4. Imogen #2
Enormous and dim and silent, every light off because there was no one here to leave one on.
I let myself in and I stand in the front hall for a second, keys in my hand, and the wedding portrait watches me from the wall, the two of us imitating happiness in our beautiful clothes, and I have the sudden urge to turn it to face the plaster.
I don’t. I put my keys in the bowl. I take off the shoes that hurt.
And I do the thing I told myself all week I wouldn’t do, the thing I swore I’d leave alone.
I turn on the television.
It’s already everywhere, so I don’t have to search.
My husband’s face is on the screen before I’ve even finished sitting down, and my chest does a slow, sick roll, because there he is, my husband, calm and handsome and composed under the studio lights, doing the one thing he reliably does for everyone but me.
He shows up.
“…yes, I’m writing the next book,” he’s saying, and the host nods along, warm and predatory. “I’m just finding the right inspiration. But it’s coming. I’m working on it.”
“Speaking of inspiration,” the host says, and even I can feel the pivot coming, the smooth cruelty of it, “the whole world has been reading a rather different book of yours this week. One you maybe didn’t intend to share just yet.”
A shadow crosses his face, there and gone, and he recovers into that measured calm. “It’s an old manuscript. A relationship from when I was in college.”
“So a first love?”
“You could call it that.” He almost smiles. “You know, I think we all have that one relationship in our life.”
The screen moves. It slides seamlessly into the next moment, the host is leaning forward with her chin on her hand and asking the question the whole country tuned in for.
“And how does your wife feel about all this?”
I stop breathing.
He looks at the host, steady, and he says, “I’m sure she understands.”
That’s it. That’s the whole answer.
Four words, delivered with the mild confidence of a man discussing the weather, and then the host is already moving on, already asking about publication dates and market interest, and the screen fills with talk of his career and his sales and the machinery of the book that isn’t about me.
I sit very still on the couch in the green dress, and I feel the strangest thing happen, which is that the sound goes out of the room. Not literally.
The television keeps going, his voice keeps going, but I’ve stopped being able to hear any of it, as if my ears have decided to protect me from the rest.
All I can see is his face on the screen, composed and certain, admitting to the entire watching world that there was a great love before me and dismissing my feelings about it in the same breath he’d use to decline a second coffee.
Never did he once say that the book has nothing to do with our marriage. Unlike what he promised and assured me. Just the confident assumption that I’ll absorb this the way I’ve absorbed everything, quietly, gracefully, without making it a story.
Hendrix stood me up at my mother’s table tonight.
Then I turned on the television and watched him show up, flawless, for the whole world, to tell them I’d understand.
The phone starts before the segment even ends.
It comes alive on the cushion beside me and it does not stop, a rising flood of it, texts and notifications stacking so fast the screen can’t keep up, and I pick it up because I’m a person who cannot not look, and I fall straight down the hole.
The clip is already clipped. Someone’s pulled the ten seconds that matter and set them loose, I’m sure she understands playing on a loop across a million screens, and underneath it the world is having exactly the field day my mother warned me about.
@bananaone “I’m sure she understands” that poor wife@princessjinn ok everyone we must find out who it is@waltonluvr this is a crazy thing to say but now i want a copy of the book@delilaaah the consolation prize wife vs the one that got away???????
At this point, I just feel unbearably, bottomlessly tired.
Because here is what nobody flooding my phone understands.
This isn’t the wound. The book isn’t the wound, the interview isn’t the wound, the beautiful actress with her college photographs isn’t the wound.
Those are just the parts that happened in public. Those are just the loud, bright, humiliating surface of a thing that has been quietly killing me for a year in rooms no camera ever saw.
The wound is the empty chair at dinner tonight.
The wound is every canceled anniversary and every reheated meal and every after the book.
The wound is that I have spent three years shrinking to fit a house, waiting on a man who reserves his showing-up for everyone but me, and telling myself it was enough, that we were content, that this was just what a grown-up marriage felt like.
The interview didn’t break anything.
It just turned on a light in a room I’d been sitting in the dark of for a very long time, and now I can see it, all of it, the whole shabby shape of what I’ve been calling my life.
I set the phone down and I stop reading. I don’t need any more of what strangers think, because I’ve finally arrived, quietly and completely, at what I think.
I sit alone in the dark of the enormous house he built me a place in and never came home to.
There’s no sound but the low hum of the television I’ve muted, no light but the flat glow of it washing over the empty room, over the too-big couch and the art I didn’t choose and the space beside me where a husband is supposed to be and has not been for longer than I let myself count.
This is it. This is the whole picture of my marriage, and it took a national broadcast to make me finally look at it directly.
One woman. One dark house. A phone full of strangers who feel sorrier for me than my own husband apparently does.
And I am done.
The thought arrives without drama, without tears, which is how I know it’s real and not just the hurt talking. I’m not going to scream at him. I’m not going to throw the phone or cry into the green dress or wait up to demand an explanation for the interview.
Because it was never going to be one conversation, one apology, one grand gesture that fixed this. The problem was never a single night.
The problem was a thousand of them, quiet and identical, and I finally understand that waiting for him to notice me is not a plan. It’s just a slower way of disappearing.
I’ve been disappearing for three years.
Now, I’m not going to spend a fourth doing it in a house this big and this empty, for a man who is sure I’ll understand.
I stand up. I turn off the television.
In the dark, in the green dress he loved and never came to see, I go upstairs to find a suitcase.