3. Flora
— ? —
Flora
The launch party is everything I hate about Aster’s world crammed into one glittering ballroom, and I’m standing in the middle of it wondering why I bothered to come at all.
Chandeliers hang from the ceiling casting hard light down on A-list celebrities scattered around the room, everyone dressed in clothes that cost more than my mother’s cottage, and cameras circle the perimeter waiting for somebody to do something interesting enough to capture.
I’m wearing green because it’s Aster’s favorite color on me, even though I can’t remember the last time he actually told me that.
I spent two hours on my hair and makeup, perfecting the careful performance of supportive wife that I’ve gotten way too good at over the past three years.
Nobody here knows that my husband came home at two in the morning last night, slid into bed without waking me, and was gone again before I opened my eyes.
I stand near the champagne station watching Aster work the room.
He’s magnetic, always has been, and people orbit around him and his energy and his smile.
Directors want to talk about collaborations.
Executives want a minute of him. Women want to discuss whatever bullshit excuse they can manufacture to stand too close to him.
He’s been at my side exactly twice tonight, and both times somebody pulled him away within minutes. I’m used to this by now, and I really shouldn’t be, but I am.
We arrived together, which I want on the record.
We walked the carpet together and I did the thing where you put your hand flat on his lapel and turn your face toward the cameras at a forty-five degree angle, because there’s a technique to it and I learned the technique, and then we came through the doors and a publicist said his name and he was gone.
That was ninety minutes ago. I’ve had two glasses of champagne and one conversation, and the conversation was with a woman who asked me where the bathrooms were.
There’s a whole category of person at these parties whose job is to make sure nobody important is left standing alone, and none of them have come near me, which tells you where I land on the list.
“Mrs. Golding?”
I turn to find a man in an expensive suit smiling at me with that professional warmth that means absolutely nothing.
“Your husband’s work on this soundtrack is truly extraordinary,” he says. “He has such an incredible gift.”
“He does.” I take a sip of my champagne, forcing myself to smile. “I’m very proud of him.”
“You must be.” He tilts his head, looking me over in a way that makes my skin crawl, his eyes traveling down my body slow and assessing and lingering in places they have no business lingering. “Though I imagine it’s quite difficult for you. He travels so much. Do you work yourself, or…?”
“I volunteer at animal shelters mostly. And some environmental charities.”
“Ah.” That single syllable carries an entire world of judgment in it. Ah, so you don’t have a real job. Ah, so you’re just the wife. “How nice.”
Then he hands me his empty champagne glass, smooth and casual, like I’m one of the servers.
It takes me a second to understand what just happened, and by the time I do he’s already walking away and I’m standing here holding some stranger’s empty glass like a fool.
“Did that man just…” A woman beside me, somebody’s plus-one, is staring with her mouth hanging open. “Did he think you were staff?”
I force a smile onto my face. “Easy mistake. Happens all the time.”
It is not an easy fucking mistake. I’m wearing a designer gown that costs thousands of dollars, and my face has been plastered on magazine covers as Aster Golding’s wife for three years straight, and I’m still invisible.
I set the glass down on a passing server’s tray with more force than necessary and look around for Aster.
He’s across the room surrounded by executives, laughing at something somebody said, and Cecilia is beside him because of course she is, pressed so close their shoulders are touching.
As I watch, she leans in to whisper something in his ear and he tilts his head toward her to listen.
He hasn’t looked for me in over an hour.
I’m working my way toward the far side of the room when Cecilia detaches from the group and heads for the bar. She catches my eye across the floor and changes course, walking straight at me.
“Flora.” She says my name like it’s a piece of gum stuck to her shoe. “I was hoping I’d run into you.”
“Were you.”
“I just wanted to say, no hard feelings about earlier.” She’s smiling, but there’s nothing warm anywhere in it. “I know it must be exhausting, being married to a man everyone else gets more of than you do.”
I stand there with absolutely nothing in my mouth. I always have something to say, always, and tonight I have nothing at all.
“Enjoy him while it lasts,” she says, and then she’s gone, folding back into the crowd like she didn’t just gut me with ten words.
The worst part isn’t the sentence. The worst part is that she said it in the middle of a crowded ballroom and she wasn’t nervous, not even slightly, which means she’s already decided how this ends and she doesn’t think I’m going to be a problem.
Women don’t talk to your face like that unless they’ve stopped considering you a person who can do anything back.
I need air, so I head for the terrace, and that’s when I hear them.
“…honestly don’t know why he even bothers keeping up the act.”
I freeze. Two women are standing just inside the terrace doors with champagne in hand, their backs to me.
“The marriage, you mean?”
“Obviously.” The first woman laughs, casual and dismissive and completely confident.
“Have you seen his wife? She’s like something out of a hippie commune.
All that wild hair and those freckles everywhere.
Men like Aster Golding marry women like that for the image, you know.
The wholesome, down-to-earth contrast. But everyone knows they don’t actually stay with them. ”
“She does look a bit lost wandering around. Did you see her earlier? Like a child at an adult party.”
“Exactly. Some men keep a cute little homey wife around for appearances. But when they want somebody who actually fits their world…” The woman’s voice drops conspiratorially. “Well, have you seen him with Cecilia Winsley? Now that’s a match that makes sense.”
“They do look really good together.”
“They look perfect together. And she’s climbing the ladder fast. By the end of this tour I’d bet good money his marriage is mysteriously over and Cecilia’s already moved in.”
They laugh together, light and casual, with the easy cruelty of people who have no idea they’re being overheard.
I can’t breathe, and for about four seconds I stand there with my hand flat against the wall and let it happen, the burning in my lungs and the sting behind my eyes and the sound of two strangers laughing at my hair.
Then I turn around and walk back into the ballroom.
I don’t decide to do it. If I’d decided, I’d have talked myself out of it somewhere between the terrace doors and the champagne station, because the version of me that has been coming to these parties for three years knows exactly how this goes.
You find a corner. You smile at whoever wanders into it.
You wait for the car. I have done that at forty of these and I am so tired of that woman I could scream.
He’s still with the executives. Cecilia is still at his elbow, close enough that her hair is touching his sleeve, and she sees me coming before he does.
I watch it happen on her face, the flicker of surprise and then the smile settling back into place, because she’s already decided I’m not going to be a problem and she’s about to find out otherwise.
I put my hand through my husband’s arm.
“There you are,” Aster says, and he’s pleased, which is almost worse. “I was just telling these guys about the bridge on track four.”
“I’m sure you were.” I keep my voice light and my hand exactly where it is, and I look at Cecilia while I say the next part. “We’re leaving.”
“We just got here.”
“We got here two hours ago. I’ve had a conversation about the location of the bathrooms and a stranger has handed me his empty glass because he thought I worked here. I’m done.”
There’s a pause. The executive nearest me looks at his shoes. Cecilia’s smile doesn’t move at all, but she takes her hand off Aster’s sleeve, and that’s the only thing I came over here for.
“Ten minutes,” Aster says. “Let me say goodbye to the director.”
“You can say goodbye to him from the door.”
He looks at me for a second like he’s trying to work out who I am, and then he laughs, that easy public laugh, and turns to the circle.
“My wife has spoken. I’ll call you all from the road.
” He puts his hand on the small of my back and steers me toward the exit, and I feel every set of eyes in that corner of the room follow us out.
The car is waiting at the curb. We get in and the door closes and the driver pulls away, and for about a block neither of us says anything.
“That was a lot,” he says finally.
“Was it.”
“You walked up in the middle of a conversation with the man who’s paying for the soundtrack and told him we were leaving.”
“I walked up in the middle of a conversation with a woman who told me twenty minutes ago to enjoy you while it lasts.”
He turns his head. “She said what?”
“Enjoy him while it lasts. Standing right next to me, smiling, like she was telling me the time.” I keep my eyes on the window, because if I look at him I’ll cry and I am not going to cry in this car.
“And the two women by the terrace doors, since you’re asking, think I look like something out of a hippie commune and that you keep me around for the image, and they’ve got money on Cecilia moving in by the end of the tour. ”
“Flora, that’s just people talking.”
“I know it’s people talking. I’m telling you what they said.”
“They’re nobodies. They’re plus-ones.”
“They’re nobodies who feel comfortable saying it out loud in a room you’re in, and she’s a somebody who feels comfortable saying it to my face, and you spent ninety minutes with her arm in yours while I stood by the champagne getting handed dirty glasses.
” I turn to him. “I’m not asking you to fix the internet.
I’m asking whether you noticed any of it. ”
He’s quiet. The streetlights come and go across his face.
“You’re being dramatic,” he says.
Twice in one week. Tuesday across a restaurant table and now Thursday in the back of a car, and the second time it lands in the same bruise the first one left.
“I handed Biscuit off this morning,” I say.
“What?”
“The dog. The one who’s been sleeping at the foot of our bed for three weeks.
I gave him to the foster coordinator at ten o’clock and then I sat in the car outside her office and cried for twenty minutes, because I always do, and then I came home and got dressed for your party.
You were in the house when I left. You were in the house when I got back.
” I turn to look at him. “You didn’t ask. ”
He opens his mouth and nothing comes out of it, and that’s the whole answer.
“That’s not dramatic,” I say. “That’s just what it’s like to live with you.”
He doesn’t say anything else for the rest of the drive, and neither do I. Forty minutes of freeway with my husband a foot away from me, and I spend all of it watching the lights go by and thinking that I’ve been more alone in this car than I was standing by myself at the champagne station.
The house is dark when we get in and I don’t turn on the overheads, just the little lamp in the entryway, because the whole place looks wrong under full light.
He bought it three years ago, the month we got married, and I picked out every single thing in it by myself, which at the time felt like being trusted and now mostly feels like decorating a hotel nobody checks into.
There are seven rooms I have never once used.
There’s a dining table that seats twelve and has never once seated more than two people at the same time.
He stops in the hall. I can feel him deciding something behind me.
“I’ve got a mix to finish,” he says.
“Of course you do.”
“Flora.”
“Go finish your mix, Aster.”
I take a shower and let the hot water run over me until it goes cold, washing off the makeup and the hairspray and the whole performance of the evening, and then I put on his old Stanford t-shirt, the one he gave me the second week we were dating, and climb into bed alone.
The shirt is starting to go at the collar.
I’ve been wearing it three or four nights a week for a year and I’ve thought more than once about how bad that is, a grown woman falling asleep in her husband’s clothes because it’s the closest thing to him she can get.
My phone lights up on the nightstand and I make the mistake of looking. Three gossip accounts have already posted photos from inside the party. Aster Golding launches film soundtrack at star-studded party. Wife Flora conspicuously alone most of the evening.
Conspicuously alone. That’s the phrase they went with, and I already know it’s going to sit in my chest for weeks.
Somebody sat down at a laptop and looked at photographs of my evening and decided that was the accurate summary, and the horrible thing is that they weren’t wrong.
Nine hundred people have already liked it.
I scroll down far enough to see two comments and then I stop, because the first one says she’s so lucky and the second one says something I’m not going to repeat to myself in the dark.
Somewhere around one in the morning I hear him in the hall. The footsteps come as far as the bedroom door and stop, and I lie perfectly still with my heart going hard against my ribs and wait to see what he’ll do.
The footsteps turn around and go back the way they came.
I listen to him walk away and then I stare at the ceiling for a long time, thinking about those women by the terrace doors and the way Cecilia looked at me and the man who handed me his empty glass, and about my husband, who is twenty feet away and might as well be on another planet.
The next morning I find him asleep on the couch in his studio, still in his suit from the party.
He looks younger when he sleeps, the tension smoothed out of his face, and for a second I see the man who sat in my diner booth for two weeks just to make me laugh.
I stand in the doorway watching him breathe and I realize I can’t remember the last time I woke up next to him.
He leaves in three weeks. That’s how long I’ve got to say what I should have said a year ago.