5. Hendrix
— ? —
Hendrix
The tie comes off the second I’m in the back of the car, and I sit there in the dark with it wound around my fist and let myself feel a thing close to relief.
I did it. I sat under those lights with a woman whose entire job is turning people inside out, and I held my ground, and I said the true things. The interview lasted longer than I thought it would but at least, it’s clear now.
So the relief is real, and underneath it there’s the low hum of a feeling I can only call bafflement, because I still don’t understand why any of this is a story at all.
My phone lights up in the cupholder. Shane, of course, riding the high.
“There he is.” His voice is bright, victorious. “That was exceptional, Hendrix. Genuinely. Calm, warm, in control, the whole room ate out of your hand. This is going to bury itself by the weekend, trust me. You did everything right.”
“Yes, but I thought I told you,” I say, and I keep my voice level, “no mention of the leaked book. That was the one condition. The approved questions were supposed to stay on the new work.”
There’s a beat. A small hitch. “You know I can’t control what a host asks live, Hendrix. These people go off-script, it’s what they’re paid to do. I got you the platform. What happens in the chair is between you and the chair. The show will show what they want to.”
I press two fingers against my temple.
“Well, I have no choice now. It’s done. Honestly, it’s probably better this way. At least now I’ve said my piece about it on the record, in my own words, instead of letting the internet keep writing my life for me.”
“Right…” Shane says. “Right, exactly.”
Then there’s a silence, just a beat too long, the kind I’ve learned to notice in a man who talks for a living.
“So. Listen. On the book itself… The publisher’s been calling. There’s real appetite here, real numbers, and they think, and I agree with them, that the smart move is to lean into the moment. Publish it properly. Ride the wave instead of fighting it.”
“No.”
“Hendrix…”
“No, Shane. I’m not publishing it.” I watch the city slide past the window, all glass and light.
“It leaked. That’s done, I can’t unring it.
But I’m not going to walk into a store and put my name on a book I already know is a lie just because a lie happens to be selling.
There’s no reason to. It’s out there. Let the pirated version be the whole of it. ”
Another pause. A weight in it I don’t have the energy to read tonight.
“Okay,” he says finally, smooth again. “Okay, that’s your call. We’ll talk about it when the dust settles, maybe you can reconsider. Get some rest, you earned it.”
“We’ll talk,” I agree, and I hang up, and I lean my head back against the seat, and for a few blessed minutes I let myself believe the worst of it is behind me.
Then I have the driver stop before we reach the house.
It’s an impulse, which is not a word anyone would use to describe me, but I saw the shop lit up on the corner and I thought of her and I couldn’t not.
I go in and I buy the pink roses, a ridiculous armful of them, because pink roses have meant one thing between us since the night I first handed her a crushed one in a study and couldn’t say why.
She’ll know. She always knows. She keeps her own counsel about a lot of things, my wife, but she has never once pretended not to understand what the roses mean.
I stand there on the sidewalk holding them in the cold, and I make myself a promise.
I’ve cleared the next few days. I told Shane I’m unreachable and for once I mean it. And I’m going to walk into that house, and I’m not going to talk about the book, because the book was never the real problem and we both know it.
This time, I’m going to sit down next to her, and I’m going to apologize for being absent.
I’m going to tell her I’ve been afraid.
That’s the part I’ve never managed. I’m going to tell her that somewhere in three years I fell the whole way into this marriage I was supposed to be tolerating, and it terrified me.
And then I’m going to tell her about our anniversary. I already called Musso’s this afternoon, between takes, and asked for the corner table, the one under the mirror where this whole impossible thing between us started to feel real.
Just us.
At least that’s the plan. That’s the whole entire plan, roses and all, and I hold it in my chest the way I should have been holding the manuscript I’ve failed to write for a year, the one story I actually know by heart.
I get back in the car. I tell the driver to take me home.
As we pull up the long drive, I see the lights already on in the house at this strange gray hour.
I know at once, the moment I step inside, that a wrongness waits.
It’s the lights, first.
Lights on all through the house at an hour when she should be asleep, the kitchen and the hall and the stairs all lit, the whole place awake and humming with a wrongness I can’t name yet.
I stand in the doorway with the roses in my arms and I call her name, and there’s no answer, only a sound from upstairs, a drawer, the particular slide and thud of a drawer being emptied.
Then I see the suitcase in the hall.
It’s standing by the foot of the stairs, upright, packed, zipped.
The roses feel suddenly absurd in my arms.
I climb the stairs slowly, and the wrongness gets louder with every step, and I stop in the doorway of our bedroom and I see the second thing, the thing that empties all the air out of me before I’ve even found her.
Her jewelry box is open on the dresser, and it’s half gone.
I know that box. I know every piece in it because I put half of them there. And I can see, even from the doorway, the shape of what she’s taken and what she’s left.
She’s taken the things that were hers before me.
The pearl studs from her grandmother, the thin gold chain she wore in every photograph from before we married, the little thing she danced in. What she’s left, arranged almost neatly in the velvet, everything I ever gave her.
The diamonds from our first anniversary.
The bracelet I had made for her, the one with the inscription she pretended not to cry over.
The necklace from last Christmas, still in its place.
She’s separated her life from mine down to the level of what hangs from her ears, and she’s given me back every single thing I ever put on her.
“Imogen.” Her name comes out of me cracked.
I find her in the closet.
She’s dressed, fully dressed, in her own clothes, just her own jeans and her own coat, an outfit assembled by a woman who is going somewhere and not coming back tonight.
She’s folding a blouse into a second bag with a terrible, smooth calm, and she doesn’t look up when I come in, and that’s how I know this isn’t a fight.
Fights are loud. This is quiet, and quiet is so much worse.
“What are you doing?” I ask. “Imogen… What is this? What’s happening?”
She doesn’t answer. She folds the blouse and sets it in the bag. Then she reaches for the next thing, and I can’t stand it, the calm of her hands, so I set the roses down on the dresser and I cross the room and I take her gently by the arm, just to stop her, just to make her look at me.
“Please,” I say. “Talk to me. Whatever this is, just talk to me.”
She goes still under my hand as she looks up, and her eyes are dry and tired and rimmed red, a woman who did all her crying hours ago and has come out the other side of it into a stillness I’ve never seen on her face before, and it terrifies me more than any tears could.
“I watched the interview, Hendrix.”
“Okay.” My mind scrambles. “Okay, then you heard me, you heard what I said about…”
“I watched you go on national television,” she says, quiet and even, “and proudly confirm to the entire world that the book is about your ex. And then I watched the host ask how your wife felt, and I watched you say you were sure I’d understand.
Dismissively. Like I was an afterthought.
Without one other word about me. While I sat here alone, in this house, after you stood me up at my mother’s table, watching you sound like a man explaining away his rebound. ”
Each sentence lands as its own separate blow, and the worst part is I don’t understand it, the shape of it doesn’t match what I know I said.
“That’s not… Imogen, that’s not how it went. The question came up unprompted, I didn’t plan for it, but I answered it. I talked about you…”
“Stop.” Her voice doesn’t rise. It just cuts, clean. “Just stop, Hendrix.”
My words catch in my throat.
“You let me down so much last night,” she says. “You’ve been letting me down for so long. And I’m tired.”
She sets the blouse down. She’s not packing anymore. She’s just looking at me, and it’s the most fully she’s looked at me in a year, and I would give anything for it to be under any other circumstances.
“Do you hear how much it sounds like an excuse now? The publisher forced you. The question was unprompted. The book means nothing. Do you hear it? Because I’ve heard so many of them, Hendrix, so many good reasons over so many nights, that your words don’t have any weight left. They just make sounds now.”
“Imogen…”
“This was never only about the book.”
She keeps going, level, relentless, kind in the terrible way of someone who has stopped being angry.
“It’s not the interview. It’s not even the humiliation of being the punchline of every headline in the country tonight, though God, that’s a lot to carry.
It’s all of it. It’s everything I’ve been swallowing for a year while I told myself I was fine.
And the fact that you walked in here with flowers and still have no idea what you actually did just proves it.
You don’t see me. You never learned how. ”
And then she says the thing that will live in me for the rest of my life.
“You dismissed my feelings. I feel like everything matters more than what I feel. Your passion, your past, your career, everything else but me…”
The room tilts. I open my mouth.
“That’s not true. Never has that been true.
I didn’t know you feel this way. I never intended you to feel this way…
Please believe me.” I keep my voice and composure steady.
“Believe me, Imogen. I’m sorry and I’ll do whatever you need me to do to believe my words, just let me understand… I promise you I will…”
“There you go again.” She almost smiles, and it breaks my heart in half. “A promise. Do you know how many of your promises I’m standing in right now?”
She shakes her head slowly.
“I can’t keep believing you with just your empty words anymore. I’ve run out. You didn’t notice what I’ve been feeling even before this and you weren’t present long enough for us to talk.”
“I don’t…”
“No. You don’t get it. I have spent three years waiting for you like a fool.” Her voice finally catches, just once, and she steadies it. “Always alone. Always in some enormous empty room, waiting for a man who was always somewhere else. That is not a marriage.”
I reach for her hand. It’s instinct, it’s three years of instinct, my hand going to hers the way it has a thousand times, in cars and crowds and the dark.
But she steps back. Out of reach.
Imogen takes one small, deliberate step backward so that my hand closes on nothing, and in three years of marriage she has never once done that, never once pulled away from my hand, and the small cruelty of that empty air where her fingers should be undoes a load-bearing thing in me.
“I’m filing for divorce,” she says.
The words don’t fit inside the room.
They’re too big. I stand there with my hand still half-extended toward the place she used to be, and I can’t feel my own face.
“Imogen. Please… Please don’t. Please, we can…”
“This was my last straw.” She picks up the second bag. She’s steady now, steadier than I’ve ever been in my life. “I’ve stayed long enough. I think I’ve stayed years too long, honestly, and I only just figured out that staying isn’t the same as being loved.”
She stops in front of me, close enough to touch, and she doesn’t touch me.
“Goodbye, Hendrix.”
Imogen walks out. Past the roses I set on the dresser, down the stairs, past the finished suitcase in the hall, and I don’t move, I can’t move, I stand frozen in the closet doorway listening to her cross the house one last time.
The front door opens.
It closes, quiet, no slam, because slamming would mean there was still a thing worth the noise.
Then the lock turns from the outside.
She has a key. She’s locking the door behind her out of habit, out of three years of muscle memory, taking care of a house that stopped being hers the second she decided to leave it.
And then there’s nothing.
No footsteps, no car yet, just the enormous ringing silence of a house that has all its lights on and no one left in it but me, standing in the wreckage of a plan I made two hours and a whole lifetime ago, holding an armful of pink roses that finally, catastrophically, mean nothing at all.