13. “Connecticut” #2
He poured me a glass of wine. I commented on the bottle. He said: “Your father gave me this case eight years ago. I have been waiting for someone worth opening it for.”
I looked at him.
“I’m worth opening it for,” I said.
“You’re worth so much more than this,” he said. “You’re worth burning the entire firm down for. You’re worth breaking every rule I’ve ever made for myself. You’re worth becoming a completely different man than I’ve been.”
We ate on the porch as the sun set. The woods around us turning dark and quiet and completely private. No neighbors. No city sounds. Just us and the trees and the understanding that we finally had all the time in the world.
He had made the chicken with lemon and thyme.
The rice was long-grained and crisped at the edges in the bottom of the pan because he had not stirred it since putting it on.
The salad had a single soft poached egg on top and the dressing was thin and clean and tasted like whatever the herbs had been growing next to in the garden.
I asked him where the herbs came from.
“There’s a small farm two miles up the road. They sell out of a cooler on the porch on the honor system. You leave cash in a coffee can. Hawk and I figured out what the can was for the second weekend we worked here.”
I almost laughed.
“You and Hawk left cash in a coffee can on a porch.”
“For three years. The can has a label that says PLEASE. That’s it. PLEASE. The whole thing is run on the principle that nobody is going to steal from a porch in this part of the world. So far nobody has stolen from the porch.”
“I’m going to write a novel about that porch one day.”
“You’re going to edit a hundred novels about that porch one day. You won’t have time to write your own.”
He said it the way he said a lot of things, which was without looking at me. He said it because it was true and he was watching the woods to keep from looking at my face when he said it.
“I built this place for you,” he said after a long silence.
“I didn’t know it at the time. But I did.
I built it so I’d have somewhere private to bring you.
Somewhere far enough from the city that no one would know.
Somewhere quiet enough that I could finally let you hear all the things I’ve been thinking for four years. ”
We cleared the plates.
We did not turn the dishwasher on. We did not even rinse the dishes. We left them in the sink the way two people leave dishes in a sink when they know they have a Saturday morning to get to them.
He poured two glasses of bourbon.
We sat on the leather couch in front of the wood stove.
The stove was new for the season — he had lit it for me. The smell of the fire was the smell that had been sitting in the back of every memory I had of fall in Connecticut for twenty-six years, and tonight it sat in the front.
He put on a record. It was a quiet jazz piano record. Somebody I did not recognize and did not ask about.
We sat without talking for a long time.
He had one arm along the back of the couch. My head was on his shoulder. My feet were tucked under me. His other hand was wrapped around the bourbon glass on his knee.
“Atlas.”
“Eden.”
“Tell me about the year you and Hawk built this.”
He told me.
He told me about driving up here every weekend for five months.
About waking up at six and putting on coffee for himself and Hawk and three other guys Hawk brought with him.
About the day they put the roof on. About the day they tore out the original loft and rebuilt it.
About the night the first wood stove went in and Hawk had cooked them all steaks on it and Atlas had sat on the floor of his unfinished kitchen at one in the morning and understood, for the first time since his marriage had ended, that he was not going to die alone.
“You thought you were going to die alone.”
“For about three years. After Helena. Before this house. Before the boys’ circle settled into what it was. I thought I was going to spend the next forty years in the apartment in the city and then die in the apartment in the city and Caleb would come and have to sort through my books.”
“And then this house.”
“And then this house. And then you. And then Caleb fourteen years old in my kitchen one night telling me, completely seriously, that I needed to start dating again because he could tell I was about to die of being alone. He was using language he had picked up from a girl in his middle-school theater class. The language was *staying alive on principle.* I have not forgotten the phrase.”
I laughed.
It came out small and warm and very close to crying.
He put his hand against my face.
He turned my face toward his.
He kissed me very slowly. He kissed me the way he had kissed me in the boathouse the second night — without urgency.
Without the particular taste of fear that the first night had carried.
Just a kiss. Just two people in a wood-warmed room on a Friday in October, on a couch a man had been sitting on for ten years alone.
After a long minute he pulled back.
He took my bourbon out of my hand.
He set both glasses on the small side table.
He took my hand and led me upstairs.
“I want to show you something,” he said.
He pulled back the covers.
Underneath the sheets were fresh linens. On the nightstand was a book. Marilynne Robinson. The same edition he had at the apartment, but this one was marked up even more extensively. Years of annotations. Years of reading the same book and finding something different each time.
“I come here to read,” he said. “I come here to think about what you mean. What patience means. What it means to wait for something you’re not sure you deserve.”
I picked up the book.
I flipped through the pages and saw his notes in the margins.
Each one a different date. Years of annotations.
The handwriting changed slightly over time—becoming more certain, or maybe just more desperate.
I found a page where he’d written: *Tuesday.
She walked into my office asking for help and I realized I was going to spend the rest of my life wanting to help her. *
“The last note is from Tuesday,” I said.
“The last note is from after you walked into my office. I read the passage about Rebekah and I understood that I’d been reading it wrong.
I wasn’t supposed to understand that I had to wait.
I was supposed to understand that once I stopped waiting, once I let myself have what I wanted, everything would change.
And I wanted that change. I wanted to become the man who could hold you without destroying you. ”
He took the book from my hands.
He set it on the nightstand.