2. Imogen
— ? —
Imogen
In reality, I married a stranger.
I’ve always known this, in the abstract way you know a fact about yourself that never comes up.
Hendrix lived a whole life before me, and I lived one before him, and we walked into this marriage as two people carrying separate histories we never fully unpacked for each other.
I knew there were years I wasn’t part of. I made my peace with the gaps.
A man like him, quiet, watchful, and half-disappeared into his own head, was always going to keep rooms in himself I’d never be handed a key to, and I told myself that was fine, that was the mature thing, that was what it meant to marry someone whole instead of someone you’d built from scratch.
But in all that knowing, in all those years of accepting the parts of him I’d never see, it never once crossed my mind that one of those rooms had a woman in it.
The manuscript is still open on my phone.
I’ve read enough of it now to feel sick, and not enough to stop.
The sun came up somewhere in the last hour but I didn’t notice. The tea I made at some point has gone cold beside me on the counter, and I am still sitting on this kitchen stool in yesterday’s clothes reading a love story my husband wrote about somebody who isn’t me.
So I do the thing you’re never supposed to do.
I read the comments.
The internet has already decided what this is, and the internet is having the time of its life.
I scroll, and I can’t stop scrolling, thumb dragging the whole ugly parade up the screen while some detached part of me watches myself do it and files it under things I’ll regret.
The book is trending under a title I’ve never heard him say out loud.
There are threads and there are threads about the threads.
@lantern_and_ash: nobody writes 300 pages about a woman he’s over.
@softsadgirl22: the ARRANGED MARRIAGE explains why he’s not over his ex@notyourbeta_reader: ok but who IS she?
?? someone said film student… WE NEED NAMES@firstedition: been waiting THREE YEARS for a new Carver book omgg@margimoths: the wife is probably lovely but let’s be honest she was always the rebound
Rebound. That one lands somewhere under my ribs and stays.
I read it three more times, because apparently I’m a masochist as I think: is that what I am?
The rebound. A placeholder, a second option, the soft place a man lands when the great love is finished with him.
Just his consolation prize wearing a wedding ring.
Feeling worse, I put the phone face down on the marble. It buzzes against the stone anyway, relentless, a whole world of strangers passing my marriage hand to hand for sport, and I press my palm flat over it as if that could hold any of it still.
Here is the thought I’ve been keeping just out of frame all morning, and now it walks right up and sits down across from me.
Hendrix never wanted this.
Not the way you’re supposed to want a marriage.
I’ve known that since the beginning, if I’m honest, known it and dressed it up in kinder words.
He married me because his dying mother asked him to, and I said yes because I was young and stupid enough to think a thing that starts as an obligation can be watered into a real marriage.
But maybe it never became real for him.
Maybe all this time, all three years, he’s just been tolerating it. Being decent about it. Managing me the way he manages everything, with good intentions and impeccable manners all while having a heart that was always somewhere else.
The thing is, I made my peace with that too. I did. Because he was never cruel to me, never cold on purpose, never anything I could point at and name as a wound.
He just wasn’t fully there and so I told myself that a marriage where both people are quietly content, where nobody’s hurting and the days pass gently, is more than a lot of people get. I told myself we were both okay with it. That we’d arrived at the same easy truce.
That was the thing I had. That was the small, warm, unglamorous thing I was holding onto with both hands. Not passion, not the great love in that book, just the belief that we were, the two of us, content in the same quiet way.
Yet now I can’t even hold onto that.
Because content men don’t reminisce three hundred pages about the absence of someone.
Content men don’t get a whole internet convinced they’re still in love.
And the question rises up in me slowly and terribly, the one I would give almost anything not to ask, the one that changes the shape of every good morning we ever had…
What if he still loves her?
“Ma’am?”
I come back to the kitchen all at once.
One of the housekeepers is standing in the doorway with an expression of a person who has said my name more than once. I have no idea how long she’s been there.
“Sorry.” I sit up straight, arrange my face into the expression of a person who runs a household. “Yes. What is it?”
“The gardeners are asking about the roses along the east wall. Whether to cut them back now or wait until after they bloom.” She hesitates. “You usually like to decide.”
I do. It’s one of the few things in this enormous house that’s actually mine to decide, and on any other morning I’d walk out and look at them and have an opinion.
Roses. Of course it’s the roses.
“Let them bloom,” I hear myself say. “Cut them after. Not before.”
“Of course, ma’am.” She lingers half a second, and I can see her deciding not to ask if I’m all right, which I’m grateful for, because I don’t have a lie polished enough for that yet. Then she’s gone, and the house folds its silence back over me.
I get up even as I don’t know why.
Then I move through rooms because sitting still had started to pull me under, and I end up doing the thing you do in a house this size when you’re unhappy, which is to drift through it and let it remind you exactly how small you’ve become inside it.
It’s a beautiful house, everyone says so.
Ceilings you could lose a whole self in, windows that pour light across floors I don’t clean, a staircase built for an entrance I’ve never once had a reason to make. And I have shrunk, over three years, to fit the corners of it.
The reading chair by the good window. My side of a bed too big for the closeness we don’t have. A single stool at a kitchen island meant for a family. I live in the margins of a place designed for a life that never quite got lived in it.
I stop in the front hall without meaning to, because that’s where the portrait hangs.
It’s enormous just as everything here is. The two of us in wedding clothes, my hand on his arm, with an imitation of the look of two people in love for the cameras. I look at it the way you’d look at a photograph of two strangers who happen to have your faces.
God, we were beautiful and I believed it.
I walked into this knowing it wasn’t love, knowing it was a merger with a nice dress, and somewhere in three years of his quiet, his kindness, and the rare mornings when he looked at me as if I were the only sentence worth writing, I forgot the terms of the deal.
Without knowing it, I gave him my heart. I never decided to.
Nobody handed it back for a signature. I just looked up one day and it was his, fully and without a receipt, and he never even knew, because I never told him, because you don’t tell a man who’s tolerating you that you’ve gone and fallen the whole way in.
My phone buzzes in my hand. Fortunately, it’s not the internet this time but a familiar name.
Trisha: saw the news. don’t you dare sit in that mausoleum alone spiraling. Trisha: lunch. today. i’m not asking.
I stand there in front of the giant lie of our wedding portrait, and I feel the first genuine thing I’ve felt all morning, which is the pull of somebody who knew me before I became the restful one.
So I type back before I can talk myself out of it.
Give me an hour.
Because I cannot stay here. I cannot spend one more minute alone in this house with my own worst question, pacing the rooms I’ve shrunk myself to fit, waiting on a man who isn’t coming home to answer for a woman I didn’t know existed.
If I stay, I’ll drown in it.
I might as well go somewhere I can breathe.
***
Trisha picks a bright, loud place with terrible acoustics and excellent bread. The second I see her waving at me from a corner table, a knot in my chest unclenches for the first time all day.
“You look terrible,” she says warmly, standing to hug me. “I mean that with love. Sit. I already ordered you the thing you like.”
“I don’t have a thing I like here. I’ve never been here.”
“You have a thing you like everywhere. It’s whatever has the most cheese.
” She drops back into her chair, all easy energy, and I remember with a small ache that this is what it’s like to be around a person who isn’t managing me.
“Okay. We can talk about it or we can absolutely not talk about it. Dealer’s choice. I’m equipped for both.”
“Not yet.” I sit. “Tell me about you first. Please. Tell me anything that isn’t my life.”
So she does.
She tells me about the studio, and her whole face changes when she does it, lit from the inside the way it always was.
A new cohort of little ones who can barely find fifth position.
A spring showcase she’s choreographing. A leak in the studio roof that they fixed with a bucket and stubbornness for a whole season before anyone would fund a real repair.
“And we finally got the good barres installed,” she says. “The sprung floor, the whole thing. You’d lose your mind. It’s the studio we used to dream about when we were fifteen and dancing on concrete.”
“That’s incredible, Trish. Really.”
And I mean it. I do.
But there’s a thing that happens in my chest while she talks, a small green twist I’m not proud of, because she gets to have this.