4. Imogen
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Imogen
For a few days, I let myself believe him.
That’s the embarrassing part, the part I’ll have to answer for later when I’m being honest with myself.
He came home that morning and swore the book was nothing, old, from before me, and he made me coffee and looked at me across the island with those tired dark eyes, and I decided to believe him.
I held onto his word the way you hold a railing on a staircase you don’t trust.
Both hands. Careful weight.
And for about a day and a half, it even seemed to be working.
Then the old gravity took hold again, the way it always does.
The book that was nothing still needed managing, apparently, because he was back at the studio by the second night, and back to texting instead of talking by the third, and back to the side of the bed that stays cold because he never makes it into it.
The reassurance started wearing off the moment it left his mouth, and I stood in the kitchen on the fourth morning drinking tea alone and understood that nothing had changed. He’d said the words that made the conversation end. That was all the words had ever been for.
I know this pattern. I could set a watch by it. He surfaces, he’s warm, he says the right thing, and I let the warmth talk me out of what I already know, and then he sinks again and I’m left standing on a staircase gripping a railing that was never actually attached to the wall.
But today he has to show up.
Today isn’t about us.
Today is dinner with my family, which he promised, weeks ago, in front of me, and a promise with witnesses is a different animal than a promise whispered over cold eggs.
So I’m choosing to believe him one more time.
Hendrix is actually home this morning, which I take, foolishly, as a sign.
He’s at the counter in yesterday’s shirt, scrolling through a feed on his phone with a crease between his brows, and I’m halfway through asking whether he wants eggs when his phone rings, and I watch it happen.
I watch his whole body register the name on the screen before he even answers, that small tightening, the way a man braces for a wave he’s decided he can’t turn his back on.
Shane. I know it’s Shane before he says a word. I’ve learned the specific frequency of that ring the way you learn the sound of the one stair that creaks.
“I have to take this,” he says, already stepping away, already gone.
I don’t hear the whole call. I hear enough.
I hear his tone shift into the clipped, competent register he keeps for work, and I hear the word “today” and the word “reschedule” and the word “fine,” and by the time he comes back into the kitchen his jaw is set and his keys are already in his hand and I know, I know before he opens his mouth, exactly what he’s about to say.
“There’s a work thing,” he says. “It got moved up. I have to go handle it.”
“The dinner is tonight.”
“I know. I’ll make the dinner. This is a morning thing, I’ll be done with hours to spare.”
He crosses to me, and he takes my face in his hand for one second, and God help me it still works, three years in it still works, the warmth of his palm short-circuiting the part of my brain that knows better.
“I promise. Seven o’clock. I’ll be there. Look at me. I’ll be there.”
I look at him. I want so badly for him to be telling the truth that it aches, a physical thing behind my ribs, and I hate how much I want it, hate that I’ve been reduced to a woman who wants nothing more complicated than her husband walking through a door when he said he would.
In reality, I could say no. I could tell him that if he walks out that door I already know how tonight ends.
But I’ve said versions of that before and it never changes anything, and I’m so tired of being the one who names the disappointment out loud before it’s even arrived.
“Okay,” I say. “Seven.”
“Seven.” He kisses my forehead, quick, and then he’s moving toward the door, and over his shoulder, warm and certain and already halfway gone, “I’ll be there. Wear the green one, I love the green one.”
The door closes as the house folds its silence back over me, and I stand alone in the kitchen holding the promise in both hands and already feeling how little it weighs.
***
I wear the green one.
But I don’t examine why. I stand in front of the mirror in the dress he said he loved and I put in the earrings my grandmother left me and I tell myself it’s because it’s a nice dress and not because some small pathetic corner of me thinks that if I look enough like the woman he married, he’ll remember to come home to her.
My phone buzzes on the vanity while I’m fixing the second earring.
Hendrix: Running a little behind but on my way soon. Hendrix: Save me a seat.
My eyes read it twice. On my way soon is not the same as on my way, and I know the difference, I’ve been fluent in the difference for a year, but I put the phone down and I finish my makeup and I decide to give him the benefit of a doubt he has done nothing to earn, because the alternative is walking into my mother’s house already defeated.
I drive to the dinner alone. I tell the valet my husband will be arriving separately.
I say it lightly, breezily, like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and I watch the young man’s face perform the polite nothing that people perform when they’ve read the news and are pretending they haven’t.
Everyone’s read the news. That’s the thing I’m walking into.
My whole family, and their staff, and the entire glittering world we move through, has spent the week reading about my husband’s great lost love and deciding what it means about me.
My mother’s house has never once made me feel welcome, and tonight is no exception.
It’s beautiful the way a museum is beautiful, all cold surfaces and things you’re not supposed to touch, and my mother is at the head of the table when I come in, straight-backed and perfect, her rings catching the light as she lifts her wine.
“Imogen.” She says it flat and cool, the particular way she says my name when she’s displeased, which is most of the time. “You’re alone.”
“He’s coming. He got held up with work, he’s on his way.” The lie slides out smooth and practiced, and I take my seat, and I feel the whole table recalibrate around the empty chair beside me.
“Work.” My mother says the word the way she’d say a stain. “Of course. On the one evening the family is together, with everything that’s happening. The optics of it.”
“Mother.”
“I’m simply observing, Imogen, that your husband has managed to be photographed at his studio every day this week, but cannot manage a single dinner with the family he married into.”
She takes a sip of her wine, unhurried, letting it land. “People are talking. You understand that. I’ve had three calls this week alone from women who could barely disguise their delight, all of them so terribly concerned for me.”
“I’m sure they were devastated on your behalf.”
“Don’t be flippant. This is precisely the sort of thing that gets worse if you let it look like what it is.
” Her eyes move over me, over the empty chair, over the whole picture I make.
“A book is a scandal. A wife dining alone while her husband hides is a story. You would do well to know the difference and manage which one you’re giving them. ”
And there it is. Not are you all right. Not this must be so hard.
Just manage it, Imogen, keep the surface smooth, don’t let the family become a thing people whisper about at their own tables.
My father, at the far end, says nothing, which is his entire contribution to most evenings, a man who has perfected the art of being present without ever being counted.
My phone buzzes in my clutch. I don’t look at it right away. I already know.
I make it through the soup course fielding my mother’s precise little cuts, and I make excuses for him, I actually hear myself doing it, “he’s just so busy with the new book,” “you know how he gets when he’s working,” and each excuse comes out thinner than the last, threadbare, until I can hear exactly how they sound to the people at this table: the practiced lines of a woman who has said them too many times, to too many rooms.
Between the soup and the next course, I check the phone under the table.
Hendrix: Running later than I thought. Hendrix: I’ll still try to catch up but start without me.
Then, twenty minutes later:
Hendrix: I’m so sorry. I can’t make it. It’s a disaster here. Hendrix: I’ll explain everything, I promise. Hendrix: Tell your mother I’m sorry. I will make it up to you.
I read it twice, sitting there in the green dress he loves, in my mother’s cold beautiful dining room, with an empty chair beside me that everyone at the table has been staring at all night.
The thing I feel isn’t even anger.
It’s a quieter thing, and much worse. It’s recognition. It’s the specific, bone-deep tiredness of a person watching a thing she predicted come true exactly on schedule.
“He’s not coming, is he?” My mother asks, although not sounding like a question.
I set the phone face down on the tablecloth. I pick my fork back up.
“No,” I say. “He’s not.”
I don’t stay for dessert.
I make it through the main course on sheer spite, answering my mother’s precision strikes with a calm I don’t feel, and then I set my napkin beside my plate and tell her I have a headache, which is the one excuse in our family that gets accepted without interrogation because it’s the excuse she uses herself.
She lets me go with a look that says we’ll discuss this properly later, and my father half-rises from his chair the way he does, a gesture toward caring that never quite becomes the thing itself, and I drive home through the dark alone in the green dress nobody came to see.
The house is waiting for me the way it always is now.