15. Hendrix
— ? —
Hendrix
Today is the annual museum benefit.
As a result of not wanting the media to make the issue bigger than it is, our parents advised us to put on an act even just for tonight.
For my part, I have no complaints. She hesitated but eventually caved.
Imogen is wearing black.
Black. A dress I have never seen, cut close and simple and chosen without me, for an evening she didn’t want to attend, on the arm of a man she is in the middle of leaving.
She looks extraordinary. And I hate, with a specific and useless intensity, that I am not allowed to tell her so in any way that would land.
Standing beside her in the museum foyer with my hand at the small of her back, because the cameras expect it and the program has our names printed side by side in gold leaf, I am aware of every inch between my palm and her skin in a way that borders on physical pain.
The dress is backless to just above where my hand rests.
If I moved my thumb an inch, I’d be touching her. I don’t move my thumb an inch. I stand there holding a live wire and pretending it’s a handshake.
“Smile,” she murmurs, without looking at me. “They’re watching.”
“They’re always watching.”
“Then give them what they came for.”
She lifts her chin and turns toward the nearest photographer with the composed, practiced warmth of a woman who has been performing for rooms like this one since long before she took the Carver name.
The flash catches her face.
My hand presses against the fabric at her back, just enough to feel the warmth of her through the silk, and the contact sends a current up my arm that I have absolutely no business feeling at a charity gala.
“You look beautiful,” I tell her, quiet enough that only she hears it.
“Don’t.”
“It’s true.”
“It’s also not useful right now.” She steps forward, just far enough that my hand loses contact with her back, and the absence of her is immediate and total, a warmth removed from my palm that my whole body registers as a loss.
“Let’s just get through it. Two hours. We smile, we circulate, we leave separately. That’s the deal.”
“That’s the deal,” I agree, even though every cell I have is filing an objection.
The benefit is what benefits always are.
Champagne and small talk and the slow shuffle of philanthropy, wealthy people moving through beautiful rooms feeling good about the checks they wrote to get in.
The museum is stunning tonight, the galleries lit in soft blues and warmer golds, the Carver Foundation’s name cut into the program above a list of patrons that reads as a directory of the most carefully maintained appearances money can buy.
It’s the kind of guest list this town assembles in its sleep, studio money and old money and new money all pretending not to notice which is which, a step-and-repeat by the doors and a valet line stretched halfway down the block.
Imogen works the room without me. She moves through the crowd on her own, greeting donors and board members and the museum’s director with a poise of the woman she has always been underneath it.
I watch her from across the gallery, pretending to follow a conversation about endowment yields, and I track the line of her neck and the way her earrings throw light and the small, unconscious roll of her left ankle every time a donor says a thing that lands wrong.
The ballerina’s tell. Still there.
Still mine to read, even though the right to do anything about it expired the night she filed.
Here I am, standing across a crowded gallery watching my own wife charm a room I can’t reach her in. I am looking at a stranger.
A magnificent, familiar stranger.
Three years married and I am realizing, in the flat blue light of a museum I paid to renovate, that I have spent all of them beside a woman I never actually sat down and met.
We were assembled. We were arranged and photographed and installed in a house, and somewhere in the machinery of becoming the Carvers, we skipped the part where two people find out who the other one is.
I memorized her tells, I never learned her.
Throughout, I try to keep my distance. I perform my half of the evening exactly the way she asked, separate and contained, two people sharing a last name and a room and nothing else that anyone can see.
Two hours. That’s all we agreed to give this.
We don’t make it to two hours.
The storm comes in fast.
One minute the sky beyond the museum’s great skylights is clear and dark and politely urban.
The next, a wall of cloud rolls in and the rain hits the glass overhead with the sudden percussive force of a thing that has decided to mean business. Lightning cracks, once, twice, and every light in the gallery stutters.
Guests start pulling out phones. The museum staff moves toward the exits with the smooth efficiency of people who have run this drill. A low murmur travels the crowd, the particular sound of very wealthy people calculating how fast they can reach their cars.
“Ladies and gentlemen.” The director’s voice carries from the main gallery. “Due to the weather advisory, we’re going to begin an orderly exit through the south wing. If you’ll please make your way…”
Lightning again, closer, and the lights surge and drop and come back at half their strength, and then the building makes a sound I have never heard a building make. A deep magnetic thunk that travels up through the floor and into the soles of my shoes.
Every door in the wing seals shut.
Storm protocol. The automated security system, the magnetic locks engaging on a power disruption, each wing sealing itself off independently to protect the collection until the system resets.
I know exactly how it works, because the Carver Foundation funded the installation, which means I am now standing on the wrong side of a lock I personally paid for.
The universe has a sense of humor I would like to file a complaint about.
The main crowd is on the far side of the sealed doors, filtering toward the exits through the south wing. The staff, the donors, the director and all her protocols, every one of them is on the correct side of the lockdown.
And on this side, in the sealed north wing, in the blue after-hours hush of galleries lit only by emergency strips with the rain hammering the skylights overhead, there are exactly two people.
Me. And my wife.
Imogen is standing in front of a painting she isn’t looking at, arms crossed, phone in her hand, the screen throwing pale light up onto a face that has gone very still.
“They’re saying thirty minutes to reset,” she says, without looking up. “Longer if the storm keeps up.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.” She lowers the phone. Takes in the sealed doors at either end of the wing, the rain streaking the skylight glass, the emergency light turning everything the color of deep water. Then she looks at me. “So we’re stuck.”
“We’re stuck.”
“Wonderful.” She sits down on one of the benches set out in front of the paintings for contemplation, crosses one ankle over the other, and fixes me with the resigned composure of a woman who has been handed one more thing she didn’t ask for and intends to survive it out of sheer stubbornness. “Don’t talk to me.”
“Imogen…”
“I mean it. We had a deal. Two hours, separate, no conversations that matter. A storm doesn’t rewrite the terms.”
“The storm locked us in a room with no exit and no audience,” I say. “I think the terms rewrote themselves.”
She looks at me. In the blue gallery light her eyes are darker than usual and her face is stripped of the performance she wore three minutes ago for the cameras.
No donors to deflect into. No flashbulbs to angle toward. Just Imogen, arms crossed, spine straight, waiting to see what I’m going to do with a privacy I didn’t earn and a nearness I don’t deserve.
And I feel the decision arrive in my chest before it ever reaches my head.
A tilt, a drop, the sensation of stepping off a ledge in the dark without knowing how far down the ground is. My father’s voice somewhere in the back of my skull, the one that told me to do the thing that costs me.
Under it, quieter, my own voice, the one I’ve been running from for a year.
Be brave, or be your father. The man you swore not to be.
One doesn’t get to be both.
I cross the space between us and I sit down on the bench across from her. Not beside her. Not crowding. Facing her, with room to breathe, with room for her to get up and walk to the far end of the wing if she wants to, the second the doors unlock.
Then I take the deepest breath of my life, and I start to tell my wife the truth.
“I need to say this,” I tell her. “Not because I think it’s going to change anything.
Not because I’m trying to win you back with a speech in a dark museum while you can’t leave the room.
I need to say it because it’s true, and I have never once said it to you, and if those doors open in thirty minutes and you walk out and I never get this chance again, I need you to have heard it at least one time in your life. ”
Her arms stay crossed. Her face gives me nothing at all.
“So say it.”
It’s one thing to admit it to myself and own it. Telling her to her face is another.
I pull the breath up from somewhere below my lungs, below my ribs, from the place where the true things live when you’ve spent years burying them under work and fear and the safe, manageable performance of being a man with everything under control.
“The neglect was mine, I understand now just how lonely I made you feel.”
She doesn’t move.
“I need you to hear that part first, before anything else I say tonight, because everything else is context and this is the fact. The year of cold mornings and canceled dinners and later, I’ll make it up to you.
That was me. Not the network, not even the bastard Shane or the leak, not any of it.
Me. I chose the studio over you, night after night, and I told myself I was building a thing that would eventually make our life better, and the telling was a lie.
I wasn’t building anything, Imogen… I was hiding. ”