2. Imogen #2
She gets to have spent the last however many years walking into a room that smells of rosin, sweat, and possibility while I gave mine up. The worst part is I didn’t even lose it in a fair fight. It was taken from me by people who smiled while they did it and called it my future.
“You should come by,” she says, and there’s a careful thing in her voice now, a door held gently open. “Just to watch. The kids would die. Half of them don’t believe me when I tell them I used to dance next to you.”
“Trisha…”
“I’m serious. You were the one, Imo. You know that.
Every recital, there’d be a line of boys at the stage door and a line of scouts behind them, and you’d walk right past all of them because you only ever cared about the next correction.
” She smiles, but it’s soft, almost sad.
“I still can’t believe you’re not dancing.
I don’t think I’ll ever fully believe it. ”
I look at the bread so I don’t have to look at her. “People change.”
“People get changed,” she says quietly. “That’s a different thing.”
I don’t answer that, because she’s righter than she knows, and I’m not ready to open that particular box in a restaurant with good acoustics for eavesdropping.
Thankfully, she lets it go. She’s always known when to let a thing go, which is one of maybe three people in my life who ever learned that skill.
Until, gently, over the ruins of the bread basket, she gets to it.
“So,” she says. “The book…”
I exhale. It comes out longer and shakier than I want it to. “Yeah.”
“How are you actually doing? Not the version you’d tell your mother. The real one.”
“I don’t know.”
And that’s the truth, the whole ugly truth of it.
“That’s the honest answer, Trish. I’ve been sitting with it since I read it and I genuinely do not know what I’m allowed to feel.
It’s about a woman from before me. It’s old.
He hasn’t even said anything to me about it, not really, and I keep waiting to feel angry and instead I just feel…
” I search for it. “Small. I feel small.”
“Okay, first of all.” She sets down her water.
“You’re allowed to feel however you feel.
You’re his wife. A book about his ex just got dumped in front of the entire world with your marriage attached to it, and everyone with a phone is speculating about whether he still loves her.
That would gut anyone. You don’t need permission to be gutted. ”
“When you say it like that it sounds worse.”
“It is worse. It’s genuinely bad, and you’re allowed to say so.” She leans in. “But, Imo… Can I say the other thing?”
“You’re going to anyway.”
“Well, yes… But you deserve an explanation. A real one. Not a leaked file and a national conversation, an actual conversation, with him, where he looks at you and tells you what this is.” Her eyes are steady on mine. “Have you asked him? Straight out?”
“Not yet.”
“Then ask him. You’ve spent three years not asking that man for things. Ask him for this one.”
The words land somewhere true and tender, and I nod before I’ve decided to. “You’re right. I’ll try. Tonight, if he comes home… I’ll try.”
“Good.”
Trisha reaches across and squeezes my hand once, hard, then releases it and reaches for the dessert menu as if she didn’t just say the most important thing anyone’s said to me in months.
“Now… We are getting a dessert that’s frankly absurd, because you look half-starved, and I refuse to let you love-problem on an empty stomach.”
“Nobody said anything about love.”
“Nobody ever does,” she says lightly, “right up until they do. Eat.”
Later, I don’t leave the mall right away.
I mean to. I’ve said my goodbyes to Trisha, hugged her twice, promised to text her when I got home, and I’m halfway to the parking garage when I pass a bakery window and stop, my feet making the decision without me.
Because there, in the case, is the tiramisu.
It’s stupid. It’s such a stupid, small thing, but Hendrix loves tiramisu with an intensity that’s genuinely out of character for a man so contained about everything else.
He gets quiet and reverent about it. He once drove forty minutes for a specific one and talked about it for a week.
Standing here, looking at it through the glass, I think about him maybe coming home tonight, tired and frayed from whatever fire he’s been putting out, and I think about setting this in front of him, and I think about him looking up at me the old way.
Ask him, Trisha said. Have the conversation.
Maybe it’s easier to have a hard conversation over a thing he loves. Maybe that’s what I’m buying. A softer place to land the question.
“One of the tiramisu,” I tell the girl behind the counter, before I can decide it’s pathetic. “The big one. Yes.”
She boxes it up, and while I wait, my attention drifts to the little television bolted up in the corner above the register, the kind every shop has playing to nobody. Some entertainment program, glossy and bright. A woman being interviewed on a white couch.
“…honestly, I’ve just been focusing on the work,” she’s saying, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear with a practiced kind of shyness. “Dating is hard when your life is this public. People want a story so badly. Sometimes there’s just no story to give them.”
The caption at the bottom of the screen reads her name.
Bridget Walton.
I don’t know it. She’s pretty in the effortless way that reads as expensive, and she laughs at whatever the host says. There’s a poise to her that I recognize because I’ve spent years learning to imitate it, that trained ease of a person who’s comfortable being looked at.