Chapter 2 #2
There’s a room behind the third bookshelf on the east wall, the one that swings out on a hinge Richard had concealed so cleverly I didn’t find it for a full week after the office became mine.
It was his trophy room once, and the trophies are still in here, two decades of silver and crystal lined up on the shelves catching what little comes in off the city at night, a championship cup the size of a wine barrel down at the end.
I’ve made the rest of it a bedroom, a narrow bed and a chair and not much else, because in the years before my marriage I worked nights far more often than I didn’t, and there was never anyone at home waiting for me to do otherwise.
That changed six months ago. I haven’t slept in this room once since the wedding.
Every single night I’ve gone home, and every night I told myself it was efficiency, or habit, or the simple sense in not wasting the commute, and every night I knew those were lies and told them to myself anyway and slept fine.
I went home because she was there. Because the apartment was warmer for having her in it, an actual degree warmer, and because I had discovered, against every plan I ever drew up, that I enjoyed my wife.
Her company across the breakfast table. Her company in the dark.
Her sleeping weight fitted along my side as though the two of us had been cut from a single pattern.
Apparently I was not the only man who enjoyed her company.
I lie down on the narrow bed among the ghosts of Richard’s trophies, the cold of the room settling over the silver and the crystal and me along with them, and I don’t sleep, and when I finally do it turns out to be worse than the not-sleeping was.
Because the articles come back to me then, in that thin country between waking and sleep, and I read them all again the way I never once bothered to read them the first time.
There were so many of them. I remember now, with the terrible clarity of a man counting up his own blindness in the dark, how the Manhattan pages used to ache openly over the two of them.
The Waymaker princess, they called her, Richard’s lovely daughter who grew up in the stands and the locker rooms with sawdust on her shoes, and Barrymore, the golden boy who carried her father’s franchise on his back for twelve seasons.
The fans wrote the fairy tale years before there could have been one.
They were heartbroken, that was the very word the columnists used, heartbroken, when she didn’t end up with him.
When the princess of the Waymakers married a cold stranger from nowhere instead of the prince the whole city had already chosen on her behalf.
I never paid it the slightest attention.
Why would I have. I had her signature on a contract and her warmth in my bed and her grief in my two hands to be careful with, and I told myself the public romance was so much noise, the kind of tidy story crowds invent because they can’t abide an ending that doesn’t resolve.
I pay attention now. Now that I know the whole city saw it before I did.
Now that I know they were grieving a thing that hadn’t ended at all, only gone quiet, only moved itself to cemeteries on weekday afternoons and park benches where she tips her head to rest on his shoulder over two cups of cooling coffee.
Everyone saw it. The fans. Raymond. The only man in all of Manhattan who somehow didn’t see it was the one who let her fall asleep against his chest every night and mistook the weight of her for being chosen.
And then I dream, and the dream is merciful at first, which is the only way I’ll understand afterward that it meant to be cruel.
I’m home. There’s no seam in it, no moment of arriving, I’m simply there, in our bed, in the dark of the apartment with the city humming faint and far below the glass, and the weight of the blanket is right, the particular weight she needs, the one I bought four of so we’d never be caught short.
The pillow smells of her. Everything is ordinary, and ordinary turns out to be the most dangerous thing the dream could have handed me, because a man braced against grand betrayals has no defense at all against the plain fact of his own bed on a quiet night.
She comes to me the way she does. I feel the mattress give under her, the cool slide of her in beneath the blanket, the small contented sound she makes when she finds me already warm.
Her knees fit in behind mine. Her arm comes around my waist. And for a moment I let it happen, because there’s nothing awake in me yet that remembers to refuse her, and the peace of it is so total that some clenched thing I’ve carried in my chest all day without naming begins, against my will, to loosen.
Then I remember. Even here, even folded into the warm dark with her breath against the back of my neck, the day comes back to me, the grey coat and the upturned laughing face and Chip’s voice going careful on the phone, and the fury rises up through the peace the way cold water rises through warm.
I turn away from her. I put my back between us and I mean it to be a wall, the kind of wall I’ve built against better and worse than her, because I have just learned exactly what she is and a man does not lie still in the dark and let himself be held by a thing that’s been lying to his face for months.
She doesn’t accept the wall. She never has, and it’s one of the thousand things about her I never understood to be a danger until it was too late.
She fits herself along the length of my back, unhurried, patient, and I feel her cheek come to rest between my shoulder blades, and then her hand spreads warm and open over my heart the way it does when she counts it, when she lies awake in the dark matching her own careful rhythm to mine.
She doesn’t say a word. She only stays, the way she stayed through the worst of the nights after her father, and the staying gets up under the wall in a way no argument she could make ever would.
“I’m angry with you,” I tell her, and even in the dream my voice has gone rough in my throat.
“I know,” she says against my spine, and I feel the shape of the words more than I hear them. “Turn over anyway.”
I shouldn’t. I know it with whatever part of me is still standing sentry.
But her hand slides up from over my heart to my jaw, gentle, turning my face back toward her in the dark, and I let her turn it, and that is the moment the wall comes down, not knocked down, not stormed, simply set quietly aside by my own traitor body before I’ve agreed to any such thing.
She kisses me before I can find the word that forbids it, and the word never comes, because the kiss is soft and certain and entirely without apology, the kiss of a woman who has never once doubted she would be welcome, and that bone-deep certainty of hers undoes me more thoroughly than any practiced seduction ever could.
My hands come up to set her away from me.
Instead they close on her shoulders and draw her in, both of them at once, traitors to the last, and I feel her smile against my mouth as though she’s known all along that they would, as though my own hands have been more honest with her this whole time than I’ve ever allowed the rest of me to be.
I stop fighting. That’s the part I will hate myself for when I wake, the ease of it, the relief of it.
The fury doesn’t vanish so much as quietly change its name, and the thing underneath it is the thing I’ve refused to look at squarely all day, the simple unbearable wanting of her, and in the dream I let myself have it at last. I gather her against me and she comes willingly, warmly, fitting to me the way she always fits, and the dark closes over the two of us, and for a while there are no articles, no photographs, no board, no golden boy with his hand at the small of her back.
There is only my wife in my arms in the dark, kissing me like I’m the only man she has ever wanted, and I believe her.
That’s the cruelty I never see coming. I believe her completely.
“There,” she breathes, when I’ve stopped pretending I want her anywhere on earth but here. Her mouth is at my ear now, her hand spread once more over my heart, laying open claim to the beat of it. “Don’t deny the truth, Trey. You know you’re mine.”
Mine.
She says it the exact way I say it to her.
The words I’ve taken from her every morning for six months, soft and certain and a little shy, I’m yours, sir, except turned all the way around now, the whole ritual reversed, the leash passed quietly out of my hand and into hers while I wasn’t watching it.
You’re mine. And here is the thing that will wake me with my heart slamming against the very palm she laid over it, I don’t argue.
In the dream I have no wish to argue. I hold her tighter and I press my mouth into her hair and I am glad, wholly and shamefully glad, to belong to a woman who belongs to another man, and I lie there in the warm after with her heartbeat going against mine and want it to be true so badly that the wanting tears something loose in me I’ll never have a name for.
“Yours,” I tell her, into the dark, and I mean it down to the floor of myself.
The dream lets me have that. It lets me say the word and lets me mean it and lets me rest there a moment in the having of it, just long enough to be certain.
Then it takes the whole of it back at once.