13. Michael
— ? —
Michael
They came in on a day I could not have named, and they did not knock, and Pia had a key because Pia has a key to everything on that property including, I suspect, the church.
“Right,” she said, from the doorway. “Up.”
I did not move.
“Michael.”
“Go away.”
“You’re on the wrong side of that bed.”
I was on the wrong side of that bed. I had been for a while, and I am not going to defend it, and anybody who has done it will understand and nobody else ever will.
Levi came in behind her, looked at the curtains, and opened them with the enthusiasm of a man committing violence.
“Christ.”
“Don’t.”
“No, I’m not being clever. I’m genuinely appalled.” He picked something up off the floor, considered it, and put it down again. “How long have you been in here?”
“What day is it?”
“That’s an answer,” said Pia.
“Is Archie all right?”
“Hmm.”
“Pia. Is he all right?”
“He’s fine. He’s got a stone he’s very attached to.” She kicked something under the bed rather than pick it up. “You don’t get to ask me that from in here. Ask me standing up and I’ll tell you everything I know.”
Get up, I thought. Get up, you’re a grown man and your sister is picking things off your floor.
I did not get up.
Pia sat down on the end of the bed, which she has never once done in her life, and that got me sitting up more than any amount of shouting would have.
“She’s filed,” she said.
“I know.”
“So there’s a clock on it now. There wasn’t before and now there is, and I don’t think you’ve understood that, because you’ve had the curtains shut for days and you’re having quite a nice time about it.”
“There’s nothing I can do about a filing.”
“No.”
“So.”
“So it’s Boston,” Pia said, “not a bedroom.”
“Boston won’t do anything.”
“Probably not.”
“Then what’s the point?”
“There isn’t one,” she said. “That’s not what it’s for. It’s for you to be a man who got in a car instead of a man who stayed in a bed, because at some stage somebody is going to ask you what you did, and one of those is an answer.”
She got up and left.
Levi stood at the window a moment longer.
“She’s been rehearsing that in the kitchen since Tuesday,” he said, and followed her out, which was the kindest thing anybody did for me that week and he will deny it forever.
I flew to Boston without showering.
I have been in a lot of rooms in that city and I have never once gone into one without shaving.
I sat in a waiting area on Franklin Street in yesterday’s shirt with my hair doing whatever it wanted, and a girl at the desk kept looking up at me and then looking down again, like she was trying to place me in a lineup.
Alicia Harvey came out and took me in without hurrying about it.
“Mr. Folger.”
“I’d like a word.”
“You would like an enormous number of things, I expect. Most men who show up unannounced do.”
“A word, and I’ll pay for the hour.”
“You’ll pay for the hour regardless,” she said. “Come in.”
Her office looks at a wall. That is the first thing I noticed and it told me she was expensive, because a woman that good with a window that bad has decided the view is not the product.
She sat. She did not offer me anything.
“You understand I can’t discuss your wife’s instructions.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
“Then what?”
“I want you to slow it down.”
Alicia Harvey took her glasses off, which I would learn is not a good sign.
“Say more.”
“I’m not contesting anything. I’ll sign whatever she wants.
I’m not going to fight her on the boy or on the money, and Ackroyd has already been told, and if you want that in writing you’ll have it before I’m back on the island.
” My hands were doing something on my knees so I stopped them.
“I’m asking for time. Not to argue. To be somebody she’d want to stay married to.
And if she still wants the divorce at the end of it then she has it and I’ll never say another word. ”
She let that sit in the room for a long moment.
“Mr. Folger, do you know what I actually do?”
“You do divorces.”
“I get women out. That’s the job. Most of them arrive very late, and a great many of them arrive because a man like you finally became interesting to them again at exactly the moment they had found the door.
” She put her glasses back on. “And you have flown to my office without washing, to ask me to hold that door shut for a while. You want me to see that you’re suffering. You want me to report back.”
“That’s not-”
“It’s precisely that.”
“That’s not fair.”
“It is not remotely unfair, Mr. Folger. It is simply not flattering, and you have reached an age where you can no longer tell the difference.” She wrote something down.
“I will tell you what I told her, because it’s the same speech for everybody.
I don’t do speed. She sets the pace. If she wants it done by Christmas it’s done by Christmas and I’ll be very good at it, and if she wants it to sit, it sits, and I’ll be very good at that too. ”
“Then she could-”
“She could. Whether she has is not mine to say.”
I sat there with nothing left to say.
“Then let me ask you one thing and I’ll go.”
“Ask.”
“Is she all right?”
Alicia Harvey considered me across her desk for a very long moment, and I have been looked at by professionals my entire career, and that one went straight through the middle of me.
“That,” she said, “is the first thing you’ve asked me that wasn’t about you.”
“Is she?”
“I won’t be telling you that. But I’d like you to notice how long it took you to get to it.”
I sat there.
“Was there anything else?”
“No.”
“Then that’s the fee,” said Alicia Harvey, “and I’ll add a note to the file that you came, because she’d want to know, and because I don’t keep things from her to make a man feel better about himself.”
I got home and made the mistake of sitting down in my mother’s kitchen while Pia was cooking, which is not a thing a man should do if he wants to leave the room with anything.
“Right,” she said, over her shoulder. “You’re going to buy her something.”
“I’m not doing that.”
“You are. Not a house. Something a normal person buys.” She had her back to me and a knife going. “So go on. Flowers.”
“No.”
“Everybody likes flowers.”
“Not those flowers. Not the ones from the place on Main Street, they do everything with a wire in it and she hates a wire. Sweet peas, and only if they’re loose, and not in a wrap.”
The knife stopped, and then started again.
“What’s wrong with a wrap?”
“She thinks they look like an apology.”
“They are an apology.”
“A cheap one.”
“Fine. Dinner somewhere nice.”
“Not somewhere nice. She doesn’t eat when people can see her doing it and she has never once said so out loud. It’d have to be somewhere with a wall on one side and nobody behind her, and the food doesn’t matter, she’ll eat anything if she’s comfortable.”
Levi, from the table, without looking up from his phone: “Take her on the boat.”
“She’s been put on a boat once by me this summer and it ended with her walking up a dock with our son on her hip.”
“A book, then,” said Pia.
“Which book?”
“I don’t know, Michael, a good one-”
“The green one with the dog in it,” I said.
“The dog is a disgrace and she has an entire position on that dog and she has never had anybody to say it to. If you can find a copy of the first printing, the one with the wrong illustration on page four, before they corrected it, that’s the one she’d have grown up with at the library.
Not a new one. She’d know the difference straight away. ”
The knife had stopped again some time ago.
I looked up.
Pia had turned around with the knife still in her hand and Levi had put his phone face down on the table, and neither of them was saying anything at all.
“What?”
Nobody said anything.
“What?”
“Nothing,” said Levi, and got up, and went and stood at the window with his back to the room, which is Levi’s version of having an emotion in public.
“Sweet peas,” he said to the glass, quietly.
“What?”
“Nothing. Carry on.”
Pia put the knife down.
“You didn’t think about one of those,” she said.
“Sorry?”
“We threw four things at you and you answered every one before we’d got to the end of the word. You didn’t think. There’s nothing in your hand, there’s nothing written down, you weren’t ready for this conversation, and it all came straight out.”
“She’s my wife.”
“So where has it been?” She was not shouting.
I would have preferred shouting. “It’s all in there.
It’s been in there the whole time. And she spent years in an apartment wondering whether you’d even noticed what she looks like, and you could have told any one of us the illustration on page fucking four. ”
The room did that thing where a fridge is suddenly very loud.
“I was working,” I said.
“I know you were working. Everybody knows you were working. Working is your last name.” She wiped her hands on a cloth. “Do you want to hear the horrible bit?”
“Not especially.”
“She’d have taken any one of them. Sweet peas, loose, in your hand, on a Tuesday, for no reason.” She threw the cloth into the sink. “That was the price the whole time. And nobody ever told you, because you never once asked anybody what she actually wanted.”
“I’d have known if she-”
“You did know. That’s what this whole conversation has been.” Pia got her bag off the back of the chair. “You knew, and you didn’t do it, and now you can say it all in one breath in a kitchen with a knife in my hand, and it’s too late, and I’ve got to go home.”
And she left, and Levi stayed at the window, and I sat at my mother’s table with everything I have ever known about my wife sitting in my mouth with nowhere to go.