Twenty-Seven
ONE MORNING AFTER THE NEW Year, Felix is strange with me in the kitchen.
He apologizes when I’m in his way at the refrigerator, shuts the bathroom door when he shaves.
I go to work and listen as Sally tells me about her husband’s worrisome drinking, and offer advice to Ivy about asking for the raise she deserves.
I take a banana and a muffin for lunch, walk laps through the plant, go into the printing room just for the ink scent and its different sounds.
The stamp, the whirl. Anything to block the feeling that I’ve let Felix down, that he knows I’m keeping something from him, that he’s unhappy and it’s my fault.
“Men can be moody,” Elise says over drinks after work that Thursday. “Have you asked him about it?”
“Yes. He acted surprised, overly cheerful, said nothing at all was the matter.”
“What happened next?”
“He went out. Stayed out late.”
“Maybe it’s a lover’s quarrel.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
And then it’s the weekend, and he’s on the train again, and I tell myself that whatever this is will fade over the time he’s gone.
The first night he’s back, I cook dinner for the family and we eat on the patio and he’s sweet and helpful but his mind is somewhere else.
After the children are asleep, I find him staring at me when I’m standing at the kitchen sink. I turn off the water.
“Felix,” I say. “What is it?”
He looks pale, unsteady. “I’ve been telling myself that you might know already, perhaps you’ve suspected…”
My heart is racing. “Felix,” I say. “Tell me.”
He closes his eyes, says in the faintest voice, “I have to go.”
“Go where?” I don’t understand. He’s almost always gone.
“Back to New Orleans,” he says. “To stay.”
I stare at him. I can’t move, can’t summon a word to say next. I’m floating above us in the kitchen. Is this you? I want to ask.
“I’m so sorry. You invited me into a beautiful life. I thought I could bend myself into it. You gave me all the freedom I asked for, and so much joy and friendship. But I’m just not built for this. I need to return to myself.”
“But aren’t you yourself here?” I ask. “With us?”
He lowers into a chair. Crosses one leg over the other, rests his hands on his knee. “For a time, yes. I thought it’s what I wanted. It is what I wanted, for a time.”
“Is there something I can do?” Panic sets in, throat constricting, each word a strain. “I haven’t been entirely open with you. There are things that I’ve withheld. Maybe you’re angry with me? Maybe if I could tell you—”
“No. Odette, no. You’ve done nothing wrong. This is entirely my doing. My own shortsightedness. A humiliating lack of insight to myself.”
Cramp under my ribs, tightening, churning.
Maybe I’m in love with him. How else could it hurt this much?
I careen into his lap. Almost kiss his mouth—impetuous, foolish—he doesn’t love me, not in that way.
He holds me and rubs my back. His touch as familiar as a lover’s.
Not a lover, though. I close my eyes, rest my head on his shoulder.
Beeswax and pine. The quick beat of his pulse.
I whisper, “Please tell me what you need. I’ll do anything. ”
He’s quiet for a long time. “Darling,” he says, voice low against my ear. “I just can’t keep it up.”
He tells me that with my paycheck and our savings, I shouldn’t have any trouble keeping the house.
The car has been mine from the beginning and the adoption is long complete.
Nothing will change with Nathalie. “Father Michael’s going to give us an annulment,” he says.
“He’ll bring the paperwork to the house. ”
“But what about the children?”
“I’ll visit, if you let me. And when they go to New Orleans in the summers, I hope they’ll spare a day or two for me.
” He says that leaving me, and leaving them, will be the biggest failure of his life.
He wants to slip away. For me to tell them after he’s gone.
He says he isn’t feeling brave enough, and maybe it would be better, don’t I think? To not have him there for the news.
I stumble through the next two days, seized by a feeling I can’t place but that unnerves me in its familiarity, until I remember the days between the New Year’s party and marrying Cyril.
The sense of something set in motion that I don’t fully understand, something I didn’t ask for, something that’s wrong in a way that grabs me by the throat and won’t let go.
So many chances to say no back then but nothing to be done now.
I spend a day crying, my eyes swelling until I can barely see.
He holds my hands and he tries to soothe me but he’s resolute.
Unmovable. I can’t force him to stay. Father Michael comes and I use a rare sick day so that we have the house to ourselves.
I hate it, hearing Felix let him through the gate, watching him walk down the garden steps in his black robes.
He greets me and we sit at the small kitchen table and he tells me that Felix has confessed his sins, and that they are grave, and that I deserve a marriage that’s blessed by God with a husband capable of such a union.
I look at Felix. Neat mustache, wide cheekbones, kindness in his eyes.
He could have told the Father anything, but he told him the truth.
I have a condition. To my surprise, I find myself smiling, and Felix smiles back at me, and it’s reverent, this moment between us, until Father Michael taps on the tabletop to get my attention.
He lectures on the sacrament of marriage and the process of the tribunal and how they reached the decision that a nullity of marriage will be granted.
He tells me that I’ll be free in the eyes of God to find a husband with whom to enter a true and honest union, and I want to scream into his face, and then I think, You’re only a man, and it gives me the composure to make it through.
The night before Felix goes back on the train, we have dinner as we always do, and he reads the children a story before bed, and he hugs them and tells them he’ll miss them, and once they’re asleep he packs his clothes and his few belongings into boxes.
I realize for the first time how little he’s kept here, how faintly he’s left any mark.
I’ve picked out all the art and the photographs on the wall.
All the books and most of the records, the glassware and the furniture.
Like he always knew he’d be leaving, like it was only a matter of time.
In the morning, we wait together outside the gate, my stomach heavy with dread, so many things I could tell him or ask but I can’t say any of them. And then his taxi’s arrived, and he hugs me on the street before shutting himself in.
I can’t focus in the booth. A record ends and I haven’t even heard it.
I start it over. Pull the curtain shut so no one will see me.
Just before lunch, I go up to Al’s office and have him call Bernard in.
When it’s the three of us with the door closed, I say, “Felix left me. Will you tell my sisters? I just don’t know how many times I’ll be able to say it.
” I stare out the window as I tell them so I don’t have to see their faces.
Al picks up his phone. “Ruby, please bring three lunch trays up to my office. Three coffees, one with cream. Whatever looks good today.”
We eat in silence. Every so often, Bernard sets his hand on my knee.
After work, I sit down with the children on the living room floor where they’re playing Jacks, and I take their hands in mine. “I have bad news,” I say, “but we’re going to be all right.”
Clément rushes off to his room. Nathalie says, “He’s barely around anyway, so what’s the difference?” She clenches her jaw, brushes tears away roughly.
“He promises that he’ll visit and write, and you can see him during the summers when you go to New Orleans.”
She shakes her head. “He isn’t coming back,” she says. And I think of Bill, how completely he left her, and Felix’s disdain for him, and surely, surely, Felix will do better. Still, I don’t make her any promises. We both know too much for that.
At night I wander the house, seeing him on the sofa with the newspaper.
Through the window as he strides down the steps.
By the fire, light across his form. I know how to be a woman at home alone with her children.
I do it for weeks at a time. And yet I’m suddenly small and young and afraid.
My heart pounds fast and hard as I pull the covers over my body and his bed lies empty under the window.
Will stay empty now. No more comfort of knowing he’ll be home in a couple weeks.
No more sound of his breathing a few feet away in the dark.
Or his slippers by the bed. Or his robe hanging on the door.
On Saturday, they come over—Lionel and Al and Bernard, Adele and Claire, with all the children in tow.
Claire cooks at my stove, enough meals to last us the week.
I’m still in shock, still floating over everything.
I don’t know what to do with the sorrow in their faces, the way they hush and move as though someone’s died.
It feels wrong to accept it, when we weren’t exactly husband and wife, at least not in the way they understood it.
What were we?
The question rattles around in my brain, unearthing every joyous memory and every mundane one.
The times we were together and the times I was lonely, when I felt that he was happy and when I felt that he was restless, when I was satisfied and when I wasn’t.
That night when he brought Ginny here by mistake.
His emotion when he hugged me in the quiet house while his lover prepared for bed.
We needed more of that. I could have given him more of that.
He could have given it to me, too, had I let him.
But I didn’t let him. Too late now. My fault.