Chapter 10
For four days after the stair tower she was, and she admitted this to herself with some disgust, happy.
Not about him. She was very firm with herself on that point, several times a day.
But something had loosened. She slept better.
She ate a whole meal sitting down at a table like a person.
On the Wednesday she caught herself humming in the trailer and Chuck looked up and she said “don’t,” and he said “wasn’t going to,” and went back to his coffee with the face of a man storing something away for later.
She was twenty-eight weeks and the building had a roof going on.
That was the thing she told herself it was about. The roof.
* * *
The file came out on the Friday.
It was not new. That was the first thing she understood, and it made everything worse rather than better: it had been in the archive since March, in the same folder as everything else, seventy-one minutes long and buried at position thirty-four in a list that nobody had gotten to the bottom of.
Somebody had gotten to the bottom of it.
Frankie called at seven in the morning, which was the second time that year she had called at an hour she never called.
“Ceel.”
“What.”
“Are you at home.”
“Frankie.”
“I need you to be sitting down and I need you to not do the thing where you go and read it by yourself with your face like a wall—”
Celia sat down on the end of her bed and read it by herself with her face like a wall.
It was week six. She knew it was week six because she had heard the four notes on either side of it in October, on a floor, in a study, with her back against a desk. She had listened to all of them. She had listened to this one.
She had listened to the first sixty-two minutes of it.
She had stopped at sixty-two minutes because it was half past one in the morning and because the file had gone quiet for a while and because she had thought — she remembered thinking it — this one’s finished, he’s talking about the Kingston deal now, this one’s nothing.
There were nine more minutes.
* * *
In the nine minutes, Sienna asks him what his wife is actually like.
Not what’s she like the way people ask at parties. She asks it the second way, the interested way, at half past one in the morning, and Lawrence — who is tired, and four drinks in, and who has been talking without interruption for an hour — tells her.
He tells her about the scar on Celia’s left hip from a site fall in 2014 and what she says about it.
He tells her the thing Celia does with her hands when she is about to disagree with somebody in a meeting and hasn’t decided yet whether it’s worth it.
He tells her that Celia cannot sleep if a door in the house is open and that this started after her grandmother died and that Celia does not know that it started then, because he worked it out and never told her.
He tells her about the drawings from 2013 in the back of the closet.
He tells her — laughing, fondly, generously, with the specific warmth of a man handing over something he thinks is charming — that his wife once cried in a car outside a bank in Poughkeepsie because a client had called her the decorator, and that she has never mentioned it since, and that he has never brought it up because she’d be embarrassed.
Celia sat on the end of her bed in an apartment above a hardware store at ten past seven in the morning.
She had cried in a car outside that bank for four minutes in 2018 and had fixed her face in the mirror and gone back in and finished the meeting, and she had told her husband about it that night in bed, in the dark, once, because he had asked her what was wrong and she had decided to say.
It was, she realized with the terrible clarity of the very early morning, the last time she had told him anything like that.
She had told him one true small humiliating thing, and he had held it for six years, and then he had given it away at half past one in the morning to a woman he had known for six weeks, because it was good material.
* * *
Frankie was still on the phone. Celia had forgotten.
“—Ceel. Ceel. Say something.”
“I’m here.”
“Say a whole sentence.”
Celia looked at the wall.
“He didn’t say anything cruel,” she said.
“What?”
“That’s what I want you to understand about it.
Everybody’s going to read it and say it wasn’t the worst thing on there, and they’re right.
There’s nothing cruel in it. He’s fond.” Her voice was completely even and she could hear it being even from somewhere outside herself.
“He’s showing her the good stuff. He’s showing her the scar and the hands and the door thing and the bank, and he’s showing her because they’re the parts of me only he had, and having them is what made him interesting at half past one in the morning. ”
There was a silence on the line.
“I was material,” Celia said. “That’s it. That’s the whole thing. He wasn’t betraying me, he was spending me. Nine years of paying attention to someone, and the reason he paid attention turns out to be that it made good conversation with somebody new.”
“Celia—”
“And I have to know that for the rest of my life. So does everybody else. There is a woman in Ohio who knows about the scar on my hip.”
She hung up.
Then she went into the bathroom and was sick, and sat on the tile floor with the good window above her, and was, for about twenty minutes, more comprehensively angry than she had ever been in thirty-eight years.
* * *
He called at nine.
Of course he did. He had been told not to and he had understood, and it had held for three weeks, and it did not hold this morning.
She watched the phone ring out.
He called again at nine-oh-four. Then he stopped, which she noticed, and then a message came:
I’m not going to call again. I know what came out. There is nothing I can say about it that isn’t me asking you for something. I’m sorry. That’s all this is.
And forty minutes later, one more:
I have never told anybody the bank. Not before her and not since. I want you to know I understood what it was when you told me. That’s not a defense, it’s worse. I knew exactly what it was worth and I spent it anyway.
Celia read that twice, standing in her kitchen.
Then she put the phone face down and did not answer it, because he was right — it was worse — and because the only reason she wanted to answer it was that it was the truest thing he had said in ten years, and she was not going to be a woman who rewarded a man for accuracy about his own cruelty.
* * *
She went to the site anyway, because the alternative was not going to the site.
It was the wrong decision and she knew it by the time she reached the lower gate, and she did it anyway, which was becoming a pattern she intended to look at later.
The crew knew. She could tell within about a minute — not from anything anybody said, because nobody said anything, but from the shape of the morning.
Kowalski held a door. Somebody had moved the good chair nearer the stove.
Chuck came in with two coffees instead of one and put hers down and started talking about the slate order in a voice that was two clicks louder than his usual voice and did not stop for four minutes.
They were being kind and they were being kind about that, and it was intolerable, and there was not one single thing she could do about it that wouldn’t make it worse.
At mid-morning she went to go up to the third floor and got as far as the fourth tread.
She stood there with her hand on the temporary rail.
She could see the light at the top of the run, coming down the way it did in the late morning, flat and gray and about to get better.
Six days ago she had gone up these stairs slowly with a man behind her and had felt him hold himself back from helping her and had thought good, and had stepped out into that room and watched him stop in it, and had known, for about ninety seconds, exactly what it was to be understood by somebody.
And now he was up there.
That was the thing she had said to Roslyn on the phone that afternoon and it was not a figure of speech.
He was in the room. He was in the specific four steps he had taken into the light and the way he had turned all the way around and the nine seconds it had cost him to get it.
He had been in her building for six days and it had been the best six days of the year, and now the same six days had a seventy-one-minute file in them and a woman in Ohio who knew about a scar.
Celia stood on the fourth tread of her own building for a long time.
Then she went back down and did the rest of the day in the trailer, and told Chuck she’d look at the rafters tomorrow, and he said “no rush,” and did not look up.
* * *
Margaret called at four and Celia let it ring and then answered on the last one.
“I’m not calling about him,” Margaret said immediately. “I want that said in the first four words. Did I do the first four words?”
“Roughly.”
“I’m calling because I’ve listened to it and I want to tell you what I think it is, and then I’m going to leave you alone for a month.”
“Margaret—”
“Twenty seconds.”
Celia sat down on the step outside the trailer.
“Go on.”
“It’s the family thing,” Margaret said. “It’s exactly the family thing and I’ve been trying to work out why it made me want to put my hand through a wall, and it’s because that’s what they do with people.
That’s what my father did with my mother for thirty years.
He’d tell a story about her at a dinner — a warm one, a fond one, a real one — and everybody would laugh, and she’d smile, and what he was actually doing was showing people that he owned something interesting. ”
Celia looked out at the yard.
“That’s a very good description,” she said, “and it doesn’t help me even slightly.”
“No,” Margaret agreed. “I didn’t think it would. I wanted you to have it anyway, so you know that when I say I understand, I’m not being nice at you.”
“Thank you.”
“Are you all right?”
“No,” Celia said. “But I’ve got a roof going on.”
* * *
She called Roslyn at ten.