9. Aster
— ? —
Aster
I spend the whole cab ride from the airport rehearsing.
Not the apology, I’ve had that written since the hallway.
The delivery is what I keep working on, where I’ll be standing when I say it, whether I should get it out before I touch her or after.
I decide after. I decide I’ll come through the door and put my bag down and hold her first, because once I start talking she’s going to go rigid and I want thirty seconds of my wife before that happens.
I have flowers on the seat beside me, which I bought at the airport from a refrigerated case near baggage claim, and they are not good flowers.
Carnations, mostly, and something dyed a blue that doesn’t occur in nature, wrapped in cellophane with a sticker on it.
She’ll laugh at them. That’s most of why I bought them, because I could have had a florist deliver two hundred dollars of peonies to the house before I landed and she’d have looked at them the way she looks at everything my money buys, which is politely.
The gate is open when we pull up, which is normal, and the driveway is empty except for her car, which is also normal.
I pay him and get out and stand for a second in my own driveway in the California morning with my bag over my shoulder, feeling better than I’ve felt in two weeks, because whatever happens in the next hour at least it happens in the same room as her.
Then I open the front door.
The foyer is full of trash bags.
That’s the first thing I see, and for a whole second it doesn’t mean anything at all. My brain files it under a household project, a donation run, the closet purge she’s been threatening for a year.
Then I actually register what I’m looking at.
Black bags, industrial-sized, at least a dozen of them, piled in the center of the marble floor. One of them is ripped open at the top and inside I can see fabric. Suits. My Armani, my Brioni, the jacket I wore on our first anniversary, all crumpled up together.
“Flora?” My voice echoes through the empty space, and I’m still holding the flowers. “Flora, what is this?”
She appears at the top of the stairs, and the look on her face makes my blood run cold.
She looks terrible. Pale and exhausted, dark circles under her eyes like she hasn’t slept at all. But it’s the expression that gets me, this bright brittle smile that doesn’t reach her eyes at all.
“Oh, husband.” Her voice is wrong too, too cheerful and too controlled. “You’re home.”
“What is all this?” I gesture at the bags. “What’s going on?”
“I was going to donate them.” She comes down the stairs slowly, one step at a time, her eyes never leaving my face. “Seemed wasteful to just throw everything away. But then I thought, who wants trash? And that’s what they are now, isn’t it? Just trash.”
“I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”
She pulls something out of her pocket and flicks it at my chest. It’s a photograph, printed on regular paper, creased from being folded. I catch it reflexively, the flowers going down onto the marble, and look down at it.
My hand on Cecilia’s waist. Her hand around my neck. Our mouths pressed together.
The hallway. The ambush. Somebody photographed us. What the fuck, we were photographed?
“Did you kiss her?” Flora asks, and her voice is ice.
“No.” I take a step toward her and she takes a step back. “I swear to you, Flora, I didn’t.”
“Then what the fuck is this?”
“She kissed me.” I know exactly how it sounds even as the words leave my mouth. “I know that sounds like bullshit, but it’s the truth. She was waiting for me outside the bathroom. She grabbed my hand and yanked me toward her and kissed me. I pushed her away the second it happened.”
“Your hand is on her waist.”
“To push her off. Look at the angle, Flora, my arms are extended, I’m creating distance.”
“And the article?” Her voice rises slightly, the first crack in that terrible calm. “All those sources? The affair that’s been going on for months?”
“What article?”
She stares at me like I’ve said something incomprehensible. Then she laughs, this horrible bitter sound that doesn’t have any humor in it at all.
“You don’t even know.” She shakes her head. “You don’t even know what’s out there.”
She grabs her phone and shoves it at me.
I take it with numb fingers and start reading, and the more I read the colder I get.
Anonymous sources confirming an affair. Claims that I told Cecilia my marriage was over.
Late nights in my trailer, which is a detail somebody invented out of nothing, because I don’t have a trailer on this production and never did.
And then the paragraph about my wife. A former waitress with no career of her own.
Somebody sat down at a desk and typed that about Flora. Somebody read it back, decided it was good, and published it.
There’s a section near the bottom that lists my past relationships, actual and invented, with photographs, as though the point being established is that this is simply what I am. There’s a line about how the marriage lasted longer than anyone expected. There’s a reader poll.
Dylan stayed behind a day to sort out the New York dates with the director, and the phone in my pocket was his, and it was on airplane mode for the whole five-hour flight and I never even thought to check it when we landed.
I just grabbed my bag and got in a cab and came straight here.
All of this has been happening for ten hours, half the country has read it, and I walked through my own front door smiling with a handful of airport flowers.
“I’m going to sue them into the ground,” I say.
“For what?” She snatches the phone back. “You know everything they wrote is allegedly.” She makes air quotes with her fingers, sharp and mocking. “They’re careful. They’re always careful.”
“This is over the line. They hurt you.”
“No, Aster.” Her voice goes cold. “You did.”
I don’t have anywhere to put that. It just sits in me.
“When did it happen?” she asks.
I close my eyes. “Four days ago.”
“Four days.” She lets that sink in, lets the silence stretch out between us. “We talked on the phone that same night. You told me everything was fine. You told me you were tired.” She tilts her head. “And New York.”
I go cold.
“It’s in the article, Aster. A further round of joint appearances. I booked nine days in a house with no phone signal and you said yes to me in our bed and then you said yes to her director the same day she put her mouth on you, and that night you told me it was handled.”
“I was going to move Baja.”
“You were going to move Baja.” She says it back to me flat, like she’s reading it off a card. “You were going to move the one thing I asked for, for a week of standing next to her on television, and you were going to tell me after.”
“I was going to tell you in person.”
“Four days, Aster.” Her voice cracks and then suddenly she’s screaming, all that terrible calm shattering at once.
“You had four days to pick up a phone and say Flora, something happened. Instead you let me find out from the entire internet while strangers commented about whether my marriage was a joke.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re always sorry!” She’s pacing now, her hands shaking, tears streaming down her face. “You’ve been sorry for a year. Sorry for missing dinner. Sorry for missing our anniversary. Sorry for never being here when I need you. Sorry isn’t enough anymore.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to have not done this!” She throws her hands up. “I want to not be standing in my own house, humiliated in front of the entire world, while my husband makes excuses for why another woman’s lips were on his.”
“I didn’t kiss her.”
“I don’t care!” The words rip out of her.
“I don’t care if you kissed her or she kissed you or it was an accident or whatever you want to call it.
I told you in our bed what it would take, Aster.
One week. You couldn’t give me one week of your time, but you could give me four days of silence while I smiled and pretended everything was fine. ”
I reach for her and she flinches away from my hand.
“I’ve been thinking all night,” she says, and her voice is quiet now, which is worse than the screaming was. “About us. About whether there’s anything left to save.”
“Flora, don’t.”
“We’ve been living separate lives for a year.” She wipes her face with a shaking hand. “You’re in airports and stadiums and studios, and I’m here in this house that feels more like a museum than a home, waiting for somebody who never shows up.”
“I can change. I can fix it.”
“You could have changed at any point in the past year.” She meets my eyes and the devastation in them nearly takes me apart. “You didn’t.”
“Flora, please.” I reach for her again and this time I catch her arm. She freezes but she doesn’t pull away. “I’ll fix this. I’ll cancel every project, every tour. I’ll stay home for a year if that’s what you need.”
“It’s too late for that.” Her voice cracks. “It’s too late.”
“No, it’s not. It can’t be. I love you.”
“I know you do.” She looks at me and her eyes are full of grief. “That was never the question.”
She pulls her arm free.
“I’m going to my mom’s. I need space. I need to figure out who I am without you, because somewhere along the way I forgot.”
“Flora.” My voice breaks. “Please. Please don’t do this.”
“Goodbye, Aster.”
She walks past me toward the door, picking up a bag by the stairs that I didn’t even notice sitting there. A bag she already packed. She’s been planning this all night while I was on a plane thinking everything would be fine once I got home and explained myself.
“Flora, wait.”
But she’s already out the door and already getting into her car and already pulling out of the driveway, and I stand in the doorway surrounded by trash bags and watch my whole world drive away.
I don’t know how long I stay there. Long enough for the sunlight to shift across the floor. Long enough for my legs to start aching underneath me.
Eventually I go back inside and walk through the house, which is a stupid thing to do and I do it anyway.
The kitchen still has a mug in the sink and the coffee maker is still warm, and there’s a full pot in it that nobody drank, which means at some point in the night my wife made coffee and then poured it out and made more.
Upstairs the bed is made on her side and stripped on mine, which I don’t understand until I do.
Her closet is untouched. Mine is a row of empty hangers, forty of them, still swinging slightly like she only just finished.
In the bathroom her toothbrush is gone. That’s the thing that does it. Not the bags, not the article, not the photograph. A missing toothbrush in a cup that has held two toothbrushes every single day for three years, and now holds one, and the one it holds is mine.
Dylan’s phone buzzes in my pocket with an email notification, and the preview is sitting on the lock screen before I can decide not to look at it.
From Flora, to Dylan, sent twenty minutes ago.
She must have written it while she was driving away, while I was standing here watching her taillights disappear.
I open it.
Dylan, it’s Flora. I need you to recommend a divorce attorney. Someone good, someone discreet. I know this is a lot to ask given you work for him, but I don’t know who else to ask. Please get back to me when you can.
A divorce attorney. She’s not just leaving me, she’s ending it.
She wrote that from the car. She was six minutes down the hill and she already knew exactly what she wanted, which means she knew before she walked out, which means she knew while I was standing in that foyer promising to cancel every project on my calendar.
I was still negotiating and she’d already finished.
I sink down onto the floor surrounded by trash bags full of my own expensive clothes, and I cry.