36. No More Pretending
Chapter thirty-six
No More Pretending
Mandy
There is a knock at my door at ten past eight in the morning, and I know it is him before I am out of the chair.
I don’t know how. There is no reason to.
It is a knock. But it has a particular unhurried authority to it, three and then a pause and then one, and I have heard that exact rhythm through a bathroom door and a bedroom door and once through the window of a truck, and my whole body identifies it about a second and a half before my brain catches up.
I look down at myself.
I am wearing flannel pyjama bottoms with small woodland creatures on them and a T-shirt from a 5K I did not finish, and I have slept eleven hours with my hair wet, so the left side of my head has made a decision that the right side has not been consulted on.
There is a cat on the counter who is not supposed to be on the counter.
There are eleven unopened boxes in my living room.
I open the door anyway, and that is the whole of my personal growth right there, in one movement, at ten past eight in the morning.
Sterling Hayes is standing in my hallway.
He’s showered. He’s shaved. He’s in the grey Henley I once told him made him look like a man who owns a canoe, an insult he has evidently been carrying around like a medal. He looks like he has slept for about eleven hours himself and is still not caught up.
And he’s holding the blue notebook.
Neither of us says anything for a second that goes on considerably too long.
“Your hair,” he says.
“I’m aware of my hair.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything about your hair.”
“You said the word hair, Sterling.”
“I did do that.” He shifts his weight. “Can I come in? I’ve been standing in this hallway for four minutes working up to knocking, and a woman came out of 3A and looked at me like I was casing the building.”
“That’s Mrs. Alvarez. She looks at everybody like that.”
“Right.” A pause. “Mandy.”
“Come in.”
He comes in, and my apartment immediately becomes a smaller apartment, which is a thing he does to rooms.
He stops three steps inside and I watch him take it in, and I know exactly what he is seeing, because I have been standing in the middle of it since five o’clock this morning with a mug going cold in my hand.
The boxes are still boxes. But the long wall, the blank white one I have been treating like an accusation for a week and a half, is covered.
I did it at four in the morning because I could not sleep and I had a roll of masking tape.
Every layout I have going. The distillery identity.
The community kitchen work. Colour studies.
Two full alphabets I drew by hand in an evening because it was that or lie in the dark.
It’s a mess. It’s the least symmetrical thing I have ever put on a wall in my life.
And in among all of it, because I did not sort them out and I was not expecting anybody, there are about nine drawings of him.
He doesn’t say anything for a long moment.
“That’s my kitchen,” he says at last.
“It is.”
“That’s Bowie on my bookshelf.”
“He was up there for two hours. I had time.”
He moves closer to the wall. He puts one hand out and doesn’t quite touch the paper, the way people do in galleries, and I have to physically stop myself from telling him it’s all rough.
“This is from the fire escape,” he says.
“Yes.”
“You weren’t drawing anything on the fire escape. I’d have noticed.”
“I drew it afterwards. I do that.” My face is extremely hot. “I draw things afterwards.”
“How long,” he says. Not accusing. Just asking.
“A while.”
“Mandy.”
“Years, Sterling.” My voice comes out steadier than I have any right to expect. “Years.”
He turns around and looks at me, and there is something happening in his face that I have only seen once before, in a shower, with the water running black off his shoulders.
And I know exactly what is about to happen. He is going to say it. He came here to say it, he has been carrying that notebook up three flights to say it, and if I let him say it right now then everything I do for the rest of my life is going to be the thing that came after.
“Wait,” I say.
He stops.
“There’s a thing I have to tell you first, and I need to say it before you say whatever you came here to say, and I need you to just let me do it in one go, because if you interrupt me I’ll lose my nerve and start apologising.”
“Okay.”
“Sit down. You’re too tall for this.”
He sits down on a box.
“I took the New York job,” I say.
His face does not change, which is how I know it has hit him somewhere, because Sterling’s face not changing is a load-bearing activity.
“Okay,” he says, very evenly.
“On Tuesday afternoon. At two o’clock. At my own kitchen table.
” I make myself keep going. “I got on a call with their creative director and I told her I wasn’t going to relocate.
I told her I’d come on as a consultant instead of staff, that I’d keep my own studio here and my own clients, and that I’d fly out four times a year for anything that genuinely needed a room. ”
He is very still.
“And she said no?” he says carefully.
“She said yes.” And then, because I still can’t quite say it without my voice doing something ridiculous, “She said yes and then she went into a room at four o’clock and came back with a fit-out budget and a twelve-month underwrite on a storefront lease, and now I have to find somewhere with a window I can put my name on. ”
Silence.
“So I’m staying,” I say. “In Chicago. In this city. I signed on Tuesday and it was done before you knocked on that door, and I need you to understand that part, Sterling, because it matters more than everything else I’m about to say.
I didn’t stay for you. I want to be extremely clear about it.
I did not turn down a job for a man. I went and got a version of my life that I actually want, and I did it on my own, at my own table, on a Tuesday, with a cat asleep on the other chair. ”
He hasn’t moved.
“I did it before I came to you,” I say, “so that when I did come to you, you would never once in forty years be able to sit across a kitchen from me and do the arithmetic.”
And Sterling Hayes puts his face in his hands.
It takes me a second to understand what is happening, because he doesn’t make any noise. He is just sitting on a cardboard box in my half-unpacked living room with his elbows on his knees and his hands over his face, and his shoulders are going.
“Oh,” I say. “Oh, no. Okay.”
“Give me a minute.”
“Take a minute.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re clearly not fine.”
“I’m having a great time.” His voice comes out wrecked. “This is the best morning of my life and I would like a minute.”
So I stand in my own living room in pyjamas with woodland creatures on them and let a firefighter cry into his hands, and I do not touch him, because I have learned in the last three days that there is a kind of dignity you take away from a person by rushing over.
After a while he wipes his face with the heel of his hand, exactly the way his sister does, and looks up.
“Who told you,” he says.
“Told me what?”
“About the arithmetic.” He is watching me very carefully. “Somebody told you. That’s not a thing you’d have known to protect me from.”
“Your sister,” I say. “On Michigan Avenue. At about one in the morning while your hotel was on fire.”
“Of course she did.”
“She’s very frightening.”
“She’s the most frightening person I have ever met and she is five foot four.” He lets out a long breath and scrubs his face again. “What else did she tell you?”
“About Priya.”
“Ah.”
“The introducing thing. This is Sterling, he’s a firefighter.”
He nods slowly. He looks at the floor between his boots for a second.
“Yeah,” he says.
“Sterling.” I sit down on the box opposite him, which puts our knees about four inches apart.
“I’m not going to do that. Not because I’ve made a decision not to.
Because it would never occur to me. You are not a job that I’m dating.
You’re the person who taped a list of rules to a fridge for me.
You are the reason I know what a Halligan bar is, which has come up exactly twice and I was insufferable both times. ”
He makes a sound that is half a laugh.
“And I need to say the other part,” I tell him, “because I have been saying everything except the other part for about three weeks.”
“Mandy,”
“No, I’m doing it. I’ve had four days and a burning hotel and a conversation with your sister to work up to this and if I don’t say it now I’ll be putting it off at Christmas.
” I take a breath that goes all the way to the floor.
“I’m in love with you. Not since the loft.
Not since the arrangement. Since a long time before that, and I have been drawing your hands in the margins of other people’s logos for years and telling myself it was a habit. ”
The rain has stopped outside. I hadn’t noticed it stop.
Sterling reaches over and picks the blue notebook up off the floor where he set it, and he turns it over in his hands like he’s forgotten what it’s for.
“Can I say the thing now,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Because I’ve had six years and a notebook and a two-thousand-mile flight from a medical student, and I have been standing in your hallway for four minutes, and I still don’t have a single word of it ready.”
“Sterling.”
“Yeah?”
“Just say it badly,” I tell him. “I don’t need it to be good. I’ve had the good version. The good version was fake.”