3. Brooke
— ? —
Brooke
Nobody warns you that you can lose a person one dinner at a time and never once catch them leaving.
It’s been three weeks since the photos went up, and the campaign didn’t so much launch as detonate. Adrian’s schedule filled up so fast I stopped being able to read it.
There are joint appearances now, and interviews, and podcast recordings, and editing sessions that run past midnight because the publisher wants the book perfect and the promo perfect and everything perfect all at once, right now, yesterday.
He comes home smelling like other rooms. He leaves before I finish my coffee. The strange part, the part I keep turning over, is that none of it looks like abandonment from the outside. It looks like success. It looks like the thing we both wanted.
So I can’t even be mad about it in a way that would hold up in court.
Tonight I make dinner because it’s Tuesday and Tuesday used to mean a thing, back when we had things that meant anything, and I set two places at the table out of a habit my hands won’t quit. I light the candles.
I pour two glasses then I sit, and I wait, and at eight-thirty I text him, and at nine he texts back that editing’s running long and to eat without him, and at nine-fifteen I blow out his candle and leave mine burning because a person shouldn’t have to eat alone in the dark on top of everything else.
I don’t cry about it. I want to be clear that I’ve mostly stopped crying about it. Crying feels like a thing you do when you still expect the situation to change, and I’m not sure I do anymore, which is either growth or the opposite of growth, I genuinely can’t tell.
What I do instead is draw.
I get out my sketchbook and I look at the table, really look at it, the way I’d look at a building I was about to put on paper, and I start drawing.
My plate, half-eaten. The two wine glasses, one full and going warm.
The candle burned down to a stub on his side and mine still tall on this side.
And the chair across from me, pushed in, empty.
I draw the empty chair with more care than I’ve drawn anything in weeks, every line of it, the grain of the wood, the exact angle it sits at, and I don’t stop to ask myself why I’m doing it, because I already know, and knowing would make me put the pencil down.
The pencil feels better in my hand than the phone does.
That’s most of what I’ve got these days.
My phone buzzes at ten, and my whole stupid body jumps, because for one second I think it’s him, and it isn’t. It’s Layla.
Layla: just wrapped!! your man was SO professional today, Layla: honestly you’d be proud. Layla: he takes this so seriously it’s actually adorable
I read it twice. I try to feel grateful but it also feels wrong at the exact same time, both feelings landing on top of each other so I can’t tell which one is real.
It’s a nice text. An objectively nice text from a good friend keeping me in the loop, and I should be glad she’s thinking of me, and I am glad, or I’m some feeling that’s wearing glad’s clothes.
: ha, adorable is a stretch. : did he do the thing where he corrects the interviewer’s grammar
Layla: ONLY TWICE. i made him apologize both timesLayla: he mentioned you today btw. twice. he misses you, i can tell. Layla: this schedule is brutal, it won’t be like this forever
The part that gets me every time.
She hands me a piece of him, he mentioned you, he misses you, I can tell, and I take it because I’m hungry, because I’ve been living on scraps of my own husband for three weeks and here’s my best friend passing me a little more under the table.
And I should be able to just have it, just be reassured, just say thanks and go to bed comforted.
But it doesn’t sit right and I can’t tell you why.
It goes down and then it sits in my chest doing nothing good, and the harder I try to name what’s wrong with it the more it slips away from me, until I start to think the problem is me.
That I’ve gotten so lonely I’ve started finding fault with kindness.
That my best friend is doing me a favor and I’m in here being weird about it.
: you’re a good friend. : tell him to come home at some point, I forget what he looks like lol
Layla: LOL i’ll drag him back myself. love you. Layla: it gets better after the launch, promise
Promise. Everybody keeps promising me things get better after the launch. I’ve started to feel like the launch is a door everyone swears leads outside, and I’m the only one who suspects it might just open onto another room.
I put the phone down and go back to my empty chair.
***
Adrian gets home at eleven-forty.
I hear the door, the keys in the bowl, the water running as he washes up, and I’m on the couch with my sketchbook closed on my lap because I’d rather he not see what I’ve been drawing.
He comes in loosening his collar and he looks tired in the good way, the used-up way of a man whose work is going well, and part of me softens just looking at him because I can’t help it, he’s still him, he’s still the one I picked.
“Hey,” he says, and he means it kindly. “You didn’t have to wait up.”
“I wasn’t waiting up. I was sitting on a couch that happens to face the door.”
That gets a tired laugh out of him, and he crosses the room and drops down next to me, close, his arm going along the back of the couch behind my shoulders, and for a minute it’s almost like it used to be.
He smells of coffee and late nights and faintly of a cologne that isn’t his, which is a set thing at events, I know, they all get sprayed by the same people, I’m not going to be insane about it.
“How was it?” I ask.
“Long. Good. Long.” He tips his head back against the couch and closes his eyes. “The book’s better than it was a month ago. I’ll give the campaign that. All this pressure, it’s making the thing meaner.” He catches himself. “Tighter. It’s making it tighter.”
“How diplomatic of you to edit that in real time.”
“I’m a professional.” His eyes are still closed. His hand finds my knee, absent, warm, and I look at it there and I feel the whole lonely three weeks rise up in me at once, and I think, okay.
Okay… He’s home, he’s here. His hand is on my knee. This is the part where I get to have my husband back for a few hours.
So I turn toward him. I lean in, slow, giving him every chance to meet me halfway, and I watch his face, and here’s the thing I’ll never be able to un-see.
For a second, half a second, I catch the want in it. It’s there. He looks at my mouth and I see it, the same pull I feel, still alive under all the exhaustion. He wants to.
And then he turns his head.
Not far, just enough.
My kiss lands on the corner of his jaw, on the edge of his cheek, on nothing, and he gives my knee a little pat, the kind you’d give a dog you’re fond of, and he says, “I’m wiped out, Brooke. I’ve got a car coming at five.”
I pull back.
But I pull back slow, because if I do it fast he’ll know, and I’m not ready for him to know, I’m not ready to hand him the information that his wife just tried to kiss him and got a cheek.
“Sure,” I say. My voice comes out fine. I’m almost proud of how fine it comes out. “Five’s early. You should sleep.”
“You’re the best.” He’s already standing, already halfway to the bedroom, already gone. “Night.”
“Night.”
And I sit there on my couch that faces the door, and I don’t cry, and this time it isn’t strength.
It’s that I’ve gone past the crying part and out the other side into a colder, quieter room, and the thing waiting for me in that room isn’t sadness.
It’s anger. Clean and flat and finally, finally honest.
Because I saw it.
I saw that he wanted to and turned away anyway, and I don’t have a name for a man who chooses to be too tired for you, but I know it isn’t the same as a man who’s actually too tired.
One of those I could forgive. The other one I’m just now learning the shape of, sitting alone on a couch at midnight in a glass box forty floors above a city that doesn’t know or care that my marriage is quietly going out, one unwatched candle at a time.
Anger, it turns out, does not help you sleep.
I lie next to him for an hour and listen to him breathe, even and easy, the sleep of a man with nothing sitting on his chest, and around two in the morning I give up and slide out of bed and go to the one place in this whole glass museum that has ever felt like mine.
The kitchen.
I don’t know when it happened, when the kitchen became my territory, but it did.
Every other room in this penthouse was decorated by a firm before I ever moved in, chosen for a magazine spread nobody ended up shooting, and I move through them like a guest who’s overstayed.
But the kitchen I made mine one loaf at a time.
My flour lives here. My mother’s mixing bowl, the yellow one with the chip, sits on the shelf where I can reach it. This counter has my scratches in it.
When the marriage gets to be too much to hold, my hands still know how to hold a bowl, and I do the only useful thing I know how to do right now, which is bake.
I pull out flour and butter and sugar and I start on bread I don’t need, because the making is the point, not the eating. My hands go through it while my brain finally shuts up for the first time all night. Knead, fold, turn. Knead, fold, turn.
It’s the only meditation I’ve ever been any good at.
I’m elbow-deep in dough when I text Layla, because who else am I going to text at this hour.
: can’t sleep. making bread nobody asked for. : this is my life now, I’m a sad artisanal ghost
She answers in under a minute.
Two in the morning, and she answers in under a minute.
Layla: save me a slice you gorgeous insomniac.Layla: also go to SLEEP you maniac it’s 2 a.m. ?? ??
And I stand there with dough on my hands and my phone lit up on the counter, and it hits me sideways, the thing I’ve been not-noticing for weeks.
My best friend answered me in under a minute.
My husband is asleep thirty feet away and hasn’t answered me in any real way in three weeks.