15. Hendrix #3
I pull it out and hold it in my open palm, between us, in the dark of a museum gallery in the dead middle of the night.
Imogen looks at it.
And the composure, the guard, the wall she has held in place all night, all month, through the confession and the proof and the careful demolition of the lie that was told about her, all of it wavers at once.
“That’s…” She reaches out, then stops, her hand hovering an inch above my palm. “Hendrix, that’s from my…”
“Your last pair of pointe shoes. The ones you wore at your final performance. The showcase before you gave it up for good.”
My voice comes out rough and I let it.
“You always cut the ribbons off your retired shoes, you told me once, it was your ritual, the way a ballerina says goodbye to a season. One had slipped loose that night, and I took it as I left, before anyone could sweep it away.”
“You…” She’s staring at the strip of satin. Her hand still hasn’t closed the last inch. “How could you have… We weren’t together. We had barely spoken two full sentences to each other.”
“I was there and I was captivated by your performance.”
The truth of it comes out simply, because it has been sitting inside me for years, patient, waiting for the right room and the right silence and the right woman to finally deserve hearing it.
Imogen’s eyes have gone wet. She doesn’t wipe them. She doesn’t look away from the ribbon.
“I don’t have words for what you were on that stage.” I hear my own voice thin out. “And I find words for a living, Imogen, it is the one thing I have ever been good at, and I have never once found the right ones for what it was to watch you dance that night.”
Her hand finally moves. Her fingers close around the ribbon in my palm, and it’s more than her taking a thing from me, her fingertips press against my skin as she lifts it.
Neither of us pulls back, and her hand stays there, over mine, the ribbon caught between us, thin and faded and holding the entire weight of every year we’ve spent orbiting each other without ever once landing.
“Everyone thinks you married me because your mother asked you to.” Her voice has dropped to almost nothing.
“I thought that. I have thought that every single day for three years. That I was a deathbed promise… A thing you did for her, and got stuck with, and stopped wanting the second the obligation was met.”
“Everyone is wrong.” My thumb moves, a fraction, along the side of her hand.
She doesn’t pull away. “I married you because I watched you shine and the wanting hit me so hard I couldn’t breathe around it.
I should’ve said it from the start. I have spent every day since trying to become a man who deserved the woman who walked off that stage and gave it up for our marriage but I have failed at it over and over, and I am done failing, Imogen. I am so done failing you.”
A tear tracks down her cheek, she lets it fall.
The ribbon is wound between her fingers now, wrapped in the automatic figure-eight of a dancer’s hands, the muscle memory of a life she gave up but never actually let go of, still living in her fingertips after all these years.
“You carried this.” The word cracks in the middle. “For years. In your jacket.”
“In every jacket.” I don’t look away from her.
“Every event. Every interview. Every signing where I sat behind a table and smiled for a line of strangers. Against my chest, the whole time. The one true thing I let myself keep close, because I couldn’t say any of the rest of it out loud, and I needed to keep one thing. ”
“You impossible man.” It isn’t a compliment and it isn’t an accusation. It’s an exhale, the sound of a woman whose defenses have just lost a war they didn’t know they were fighting, to a strip of faded satin and the truth of why a stranger married her. “You absolute, impossible man.”
Here is the thing I was not ready for.
She looks up from the ribbon, and she looks at me, and the wall is simply gone.
In the place where it stood there’s the woman I fell for in the fourth row, the one who feels everything all the way to the floor and hides none of it, and she’s close, closer than we’ve been in a year, close enough that in the blue dark I can see the wet on her lashes and the uneven pull of her breath, and the emotional nakedness of the moment tips, without warning, into a different kind of nakedness entirely.
The space between us stops being safe.
I am suddenly, ruinously aware of all of it at once.
The black dress and the bare line of her back where my hand rested hours ago.
The heat of her fingers still curled over mine.
The three inches of dark between her mouth and mine, and the way her eyes drop, once, to my mouth and come back up, and the small catch in her breathing that is not about grief anymore.
I don’t move even if I want to.
Every cell I own is leaning toward the almost non-existent distance between us, and I hold myself dead still, because I have spent a year learning that wanting a thing is not the same as being owed it, and I did not tell her the truth about a ribbon to cash it in three seconds later.
“Imogen,” I say, and her name comes out lower than I mean it to.
“I know.” Her voice isn’t steady either. Her hand is still on mine. She hasn’t moved back. “I know. Don’t. Not yet.”
Not yet.
Two words, and they are not a no, and both of us hear exactly what they are, and neither of us says another thing about it.
She keeps her hand over mine with the ribbon wound between her fingers, and I keep still, and we sit in the blue dark with the rain washing the skylights and a want neither of us is going to act on humming in the space between our bodies, a struck string that will not stop ringing.
She’s the one who breaks the quiet, eventually, and she doesn’t break it the way I expect.
“Can I tell you a thing I’ve never said out loud?
” She’s looking at the ribbon in her fingers, not at me.
“We never actually knew each other. You know that, don’t you?
We got married, and we lived in that enormous house, and we did all of it, the events and the dinners and the anniversaries, and I don’t think either of us could have answered a single real question about the other one. Not the important kind.”
“Imogen…”
“I’m not saying it to hurt you. I’m saying it because I think it’s the truest thing in this whole room, and we’ve been avoiding it for three years.”
She finally looks up.
“Our mothers shook hands over us before we could walk. We got handed a marriage the way other people get handed a house, fully built, already furnished, and we just moved into it and started performing the parts. And somewhere in there we skipped the entire beginning. The part where two people actually find out who the other one is. We never had it. I married a stranger, and then I spent three years being angry that he stayed a stranger, and I never once stopped to notice that I never gave him my real self either. I performed the wife the same way you performed the husband.”
The accuracy of it lands somewhere under my ribs and stays there.
“You’re right,” I say. “You’re completely right. I cataloged you for three years. Every tell, every mood, the way your ankle rolls and the way you hold a pen. And I never learned you, because learning you would have meant letting you learn me back, and I couldn’t risk what you’d find.”
I take a breath. “We started at the end and called it a beginning. We never had a first conversation, Imogen. Not a real one. Not the kind where you don’t already know how it has to turn out.”
“No. We didn’t.” She turns the ribbon over in her fingers. And then, quietly, in a voice I haven’t heard from her in longer than I can name, careful and a little scared and entirely her own, she says the thing that undoes me more than any of the rest of it. “So maybe that’s the part we missed.”
I don’t say anything. I’ve learned, finally, to let her arrive at things in her own time instead of racing ahead to meet her.
“Here’s what I can give you.”
She sits up a little straighter, and I watch her assemble it, the terms, the way she used to lay out the pieces of a hard thing before she committed to it.
“When those doors open, I’ll give you one day.
One. No cameras, no lawyers. No Carver name and no press and nobody telling either of us who we’re supposed to be.
We go somewhere, and we do the thing we never did.
We actually meet. You show me who you are now, the real one, the one under all of it, and I find out whether there’s a single true thing left underneath all the wreckage. ”
Her jaw sets. “And at the end of it, I tell you where I land. That’s all I’m promising you.
One day. No assurances. I might spend the whole drive home telling you it’s still over.
I need you to understand that before you say yes, because I will not do this if you’re going to treat one day like a down payment on the rest of them. ”
“I understand.”
“I mean it, Hendrix. It might be a no.”
“I understand.”
And I do, and it doesn’t matter, because a man who spent a year certain he had lost her for good does not negotiate the terms of a single day he never thought he’d get again.
I would take an hour. I would take ten minutes on a cold sidewalk.
She is offering me a whole day of her, honest and unguarded, with her real self finally on the table, and if the only thing waiting at the end of it is a no, then I will have had the day, and the day is more than I have any right to.
“One day. Whatever it costs me, whatever it ends in.”
A thing in her face eases, just slightly, at how fast I said it. At how completely I meant it.
“Okay,” she says. “One day.”
Because the doors are still sealed and the rain is still washing the skylights and there is nowhere in the world for either of us to be except this bench, we do the thing we agreed to.
We start.