Epilogue
Imogen
The man steals my yogurt and I let him get away with it, which tells you everything you need to know about how far we’ve come.
It’s a Tuesday morning. I’m standing in our kitchen, and it isn’t the sublet kitchen with the counter that nearly gave out under us, and it isn’t the mansion kitchen where I used to stand holding two coffees nobody ever came to take.
A new one. A house we picked out together, the two of us, with windows that face east and a counter at exactly the right height and a refrigerator that holds, at any given moment, roughly three times more food than two people could ever eat, because Hendrix shops the way he writes, excessively and with no discernible plan.
He comes up behind me while I’m eating yogurt at the counter, winds both arms around my waist, and sets his chin on my shoulder with the easy possessiveness of a man who has learned the hard way that being close is not a privilege you leave lying around unused.
“Good morning.” His mouth is against my neck. His hand is already snaking around me toward the yogurt.
“Don’t you dare.”
“I just want a taste.”
“You have your own yogurt. It’s on the second shelf. It has your name on it. I wrote your name on it in permanent marker, Hendrix, specifically because of this exact behavior.”
“Yours tastes better.”
“It is the identical brand.”
“It tastes better when it’s yours.”
He steals the spoon right out of my hand, takes a bite, and grins against my shoulder, and I should be irritated, except the warmth of his chest against my back and the weight of his arms around me and the specific, greedy nearness of a man who genuinely cannot stand to be two rooms away from me anymore makes the irritation impossible to hold on to.
My free hand finds his forearm where it crosses my stomach, and I notice, distantly, that the reaching has become a thing I no longer think about.
There was a year I reached across a cold bed every morning and found nothing. Now I reach without deciding to, and he’s always, always there to be found, and neither of us makes anything of it. That’s the whole miracle, in the end. That it stopped being remarkable.
This is the marriage I signed up for. The one I very nearly lost. The one that had to burn all the way down and get rebuilt from the foundation before it started working the way it was always supposed to.
He’s at every performance now.
Hendrix writes in the mornings while I’m at rehearsal, and when I come home he reads me his sentences before another living soul gets to hear them, the way he used to at the very beginning, the way he stopped, the way he taught himself to start again.
The difference in him is visible. The weight he used to haul around, the terror of turning into Frank, the hiding inside the work, the blank page he kept as a bomb shelter from the size of what he felt, all of it is simply gone.
He writes because he loves it now, not to escape me.
The difference shows up in the prose, which I have read, every draft, every revision, and which is the best thing he has ever made, because it’s the first thing he’s ever written from inside a life he was actually living instead of hiding from.
My parents have softened into a thing I can hold in my hands without disappearing straight through the middle of it.
Susannah calls every Sunday. To ask about the company, about the choreography, about whether I need new pointe shoes, a subject she has apparently been researching with the focused ferocity of a woman channeling a lifetime of misplaced control into becoming a world authority on dancewear.
“I found a supplier in Milan,” she told me last week. “Hand-stitched. The reviews are extraordinary. I’ve sent you the link.”
“Mother. I order my shoes from the same place I’ve ordered them since I was a girl.”
“The Milanese ones have superior arch support. I read a study.”
“You read a study about pointe shoes.”
“I read several studies about pointe shoes. Do not underestimate me, Imogen.”
Father sends flowers after every performance. Pink roses, because he asked Hendrix what I preferred, and the asking was apparently so emotionally strenuous for both men that I don’t think either of them has fully recovered from having had the conversation.
Frank comes to the shows. Every single one. Fourth row, left of center, the same seat every time, wearing the same expression of grudging admiration that is, for Frank Carver, the emotional equivalent of leaping to his feet screaming.
He clapped once, at the second performance, three firm claps that badly startled the woman beside him, and Hendrix and I have chosen to observe it annually as a national holiday.
They’re all orbiting now, the three of them, circling the marriage with the faintly desperate warmth of people who know exactly how close they came to losing it and are overcorrecting with a fervor that edges into comedy.
The grandchild hints have started, and they are not subtle, delivered with the specific total absence of subtlety that only old-money parents can pull off.
“The house has three bedrooms,” Susannah mentioned last Sunday. “That does seem like a great deal of space for two people.”
“We use the third as a studio, Mother.”
“Of course you do. Very practical. Plenty of room for a crib, though. If you ever needed one. Hypothetically.”
I’m learning to hold the door open without walking back through it myself.
They’re allowed in, on my terms and at my pace, and the allowing feels different than it used to, because I am large enough in my own life now that their presence doesn’t shrink me back down.
They’re additions, not architects. They orbit, and I let them, and the letting is generous instead of obligatory, which is the only version of it I was ever willing to live inside.
***
The bookstore is packed.
A line out the door, around the corner, past the coffee shop three storefronts down, the kind of stubborn independent shop that has somehow held on to its corner of this neighborhood while the rents around it went the way rents in this city go.
People holding copies of a book that did not exist a year ago, that sat dead on a hard drive while its author stared at a cursor and forgot how to be a writer, and that came alive all at once the moment he stopped hiding and wrote the truth.
Our truth. My name threaded through every line of the fiction with the care of a man who spent a year earning the right to tell it.
I’m in the back of the room. Rehearsal clothes, hair up, a cardigan thrown over my leotard because I came straight from the studio and didn’t have a minute to change.
Nobody recognizes me, which is the very best part. The woman the whole book is about, standing ten feet from a display of her own love story, unrecognized, anonymous, and completely delighted about it.
Hendrix is at the signing table, and he is radiant.
Real warmth, aimed at every single person who sets a book in front of him.
He asks their names. He listens to their stories.
He signs with that left-slanting handwriting I could pick out from across a dark room, and between signatures he looks up and scans the crowd, and I know precisely who he’s looking for, because his eyes do the thing they always do when they land on me. They stop searching.
He finds me in the back. A grin breaks across his face, the private one, the one that belongs to me, and I watch him mouth a thing over everyone’s heads. I can’t read it from here, but I don’t have to.
Hi, beautiful.
I roll my eyes. He grins wider.
A woman at the front of the line says a thing to him and he turns back to her with his whole attention, and the turning back instead of staying locked on me is its own kind of proof. He can leave and come back now.
The leaving isn’t permanent anymore, the coming back is reliable.
That, in the end, was the entire lesson.
Later, the bookstore manager takes the microphone once the signing line has finally run dry.
“We have time for one more thing before we close,” she says, beaming at a room that is in no hurry to leave. “Hendrix, we’d love it if you’d read for us. A passage. Anything you like.”
The crowd answers with the enthusiastic consensus of people who came for exactly this.
Hendrix stands. He picks a copy of the book up off the table and holds it in both hands for a moment, looking at the cover, and the expression on his face is not the expression of a man holding his own novel. It’s the expression of a man holding a letter he has been writing for a year.
“I’m not going to read a scene,” he says. “If that’s all right. You can read the scenes at home. They’re better on the page than they are out loud, and anyone who tells you otherwise is performing.”
Laughter, warm and real. He has the room in his palm.
“Instead, I’d like to read the dedication.” He opens the book to the front pages. “It’s long. Longer than a dedication is supposed to be. My editor told me it ran too long, and I told her that was the point.”
More laughter. He nudges his reading glasses up his nose with one finger, and even from the back of the room I can see his hand tremble, barely, the exact way it trembled in the third row on the night I danced.
He begins.
“To the woman who dances the way she loves.” His voice carries, not projected, not performed, just clear, the way a voice goes clear when the words it’s carrying happen to be true.
“With control that looks effortless. With strength that doesn’t announce itself.
With the specific, terrifying grace of a woman who refuses to be small. ”
My throat closes. In the back of the room, invisible, anonymous, I grip the edge of the bookshelf next to me.