Chapter 12 #2
Martin had been his closest friend for twenty-two years.
He had also, over nine of them, covered for him roughly a dozen times — not about Sienna, there had never been anything to cover about Sienna, but about the four hundred other evenings, the dinners that ran to one, the Thursday in Chicago, the whole apparatus of a man who was always about to be home.
He had done it lightly and well and had never once, in twenty-two years, said go home.
“Law.” Martin sounded pleased. He always sounded pleased. “Christ, finally. I’ve been calling.”
“I know.”
“How are you? Don’t answer that. Come out Saturday, Deb’s got her sister, it’s nothing, it’s four people and a grill—”
“Marty.” Lawrence stood at the gatehouse window with the phone against his ear. “I’m going to say something and it’s going to sound ungrateful.”
A pause.
“Okay.”
“That night in March, two years ago. The Sotheby’s thing. You called the house at midnight and told Celia I was still at the table with you.”
“Law—”
“I wasn’t at the table with you. I’d left at nine.” He watched the road. “That was the third time. There was the one in the spring before that, and there was the Thursday I was in Chicago and you told her the flight was weather.”
Martin’s voice changed. “I did what you asked.”
“Yes.”
“I did exactly what you asked, every single time, and I never once asked you for a reason, and you’re standing there now doing — what is this? Is this a reckoning?” He laughed, and it came out wrong. “You want me to apologize for covering for you?”
“No,” Lawrence said. “God, no. You didn’t do anything I didn’t ask for. That’s not the part.”
“Then what’s the part?”
“The part is that you’re the person I’ve been closest to for twenty-two years,” Lawrence said, “and in nine years of me lying to my wife, you never said go home. Not once. Not one time, Marty. And I’ve been sitting in a gatehouse for six months working out how a man gets from where I started to where I ended up, and the honest answer is that everybody around me was extremely nice about it. ”
The line was quiet for a long time.
“That’s not fair,” Martin said.
“No,” Lawrence agreed. “It’s probably not.”
“You’re going to blow up your entire life to feel clean and then you’re going to be forty-seven with no wife and no father and no friends and she still isn’t going to—”
“I know,” Lawrence said. “Goodnight, Marty.”
He hung up, and stood at the window with his hand still on the phone, and understood that he had just ended a friendship older than his marriage, over a favor he had asked for himself.
It did not feel like anything. That was the part he hadn’t expected. He had thought it would feel like something.
He put the estate on the market on the Monday.
Not the boathouse. He had thought about that for a long time — three nights, in a gatehouse, with a legal pad, which would have amused her — and in the end he took the whole property to a broker and told them the boathouse was not part of it and would be transferred separately, in her name, unencumbered, whatever it cost to sever.
The broker said that was extremely irregular.
“Yes,” Lawrence said.
He did not tell Roslyn Ashworth. There was a version where he had it done through counsel, and counsel told her, and she told Celia, and Celia would know — and he sat with how much he wanted that for about four minutes before he told the broker to lodge the paperwork and say nothing to anyone until the decree was through.
* * *
The last night before the house went under offer he walked through it.
He had not been inside since Christmas. He went from room to room in a coat with the heat off and the sheets over everything, and he looked at all of it properly, possibly for the first time.
The north wing she had done in the second year, when he had said do whatever you like and meant it as a gift and had never once come to look at it while it was happening.
The boathouse.
The long room, where forty people had heard him, with its sightline running the whole length of the house to the water because a woman he was married to had moved a chair eight inches on an afternoon he could not remember.
The kitchen where they had eaten cereal at midnight in the first year.
He stopped in the middle of the long room and stood there for a while in the dark, and it came up on him without warning — not guilt, which he had been carrying since October and which was familiar and almost comfortable by now, but the actual size of it: that he had lived for nine years inside a thing she made, and had never once said the word made, and had gone looking for somebody to talk to about how lonely he was.
There was nobody to tell.
That was the whole of it, standing there.
He had a sister who would take the call and a father he had just finished with and a friend he had cut on Friday, and none of them were the person.
The person he wanted to tell was the person it was about, and she was twenty-five minutes north in four rooms above a hardware store with his child, and she had asked him not to call, and she had been entirely right to.
He sat down on the arm of a sheeted chair in his own dark house.
“Well,” Lawrence said, out loud, to nobody at all. “There it is.”
Then he got up and turned the heat down to nothing and locked the door behind him and walked back up the drive between the bare beeches to the gatehouse, where the lamp was on, and the table was covered in papers, and there was nobody waiting.