2. Imogen #3
I watch her for a second longer than I mean to. Not because of anything, just because there’s a woman on a screen talking about a career and a public life and the work she’s focusing on, and I used to have those things.
Or the beginning of them. I used to be somebody people looked at on purpose, in a theater, under lights, and now I’m a woman buying a cake in a mall watching a Hollywood actress I’ve never heard of talk about the life I traded away.
“Ma’am? Your order.”
I take the box and I don’t think about the actress again.
***
The house is dark when I get back, and completely, echoingly empty.
The staff have gone for the day, the way they always do, and there’s no car in the drive but mine. No lights on that I didn’t also leave on as I stand in the doorway for a second, holding a cake in a box and feeling the full weight of the quiet settle over the whole enormous place.
This is the part of the day I’ve never gotten used to. The handoff into the hours where it’s just me and all these rooms.
I put the box on the kitchen island as I take off my shoes. Then I stand there with my hand on the cold marble and I think about what Trisha said. I decide, before the courage can leak back out of me, to call him.
It rings four times. I count them, biting the edge of my thumbnail, a habit I broke in high school and apparently un-broke this morning.
“Hey.” Hendrix sounds distracted, half-there, the particular flatness of a man who answered without fully leaving whatever room he’s in. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah. I just…” I close my eyes. “I wanted to hear your voice. How’s your day?”
“Long. It’s been a long one.” A rustle of papers. “Shane’s got the whole thing on lockdown, we’re getting ahead of it. How was yours?”
“It was fine. I had lunch with Trisha.”
“Good. That’s good. Tell her I said hello.”
A pause, and I can hear him already halfway to hanging up, the goodbye forming.
But I wait. I hold my breath and I wait for him to say the thing, to bring it up himself, to mention the thing about the book so that he can explain and tell me what it actually is.
Because if he cared, if he noticed… he would know.
At least, even just that, he’d know. Right?
I give him the space. I leave the whole silence open for him to walk into.
Yet he doesn’t. He just says, “Listen, I’ve got about six people waiting on me, so…”
My heart sinks.
“Are you coming home tonight?” It comes out before I can dress it up. “I wanted to talk. In person. There’s a lot I want to ask…”
“I can’t tonight.” Fast. Almost reflexive. “I’m sorry. It’s a nightmare here, I might just crash at the studio again. Don’t wait up, okay?”
And there it is. My heart does the slow familiar drop, the elevator-cable feeling I know so well by now I could chart it.
“Okay,” I say.
He must hear the flatness in it, because there’s a beat, and then, gentler, “Was it important? You sound…”
Here’s the moment. Here’s where I could say yes.
‘Yes, it’s important. Yes, I need you to come home. Yes, I have a question, and I’ve been holding it since the first time I read it, and I need you to look me in the eye and answer it…’
But I look around the dark, empty kitchen, at the cake I bought for a man who isn’t coming, and I understand with a terrible, quiet clarity that it doesn’t matter.
That if I have to ask him to notice I’m drowning, then he was never going to be the one to pull me out. That a question you have to beg someone to hear the importance of has already been answered by the begging.
Besides, this is not a thing I wanted to talk to him about over the phone.
I want to fix this and I want him to be fully present for it so that it stops feeling as if I’m the only one constantly trying to salvage this marriage.
The realization tastes bitter on my tongue.
“No,” I end up saying. “It’s nothing. Go. Your six people are waiting.”
“I’ll make it up to you. This weekend. I promise.”
“Sure,” I say again, and I mean nothing by it.
Hendrix doesn’t notice that either, and the line goes dead in my hand.
Next thing I know, I set the phone down on the marble, face up this time, and it doesn’t buzz as the silence rushes in to fill the whole house.
I look at the box on the counter. I don’t know why I bought it.
For a version of tonight that was never going to happen, I guess. For a man I keep setting a place for who keeps not coming home. I pull the stool out and I sit down at the enormous island in the enormous dark kitchen.
One small woman and one small cake. Still, I don’t cry, because I’m too tired to cry. Crying is for people who are still surprised.
I pull the box toward me and open the lid.
It looks perfect. Soft and dusted and exactly the thing he loves. I pick up a fork, because I paid for it and I’m here even when there’s nobody to share it with. It would be a waste so I take a bite of the thing that’s supposed to be sweet.
The cake is sweet, and creamy but it turns to ash in my mouth because the only flavor I can taste is the truth I’ve been swallowing all day… Sitting alone in the dark at the end of my marriage, watching the last small warm thing I had left crumble quietly between my fingers.
Loneliness is pathetic.
I hate it.