Chapter 16
Sunday comes the way mornings come in Ubud — slowly, greenly, with the canopy filtering the light into something soft and the birds starting before the sun clears the trees.
I lie in bed and listen to the compound family begin their day — the broom on the stone, the clatter of dishes, the low murmur of conversation in Balinese — and I think about pasta.
Specifically, I think about the pasta Silas used to make in the first year.
Aglio e olio. Garlic, olive oil, red pepper flakes, parsley, and the kind of attention to timing that he brought to everything before the company ate his capacity for attention.
He learned it from a YouTube video and practiced it until the garlic was perfect — golden, not brown, because brown garlic is bitter and he said bitterness was a choice you should make on purpose, not by accident.
I thought that was the most romantic thing anyone had ever said about garlic. I still think it might be.
I shower. I dress. I eat rambutan on the balcony and I look at the ravine and I think about what I'm walking toward, which is not reconciliation — not yet, not in any complete sense — but the first unguarded evening with a man I married and left and am choosing to face again with my eyes open and my clean narrative dismantled and nothing between us but the truth, which is messy and mutual and does not fit on a tabloid headline.
I walk to his villa. The lane is quiet — Sunday quiet, the particular stillness of a day that Bali treats with the same reverence it treats everything: deliberately, with flowers and incense and the understanding that some days are for stopping.
Small offerings sit in front of every doorway — woven palm-leaf baskets with flowers and rice and a stick of incense, the daily canang sari, and the smoke from them drifts across the lane in thin lines that smell like clove and frangipani.
The gate is open. The frangipani tree is dropping white flowers onto the stone path.
I walk through the yard and the front door is open too — not all the way, but enough that I can hear music from inside.
Acoustic guitar. Something I don't recognize.
Silas used to play guitar — before the company, before the studio consumed the hours that used to hold music, he'd sit on the couch in our first apartment and play songs he was learning, badly, with the concentration of a man who approached imperfection as a temporary condition.
I knock on the open door. "It's me."
"Kitchen."
I step inside. The small main room is the same — couch, desk, bookshelf — but the desk has been cleared.
The papers are gone, the laptop closed, the coffee cup washed and set on a shelf.
The room has been cleaned with the specific effort of a man who wants a woman to see that he made an effort, without the overcorrection of a man who hired someone to make the effort for him.
The kitchen is small and warm and smells like garlic.
Silas is standing at the stove, barefoot again, wearing a T-shirt and shorts, and he is slicing garlic with a knife that looks like it came with the rental.
His movements are careful — not the efficient chop of the man who used to make this dish three times a week, but the deliberate, relearning motions of someone who hasn't cooked in a long time and is remembering how the knife feels in his hand.
"You're using the wrong knife," I say.
He looks up. The briefest smile — the one that existed before the CEO smile, before the press-conference smile, before any of the smiles that served a function. The first smile. The private one. "It's the only knife."
"Then it's the right knife."
I lean against the doorframe. He goes back to the garlic.
I watch his hands — the same hands I watched on the Siem Reap table, the Ubud café table, the hands that moved when Kowalski's deal excited him and lay flat when he was trying to be still.
Now they are holding a knife and a clove of garlic and they are doing what they were designed to do, which is not build empires or sign contracts or swipe calls to voicemail.
They are making something small and specific and immediate, and the smallness of it is everything.
"Water's almost boiling," he says. "The pasta is — I found pasta at a shop in town. Italian import. Probably overpriced. Definitely overpriced. The garlic is local, though. Balinese garlic. Smaller cloves. More heat."
"You're nervous."
"I'm beyond nervous. I'm in the territory past nervous where the body just does things and the brain watches and hopes for the best."
I walk into the kitchen. It is a small space — two people in it means proximity, means the heat from the stove and the heat from his body and the particular density of air between two people who have been circling each other across four countries and are now standing three feet apart in a rented kitchen in Bali.
"Can I help?" I say.
"You can open the wine. There's a bottle on the counter. I don't know if it's good. The label is in Indonesian and I'm choosing optimism."
I open the wine. I pour two glasses. I hand him one and our fingers touch on the glass — the briefest contact, skin on skin, the first physical touch since before the earthquake that is not a handshake or an accident.
His fingers are warm. The garlic smell is on them.
The contact lasts half a second and lands in my body like a detonation.
He feels it too. I see it in the way his hand tightens on the glass, the slight catch in his breathing, the way his eyes go to mine and hold.
We stand in the kitchen with a glass of wine between us and the garlic browning on the stove and the whole impossible architecture of the last six months hanging in the air like smoke.
"Garlic's going to burn," I say.
"Right." He turns to the stove. I watch him rescue the garlic — just in time, golden not brown, the difference between bitter and not — and I think about all the things that are like garlic. The timing. The attention. The difference between one second too long and exactly right.
He cooks. I sit at the small table in the kitchen — two chairs, wooden, the kind that come with rentals — and I drink wine and I watch him and the watching is different now.
Not the watching of the assessment, not the watching of the investigation, not the watching of a woman who is testing a foundation.
This is the watching of a woman who is choosing to be in a room with a man and letting the room be enough.
He plates the pasta. Two plates, two forks, the wine between us. He sits across from me and the table is small enough that our knees almost touch and the intimacy of the almost-touching is louder than actual contact would be.
"Try it," he says.
I eat. The pasta is good — not perfect, not the version from year one when he'd practiced it until the timing was automatic.
The garlic is slightly more golden than it should be.
The oil is a little heavy. The red pepper flakes are a different variety than the ones we used in LA — hotter, sharper, the Balinese version of a flavor I know by heart.
"It's different," I say.
"Different good or different bad?"
"Different. Just — different. The garlic is the same but the garlic is also not the same.
The recipe is the same but the person making it is not the same.
" I look at him across the table. His blue-gray eyes in the warm kitchen light, the trimmed beard, the T-shirt, the bare feet.
Not the man on the magazine covers. Not the man who built an empire.
The man who made pasta. "That's not a complaint. "
"I know."
We eat. We drink the wine, which is better than the label suggested — something fruity and light, a wine that doesn't take itself seriously, which is perfect for this evening, which is the most serious evening of my life happening inside the least serious setting.
A rented kitchen. A borrowed knife. Indonesian wine.
Two people who used to be married and might be again, eating pasta and not saying the things that don't need to be said because the pasta is saying them.
After dinner, we sit on the small porch behind the villa.
It faces the rice terraces — dark now, the water in the paddies reflecting the stars, and the reflection makes the terraces look like the earth has opened up into sky.
We sit in two wooden chairs and the chairs are close enough that I can feel the heat from his arm without touching it.
"I forgot how much I like cooking for you," he says. His voice is quiet. Not the performance-quiet of the studio. The actual quiet of a man who is saying something true and doesn't need volume to make it land.
"You forgot a lot of things."
"I did."
"So did I."
The admission — mine, not his, the mirror of accountability I set up in his living room when I told him about Gail Hirsch — sits in the warm air between us.
We are both looking at the terraces. We are both holding wine glasses.
We are both sitting in the ruins of a marriage and the beginning of whatever comes next, and the ruins and the beginning occupy the same space, the way they do in every building I've ever assessed: the damage and the possibility, coexisting, one not possible without the other.
"Lucy."
"Yes."
"Can I — " He stops. Starts again. "I want to say something and I don't know how to say it without it sounding like a line, and I promised you no more lines."
"Say it."