Chapter 3 #2
She let that sit exactly as long as it needed to.
“I did go quiet. He’s right about that. I went quiet the year I stopped taking clients, and the year I stopped saying what I thought at that table, and every time I turned the light off at three in the morning so nobody would feel bad about the hour.
I went quiet on purpose, for nine years, in this house, to make room.
And I’d like to be very clear, since we’re all here: nobody made me do it.
I did it. It was the worst work of my life and I did every bit of it myself. ”
She set the microphone down on the table because it had begun to feel absurd in her hand, and her voice carried perfectly well without it, because she had specified the acoustic ceiling on that tent.
“I’m not going to make a scene at Margaret’s wedding.
Margaret has done nothing wrong and neither has anybody at table four, who I think are genuinely just confused.
” A shocked, grateful laugh from somewhere.
“So I’ll say the short version. I’m leaving him.
It’s done, it’s not a negotiation, and it happened last Tuesday on the floor of his study, not tonight.
Tonight is only the part where I stop being quiet about it. ”
She picked up her glass.
“To Margaret and Roman. Sit at the table. Say the thing out loud. Don’t wait nine years.”
And three hundred people, having absolutely no idea what else to do, drank.
* * *
She did not run.
That was the part she had worked out on Thursday in the rain: the whole thing failed if she ran.
So she put down her glass, and she went around the top table and kissed Margaret’s cheek, and Margaret grabbed her wrist and held it too hard and said, “Celia,” with her whole face open, and Celia said, “Go and dance. I mean it. Go.”
Roman stood up. She squeezed his shoulder as she went past.
The tent was standing up in sections behind her — she could hear it, chairs going back, the specific noise of a room deciding it had permission to talk.
Frankie was already up at table nine and moving, and Celia caught her eye and shook her head once, and Frankie stopped, because Frankie had known her for nineteen years and understood that this was a thing that had to be done alone or it did not count.
Her mother was standing at the tent’s edge by the doors.
Roberta did not say anything. She reached out and put her hand flat on the side of her daughter’s face for about two seconds, the way you check a child for fever, and then she let her go.
“Sunday,” Celia said. “You and Dad. I’ll call you Sunday.”
“I know you will.”
Lawrence caught her on the gravel.
He was without his jacket and he had come out fast enough to be breathing hard, and his face had nothing on it at all, no strategy, nothing, and it was the most naked she had seen him in nine years.
“Celia. Celia, please—”
“No.”
“You don’t — that isn’t what I meant. On the recording. That is not what I—”
“It’s exactly what you meant.” She kept walking.
He kept up. “That’s the whole problem, Lawrence.
If you’d been lying to impress her I could have lived with it.
You were being honest with her. You were more honest with a woman you’d known seven weeks than you were with me for nine years, and you didn’t even notice you were doing it. ”
“Then let me be honest now. Let me—”
“You had Tuesday. You had Wednesday. You had a rehearsal in a tent.” She reached the car. Her bag had been in the trunk since two o’clock. “You asked me if Saturday was going to be all right. That was your question. Out of everything you could have asked me that week, that was the one you picked.”
He stopped as if she had hit him.
“I didn’t know,” he said. “Celia. I didn’t know you were — I didn’t know any of that. About the studio. About the — you never said.”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t.”
“Then how was I supposed to—”
“That’s the question, isn’t it.” She opened the car door and stood behind it.
“You had it right, on the recording. I did go quiet. You just got the last part backwards. You thought I went quiet because I’d stopped caring where you were.
” She looked at him over the top of the door.
“I went quiet because it was the only way to stay.”
He put his hand out. Not toward her — toward the space between them, like a man steadying himself on something that wasn’t there.
“Nine years,” he said. “Nine years and you never once—”
“And you never once asked.”
Gerald was coming down the steps behind him at speed. “Celia. Celia, now, let’s not do this on a driveway—”
She turned around.
“Gerald,” she said, “you’ve been talking down to me at that table for nine years and I have never once let you see it land. I’d like you to know that it landed every time.”
She got in the car.
He said her name again through the window, both hands on the glass — her husband, the man she had married in a registry office in the year she still had a studio, forty-six years old and gray-faced under a security light in the wrong color that she had been meaning to change for four years.
She put the car in gear.
In the mirror the tent was gold and full of people and the whole house was lit up behind it, and it got smaller, and she drove down between the beeches and out onto the road, and she did not stop until she was thirty miles south, in a gas station parking lot, where she sat with her hands on the wheel and her head back against the seat and finally, for a long ugly stretch, cried.
Then she washed her face in the restroom, and bought a bottle of water and a bag of pretzels, and got back in the car, and kept going.