3. Hendrix #3
“Shane.” My voice comes out wrong. “How much of it is out there?”
“All of it.” He says this as if it’s good news. “Every chapter. People are dissecting it and…”
The dread settles into me slowly.
Fuck. She’s going to read it.
My wife won’t know the truth behind it through the text alone. She’ll only know her husband published a love letter to the woman who came before her, and that I did it while I was already too far away to reach.
Imogen is at home. Alone.
And foolish as I am, I didn’t know until now, and she probably has been sitting in that house all night while I have been in here, unreachable, buried in cold coffee and crumpled paper.
I’m on my feet before Shane finishes his sentence.
“Where are you going?” he asks. “Hendrix. We need to talk about the interview, we need a plan, you can’t just…”
“I have to go home.”
“It’s the middle of the night. There’s nothing you can do at three a.m. that we can’t do better with a strategy in the morning…”
“I have to go home, Shane.” I’m already grabbing my keys. “My wife is in that house by herself and she’s probably already seen it, and I let her find out alone. I’m not going to also make her wait until morning.”
He says more after that, a stream about optics and timing and letting him get ahead of it but I don’t hear any of it because the door is already closing behind me.
***
By the time I get home the sky is going gray at the edges, and she’s already up.
Imogen is in the kitchen, dressed, making coffee, and the sight of her stops me in the doorway, because I don’t know what I’m walking into.
She turns, and her face is carefully composed in a way that tells me she’s been awake for a while, and neither of us says anything for a moment.
“You’ve seen the book,” I say.
“I’ve seen it.” She pours a second cup and slides it across the island to me, black, one sugar, the way she’s made it a thousand mornings, and the ordinary kindness of it nearly takes my legs out. “Everyone’s seen it, Hendrix.”
“I only found out an hour ago. I swear to you… I was writing, my phone was off, Shane came to tell me in person because he couldn’t reach me.
The second I knew, I came home…” I wrap my hands around the cup.
“I should have known sooner. I should have been reachable. I’m sorry you were alone with it. ”
She studies me over the rim of her own cup, and I can’t read her, which frightens me, because I used to be able to read her in an instant and somewhere in the last year I lost the fluency.
“So what is it,” she says quietly. “The book?”
“It’s old. That’s the first thing you have to understand.
It’s from before you, a relationship in college, brief, not serious.
It ended and I wrote a book to get it out of my system and then I put it in a drawer and forgot it existed…
” I lean toward her across the island. “It means nothing. It meant nothing then. I don’t know how it got out or who put it out, but I’m going to find out, and I’m going to handle it but I need you to know there is nothing in it for you to worry about. Nothing.”
She holds my eyes for a long moment. Then her shoulders lower, just slightly, and she looks away nodding.
I feel a relief so large I almost miss the fact that nothing has actually been solved, that she’s chosen to believe me the way you choose to stop pressing on a bruise, not because it stopped hurting but because you’re tired of your own wincing.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay… I’ll take your word for it.”
“Thank you.”
“Sure. I’ll let you handle it. But for now, there’s the dinner this week. With my family.” She says it to the counter, not to me. “I told my father you’d come.”
“I’ll be there.” I say it fast, because I want it to be true, because I want to be a man whose promises land where he throws them. “I’ll be there. I promise.”
She nods again. Then she gestures at the plate she’s set out for me, eggs going cold, and says,
“Eat. You look terrible,” which is the second time tonight I’ve been told that, and the only time it’s felt like tenderness.
So I eat, and she moves around the kitchen in the gray light, and I watch her with a cup of coffee she made me without being asked, and I think about the stone I’ve been carrying, the truth about the recital and the rose and my mother’s last gift.
Soon, I think.
Our anniversary is almost here. I’ll tell her then.
I’ll find the words I’ve never been able to find, the ones about the theater and the numbness and the wanting, and she’ll finally understand that she was never the obligation. She was the rescue.
Underneath that, so quiet I almost don’t let myself hear it, the fear that’s lived in me since the beginning. That the marriage was an arrangement to her and always has been.
That I’ll finally say all of it, lay the whole of my heart on the table between us, and she’ll look at me with kind eyes and gentle regret, and I’ll learn that whatever she might once have felt for a frozen man who couldn’t speak, she has long since stopped.
I finish the eggs as I look forward to it.
Maybe we can finally meet in between.
Before it’s too late.