Chapter 15 – Ben
Ben
The coffee's wrong.
That's how it starts, the first morning, though I don't understand it as a beginning yet—I stand in the kitchen and drink it and it's wrong, thin and sour, and I stare into the cup like it's betrayed me before I remember that the beans come from Portland in the black bag, and that the black bag has been reordered on some schedule I never once thought about because it simply always appeared, full, in the cabinet, the way rain appears.
I open the cabinet. The bag is nearly empty.
I stand there holding it and I have the disorienting sense of a man who's just discovered his own hands don't work the way he assumed, that they've been operated all this time by something outside himself.
I don't know how to reorder the beans. I know how to close an eleven-figure deal across a language barrier and a twelve-hour time difference. I do not know the name of the place in Portland.
It goes like that. It keeps going like that.
The dry cleaning doesn't come back. My shirts—I go to the closet on the fourth day and the shirts I reach for aren't there, and it takes me the better part of an hour and two irritated exchanges with Marta, who looks at me with a carefully blank face that I'm starting to hate, to understand that someone used to take them somewhere and bring them back, that this was a transaction with edges and a rhythm and a human being on the other end of it, and that the someone was not Marta, and was not me.
The car needs its service. The thing with the property tax, the letter that comes, thick and official, that I open and read three times and set down because I genuinely do not know what's meant to happen next, who handles it, where it goes.
There's a birthday—my mother's cousin, a card that apparently went out every year in Emily's slanting hand with my name signed beneath hers, and I only learn this because the cousin calls, hurt, wondering if everything's all right, and I have to sit there and manufacture warmth I don't have the pieces for.
She ran it. All of it. The whole enormous invisible machine of the life I thought I was running she was running underneath me, silently, the way a hull moves a ship while the man on deck believes it's the wind.
I never once saw the hull. You don't. That's the entire point of a hull.
And the house is loud now.
I don't have language for this at first either, because it makes no sense—there's a person gone from the house, it should be quieter, subtraction should mean quiet.
But it's the opposite. It's as if Emily's silence was a thing with mass, a kind of ballast, and without it the whole place has tipped and everything slides.
Tara fills every room she's in and every room she isn't. She talks through breakfast and she talks through the drive and she narrates her own work in a bright unbroken stream, I was thinking, and then I thought, and don't you think, and there's music from the studio now, loud music, something with a beat that comes through the walls where the cello used to come through, and I catch myself, God help me, straining under it for a sound that isn't there anymore, that low sawing I stopped hearing years ago and now cannot stop not-hearing.
The house doesn't swallow Tara. That's the thing I keep circling.
It used to take Emily's sounds and fold them into itself and give nothing back, and I thought that was the house.
I thought that was just the architecture, the glass, the height of the ceilings.
But it takes Tara's sounds and throws them everywhere, back and back and back, and I understand now, too late, the way I understand everything now, that it was never the house.
It was Emily. Emily was the quiet, and the quiet was the thing I rested in without ever knowing I was resting.
I don't sleep well. I tell myself it's the merger.
—
She comes into the study after dinner on the ninth night.
I'm at the desk with the Osaka reports and a whiskey I'm not drinking, and the itch is going in the back of my skull, the one that's never wrong, louder every day now, and I still haven't found the planner, and I've stopped looking for it because I've started to be afraid of what the sixth would say in my own ink, in the covenant I keep with the things that matter.
"You've been so tense," Tara says.
I don't look up right away. "It's a lot going on."
"I know." She comes around the side of the desk, and there's a shift in the air, in the register of her, that I clock a half-second late, the way I clock everything late now.
"You carry all of it. Everybody leans on you and nobody—" Her hand comes onto my shoulder. Then it slides. "Nobody carries you."
And then she's leaning down, and her hair is against my jaw, and her mouth is coming toward mine, and her hand is flat against my chest with an intention in it there's no mistaking, no reasonable voice I can extend toward it, no you're reading into this?—
I stand up so fast the chair goes back into the shelves.
"What are you doing."
"Ben." She straightens, and her face does something, a quick flat recalibration behind the eyes, there and gone, and I've seen it before, I saw it on the platform under the paint and the tears, and I didn't let myself keep it then. "Don't—it's okay. It's just us. I thought?—"
"You thought what."
"I thought—" and her chin lifts, and there's a shine coming up in her eyes, on cue, the tears arriving the way they always arrive, "—the way you look at me, the way you've always looked at me, since before her, and now she's gone, she left you, Ben, she walked out and took half your money and humiliated you in front of everyone, and I'm still here, I stayed, I've been right here the whole?—"
"Stop."
She stops.
"You thought wrong." My voice is level and it doesn't shrink and it fills the study and it does not get swallowed, and some distant part of me notes that this is how she used to sound, the last few times, at the end, that I'm borrowing a register I taught her to stop using.
"I'm married. Do you understand that? I have a wife. Emily is my wife."
"Emily left."
"Emily's coming back." I say it and I hear how much I need it to be true. "I don't—" The itch flares, white, behind the skull. "I don't know when. But she's coming back. And when she does she is not going to walk into her own house and find—this. Whatever this was."
Tara's face changes. The shine dries up faster than tears should.
"You don't even know when," she says, and there's something underneath it now, thin and hard, the thing the softness has been laid over all along.
"You said it yourself. You don't know when.
Maybe never, Ben. Maybe she's not the kind of woman who?—"
"Don't." I hold up a hand. "Don't tell me about my wife."
And it lands strangely in the room, that word, my wife, because I realize as I say it that I've spent a season letting other people—my mother, this woman, myself—talk about Emily as a mood, a problem, a thing to be handled, and that not once did I stand up out of a chair and put a wall around her name.
Not at the dinner. Not over the china. Not on the platform.
The one time I set down my fork all night it was to defend the woman now standing in front of me with her intention still hanging in the air between us like a smell.
I think about the box in the hallway. Petty, I called her.
I think about how the box kept ending up in her room.
I never once asked who kept moving it. I never once asked because I'd already decided the answer, the way I decide everything, fast and clean and final, and the deciding felt like intelligence and it was only ever laziness wearing intelligence's coat.
"You need to start looking for a place," I say.
Her mouth opens.
"I mean it. This was always—you were a guest, Tara.
You came for a couple of weeks and it's been months and this—tonight—this can't happen under my roof.
" I'm already moving toward the door, already needing to be out of the room, out of the reach of her.
"I'll have Diane help you. My assistant.
She'll pull listings, whatever you need, whatever part of town.
And I'll cover the deposit, first and last, so there's no—so it's not a hardship.
You won't be out on the street. Nobody's putting you on the street. "
"Ben—" and the pout comes, the lower lip, the wounded tilt of the head, the whole apparatus I've watched work on me for months and cannot, standing here in the doorway of my own study, believe I ever couldn't see. "After everything. After I built you that whole campaign, after I stayed?—"
"Diane will call you in the morning," I say.
And I go.
I go out into the loud house, the house that won't stop giving me back sounds I don't want, and I climb the stairs to a bedroom thinned of half its life, and I stand in the middle of it, and I think about a cello I chased across a continent for a year because I'd listened, once, when it mattered, and I think about the woman who left, and I think, for the first time, turning it over slow and careful the way she used to turn things over?—
what if it wasn't Emily being petty.
What if it was never Emily being petty at all.