Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
I’M A MARRIED WOMAN
LOUISA
My phone has three missed calls from Roma and I know what they're about. (It’s absolutely why I’m avoiding them, and my phone in general.) The files I sent before everything imploded into paperwork and chaos, the ones I recorded in the weeks after she called and told me the passion was gone.
The ones I recorded (if I am being completely honest with both of us) with the shape of him in my head after a face-to-face one night.
I have been a professional for long enough to know that Roma's feedback is always right, and recently that feedback requires me admitting that I am the cuckold in the chapters I’m narrating as I watch rather than experience.
So I let her call go to voicemail a third time, and I get up from this bed that is newly mine to make a cup of…
tea. Yes, I think this is a tea morning.
I play a game of Go-fish with his cabinets looking for his kettle.
None in sight. His espresso maker is perhaps the only appliance that he allows to live exposed to the outside world and sits on the kitchen counter.
Sleek and flawless. Fine, morning latte it is.
But one of the first things I’ll move over is a kettle, because microwave tea is a travesty.
I listen to the voicemail while the espresso hisses into a small glass as I steam the milk.
Roma’s voice comes through, brisk and satisfied (not what I was expecting) and very caffeinated. (Okay, that I was expecting.)
“Whatever you’re doing,” she says, “married life agrees with you.” A pause. “Also, your instinct on the chapter pacing was correct. Keep doing whatever—whoever— you’re doing.”
I put the phone face down on the counter.
Ha. Married life. I told her about the nuptials, had stuck to the same story we’ve given everyone else, and she didn’t even ask a follow-up question besides about my next recording plans.
And now, I see why, clearly thinking this will be the thing that reignites the passion she felt I was missing.
(In the words of Alanis Morissette, isn’t it ironic?)
Sure, does Hudson have something to do with it?
Maybe. But not because it’s passion, because I was channeling the rage that buzzed between us.
Rage that just happened to look like him bare-chested in my doorway, or like our bodies pressed together as he asked me if I'd ‘thought about it.’ And I don’t know how to tell her (like everything else) this, too, is temporary.
It’s not anything sustainable, not any real intimacy which doesn't just spawn out of nowhere, certainly not just saying ‘I do.’
Even though the wedding (Say it, Lou, our wedding) was single-handedly the most thoughtful thing anyone has ever done for me.
Not the marrying part, though being saved from the U.S.
government will certainly be at the top of that list also, but the wedding.
The thing he didn’t need to do. And did, for me.
I make my latte (no art because Chandler isn’t here) and I take it on a tour around the apartment that is his and also now mine (and also not mine in any way that will outlast the paperwork.) But he’s doing this for his own reasons and they all come down to what is right upstairs.
In some ways, I think USICS is going to be easier to convince than Mrs. Saraceno and the co-op board.
Especially because it sounds like he hasn’t made the best impression.
I’m not sure that I can help besides check the box that says wife.
Because I’ve never been anything impressive to anyone. (Go ahead, ask my parents.)
And as for Roma, she might think the explanation for whatever is now coming through in my recordings is just ‘married.’ A box checked. (The explanation is not married.)
The explanation is that I have spent years narrating other people’s passion and somewhere along the way stopped being able to feel it as anything other than language.
Beautiful language, delicious, tantalizing, language I love, but language all the same.
Words arranged in a particular order to produce a particular effect.
(Like the ones I just used. But saying tantalizing, and being tantalized are not the same.) But somewhere in there, what I stopped feeling, and what stopped being conveyed, converged.
And that is the problem she thinks ‘marriage’ has solved.
I just understand something now that I didn't before. About the last inch of distance that is both nothing and everything as his lips consumed mine after an abrupt ‘I do,’ and the goosebumps ripped down my back as he touched me, it didn’t feel like an arrangement.
It doesn’t feel like a marriage either, but it does feel (at least for now) like the way I can record things that aren't ‘A Modern History of the Postal Service.’ (I still submitted the audition just in case.)
I spend the morning moving, because apparently marriage is just a lot of logistics. (At least this one is.) Waking up this morning as a Mrs. should be nothing except adding a syllable to an honorific I never use anyways.
The newspapers would say it was a casual, intimate, surprise affair.
In reality, no papers were written about it (we aren’t exactly wedding-announcement people) and it was intimate because, well, we don’t have a lot of people between us.
And it was a surprise because I didn’t see this coming. (Any of it.)
I woke up the morning after our night under the stars (just call it a wedding, Lou) in my new bed with a headache from all the champagne and a pepperoni-oil stain on my dress from the pizza.
I went back up to the roof to see the graveyard of our nuptials, all the candles that had been lit gone, maybe by Hudson, he seems like he’d be conscious of fire safety and not wanting to leave behind a trace of what happened.
He just woke up and went to work after some forensic-level cleaning of a romantic affair no one has record of besides a few cellphone shots because there isn’t even melted wax left upstairs.
There’s nothing different between us except the paperwork we signed and a conversation that didn’t result in me calling him an arrogant asshole and him calling me inconsiderate brat. (That really happened.)
I’m on my fifth trip between apartments, waiting for Toby and Chandler to show up, when Mr. Ambrose, my eighty-six-year-old neighbor, stops me, the pile of my clothes wrapped in a blanket still in my hands. (Because why would I pack a box to walk a few feet?)
He has been orchestrating a deeply charming long-game of flirtation with me since about the third day after I moved in.
It doesn’t mean anything, because no matter how playful he may be, he’s told me enough stories about his marriage to his wife, who passed away years ago, that I know this is just a game to pass time.
He jokes of ‘if I was forty years younger,’ and I just reply ‘then you’d still be too old for me.
’ He always laughs, then invites me in for tea, introducing me to new flavors whenever he picks one up he thinks I might like.
Which we share while he shows me pictures of his grandchildren that don’t visit and I end up fixing his TV remote, because his ‘Smart TV is the dumbest contraption he’s ever seen. ’
Today, he catches me, from his door, in his usual brown cardigan, and it looks like it’s been his favorite since the Carter administration. (Who am I kidding, I would totally buy it at the thrift shop.)
“Going somewhere?” he asks.
“Moving day,” I confirm, from behind the pile of stuff.
“I’ll be sad to see you leave, Lou, but I expect a forwarding address,” he says.
“Oh! Easy, it’s erm— well, the same exact as the current, just, a different apartment. 7A rather than B.” I adjust the pile of clothes in my arms, as he clearly has no concern for how heavy knits can be.
But there’s a pause as I see him wrestling with the realization.
“You don’t mean, Ellis’s place?” he says, with just the slight inflection of an impossible truth forcing it into a question.
“I sure do.” Another pause. Longer this time. So I finally give up and drop the makeshift blanket-bag full of laundry at my feet.
“If you were looking for a roommate, I would have loved the company,” he says with more sadness than maybe he means to let through.
I don’t doubt it, and honestly, a daily tea time with Mr. Ambrose in exchange for the occasional ‘how do I FaceTime’ support isn’t a bad deal.
(Just not the deal I need. Then again, if he was forty years younger…)
“Mr. Ambrose.” I put my hand on my hip and look at him with what I hope conveys both the affection and regret I have for the rejection. (Though he will never know the depths of regret I truly feel.) “I’m a married woman now.”
He stares at me, frozen in his doorway.
“I'm sorry?”
“Me too,” I say under my breath as I snort a laugh that does not convey ‘newlywed’ the way I want it to.
So I switch to the thing every newly married woman does, and just extend my left hand to wiggle my ring finger, with the ruby that sits atop it.
“Married.” His eyes land on it, and me, with a weight of disbelief.
(Same, honestly.) “It’s new.” I hurry as if the recency of it explains anything more than timing.
“To—” He stops, looking directly at the door of 7A, which I currently have propped open with a shoe, and then looks back at me. “You married Ellis?”
“I sureee did.” (That sounds natural, right?)
“Hudson Ellis?” He says the full name as if maybe a different version of the man will materialize if he’s more specific, maybe I’ll clarify a different broody, rude man. Not the one who we all collectively seem to feel is the same Angry Neighbor?.
“One and the same.”
Mr. Ambrose is quiet. He’s been to war, and somehow this seems to be the most shocking piece of news he’s ever been asked to absorb.