Chapter 17 #2
“You tell me things. Not the good ones — I know you can do the good ones. The other ones. The deal you’re frightened of, the thing your father said, the two in the morning ones.
” She held his eye. “That’s the actual condition, Lawrence.
If you ever find yourself with something to say at half past one in the morning, it comes to me, and if it can’t come to me then something has gone wrong and we deal with it that week and not in four years. ”
“Yes.”
“And I’m not going back to that house.”
“It’s sold,” he said. “It completed on the ninth.”
“I know. Roslyn told me.” Celia allowed herself, finally, a small breath of something like amusement. “I’m telling you anyway. Wherever we live, I design it, and if you say do whatever you like to me one more time in my life I’ll put you through a wall.”
And Lawrence Hollister laughed — helplessly, out loud, with his hand over his eyes.
“Say them back,” Celia said.
“You hold the design. You get the site meeting. I bring you the two in the morning.” He took his hand down and his eyes were wet and he did not hide it. “And I never say do whatever you like again.”
“Good.”
“Celia—”
“One more.” She stood up, which took a moment, and he started to rise and she put a hand out and he stayed exactly where he was, which she noted and would think about later with a great deal of pleasure.
“This isn’t a trial and it isn’t provisional and I’m not going to be a woman who says let’s see how it goes.
I’ve watched my mother’s whole generation say let’s see how it goes.
I’m deciding. Tonight. Out loud, in a gatehouse. ”
She stood in front of his chair.
“I’m choosing you,” she said. “That’s a decision, not an experiment. Do you understand the difference?”
“Yes,” Lawrence said.
“Say it.”
He stood up. He was very close and he did not touch her.
“It’s a decision,” he said. “I know exactly what it costs you to make it and I’m going to spend the rest of my life not spending it.”
* * *
And then she reached up and put her hand flat on the side of his face, which she had not done since a night in September, and he made a sound she had never heard from him in nine years, and it broke.
He kissed her like a man coming up out of water.
There was nothing careful in it. That was what undid her — she had been braced for careful, for a man being respectful at a woman ten days from a baby, and instead he had one hand in her hair and one at her back and he kissed her as if she had been gone for a year, which she had, and she got both hands into his shirt and pulled and heard a seam go somewhere and did not care in the slightest.
“Bed,” she said, against his mouth. “Now. Also slowly, because I can’t do anything fast.”
“Celia—”
“If you ask me if I’m sure I’ll go home.”
“I was going to ask you where it is,” Lawrence said, “because I’ve been living here for six months and this house has a genuinely stupid staircase.”
She laughed into his mouth and he picked her up off her feet about four inches, which was as far as either of them was getting, and they went up the stupid staircase very badly.
* * *
It was slow because it had to be and it was better for it.
He undressed her in a small bedroom with the window open onto the drive and the June evening coming in, and he did it slowly, and he did it looking at her the entire time — at all of her, at the whole changed shape of her, at ten days out, without one flicker of anything except the thing that had been in his face on the loading dock in the sun.
“Don’t,” she said, when her hands went, automatically, to cover.
“Don’t what?”
“I’ve got a — I don’t know what you’re expecting. It’s been eight months and I’m—”
“Celia.” He put his mouth on her shoulder, and left it there. “I have thought about you every single day for eight months in a four-room house and I have not once been picturing October.”
He said the rest of it against her skin, moving down, in the low unhurried voice she had married and had not heard in about four years — the scar on her hip, which he found with his mouth and stayed at for long enough that she had to put a hand in his hair; the two freckles under her left shoulder blade that he had once, in a hotel in Lisbon, insisted were a constellation; the back of her knee.
“Stop talking,” she said, and did not mean it at all, and he knew she did not mean it and did not stop.
It was not, she understood at some point with her head back against the wall, remotely careful.
It was slow, which was different — slow because he was taking his time, and because he had eight months of it, and because at forty-six he had apparently decided there was nothing left in his life he was in a hurry about.
He got her onto the bed and knelt over her and looked at her for a moment, and she saw him about to ask.
“Don’t ask me if I’m sure.”
“I wasn’t going to ask if you were sure,” Lawrence said. “I was going to ask what still works, because I have absolutely no idea and I would rather find out from you than from a noise you make.”
Celia laughed and put her hand over her face.
“On my side,” she said. “God. That’s such a — yes. On my side, and you’ll have to be behind me, and I need the pillow.”
“Which pillow?”
“Any pillow, Lawrence, it’s a pillow—”
He got her a pillow.
It took some negotiating. She had to move twice, and there was a moment where his elbow went somewhere and she said “no, up, up,” and then a long stretch where they were both laughing so hard that nothing was going to be possible for a while and neither of them minded.
That was the part she had not been ready for.
She had been ready for grief, for heat, for the awful pull of it — she had spent an afternoon in a car getting ready to be undone.
She had not once considered that it might be funny, that they might end up wheezing into a mattress in a gatehouse like two people in their twenties, and that this would turn out to be the thing that took the last of the wall down.
She stopped laughing first.
She reached back and got a handful of his shirt, which he had somehow still half got on, and said, “Come here,” and he came.
Then he stopped laughing.
He put his hand flat on her stomach — the first time, the first time in the whole of it, and he did it slowly enough that she could have moved it and did not — and his daughter turned over under his palm, at nine o’clock, the way she did every night like clockwork, and Lawrence Hollister put his forehead against the back of Celia’s neck and stopped breathing for a second.
“Oh,” he said.
“She does that.”
“Every night?”
“Nine o’clock. You can set a watch by her.”
He did not say anything for a while. His hand stayed where it was.
Then he moved it, and moved her hair off her neck, and put his mouth just under her ear, and said, “Tell me if anything hurts,” and she said, “It won’t,” and it didn’t.
It was slow from the first second and it stayed slow, and it was nothing like the last four years of their marriage, which had been efficient and affectionate and conducted, she understood now, by two people being polite in the dark.
This was not polite.
He had one arm under her and the other hand spread wide on her stomach and he was not going anywhere, and every so often he stopped entirely — just stopped, and held still, with his mouth on the back of her shoulder — and she could feel him doing it deliberately, making it last, refusing to be anywhere except in that room at that minute.
“You’re drawing it out,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Why.”
“Because I’ve had eight months to think about what I’d do if I ever got this back,” Lawrence said, against her neck, “and every single version of it was slow.”
She got her hand back into his hair and held on.
He went slowly. He kept one hand on her stomach the entire time and the other over her hand on the sheet, and he said her name twice, and both times it sounded like it had in the first year — not the way he had said it across a conference table or on a driveway or at the top of a garden, but the way he had said it at midnight in a kitchen with cereal, before there was anything to be careful about.
She came with her face turned into the pillow and his mouth against her shoulder, and it was not spectacular and it was not what she was going to remember.
What she was going to remember was afterward: lying in a small room in a gatehouse in the dark with the window open, with a man’s arm over her and his hand still flat where their daughter was, and neither of them saying anything for about twenty minutes, and the whole enormous silence of it being, for the first time in nine years, entirely comfortable.
“I want to say something,” he said eventually, into her hair.
“Say it.”
“I never settled.”
Celia lay in the dark with her eyes open.
“I know,” she said. “You told me why on Thursday. I’ve had it for six days.”
“I know you have. I’d like to say the other half out loud anyway, since we’re doing things out loud now.
” His arm tightened. “I married the most interesting person I have ever met and I have been aware of it every single day for nine years, and the only reason I ever said otherwise was that I couldn’t stand how it looked.
That’s all it ever was. I’d like that to be the last thing anybody in this family says about that word. ”
“All right,” Celia said.
And then, because she was not going to leave it there and because it was the twelfth thing she had decided in a car that afternoon:
“I love you. I never stopped, which was extremely inconvenient in April.”
Lawrence laughed, wrecked, into the back of her neck.
“I love you,” he said. “Every version. Including the one that took a microphone off a table at my sister’s wedding.”
“That was a good toast.”
“That was the best thing I’ve ever seen anybody do,” he said, “and I was the thing it was being done to.”
She fell asleep like that, in a four-room house at the top of a drive, twenty-five minutes from a mill with her name on it, ten days out.