1. Imogen #2
“If I hand off every single thing,” I say, “the house, the food, the calendar… all of it, then what’s left?
I do a little foundation work here and there, I sign what they put in front of me, I show up and smile at the benefits.
That’s a few hours a month. What am I supposed to do with the rest of them, Hendrix?
Rattle around our house and wait for you to come home? ”
His face shifts, a hairline crack in the dry, and for a second he looks as if he’s going to say the real thing under the question instead of the easy answer.
“I need to do a thing that’s mine,” I finish, quieter. “Even if the thing is buying stupid lemons. Let me have the lemons.”
“You gave up a great deal of things that were yours,” he says. It lands low and even and I feel it in my sternum, because it’s the closest he’s come to naming it out loud in months. “I know that better than anyone.”
I don’t have a joke ready for that one. So I put two pints of ice cream in the cart instead, and I make sure he’s watching when I do it.
“We’re forty minutes from home,” he notes.
“And?”
“And that’s ice cream. It won’t survive the drive.”
“Then it’ll die doing what it loved.” I push the cart toward the register before he can argue, and I hear him exhale behind me, that short almost-laugh he does through his nose when he’s decided to let me win.
We make it through the checkout, where he charms the woman behind the counter so thoroughly she gives us a coupon neither of us asked for, and then we’re back in the car, his stupid beautiful convertible with the top already down, and I’ve barely got the bags wedged into the back seat before he pulls out of the lot and turns.
“That’s the wrong way,” I tell him. “Hardware’s left.”
“Is it?”
“Hendrix. The faucet… There’s still other things on the list.”
“The list and the faucet have waited three weeks. The faucet can wait three more hours.”
He doesn’t slow down. If anything he speeds up, one hand loose on the wheel, the other resting on the gearshift, and there’s a recklessness in the set of his jaw that I recognize from a very long time ago.
From before, from the version of him I fell for at a supper club when we were both pretending the arrangement was a joke.
“I told you I cleared the day. I didn’t clear it for the hardware store.”
“Where are we going?”
“No idea.” He glances over at me, and the sun catches him full in the face, and he looks so ridiculously pleased with himself that I can feel the argument dissolving in my mouth before I’ve finished making it. “Somewhere with a horizon… I’ll know it when I see it.”
He points the car away from the flats and toward the Hills, toward the canyon roads that only ever lead one direction once you commit to them, which is down and west and out to the water.
“You’re abandoning my errands.”
“I’m liberating you from your errands. There’s a difference.”
And here’s the thing about being married to a man who vanishes for weeks at a time.
When he comes back, when he’s really, actually back, the pull of him is a gravity you forgot you were fighting. I could dig in. I could make him turn around, could insist on the faucet and the grim joyless responsibility of being a person.
Or I could tip my head back against the seat and let the wind take my hair as my ridiculous husband drives me toward a horizon he hasn’t picked yet.
In the end, I choose the horizon.
I choose it the way I always choose him, with both eyes open and my better judgment filed carefully away for later.
Then I stick my hand out into the rushing wind and let it ride the current the way I used to when I was small and stupid and hadn’t yet learned that good things have a way of ending exactly when you stop bracing for it.
“You’re smiling,” he says over the wind.
“I’m not.”
“You are. I can see it.”
“Watch the road, mister.”
But he doesn’t, not entirely, and that’s the part that undoes me.
The way his eyes keep cutting from the road to me and back, quick stolen glances, checking that I’m still there, still laughing, still real, as if I’m the more interesting view and the ocean is just a thing to park in front of.
He used to look at me this way. Somewhere in the last year I stopped noticing when he stopped, the way you don’t notice a sound going quiet until it comes back.
The city thins out. The Hills fall away behind us and the road tips down into a canyon, all switchbacks and dry gold hillsides and that warm, restless Hollywood wind pouring through both open windows, carrying eucalyptus and hot asphalt and the faint sea-salt promise of where the road eventually has to end.
He takes the canyon fast and easy and then the canyon spits us out onto the coast highway and there it is on our left, running north toward Malibu, the whole gray-blue Pacific just sitting there being enormous and utterly indifferent to the two of us and our groceries.
Eventually, half by accident, he swings off onto a gravel pull-off where the land just runs out of itself and there’s water.
It’s nothing special. A public pull-off, a gravel shoulder, a scattering of other cars and a dad wrestling a windbreaker onto a furious toddler.
It’s not a private beach or a postcard. Just a stretch of ordinary coast we found because a man who was supposed to be at his desk decided he’d rather be lost with me.
Hendrix kills the engine, and for a second neither of us says anything while the quiet after all that wind rings in my ears.
“Musso and Frank had a horizon,” he says finally, apropos of nothing, looking out at the water. “That corner table at Musso’s. You could see the whole room in that mirror behind the bar.”
“You remember the mirror?”
“I remember most things.” He says it plainly, no performance in it, but he doesn’t look at me when he says the next part, which is how I know it costs him. “You told me you were terrified of the Nutcracker. Engaged to me a whole month and that was the first real thing you’d said.”
“It was a good icebreaker.”
“It was.” A pause, his eyes still on the water. “It was a good night.”
Then he opens his door and gets out, and comes around to my side holding out his hand.
“Walk with me.”
“The whole back seat is turning into a science experiment.”
“The groceries made their choices.” His hand stays there, open, waiting. “Walk with me, Imogen.”
So I put my hand in his, because I have never once been able to not, and he pulls me up out of the car and doesn’t let go.
We pick our way down over the gravel to where the sand starts, and I stop to yank my shoes off because heels and sand have never been friends.
Before I can figure out what to do with them, he holds out his free hand, palm up, and waits until I set them in it.
Then he just keeps them. Hooks both heels over two fingers and goes on walking, my ridiculous shoes swinging at his side as if he’s been carrying my things his whole life, and he doesn’t say a word about it, doesn’t even seem to notice he’s done it.
My heart does a stupid, undignified thing in my chest.
I hate to admit that it gets me. The offhand way he took my shoes so I wouldn’t have to hold them, automatic, as if caring for me is a reflex he forgot he still had. He has no idea he’s doing it. If I pointed it out he’d look at the shoes in his hand as if he wasn’t sure how they got there.
And then we just walk, his fingers laced through mine, the water sliding up and pulling back while the last of the sun goes soft and orange across all of it.
Hendrix doesn’t talk much. He never does.
But his thumb keeps moving over the back of my hand, slow, absent, as if he’s confirming I’m still attached to him, and every so often he glances down at me with an expression I gave up expecting to see this year, and I think, dangerously, that maybe the cold months were just weather.
That maybe we come back around.
That maybe this is us finding the thread again.
“You’re quiet,” he says.
“I’m letting you make it up to me. Don’t rush it.”
“That’s never stopped you before.”
“Watch it, or I’ll leave you out here with the groceries.”
His mouth does the thing that isn’t quite a smile, the private one, and he lifts my hand and presses his lips to my knuckles without breaking stride, and I feel that all the way down to the sand between my toes.
And then his phone goes off in his pocket.
The sound of it lands wrong out here, shrill and modern against all this open quiet, and I feel him go still beside me.
My stomach drops the familiar half-inch it always drops, bracing for the pivot back into the man who lives behind his own face, the one who takes the call, who says give me five minutes and means the rest of the night.
He pulls the phone out, glances at it, and turns it off. Not silences. Off. Holds the button until the screen goes black, and slides it back into his pocket as if it never rang at all.
“You turned it off,” I say.
“I did.”
“You don’t turn off your phone. You sleep with your phone. I have watched you take a call at your own book launch.”
“That was one time, and it was important.”
“It was your mother’s cousin asking about parking.”
“Parking is a genuine crisis at those things. People circle for hours.” He turns to face me fully, and the humor bleeds out of him into the steadier thing underneath. “Besides, today is yours. I said that this morning and I meant it. Whatever that is, it can wait until tomorrow.”
We continue to walk. Longer than we mean to, down to where the sand goes firm and dark at the waterline and back again, my shoes still swinging from his fingers and his other hand warm around mine. Neither of us says much because neither of us needs to.
The sun drops lower. The dad and the furious toddler pack up and leave. By the time we make it back up the gravel to the car, my feet are a lost cause, caked to the ankle, and I drop into the passenger seat and start the grim assessment of how much of this beach I’m about to bring home with me.