9. Imogen
— ? —
Imogen
Days pass, and I continue my new life.
I call Trisha first, because Trisha doesn’t do preamble.
“I need to have lunch,” I tell her. “Real lunch. The kind where I eat actual food and drink too much wine and talk about anything on this earth that isn’t my husband or my divorce or a single manuscript written by any person at any point in human history. Can you make that happen for me?”
“I can make that happen in forty-five minutes. I’m calling Candace. We’re getting a booth somewhere loud, you’re wearing the earrings I bought you for your birthday, and you’re going to be aggressively normal with us for three hours whether you like it or not.”
“I love you, have I told you that?”
“Duh. Obviously. Forty-five minutes. Don’t do your sad-girl thing where you almost cancel.”
She hangs up before I can do my sad-girl thing where I almost cancel, and I stand in the middle of my sublet holding the phone and feel the specific relief of being known by people who knew me before.
Because Trisha and Candace are from before.
Before the Carvers, before the marriage, before the name and the mansion and the slow, systematic disappearance of every part of me that used to take up space in a room.
We came up together at the same studio, back when we were girls with bloody feet and enormous plans, spending our weekends stretching and sweating and announcing to the mirror exactly which stages we were going to command.
Candace went into choreography. Trisha stayed close to the studios, teaching, coaching, keeping one foot in the world we all grew up dreaming about.
Meanwhile, I went into a marriage, and let the friendship narrow down to unanswered texts and brunches I canceled because Hendrix was home for once and I didn’t want to waste an hour of him.
They never once made me pay for it. Not a single pointed comment about the calls I stopped returning. They just waited, the way you wait for a person you know got pulled underwater, certain she’d come up eventually if you kept the light on.
Today I’m coming up.
***
The restaurant is loud and warm and exactly right, a cramped little place down Hollywood Boulevard from my block, the kind with tables too close together and a wine list with delusions of grandeur and a room so busy nobody has the attention to spare wondering who I’m married to.
It’s the sort of neighborhood spot this town keeps tucked between the tourist traps and the valet stands, where the people at the next table are arguing about a pilot that didn’t get picked up and nobody, blessedly, cares about anybody but themselves.
Trisha slides into the booth across from me and immediately reaches over to fix my collar, which she has been doing without asking permission since we were girls.
“You look good,” she decides. “Tired, but good. The famous sublet treating you okay?”
“The sublet has a couch that tries to eat you if you sit in the middle cushion. I’ve never loved anything more.”
“That’s a structural hazard, Imo.”
“It’s the finest piece of furniture I have ever personally owned.”
Candace arrives two minutes later, breathless and unrepentant, dropping into the booth beside me and stealing bread from the basket before she’s fully seated.
“Okay. Ground rules.” She holds the bread up for emphasis.
“We are not talking about him. We are not talking about the book. We are not looking at our phones. We are three women in a restaurant, and for the next three hours we are behaving as though the internet was never invented. Everybody agree?”
“Agreed,” I say.
“Agreed,” Trisha says. “Now somebody tell me more about this couch.”
And just that fast, I’m back.
Not fixed. Not healed. Not pretending the last few weeks didn’t crater my entire life. Just back, in my own skin, in my own friendships, in a version of me that doesn’t need a husband or a headline to be a person worth taking up a booth with.
We order too much pasta.
Candace tells us about a commission that went sideways when the lead refused to do any lifts because she’d had a bad experience with a trust fall at a corporate retreat, and had to have the entire second act rechoreographed around the principle of keeping both feet on the floor at all times.
“A trust fall,” Candace repeats, refilling my glass with the focus of a woman on assignment. “She went off a table at an insurance seminar and now she won’t let a trained professional catch her. I built forty minutes of choreography around a woman who is emotionally unable to leave the ground.”
“That’s kind of beautiful, though,” I say. “In a bleak, corporate way.”
“Nothing about insurance is beautiful, Imogen. Do not romanticize my suffering.”
I laugh, the real kind, the kind that comes up from somewhere under my ribs and surprises me with its volume, and Trisha grins at me across the table with a warmth that makes my chest ache in the good way, the way that reminds me I wasn’t always this alone, even when the big house was empty and the internet was cruel and the only voice I heard for days on end was my own.
And it’s Trisha, of course, who slides it in sideways, gentle, when Candace gets up to find the bathroom.
“So.” She turns her wine glass by the stem.
“I heard the old studio’s looking for someone.
Evening classes. The little ones.” She doesn’t look up at me, which is how I know she’s being careful.
“I know you saw the flyer, Imo. Candace’s cousin teaches there, word gets around.
Just, whatever you’re telling yourself about why you can’t, I’d think about calling the number. That’s all. That’s the whole speech.”
My throat does a complicated, tightening thing. “I don’t know if I can walk back into that room.”
“You spent half your childhood in that room. It’s the rest of the city you’ve been struggling to walk through.” She finally looks at me, and there’s no push in it, just the steady faith of a person who knew me before I forgot who I was. “The number’s still up. Think about it.”
Candace comes back before I can answer, and the conversation folds back into pasta and gossip and the loud bright ordinary warmth of it, but the flyer sits in my chest the whole rest of the meal, quiet and patient, waiting.
For an afternoon, I am not the headline.
I’m not the placeholder or the pity case or the arranged wife who got publicly humiliated by a book she didn’t know existed. I am Imogen, in a booth with the two women who knew me when my biggest problem was a blister on my left foot and my biggest dream was a stage with my own name in the program.
And I know exactly what’s being written about me out there, past the windows, in the comment threads and the coy little interviews.
They’ve already cast me.
The tragic ex, the one left behind. The sad, beautiful footnote in somebody else’s love story.
I refuse. Whatever story they think they’re telling, it won’t be the one they get. It won’t be a woman who left and fell apart. It’ll be a woman who left and got better.
Spite is not my finest fuel. But today, with wine on my lips and my friends’ laughter in my ears and a phone number burning quietly in my chest, I’ll take it and be grateful.
The afternoon changes the second we step outside.
One moment I’m on the sidewalk saying goodbye, hugging Trisha, promising Candace I’ll come watch a rehearsal this week, feeling more like a person than I’ve felt in a month. The next moment, the cameras are there.
Not one. A swarm of them, materializing out of parked cars and doorways and the specific nowhere that photographers seem to live in when they aren’t feeding, lenses already up, voices already shouting before I’ve caught up to what’s happening.
“Imogen! Over here! Is it true the divorce is final?”“Did he cheat? Was Bridget the reason?”“How’s it feel being the rebound wife?”“Imogen, was it always about her? Did you know about the book?”
The questions come fast and overlapping, a wall of sound and light and appetite that pins me to the concrete.
Trisha’s hand closes on my arm. Candace steps in front of me and starts telling a very tall man with a very long lens to do an anatomically ambitious thing to himself.
But the lenses reach further than my friends’ arms do, and the shouting keeps coming, and my body does the one thing I have spent weeks training it not to do.
I freeze.
One second. One open, defenseless, caught-in-the-crossfire second where my face falls open and my eyes go wide and every camera in the cluster gets the exact expression it came here to collect.
The wounded wife, the woman who isn’t holding up, the hairline crack running through the granite.
One second. And I know, even while it’s happening, that this is the photo. Not the three hours of laughing with my friends. Not the wine or the pasta or the woman who was, ninety seconds ago, the furthest thing from broken.
This. The instant of shock, the flinch. The exact story they wanted, handed to them free of charge on a sidewalk in good afternoon light.
Trisha is pulling me toward the street and Candace is escalating her vocabulary in ways that would impress a dockworker, and I’m trying to remember how walking works, when a hand lands at the small of my back.
Sure. Familiar. Warm in a way my body recognizes a full second before my brain does.
Hendrix.
He’s beside me before I’ve finished registering that he exists, his body angling between me and the nearest lens, one arm coming around my shoulders to turn me forward. Not rough. Not a performance.
Just the calm, exact physicality of a man who has navigated cameras with his wife a hundred times, whose muscle memory knows precisely how to set his shoulders to kill a shot and precisely how much weight to put at the base of my spine to move me without pushing.
“Walk with me.” His voice is low, close, meant for no one but me. “Don’t look at them. Don’t answer anything. I’ve got you.”
My body obeys him before my brain gets a vote.