10. “Penthouse”
“PENTHOUSE”
Ihad Foster handle Marcus Ellery while I drove to pick up Eden from the Carlyle.
I pulled the car to the curb.
She got in.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi. Are you hurt.”
“No. I’m fine. I’m better than fine. I met with Ardent and she tried to blackmail me and I told her that her crimes were about to land her in federal prison and now I’m sitting in your car and I feel like I could do anything.”
I drove downtown.
“You told her about the federal investigation,” I said.
“I implied it. She figured it out. And then when I walked out, Marcus Ellery was photographing me. Your investigator got him. So I assume that’s being handled.”
“It is. Foster is at the Carlyle now. Marcus won’t be a problem.”
The light at 73rd was red.
I sat at the wheel and I did not look at her, because if I looked at her I was going to do something that I did not yet have permission to do, which was put my hand on the side of her face and tell her in a voice I had only used twice in my adult life that I was so grateful she had walked out of that hotel exactly the way she had walked in.
I watched the light instead.
The light went green.
I drove down Fifth Avenue along the park.
The leaves were the color of pumpkin pie.
The horse-drawn carriages were lined up along the curb at 59th.
A woman with a dog. A man with a child on his shoulders.
A jogger going north against the current.
The whole park doing its September-into-October trick of looking like a place you had not been to in twenty years even though you had been to it last week.
Eden was quiet beside me.
She had taken the gray cashmere blazer off her shoulders and folded it across her lap.
She was sitting with her hand resting on the folded fabric like she was holding her mother’s hand for the drive.
I reached over and I put my hand over hers.
She did not say anything.
She turned her palm up and she laced her fingers with mine.
I drove the rest of Fifth Avenue with one hand.
I had pulled the car into my building’s garage at 12:08.
The valet recognized the car and came around to open Eden’s door, and I had never, in fifteen years, brought a woman into this building through this entrance, and the valet’s face did the small thing it did when it noticed something it was paid to never notice.
I tipped him.
He nodded.
He drove the car away.
I got to the penthouse at 12:14 p.m.
It was a Tuesday afternoon in October and my building was full of bankers and lawyers trying to make money before the markets closed. Nobody looked at us as we went through the lobby.
The elevator opened directly into my apartment.
“This is where I’ve been,” I said, letting her in. “When I’m not at the office. When I’m not pretending to be a man who doesn’t want you.”
She looked around.
The apartment was dark wood and leather and floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the East Side. It was a space that said everything about how I’d been living: alone, controlled, meticulous about every detail except the one that mattered.
She took two steps in. She stopped. She looked at the entry hall. She looked at the painting on the entry hall wall — a small Hudson River School landscape my grandfather had bought in 1962 — and she did not say anything about it.
She walked to the living room.
The Steinway was at the south wall. I had inherited it from my mother. I had played it twice in fifteen years. The lid was closed. A folded cashmere throw was draped over the bench because Caleb, when he stayed here, used the bench to put his backpack on.
Eden put her hand on the lid.
She did not lift it.
“You play,” she said.
“Badly. My mother made me take lessons until I was fourteen. I played at her funeral and I have not played since.”
“I’d like to hear you play sometime.”
“You may have to wait a while.”
“I have time.”
She crossed to the windows. The view from this room ran north up Park, and east across the river to Brooklyn and Queens. The October light was the color of weak tea. The roofs of the brownstones along 70-something Street looked, from this height, like the back of a long quiet animal lying down.
She turned away from the window.
“Show me the rest,” she said.
I took her down the hall.
“Caleb’s room.”
The door was closed. It had been closed since Sunday morning when he had driven himself back from the compound. I did not open it. I did not, in front of her, want to open it.
“You don’t have to.”
“I will. Some other time. Not today.”
“Okay.”
I led her to the kitchen. The kitchen was the room of the apartment I used most. Marble counters, a single Eames stool at the island, a small wood cutting board that had been my father’s and that I had been oiling since I was twenty-two.
The wall above the cooktop had three framed black-and-white photographs of Caleb at various ages. Six. Ten. Fourteen.
She looked at the fourteen-year-old picture for a long second.
“He looks like you.”
“He looks like his mother.”
“He looks like both.”
“Yes.”
We came back through to the living room.
I led her past it to the small library off the main hallway.
The books were on three walls, floor to ceiling.
The fourth wall was the window facing south.
The leather chair in the corner was the chair I read in.
The reading lamp on the side table was the lamp that had been on my father’s desk in his office before he died.
Eden walked to the bookshelves.
She trailed her fingers along the spines.
She stopped.
She turned.
“Your books,” she said, walking to the wall of shelves.
There were three walls of them. First editions mostly. The things I’d been buying with the money I made instead of buying happiness.
“Marilynne Robinson is there,” I said. “The copy your mother gave me. I’ve read it seven times. Each time, I understand it differently.”
She found it.
She pulled it from the shelf and opened it carefully.
The spine was broken. The pages were dog-eared. There were notes in my handwriting in the margins.
She looked at me.
“You marked it up.”
“I marked it up. Every time I reread it, I added something new. Your mother gave me this book to teach me about patience. About waiting for something you couldn’t hold yet. Each time I read it again, I understood more about what she was asking me to wait for.”
“She was asking you to wait for me,” Eden said.
“Yes.”
She set the book back on the shelf.
She crossed the room to the window.
She looked out at the city.
“I’m here,” she said. “I’m in your apartment. In your space. And everything feels real in a way it didn’t in the boathouse.”
“That’s because the boathouse was the dream. This is what happens after the dream.”
She turned to face me.
“Show me,” she said. “Show me what happens after the dream.”
I locked the apartment door.
I pulled her toward me.
I kissed her like I had something to prove. Like I had four years of carefully measured distance to make up for in the span of a single afternoon.
She made a sound against my mouth.
She pulled back just far enough to breathe.
“Are we safe here,” she asked.
“Caleb’s with his mother. No one knows you’re here. Everyone who needs to know already knows we’re together.”
“Then I want — “ she said, and she didn’t finish the sentence because I was already lowering her dress from her shoulders and she was already reaching for my jacket.
We made it three steps before she was pressed up against the window. The city three hundred feet below. The glass cold against her back. My hands on her face.
“Yes,” she said before I could ask.
“I need to be sure.”
“I’m sure. I’ve been sure since Tuesday. I’m sure right now. I’m going to be sure Sunday. Ask me every day if you need to, but the answer is always going to be yes, Atlas.”
I carried her to my bedroom.
I laid her down on the high bed that faced the windows.
The afternoon light was coming through and it was catching her hair and making her skin look like something I’d been waiting to see for four years.
I undressed her with deliberate slowness.
Each piece of clothing. Each revelation. The small freckle on her left hip. The scar from when she fell off a horse at fourteen. The particular sensitivity of the inside of her wrist.
I was mapping her like a man who understood that he’d never get this specific moment again. This afternoon. This light. This particular configuration of her being in my apartment and trusting me with her entire self.
“Are you okay,” I asked.
“I’m more than okay. I’m — “ she couldn’t finish because I was kissing her again and her hands were on my chest and moving lower and I understood that she was done with me being careful.
I shed my clothes quickly.
I settled myself above her.
“Look at me,” I said.
She opened her eyes.
“Are you absolutely sure.”
“I’ve never been sure about anything in my entire life until Tuesday morning when you texted those two words. Now I’m sure about everything.”
I pushed into her.
She made a small sound.
She wrapped her legs around me and held on.
I moved slowly at first. Methodically. Making sure she was with me the whole way. Making sure this was pleasure and not just friction. Making sure that when she looked back on this moment, it was the moment she understood that loving someone wasn’t supposed to hurt.
She said my name.
She said it again.
She was close and I could feel it, could feel the way her body was tightening around me and the way her breathing had shifted into something urgent.
I brought her there.
I held her while she came. I held her face between my hands and I did not let her look away. I watched her eyes go soft. I watched her mouth open. I watched the small line between her brows go deep and then smooth.
I followed her.
I followed her with her name in my mouth and my forehead against hers and the afternoon light moving very slowly across the white duvet beneath us.
After.
I rolled onto my back.
She rolled with me. She landed against my chest with one of her bare feet hooked over my ankle the way she had hooked it in the boathouse on Friday night.