31. “After”
“AFTER”
Two weeks went past.
The press cycle moved off my marriage and onto Senator Ardent’s downfall.
Within five days I had stopped being the most-photographed woman on Park Avenue.
By the second week the story was already settling into the small back-of-the-paper place where political stories went when they were no longer fresh enough for the front.
The journalists who had been camped outside the firm at the start of the week were gone by the end of it.
The journalists who had been camped outside my loft on Hudson Street had not been there in days.
I was not the news anymore.
I was relieved.
I had not understood until that week how much of my body had been rented out to being photographed.
The divorce was final on a Tuesday.
I signed the papers in Atlas’s office on the forty-third floor of Cain Sterling Hayes with my left hand, ringless for the only time in six weeks because I had taken the ring off for the photograph the press kept asking for.
The photograph that would never be released because I was not going to release it.
I signed the papers and I gave the pen back to the notary and I stood up and I put the ring back on my finger.
That was that.
Atlas drove me home.
We did not speak the entire ride. He held my hand on the seat between us. He drove the way he always drove, with both hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road and the small careful attention he brought to driving the same way he brought to everything.
I went to the loft. He went back to the firm.
By Friday the divorce was old news too.
Mrs. Harris called me the day after.
She wanted me at the compound for the weekend. The boys’ poker game was at the compound on Friday night for the first time in three weeks. Atlas was going. Caleb was coming. Aspen and Sloane and Hadley were coming too. The whole circle would be there.
It would not be a Sunday dinner. It would be a Friday game.
I said yes.
I packed my overnight bag at four. The same bag I had been packing since I was eleven. The bag had been my mother’s. It was a small canvas duffle with brown leather handles. I had used it for every weekend at the compound for fifteen years.
I packed for two nights.
I drove up Friday afternoon.
The Merritt was the Merritt. The trees were in the deep middle of October — the orange just beginning to give way to the deeper red the leaves did the second week of the month. The light was thin and gold. The exit at New Canaan had its sign half-hidden under a maple in full color.
I came into the compound at five.
Mrs. Harris was on the porch. She had a small dishtowel over her shoulder. She came down the steps before I had the door of the car open. She took my face in both her hands and held it for a second the way she had been holding it since I was five.
“You look well, baby.”
“I feel well, Mrs. Harris.”
“Good. Get inside. The boys are already in the library. Atlas is at the piano. Hawk is teaching your sister how to mix a drink she does not need to know how to mix.”
The library was the library.
The fire was going. The bourbon was on the sideboard.
Hawk was at the cocktail table with Aspen, and the two of them were not exactly looking at each other, and Aspen was holding the glass he had handed her with the careful neutrality of a woman who had decided that her contractor neighbor was not going to know what she was thinking until she had decided herself.
Hawk was wearing the small pleased look of a man who had recently bought a house next door to a woman and was waiting patiently for her to bring it up.
She was not bringing it up.
I caught her eye across the room. She rolled her eyes.
I bit my lip.
Sterling and Hadley were on the couch.
They were sitting closer than two friends who had grown up at the same compound usually sat.
Hadley was reading something on her phone with her shoulder against Sterling’s shoulder and Sterling was looking at the page over her shoulder, and the two of them looked the way two people look when they are about three months from a thing neither of them is yet calling a thing.
Cole was at the bookshelf.
Cole was always at the bookshelf at our house. The bookshelf was where Cole put himself when he was at the compound and Sloane was in the room. He had been doing it for nine years. He had read more of the books on that bookshelf in the last decade than my father had read in fifty.
Sloane came in with a tray of crackers from the kitchen and Cole’s eyes followed her across the room and then she set the tray down on the cocktail table and Cole went back to the books.
I made a small note.
I had been making a lot of small notes lately.
I had been making them since the gala.
The kitchen smelled like the prime rib Mrs. Harris was prepping for tomorrow. It smelled like the rosemary she put on her potatoes. It smelled like the small permanent smell of furniture polish that the house had smelled like since I was small enough to crawl under the kitchen table.
I dropped my bag at the foot of the stairs.
I went down the hall.
Atlas was at the piano.
He was playing the Chopin he played when he was distracted.
He played it badly. He played it the way Hawk played piano, which was the way of a man who had decided early he was not going to be good and had stopped caring.
He looked up when I came in. He smiled the small private smile he saved for me.
I came around to the bench.
I sat down beside him.
He played the rest of the passage. He stopped. He took my hand.
“You drove well,” he said.
“I always drive well.”
“Caleb drove last weekend.”
“He told me. He gave you a four out of five.”
“He gave me a four because I told him I would buy him a sandwich after.”
“Bribery.”
“Bribery has always worked on Caleb.”
We sat at the bench for a long minute.
The poker started at nine.
The poker is the same poker the boys have been playing in the library at the compound on Friday nights for thirty years.
Knox lost the first hand because Knox always loses the first hand.
Sterling won the second. Cole won the third.
Atlas won the fourth and he won it without effort because he had been winning the fourth hand at the boys’ poker game for years.
I did not stay to watch.
I took my father by the elbow and I walked him into his study at ten.
“Dad.”
“Eden.”
“I want to show you something.”
“All right.”
I took out the envelope I had brought from the loft.
I had carried it in my coat pocket the entire drive up.
I had not opened it. I had not yet shown it to Atlas.
It was the letter my mother had written me my freshman fall at Yale in 2018, three weeks before she died.
The one I had told her about in the letter I had written her two weeks ago and put in the bottom drawer of her desk.
I had brought it to read out loud.
I sat my father down in his chair and I sat across from him and I read the letter out loud.
The letter was three pages.
It was in her handwriting. The dark green ink she always used. The small careful capital E she had used to begin every paragraph.
She had written about love. She had written about choosing.
She had written about the difference between being seen by a man who only saw the version of you he wanted and being seen by a man who saw all of you.
She had written about how rare the second man was.
She had written about how she had married my father at twenty-three and had spent thirty years married to him and had not yet found a single morning where she did not want to go down to the kitchen and make him coffee.
She had written about waiting.
She had written: do not marry the man who looks at you the way men look at women they want.
Marry the man who looks at you the way your father looks at me.
Like I am the one thing in the room he has been looking for.
Like I am the only thing in the room he is going to keep looking at for the rest of his life.
She had written: the man like that already exists in your life, Eden. You will know him when you stop pretending you do not know him. I am not going to write his name. You will see him. You see almost everything.
I read the whole letter to my father in his study with the fire going and the boys playing poker down the hall and the sound of Hawk’s laugh occasionally cutting through the door.
When I finished, I folded the letter back into its envelope.
I held it in my lap.
I looked at my father.
He had his elbow on the arm of the chair and his hand against his mouth and he was looking at me with an expression I had not seen on him in eight years.
“She wrote you that,” he said.
“She wrote me that.”
“In 2018.”
“October fifteenth, 2018.”
“Atlas read his book at Christmas the year before.”
“Yes.”
“She knew.”
“She knew.”
He sat with it.
He did not speak for a long time. The fire popped. Hawk laughed in the library again. A car passed on the road outside the window.
“She gave him Marilynne Robinson because she was asking him to wait for her daughter to grow up,” he said.
He was talking to himself as much as to me.
“He did not know then. He thinks he does now. I think he does too.”
I looked at him.
I did not say what I was about to say. I said something else first.
“She did know, Dad.”
“Yes.”
“She always knew.”
“Yes.”
He stood up. He came around the desk. He kissed the top of my head. He held me against his shoulder for a second. He took the letter from my lap and he put it on the desk under the small brass weight my mother had brought him from a trip to Vermont in 1998.
“I will give it back tomorrow,” he said.
“Keep it as long as you want.”
“Tomorrow. It is yours.”
“All right.”
I sat in his study with him for another twenty minutes.
We did not speak much.
He told me a story about my mother and a Christmas tree and a lobsterman in Camden in 1991 that I had not heard before.
I laughed. He laughed. He poured me a small bourbon I did not drink.
He poured himself a small bourbon he drank slowly.
The fire popped. The boys laughed in the library down the hall.
At eleven thirty I kissed his cheek.
I went up to my old room at midnight.
I left the boys in the library. The poker would go until two.
Atlas would come up at one or two depending on how many hands he was up.
Mrs. Harris had put us in my old room because the compound had not yet redone the room next door for grown couples.
The bed in my old room was a queen with the same quilt my grandmother had made my mother in 1968.
The walls were the pale yellow they had always been.
The window looked out at the lawn and beyond the lawn at the Sound.
I changed into the long t-shirt I slept in. I brushed my teeth at the small sink in the bathroom. I climbed into bed.
I did not sleep.
I lay on my back and I looked at the ceiling and I thought about my mother.
I thought: thank you.
I thought: I wish you could see this.
I thought: you can. You are.
Atlas came up at one twenty.
He shed his clothes the way he always shed his clothes — carefully, methodically, his glasses in their case, his watch face up on the nightstand, his trousers across the chair. He climbed in beside me. He pulled me against his chest.
He smelled like bourbon and cigar smoke. He had not smoked but he had been in the room with men who had.
“You won,” I said.
“I won.”
“How much.”
“Eighty-seven dollars and forty cents from Knox.”
“Knox lost eighty-seven dollars and forty cents.”
“Knox lost eighty-seven dollars and forty cents and he is going to make me buy him an Old Fashioned at the bar at the Pierre next week to win it back.”
“You are going to.”
“I am going to.”
He kissed the top of my head. He fell asleep within the minute. He fell asleep the way he always fell asleep, with his hand at the back of my neck and his breathing slowing into the slow steady rhythm I had gotten used to over the last six weeks.
I lay against him.
I did not sleep for another hour.
I read my mother’s letter in my head, line by line, the way I had read it a hundred times.
I woke at six thirty to him not being in the bed.
He was at the window of my old room.
He had on the trousers from the night before. He was barefoot. He was holding his coffee. He was looking out at the lawn.
The sun was just starting to come up over the Sound.
The water was the smooth gray it did at this hour. The lawn was wet with the first frost. There was a deer at the edge of the trees. Two deer. Three. They were standing very still.
“Eden,” he said. “Come look.”
I got out of bed. I came to the window. I leaned against him. He put his arm around me.
The deer looked up.
They held our eyes for a long second.
They turned. They moved into the trees the way deer move at sunrise — slow, careful, weightless against the ground.
The sun came over the Sound.
We stood there, the two of us, in the window of the room I had grown up in, watching the world start over.
It felt like the first morning of something.
Because it was.