Chapter 13
She decided it on a Tuesday in May at four in the morning, which is when she decided most things now, because at four in the morning she was awake anyway and there was nobody to argue with.
The decision was not forgiveness. She was extremely clear with herself about that, lying on her left side in a rented bed with the streetlight coming through a good window, and she went over it twice to be sure.
She had not forgiven him. She did not expect to. There was a seventy-one-minute file with nine minutes on the end of it and there was going to be, for the rest of her life, a woman in Ohio who knew about a scar.
What she had decided was narrower and entirely practical.
She was going to have a child in about six weeks.
And that child was going to arrive into whatever arrangement existed on the day it arrived, and the arrangement that currently existed was a wall, two lawyers, and a man in a gatehouse who had been instructed in writing not to come near a building site.
I am not doing this in a war, she thought, at four in the morning. Not because he deserves peace. Because I’m not spending the first year of somebody’s life being at war, and because I refuse to hand a nine-year-old an explanation of why her parents have never been in the same room.
That was it. That was the whole reasoning. It was not romantic and it was not generous and she was going to be irritated for months by everyone who assumed it was either.
She got up at six and wrote the terms on a legal pad before she made tea.
* * *
“No,” said Roslyn.
“It’s not a legal question.”
“Everything is a legal question until the decree is entered, which it is not, for another five weeks.” Roslyn’s voice on the phone had gone to the register she probably used in court.
“You want to sit down with the respondent, without counsel, four times, while there is an open financial disclosure and an unresolved provision about a child.”
“Yes.”
“Celia.”
“Roslyn, I’ve listened. In October I did every single thing you told me, exactly, for seven months, and you were right about all of it and it saved me.” Celia was standing in her kitchen with the pad in front of her. “This is the one I’m doing anyway.”
There was a long pause.
“Read them to me,” Roslyn said. “The terms. If you’ve written terms I’d at least like to know they’re any good.”
Celia read them.
“One conversation a week. A public place, which I choose. It starts at a time I set and it ends at a time I set, and I say both of those in advance. One subject per conversation, named beforehand, and if he moves off it, it’s over.
No gifts, no letters, no arriving early, no walking me to a car.
Nothing goes through him to Frankie or Margaret.
If any of it breaks, we go back to counsel only and it doesn’t reopen. ”
A silence.
“That,” Roslyn said slowly, “is considerably better drafted than most of what crosses my desk.”
“I’ve written a punch list before.”
“Yes. I can hear that.” A pause. “For the record I still think it’s a mistake, and I’d like that in the file. But it’s your file.” Then, drier: “Who chooses the subject?”
“I do.”
“Good,” said Roslyn. “Then I withdraw about a third of my objection.”
* * *
Frankie’s reaction was worse, because Frankie did not have to be professional.
“Absolutely not.”
“Frankie.”
“Nope. No. I’ve been very good, Ceel, I have been so good, I have not said one word about the phone call or the stairwell or the fact that you looked like somebody had switched a light on for four days in April—”
“That’s a lot of not saying it.”
“—and this is where I get off.” Frankie was pacing four hundred and ten square feet, which took about nine steps.
“Six weeks. You’re six weeks out. Do you know what you’re like right now?
You’re tired and you’re huge and you’re frightened, and that is the single worst condition in which to be in a room with a man who knows every door in your head. ”
“I know.”
“Then why?”
Celia sat down carefully, because sitting down was a project now.
“Because it’s the last month I get to decide anything from strength,” she said.
Frankie stopped pacing.
“After this I’m going to be a woman with a newborn,” Celia said.
“I’ll be exhausted for a year. I’ll be in a small apartment with no sleep, and things will happen to me for a while, and that’s fine, that’s what it is.
But every single thing that’s been decided about my life in the last nine years got decided while I was tired and being reasonable, and I’m not doing that again.
” She put her hand on the pad. “So I’m doing it now. In May. On paper. With an end time.”
Frankie looked at her for a while and then sat down on the folding chair she had never taken home.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay?”
“Okay. I hate it and I think it’s dangerous and I’m going to be extremely available on Thursdays.” Frankie rubbed her face. “That’s a good reason, is the problem. That’s a really good reason.”
* * *
Roslyn sent the terms to his counsel on the Wednesday.
He accepted them in forty minutes.
That was the first thing Celia filed away, and she was aware of filing it, and she did it anyway: forty minutes, no negotiation, no counter, no request for a fifth conversation or a longer end time or a subject of his own.
His counsel sent back a single line confirming all of it and adding, presumably under protest, that his client had been advised.
“He didn’t ask for anything,” she said to Roslyn.
“No.”
“Not one thing.”
“Celia,” Roslyn said, “I have been doing this for thirty years and I want to give you something and then never mention it again. In thirty years I have had one other man on the other side of a file behave the way this one has, and that man was doing it because his counsel had told him it played well.” A pause.
“This one’s counsel is furious. I’ve spoken to her twice.
She thinks he’s being an idiot and she cannot move him an inch. ”
Celia stood in the trailer at the mill with the phone against her ear and did not say anything for a moment.
“Thank you,” she said.
“That’s not encouragement.”
“I know exactly what it is.”
* * *
The first conversation was on a Thursday at ten in the morning in a café in the river town with four tables and a window, and it was, from beginning to end, a disaster.
She had named the subject in advance: the sale of the house — logistics only.
He was not early. She noticed that immediately, because being early had been the first thing he did wrong in April, and this time he came in at ten exactly and she understood that he had probably been sitting in a car around the corner for twenty minutes to manage it, and she did not know what to do with that at all.
“Celia.”
“Sit down.”
He sat. He put nothing on the table. He had done that before too.
“We’ve got until twenty to eleven,” she said. “The house.”
“Right.”
And then neither of them said anything for about nine seconds.
It was excruciating. She had not been prepared for it to be excruciating.
She had prepared for grief, for anger, for the awful pull of the stair tower — she had spent four days getting ready to be moved and had made contingencies — and what actually happened was that two people who had been married for nine years sat in a café and could not make sentences.
“The broker’s got an offer,” he said.
“Roslyn told me.”
“Right.”
“Is it a good offer?”
“It’s an offer.” He turned his water glass a quarter turn, which his father did, which she did not point out. “I’d take it. There’s a family. Three kids. The mother spent forty minutes in the north wing.”
Celia looked out the window.
“That’s the thing I’d want to know,” she said, “so thank you.”
“I thought you would.”
Silence again.
They got through perhaps four actual items in thirty-five minutes and every one of them could have been done by email in ninety seconds.
Twice he started a sentence with “Celia—” in a different voice and she said “the house,” and he stopped, and went back to the house, and it happened a second time and he stopped a second time, and the effort it cost him was visible across the table.
At twenty to eleven she looked at her phone.
“That’s the time.”
He stood up immediately. Not slowly, not with a last thing, not with his hand on the back of the chair looking at her. He stood up as if a bell had gone.
“Thank you for the coffee,” he said, and went out, and did not look back through the window, which she watched him not do.
* * *
She sat there for another ten minutes.
Then she drove to the mill and went up to the third floor — she could do that again now; it had taken her three weeks — and stood in the light and was, to her enormous irritation, close to tears about a conversation in which nothing whatsoever had happened.
Because it had been useless. That was what got her. Thirty-five minutes of two adults failing to discuss a real estate transaction.
And he had not once tried to make it more than it was.
He had been given thirty-five minutes with a woman he had not been alone with since a stairwell in April, and he had spent it on a broker’s offer, twice caught himself, twice stopped, and then stood up on the exact minute and left without a backward glance — because those were the terms, and because he had understood, apparently in forty minutes on a Wednesday, that the only thing he had left to give her was doing exactly what she said.
Celia stood in the light with her hand on the small of her back.
“Damn it,” she said, to a building.
Then she got her phone out and typed a message to Roslyn, because everything still went through Roslyn, and it took her three attempts to get the wording flat enough.
Next Thursday. Same place, same time. Subject: the boathouse and what’s in the north wing store. Tell him it’s forty minutes.
She looked at it.
Then she added, because she had built the terms and could amend them and because she was not, in the end, going to pretend she had not noticed:
And tell him he did it right.
She sent it before she could take that out.