47. Margot
MARGOT
Ifinally got the love story. It needed edits, but then, so does everything worth keeping.
I have written thirty-one novels that end exactly like the day I was about to have, with two people and a promise and a room full of witnesses crying on cue, and I never once believed a word of it.
That is the dirty little engine at the heart of writing romance for a living.
You learn the machine so well that you stop trusting the very feeling it was built to counterfeit.
So there was a specific justice in it, standing in the back of my own bookshop in the last mean week of winter, in a dress I had let Birdie choose, with a person roughly the size of a grapefruit lodged under my ribs and expressing firm opinions about the waistline, about to walk straight into the ending I had sold to strangers a thousand times and trusted for myself not even once.
We did it in the shop, because there was never anywhere else it was going to be.
The block had spent two days turning the place into something that could hold a wedding and, thank every god there is, had failed to make it stop smelling like a shop full of old books.
We stood people between the shelves. We left my grandmother's chair by the register empty, her reading glasses folded on the seat, because a wedding is only a room full of people agreeing to remember their dead and to go ahead and marry anyway.
Outside, the ice was finally letting go of the gutters in long gray ropes, that first ugly thaw that is not quite spring and that nobody but a person who has survived the winter here could ever learn to love.
"Don't cry yet," Birdie warned, holding my face in both hands like a surgeon about to deliver hard news.
"If you cry now, you cry off the entire face I built, and then you go down that aisle looking like a raccoon who got a phone call, and that's the photograph your child inherits.
Is that what you want, to haunt your own kid? "
"You're crying," I said.
"I'm pre-crying. It's a completely different discipline.
I paced myself. I've got a schedule." She did, in fact, have a schedule.
It lived on the spreadsheet, on a tab, and I had learned long ago not to ask to see the tab.
"I get a controlled amount now, and then I'm saving the real event for the vows, and if that man says one sincere thing up there, and he will, because he's physically incapable of a small feeling, I'm going down like a demolition and I've made peace with it. "
"Thank you," I said, and I didn't mean the buttons or the schedule. She knew which thing I meant. She squeezed my hands once, hard, and turned me toward the door before either of us could ruin her work early.
And then I saw him, down the length of the shop, standing in the poetry section, on the same worn boards where I first failed to get a good look at him, and the whole clever machine in my head that knows exactly how this scene is supposed to go just quietly shut itself off.
He was in a dark suit and he was too still, the way he is when a thing matters more than he has words for, and he was watching me cross the room the way he has always watched me, except that now he was doing it in front of everyone, in the light, with his whole ruined careful face wide open, and letting me watch him do it.
That is the entire distance we traveled, the two of us.
He used to see me from the dark. Now he lets me see him seeing me.
It sounds like nothing. It is the whole book.
We did not have a priest. We had Mrs. Okafor, who is licensed to solemnize marriages in this state for reasons she has declined to explain and that the block has collectively agreed never to investigate, and who kept it short, because she is a woman with a deep understanding of when a room is already full.
"These two found each other the hard way," she said.
"I have watched the whole strange business from across the street, and I'm not going to stand here and tell you it was simple, because you were all there, and you would know I was lying.
Say your words to each other. Go on. We didn't close the shop for my opinions. "
He went first. I had told him he had to, because I'm a writer and I know the value of going second, and because I did not trust myself to leave him anything to say if I opened my mouth first.
"I spent thirty years learning to watch people without ever being seen," he said, and his voice did the thing it does, low and level and holding a great weight very still.
"I was the best there was at it. I told myself it was how I kept people alive, and for most of my life that was even the truth.
Then I was sent to watch a woman who sold other people's stories, and on that job I did the one thing I had never done on any other.
I got caught, though not by you. You did not catch me for a year and a half.
" A low laugh moved through the shelves.
"I got caught by myself. I stood in the cold outside your window and I understood that I had stopped guarding you and started simply refusing to look away, because looking at you was the first warm thing that had happened to me in three decades. "
I had promised myself I would not go first, and I had said nothing about not falling apart quietly while he talked, so I did that instead.
"I know how we began," he went on, and he said it to me but he pitched it for the room, because that was the entire point, because we had decided we would not spend one married day pretending it started prettier than it did.
"I will never tell you it was gentle. I watched you before you knew my face, and that was a debt, not a courtship, and I have spent every day since paying it down in the only currency that clears it, which is standing where you can see me.
So here is what I am promising, in front of your grandmother's chair, your neighbors, and a cat who defected to my side months ago.
I will never watch you from the dark again.
I will watch you the way a man watches the one light left burning in a house he is finally allowed to enter.
I will do it out loud, where you can catch me at it.
For the rest of my life, you will never once have to wonder where I am, because I will be exactly where you can find me. "
The room had gone completely quiet, which in that block is roughly a miracle on the order of the loaves and the fishes, and somewhere behind me Birdie's schedule collapsed entirely and ahead of time.
Then it was mine, and I'm a woman who has spent her whole life being good with words, and I nearly couldn't find a single one. So I told the truth, which is what he had just taught me to do standing there in his good suit.
"I've written thirty-one love stories," I said.
"I sold every one of them and believed in not a single one, because I knew the trick of it.
You take two people who cannot possibly work, and then you cheat, quietly, on the last page, and you hand them an ending they did not really earn, and the reader forgives you because everybody wants to be lied to kindly.
I was very good at the lie. I couldn't do it for myself for one minute. "
"And then a man came into my shop and would not let me see his face, and paid in cash, and vanished, and I spent the next year and a half telling myself the feeling on the back of my neck was my imagination.
" I looked right at him. "It wasn't my imagination.
It was you. You knew me before I knew you were alive, and I wanted to hate you for it, and for a while I managed.
Then I found out what you actually do with a life.
You stand in the cold so other people get to stay warm and never know your name. "
"So here is mine, and I get to decide it, which is the whole luxury of my life now.
" My voice was going and I let it. "I am not marrying the safe version of you, the one that would go down easy at a dinner party.
I am marrying the entire unvarnished truth of us, the watching and the choosing and the mess of it, because it is ours, and because you are the only love story I have ever come across that I did not have to cheat to believe.
You did not hand me an ending I had not earned.
You made me earn it, and then you stood in the light and earned it back where I could see you do it.
You asked me here in the open. I'm answering you in it.
I choose you, out loud, with the door unlocked, and no editor alive is ever touching a word of it. "
"Well," said Mrs. Okafor, into the wreckage of a room where every single person was now openly weeping, including two men I happen to know have done genuinely frightening things for a living.
"That'll do it. By the power the state of Illinois has seen fit to give me, and which I still think it should look into, I'm calling this done.
Kiss the woman, Volkov, before your friend in the third row drowns. "
He kissed me among the poetry, and the shop came apart at the seams, and Hemingway, who had spent the ceremony installed on my grandmother's empty chair in a bow tie he had already half destroyed, chose that exact moment to yowl his loud gray opinion into the noise, which everyone agreed afterward was the cat giving me away.
The reception was less a party than a controlled riot with catering.
Mateo had cooked for three times the guest list because in his family you feed a wedding the way you would provision a mild siege, and the block ate and cried and danced between the shelves, and somewhere in the thick of it the toasts began, which is where any hope of dignity went to die.