11. Aster
— ? —
Aster
I haven’t left the house in four days.
The trash bags are still in the foyer. I walk past them to get to the kitchen and I walk past them to get to the stairs, and every time I do it I see her face when she handed me that photograph, and I still can’t bring myself to move them.
Moving them would mean deciding what they are.
Right now they’re just the last thing she touched in this house.
I’ve called her eleven times. Every one of them went straight to voicemail without a single ring, which is what happens when a phone is off or sitting somewhere the signal can’t find it. Four years with her and I have never once called my wife and not had it ring.
The first day I left messages. Long ones, bad ones, one of them almost nine minutes because I couldn’t figure out how to stop talking.
Yesterday I stopped leaving them, because it occurred to me that she might be saving them, and that a woman with an attorney and eleven rambling voicemails from her husband is a woman holding a folder.
The house is wrong without her. Too big and too quiet and too full of the places she should be.
I keep catching myself listening for sounds that don’t come, her laugh, the off-key humming she does when she’s cooking, the particular way she closes a cabinet.
I slept on the couch in the studio the first night because I couldn’t make myself go up to a bed with one pillow dented and one not, and the second night I slept on the floor of our closet with my back against her side of it.
Dylan lets himself in around noon with a bag of groceries and a new phone.
“Same number,” he says, putting the phone on the counter. “Everything moved over. You have four hundred messages and I don’t recommend any of them.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I didn’t ask.” He starts unloading the bag onto the island. Bread, eggs, the coffee she likes, which he must have looked up. “New York’s canceled. The director’s furious. I told him you’d cancel the moon if you had to, and I told him why, and he’s still furious, so that’s where that is.”
I nod. I don’t care about the director. I told Dylan to cancel New York from the foyer floor the morning she left, before I’d even stood up, and it’s the first thing I’ve done in a year that I’m sure about.
“The article’s still up,” he says.
“I know.”
“They’re not going to take it down. They never do. I could make some noise but it’ll just be more noise.”
“Then don’t.”
He looks at me over the eggs. Dylan has been my manager since before anybody knew my name, and he’s the closest thing I have to a brother, and he has spent the last four days doing the thing he does, which is manage.
Calls, cancellations, a statement drafted and thrown away.
He hasn’t once mentioned my career. He hasn’t mentioned it because there’s nothing to say and we both know it.
“I should have said something,” he says, and it’s so quiet I almost miss it.
“About what?”
“At the restaurant. On your anniversary. You were two hours late and you sat down and started talking about the movie, and I was on the phone with you the whole way there telling you it could wait, and then I stopped telling you because you weren’t listening.
” He puts the eggs in the fridge and stands there with the door open.
“I watched it for a year, Aster. I said it once, at her birthday, at the door, and then I booked the next thing anyway.”
It sits in me next to everything else he’s ever not said.
My new phone buzzes on the counter with a blocked number. I almost ignore it. Then I pick it up, because something about the timing feels wrong, and I put it on speaker and set it down between us.
“Aster.” Cecilia’s voice, smooth and controlled and completely without shame. “I’ve been thinking about our situation.”
Every muscle in my body goes rigid. Dylan closes the fridge.
“There is no our situation,” I say.
“Oh, but there is.” She sounds almost amused, like this is a game she’s been enjoying. “The photo is out there. The story has legs. People believe we had an affair, whether we did or not, and I think we should make the most of it.”
“Make the most of it.”
“Think about it. We confirm the relationship. A few interviews, a photo shoot, let people see us together. It’s incredible publicity for the film, the tragic love triangle, the forbidden romance, all that delicious drama. Everyone wins.”
I feel physically sick. It’s the casual way she says it, like my marriage is a brand partnership she’s pitching, and somewhere underneath the disgust is the knowledge that I have sat in rooms with people who talk exactly like this for six years and never once found it strange.
“My wife is filing for divorce,” I say slowly. “Because of a photograph you arranged. And you want me to pretend we’re together for the streaming numbers.”
“I didn’t arrange anything. A photographer was in the right place at the right time.”
“Bullshit.”
“Your marriage was already over, Aster. Everyone could see it. I just moved things along.” Her voice shifts into something she must think is seductive. “It’s not too late. The wronged wife moves on, the star-crossed lovers find each other, everybody comes out ahead.”
“Everybody comes out ahead.” I laugh, and it sounds unhinged even to me. “She packed a bag and got on a plane, Cecilia. I don’t know if she’s ever coming back. And you’re calling me to pitch.”
“Your wife was never going to stay.” The sweetness drops out of her voice all at once and what’s underneath is ugly. “Women like her don’t belong in our world. She’s a waitress. A nobody who got lucky. Everyone could see it was only a matter of time before you outgrew her.”
The words hit me like ice water, because the last time I read them they had quotation marks around them and the word insider in front.
“That was you,” I say. “You said that to me at the studio. And then you said it to a reporter.”
Silence on the other end. Then, carefully, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do.” I lean closer to the phone. “Listen to me. I was never interested in you. Not for one second. I love my wife. And if you think I would put my marriage in the trash for album sales, you don’t know a single thing about me.”
“Your marriage is already in the trash. She left.”
“You’re off everything. Every appearance, every interview, every photo. I’ll walk out of any room you walk into. I’ll lose money before I stand next to somebody who kissed me without asking and then tried to sell it.”
There’s a long pause, and I can hear her breathing on the other end, sharp and angry.
“You’re making me the villain,” she says softly. “Villains fight back.”
“You made yourself the villain in a hallway. I’m just done pretending I didn’t notice.”
I hang up. Dylan is staring at me with his mouth open.
“She’s going to go on TV,” he says.
“Probably.”
“I’ll call the director tonight and tell him what she just said.
All of it.” He picks up the empty grocery bag and folds it, which is what Dylan does with his hands when he’s angry.
“And your old phone turned up, by the way. Housekeeping found it in a planter on the fourth floor of the hotel. Her floor.”
I’m not surprised, and that’s its own kind of tired.
“The hallway had a service door at the end of it,” I say. “She’d have needed one person and a phone.”
“She had both. And your calendar. That’s where the private dinners in the article came from, your own schedule with her name pasted into it.”
I sit with that for a second and find I’m past being surprised by her.
“And Flora,” Dylan says, quieter. “She asked me for a name. The morning she left. I gave her one.”
“Good.”
“You’re not angry.”
“She asked you because she trusts you. I’d rather she had somebody good.”
The doorbell rings.
We both freeze. Nobody comes to this house unannounced. I walk to the foyer, stepping around the bags, and open the door to a courier who doesn’t look at my face, and he hands me an envelope and goes back to his van, and I already know what’s inside before I open it.
Her signature at the bottom, neat and careful. The date is yesterday.
Her handwriting is on our marriage certificate too.
Same loops, same slight backward lean. She signed that one standing up, at a side table, with my hand on her lower back and a pen that skipped, and she laughed and said the pen was a bad omen and then signed it anyway because she has never once in her life let a bad omen stop her from doing something she’d decided on.
This one she signed sitting down, alone, in a room I’ve never been in, in a state I’ve never visited.
Somebody moved fast for her. Four days from our driveway to a signature in Vermont and a courier on my porch, and she didn’t waste one of them.
My phone rings. It’s her number.
I answer so fast I nearly drop the envelope. “Flora?”
“I know the papers arrived.” Her voice is flat and distant, thin with static, like she’s standing outside somewhere holding the phone up to find a signal. “The attorney’s office confirmed delivery.”
“Flora, please. We can talk about this.”
“There’s nothing to talk about. Sign them, Aster. Let me go.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You have to.”
“I don’t have to do anything except fight for my marriage.” I’m gripping the phone so hard my knuckles have gone white. “I’m not signing. Not today, not tomorrow. You’re going to have to look me in the eye and tell me it’s over, and even then I’m not sure I’ll believe you.”
Silence on the other end. I can hear her breathing, unsteady now.
“I canceled New York,” I say. “The morning you left. Before I’d gotten up off the floor.”
“That’s four days too late.”
“I know it is.”
“I’m coming to find you.”
“Aster, don’t.”
“I’m coming, Flora. And I’m not leaving until you talk to me. Really talk, not through paperwork. You owe me that much.”
“I don’t owe you anything.”
“Maybe not. But I owe you everything, and I’m going to prove it.”
I hang up before she can argue.
Dylan is watching me from the kitchen doorway. “You’re going after her.”
“I’m going after her.”
“Do you even know where she is?”
I’m already at the junk drawer, digging through warranties and takeout menus and the detritus of a life that suddenly seems very far away.
The emergency contact form she filled out when we got married, with her mother’s information on it and an address in Vermont.
Three years in this house and I have never once needed it.
“I know now.”
“And if she won’t see you?”
I stop at the bottom of the stairs and look back at him. He’s still holding the empty grocery bag.
“Then I’ll wait until she does. However long it takes.”
“Aster.” He says it to the bag, not to me. “When you get there. Don’t talk about the kiss. She already knows about the kiss.”