1. Juliette
— ? —
Juliette
On the morning of our sixth wedding anniversary, I draw a star in the foam of my husband’s coffee.
It takes two tries. The foam pen is temperamental and the milk has to sit at exactly the right temperature, but I’ve had years of practice, so the star comes out clean: five points, a small six curled in the center. One star for every anniversary. It’s the only art I’ve ever been any good at.
The note I tucked under the cup last night is gone. It always is. I’ve never once seen him take one, and I’ve never once found one in the trash, which means somewhere between the coffee and the car they simply stop existing. I’ve decided that’s a magic trick I don’t want explained.
Zachary comes down with his tie loose and his phone already talking to him.
“The Zurich people moved the Thayer call up,” he says to the phone, or to me, or to the kitchen in general. “I have to be brilliant before seven.”
“Happy anniversary.”
He looks up. And for a moment, one whole unbroken moment, I have all of him.
“Happy anniversary, Jules.” He crosses the kitchen and kisses my temple. “Six years.”
“Six years.”
“Tonight. Oleana, the little table by the window. I already told Marcy to guard the evening with her life.”
“Did you tell yourself that too?”
It comes out lighter than I mean it, which is a skill I’ve been perfecting.
“Insufferably romantic,” he says. “That’s my whole plan. Seven-thirty, green dress, me being insufferably romantic.”
“You’re always insufferable.”
“Then half my promise is kept already.” He grins, and it’s the library grin, the one that got a security guard bribed, and I decide the day is going to be good.
He takes the coffee on his way out. He doesn’t look at it.
He never looks at it, just carries it out the door at face height like a man transporting evidence, and I stand at the window while the car pulls away and wonder, the way I wonder every year, whether he has ever once seen a single star before he drinks it.
The flowers arrive at eleven, which is perfect timing, because I’ve read the same paragraph of the same book so many times the words have stopped being words, and I needed an excuse to abandon it.
“Mrs. Dean?” The delivery guy is young and slightly terrified in the way that everyone who approaches the Boston house seems slightly terrified, like the architecture might judge them. “These are for you.”
The arrangement is gorgeous. Cream roses, pale pink peonies, and ranunculus, which is my favorite flower, which my husband has never once remembered and his assistant apparently keeps on file.
I take the vase from his hands and tip him too much because I always tip too much and Zachary says it’s one of his favorite things about me, and I carry the flowers inside and set them on the hall table next to the wrapped first edition I’ve been saving since winter.
The card is small and tasteful and tucked into the arrangement at a perfect angle.
Happy Anniversary. -M
I read it twice.
Then a third time, just to be sure.
M.
Marcy. His assistant. Who sends flowers when he’s too slammed to remember, who manages his calendar and his correspondence and apparently, now, his marriage.
I should be angry. A normal person would be angry. But here’s the thing about being married to Zachary Dean for six years: you learn to build explanations faster than you build outrage.
He’s drowning in the Thayer acquisition.
He told me last week he’s sleeping in his office more nights than not.
He probably called Marcy from a meeting and said handle the flowers and she handled them the way she handles everything, efficiently and without personality, and he didn’t know she’d sign the card, he didn’t mean for me to see her initial where his name should be.
He told her to send them.
He just didn’t tell her what to say.
I carry the arrangement into his study, the one room in this house that still smells like him even when he’s not in it, and set the vase on the corner of his desk where his laptop should be.
“They’re for you, really,” I say to the empty chair.
My phone is in my hand before I’ve decided to reach for it.
He picks up just before the call can tip into voicemail, which means he saw my name and decided to answer, and I should be grateful for that, I should note it, I should add it to the list of small kindnesses that I’ve been curating like a museum exhibit of Why This Marriage Is Fine.
“Hey.” His voice is warm and distracted, the particular tone he uses when he’s looking at a spreadsheet while talking to me. “Happy anniversary.”
“Happy anniversary. Again.”
“You can’t have too many. The flowers are there?”
“The flowers are beautiful.”
“Good. I wanted to do roses but Marcy said peonies were more you, so I let her make the call. Was she right?”
She was, actually. Marcy knows my taste in flowers better than my husband does, and I’m going to file that information somewhere I don’t have to look at it.
“She was right. They’re perfect.”
“I’m glad.” Keys clacking in the background. A muffled voice asking him about projections. “Listen, I made the reservation for eight. That little table by the window you like. I know I’ve been-” The clacking stops. “I know it’s been hard. The last few months. I want tonight to be good.”
“I want that too.”
“Wear the green dress?”
“You remember the green dress?”
“I remember everything.” His voice softens, finally focusing on me instead of whatever else is demanding his attention.
“The green dress, the earrings from our second anniversary, the way you tuck your hair behind your left ear when you’re nervous.
I know I don’t always show it, but I remember, Jules. ”
Jules. The nickname only he uses. The one that makes me feel like the girl in the library instead of the wife in the big empty house.
“Even the hair thing?”
“Especially the hair thing. It’s how I knew you liked me. You did it six times in our first conversation.”
“I did not.”
“You absolutely did. I counted.”
I’m smiling. Against all my better judgment, against the assistant’s initial still fresh in my mind, I’m smiling, because this is the version of him I married. The one who notices. The one who counts.
“Pick me up at seven-thirty?”
“I’ll be there. And Jules?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you.” A pause. Someone talking in the background again, and he doesn’t turn toward it. “I love you, Jules.”
“I love you too.”
I spend the afternoon getting ready the way I used to get ready when we were dating, when every dinner was an event and every outfit was a statement and I still believed that the right shade of lipstick could communicate something essential about my soul.
The green dress fits differently than it did last year. Not worse, just different. I’ve lost weight in places I didn’t mean to lose it, the particular erosion that comes from eating alone more often than not.
By six-thirty, I’m perfect. Hair up the way he likes it.
Earrings from our second anniversary, the ones I had to talk him out of returning because he thought they weren’t nice enough.
The first edition wrapped in paper I chose specifically because the color matches his eyes, because I am still, after everything, a person who thinks about these things.
The book is Hemingway. A Moveable Feast, first American edition, signed.
He told me once that it made him want to be better, want to live in a way that was worth writing about, and I hunted a copy that wouldn’t bankrupt us for an entire season, and then agonized even longer over what to write in the bookmark I tucked inside.
The note says: You already were. -J
I’m practicing my casual face in the hall mirror when the doorbell rings.
Seven-fifteen. He’s early. He’s actually early, and a knot I didn’t know I was carrying loosens in my chest.
I open the door with my best approximation of surprise, and Eleanor Dean is standing on my front steps in head-to-toe cream, wearing the smile she saves for people she’s about to inconvenience.
“Juliette. You look lovely.”
“Eleanor.” I don’t step back to let her in. A small rebellion, but satisfying. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
“I know, darling, and I’m so sorry to intrude on your anniversary.
” She’s already moving past me into the foyer, because Eleanor Dean has never met a boundary she couldn’t treat as a suggestion.
“There’s been a small crisis with the Children’s Hospital benefit.
The Harrington Foundation is pulling out as lead sponsor and the board is in absolute hysterics. ”
“That sounds stressful.” I close the door behind her. She takes in my dress, my jewelry, the wrapped gift on the hall table, and her expression doesn’t move, but behind her eyes a catalog updates. “But I’m not sure how I can help.”
“Not you, darling. Zachary. I need him to make some calls tonight. The Harringtons are old family friends - they’ll listen to a Dean in a way they simply won’t listen to me.”
“Tonight.”
“The board needs reassurance before the morning news cycle. You understand.”
“It’s our anniversary, Eleanor. Six years today.”
“Six years.” She says it the way other people say already?
“I remember thinking at the wedding what a refreshing choice you were.” Her hand comes to rest on the hall table, an inch from my wrapped gift, claiming the furniture.
“The Harringtons built the neonatal wing, darling. Babies don’t reschedule. ”
And there it is. I’ve just been outranked by hypothetical babies, and there’s no answer to that, which is precisely why she chose it.
“Eleanor, we have reservations. I’m sure the calls can wait until-”
“If the calls could wait, I wouldn’t be here.” She’s already pulling out her phone. “I’ll just ring him now. Sort this out.”
“I can call him.”
“Nonsense, you’re busy getting ready.” She’s dialing before I can object, and I’m standing in my own home in my anniversary dress, and my mother-in-law is hijacking my evening with the efficiency of a hostile corporate takeover.