Fourteen
DAMIAN
Whitcombe requested a second interview ten days after the coast house, and this time he wanted us together — which we both understood, the moment the invitation arrived, to be an entirely different examination.
“Separately, he audited the records,” Nora said.
“Together, he audits the system. He’s going to watch us be a couple in real time.
You can’t prep this, Damian. The only way to pass is to stop trying. ”
“I’ve never once stopped trying at anything. I don’t have the musculature.”
“I know,” she said, patting my hand with grave condolence. “It’s going to be horrible for you.”
He began with softballs, and then, over the second cup of tea, without any change of register: “Describe a disagreement. A real one — recent, unresolved if possible. I find resolved disputes get curated in the retelling.”
There was a pause of marital telemetry, an entire negotiation conducted in a glance and a half-raised eyebrow, and then Nora said, “The piano.”
“The piano is not a disagreement, it’s a pending acquisition—“
“He wants to buy me a piano,” she told Whitcombe, “because I mentioned — once, in passing — that I took lessons until I was eleven and stopped when the lessons stopped being affordable. And now there is a Steinway dealer who has my husband’s cell number, and I keep killing the purchase order, and he keeps regenerating it like a hydra in a tax bracket. ”
“Because the stated obstacle was affordability, and the obstacle no longer—“
“The obstacle is that I was eleven. I don’t want to play the piano, Damian, I wanted to be a person whose mother didn’t have to cancel things.
You can’t retroactively fund my childhood—“ she stopped, caught, and finished quieter, “—and it’s the nicest wrong thing anyone’s ever tried to do for me. Repeatedly.”
I sat with the thing she’d just said doing its work in me — retroactively fund my childhood, eleven words solving a puzzle I’d been attacking with purchase orders — and did what the clauses now require.
“I withdraw the piano. The eleven-year-old is out of scope; I concede the point; that account isn’t mine to settle.
But the forty-year-old who comes home humming on Thursdays after walking past the conservatory on Sixty-Seventh — that woman is in scope.
So the substitute motion is: lessons. Not a piano.
A teacher, an hour a week, starting from nothing, badly, for the woman who exists now. Yours to decline.”
Nora looked at me a long moment. “See, this is the problem with being married to him,” she said to Whitcombe, slightly unsteady. “You build a perfectly good grievance and he restructures it.”
“Mrs. Durand,” Whitcombe said, making no note at all, “rehearsed couples bring me their resolved disputes, polished like apples. Real ones bring me a live one and then forget I’m in the room.
“ He rose and buttoned his jacket, for the first time in our acquaintance entirely unburdened by his function. “This concludes the joint examination, which you have both, for what it’s worth, comprehensively failed to perform.”
In the car she put her head back and started to laugh — the Queens one, full volume — and laughed until she had to hold my arm, and I sat there being held onto, certified, the most successfully failed examinee in forty years of that office.
Lessons started the following Thursday. She comes home humming.
The building hums back. I have the data; I’m just no longer the only place it’s filed.