Chapter 5 #2
I thought about Cade. I tried not to, but I thought about him.
Not the gala Cade — the lean, tentative man with the water glass and the swallowed words — but the courtship Cade, the one who had texted me about Marilynne Robinson and shown up ten minutes early with a dog-eared copy of Gilead.
That Cade had remembered things too. He’d remembered the coffee from Elliston Place and the green pen and the fifty pages in the manila folder.
He’d remembered the way Cade remembered — broadly, with the blunt force of a man who cared deeply but imprecisely, the way a spotlight lights up a stage without noticing the corners.
Eli remembered the corners. Eli was all corners.
He noticed the half of the scone I preferred and the pears I liked and the way I held my coffee cup with both hands when I was cold and the way my jaw tightened when I was trying not to say something.
He noticed these things and he filed them away and he used them — not as leverage, not as proof of love, but as information.
Data points in the ongoing study of the woman he was going to marry.
The difference between being seen broadly and being seen precisely was the difference between Cade and Eli.
And I had chosen precisely. I had chosen it with my whole body and my whole mind and the specific, deliberate intention of a woman who had been overlooked for three years and would never allow it again.
We walked home. The pears were heavy in their paper bag. The September sun was warm on my shoulders. Brooklyn unspooled around us — families, dogs, a man selling watercolors of the bridge from a folding table on the sidewalk.
At the apartment, Eli unpacked the pears and set them on the counter in a bowl — the blue ceramic one he’d bought at a crafts fair before I moved in, the one Margaret had apparently hated because she thought it was the wrong shade of blue, which Eli found endlessly funny.
“She was very specific about blue,” he’d told me.
“There were acceptable blues and unacceptable blues and the line between them was invisible to everyone but her.”
I loved that he talked about Margaret. Not constantly, not mournfully, but openly — the way you talk about someone who mattered and still matters, whose absence is a fact and not a wound.
He kept one photograph of her on the bookshelf in the living room: Margaret in a garden somewhere, laughing at something outside the frame, her dark hair blowing across her face.
She was beautiful. She was the kind of woman who made rooms warmer just by being in them.
And she was gone, and Eli had mourned her, and then he had continued living — not past her but through the fact of her loss, the way a river continues through a landscape that has changed.
I put the pears in the bowl. I looked at the photograph of Margaret. I looked at Eli, who was sorting his students’ manuscripts into two piles — one for “yes” and one for “try again” — with the focus of a man who believed that this was exactly where he should be on a Saturday afternoon.
That evening we cooked dinner together — pasta, because it was Saturday, and Saturday was pasta, and the consistency of this was one of the things I loved about our life.
Eli chopped garlic with the precision of someone who had read exactly one cookbook and followed it to the letter.
I made the sauce. The kitchen windows fogged from the steam, the way they always did, and through the blur the streetlights of our block looked like watercolors.
We ate at the small table by the window where Eli kept a stack of literary journals he claimed he was going to read and never did, and he told me about a student who had written a story about a man who builds a boat in his backyard and never launches it, and how the student didn’t realize the story was about her father until Eli asked her during office hours, and she cried, and he gave her a tissue and said, “Good. Now write it again knowing that.”
“That’s either brilliant teaching or cruel teaching,” I said.
“It’s honest teaching. The cruel thing would be letting her think the story is about a boat.”
After dinner I sat beside him on the couch while he read and I didn’t read, because I was too busy thinking about what it meant to be loved by a man who didn’t need to perform his love.
Cade’s love had been a spotlight — bright, consuming, aimed directly at the center of the stage, leaving everything in the margins invisible.
Eli’s love was ambient light. It was everywhere.
It didn’t have a source you could point to.
It was just the temperature of the room.
I traced the line of his shoulder through his shirt.
The cotton was soft — a gray Henley, washed so many times it had achieved the particular softness that only comes from years of wear and care.
He didn’t look up from his book, but he shifted closer, the way he always did when I touched him — a small gravitational adjustment, a body responding to another body without the mind needing to be involved.
“Eli.”
“Mm.”
“Do you ever worry that I’m not — that this isn’t—” I stopped. I didn’t know how to finish the sentence. I didn’t know what I was asking.
He looked up. Took off his glasses. Without them his eyes were softer, more exposed, like a room with the curtains pulled back. “That you’re not what?”
“Over it.”
A pause. He put his glasses back on. “I don’t need you to be over it. I need you to be honest about where you are. Those are different things.”
“Where do you think I am?”
“Here,” he said. “On this couch. With me. Reading nothing.”
“I’m not reading nothing. I’m thinking.”
“You’re thinking about whether you’re enough for this, and you are, and you know you are, and you’ll believe it eventually.” He turned a page. “The pears were excellent, by the way.”
“You already ate one?”
“Two.”
I leaned into him. His arm came around me — not pulling, not holding, just there.
Present. The way he was always present. The way he had been present since the day Joss introduced us at a faculty reading fourteen months into my Brooklyn life, and he’d shaken my hand and said, “Joss tells me you write fiction,” and I’d said, “Joss tells me you teach it,” and he’d said, “Then we have something to argue about,” and I’d known — not hoped, not guessed, known — that this was a man who would never check his phone during the most important moment of my life and go back to celebrating.
That was the bar. That was the minimum. And Eli cleared it so effortlessly, so completely, that sometimes I forgot the bar existed at all.
The window darkened. The streetlamp outside came on, casting a yellow parallelogram across the floor.
A siren passed somewhere on Atlantic. A dog barked from the apartment above — the terrier belonging to the couple who argued about dishes and made up loudly enough that I could hear the making up through the ceiling, which I tried very hard not to think about.
Eli read. I sat beside him and the weight of the day settled around me like a blanket — the café, the market, the pears, the pasta, the student who didn’t know her story was about her father.
A Saturday. A whole, complete, ordinary Saturday with a man who loved me in the specific, calibrated way of someone who had already lost the most important person in his life and understood that love is not a thing you can take for granted.
Not even for a day. Not even for an afternoon.
I did not think about Cade Calloway.
I almost believed it.