay it flat on the desk, then I dial it on the office landline.
It rings four times.
“Hello.”
“Caleb. It’s Julian.”
A pause.
“Is your brother there?”
“No.”
“Is he in the barn?”
“He’s working.”
“Could you go and get him?”
Another pause. I hear the kitchen behind him. The fridge door opens. Matthew, somewhere further off, asking a question I cannot make out.
“He doesn’t want to talk to you,” Caleb says.
“Caleb.”
“He told me. If you call that he doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“Has he said that? Or are you guessing?”
The pause this time is longer. Long enough that I think perhaps he has set the phone down and gone for Wyatt after all, but the silence has the wrong quality. He is still there. He is on the other end of the line and he is thinking about what to say.
“He hasn’t said anything,” Caleb says, finally. “About any of it. He hasn’t said one word about you since you left. Do you know how bad that is?”
That’s not fair. “Come on, Caleb. Wyatt barely says a word to anyone.”
“Yeah, he does. He does when he trusts them.”
Ouch.
“Caleb, please. I just need to talk to him.”
“No.”
He hangs up.
I sit with the receiver in my hand for a second longer than I need to and then I put it back on the cradle.
I close the laptop, and sit at my desk staring at the piece of paper with Wyatt’s phone number on it. Then I pick it up, crumple it up into a ball and throw it at the trash basket.
I miss and have to go pick it up which does not improve my mood.
The Bureau office is on the seventh floor of a government building four blocks from work. I walk it on the Friday lunch break with my coat collar up against a wind off the river.
The receptionist takes my name, then tells me to take a seat.
I am called through after eleven minutes.
David Sun is different in person than he was on the phone. He is shorter and older than I expected, and far politer.
“Mr. Duffield. Please. Have a seat.”
I sit.
“Thank you for coming in. I appreciate it isn’t always convenient.”
“It’s fine.”
He has a folder open in front of him already. He turns a page.
“So,” he says. “You completed the cohabitation order. Day fourteen. Departure logged at five forty-two a.m.”
“Yes.”
“And you have not returned to the property since.”
“No.”
“And Mr. Briggs has not contacted you to extend or renew the matching process.”
I think of Caleb on the phone three nights ago.
“No.”
“Then we have a non-progressing prime match.” He turns another page. “It happens. Not as often as the press would have you believe, but it happens. And when it does, we have a process. The process is there to protect both parties. I’m going to walk you through it.”
He walks me through it. There are forms. There is a waiver. There is a clause about future contact that prohibits either party from initiating Bureau-mediated re-matching for a period of twelve months.
There’s a lot of other stuff but, if I were to be honest, I’m barely listening. All I need to know is where to sign because it didn’t work out.
I sign where he points using a cheap blue ballpoint with the Bureau’s name on the side.
When I have signed everything, Sun closes the folder and folds his hands on top of it and looks at me.
“Well,” he says. “That’s that.”
“That’s that.”
“I will say, Mr. Duffield, that I am sorry it didn’t work out.”
“Thank you.”
“Prime matches at this compatibility very rarely don’t, in our experience.”
“I’m aware.”
“I had hoped, when you went out, that the issue was simply one of access. That you would meet, that the chemistry would do its work, and that the two of you would proceed. Most do. I gather there was chemistry.”
I do not answer him.
“Well,” he says again. He stands. He offers his hand. “Best of luck, Mr. Duffield. The Bureau wishes you well.”
I shake his hand and give him a polite goodbye when really I want to tell him to fuck off.
I’m due at my mother’s for Sunday lunch the following weekend and I am not looking forward to it.
The house is the house I grew up in. It is a brownstone two streets back from the park. My mother opens the door before I knock.
“Julian.”
“Mom.”
She puts both hands on my face. She looks at me for one second longer than a hello requires.
“It’s wonderful to see you, sweetheart,” she says. “Go and say hello to your father. We’ve been dying to hear everything.”
The front parlor is warm. The fire is laid, not lit. My father is in his chair with the paper, glasses down on his nose. He folds the paper when I come in.
“Well. Look who it is.”
“Hi, Dad.”
“You look thin.”
“I’m not thin.”
“He’s thin,” he says to my mother, who has come through behind me. “Cara, he’s thin.”
“He’s been on a ranch, John, what did you expect, leave him alone.”
“I’m not thin.”
“He’s not thin,” my mother agrees, going past me into the dining room with a stack of plates, and she pats my chest as she goes. “He’s tired.”
Eli is on the sofa with a glass already in his hand and his feet on the coffee table that we were never allowed to put our feet on. He grins at me over the rim of the glass.
“There he is. The cowboy.”
“Don’t.”
“Were there spurs?”
“No.”
“I’m just asking. Did you ride?”
“I rode in his truck. That is the extent of it.”
“Mm.” He takes a drink. “You look like shit.”
“Eli,” my mother calls from the dining room. “Language.”
“Sorry, Mom.” He looks at me. He drops his voice. “Seriously. How did it go?”
“Weird but I’m fine.”
“Jules.”
“Eli, I’m fine.”
He looks at me a beat longer than I want him to. Then he shrugs and he swings his legs down and goes to fix me a drink. A moment later, he hands me the glass.
“To being home.”
“To being home.”
We drink.
My mother calls us in to eat. The dining room is laid for four. The candles are lit. The wine is open and breathing on the sideboard. The food, as it always does, comes out of my mother’s kitchen in stages, and is, as it always is, very good.
For the first ten minutes nobody asks me anything. My father talks about a lecture he is giving in the spring. Eli tells a story about a colleague’s disastrous engagement party. My mother corrects him on a detail and then corrects him on a different detail and then asks me to pass the salt.
I pass the salt.
She looks at me.
“So,” she says. “How was it? What happened?”
I set my fork down. The three of them are looking at me.
“It didn’t take,” I say. “I was at the Bureau yesterday. The file’s closed.”
A small silence.
My father makes a small harrumphing noise.
Eli says, “Jules.”
My mother does not say anything for a long second. Her hands stay folded.
“There now, my love,” she says.
“It’s all right, Mom.”
She watches me eat for a moment, but she does not ask another question.
Across the table Eli catches my eye. He raises his glass, half an inch, a small private toast to nothing, and he drinks.
My father turns the conversation, gently, back to his spring lecture.
My mother passes me the potatoes.
I eat. I am home, and I am cross, and I am not thinking about him.
I am not thinking about him. I refuse to think about him. Stupid Wyatt Briggs.