20. Flora
— ? —
Flora
I’ve been to enough of these to know exactly what I’m walking into, and knowing doesn’t make it any easier.
The venue is a converted warehouse in the Arts District, all exposed brick and industrial beams softened by a few thousand fairy lights and floral arrangements that probably cost more than my car.
The guest list reads like a who’s who of everybody in this town, actors and directors and producers milling around with champagne flutes, networking and schmoozing and pretending they aren’t all calculating what everybody else can do for their careers.
Aster is beside me in a black suit with no tie, which is his version of dressing down, and he has been holding some part of me since we got out of the car.
My hand, my elbow, the small of my back.
He isn’t doing it for the cameras. He did it in the car too, where there were no cameras, all the way down the freeway with his thumb moving across my knuckles like he was checking I was still attached.
I’m wearing red tonight. Deep crimson silk that makes my skin glow and my eyes look greener than they are.
I told him green last night, with my head on his chest, and I think I even meant it.
Then I opened the closet tonight and reached past it.
Aster wanted me in green, because he always wants me in green, and I chose this instead for a reason.
Green is soft. Green is what I wear when I want to disappear into his shadow and let him have the room.
Tonight I don’t want to disappear. Tonight I want to be seen.
“You look incredible,” Aster says quietly, his hand warm on the bare skin of my lower back. The dress dips low there, held together by two thin gold chains, and he hasn’t stopped touching them since we left the house.
“I know.”
He laughs, a short real one. “Confident.”
“I’m about to face down the woman who tried to end my marriage. Confidence is required.” I scan the room, cataloging faces, looking for the one I’m dreading. “Where is she?”
“Ten o’clock. By the champagne tower.”
We’ve been here forty minutes and I’ve counted nine people who looked at me and then looked away, and four who looked at me and then said something to the person next to them.
There’s a particular expression that goes across a face when somebody recognizes you from a scandal rather than from a red carpet.
It’s the same one you’d give a car with a dent in it.
The difference between tonight and every other night I’ve stood in a room like this one is that I’m looking back.
Three years I spent finding the least occupied corner and being pleasant to whoever wandered into it.
Tonight I’m standing in the middle of the floor with my shoulders back, and two separate people have come over to say hello, and I have watched both of them decide I wasn’t going to be embarrassing about it.
I turn my head slightly and there she is.
Cecilia is holding court inside a circle of admirers, dressed in white because of course she is.
The wronged woman. The innocent party. Her blonde hair is swept up to show off her neck and her makeup is camera-ready and she’s laughing at something somebody said, completely at ease inside her own lie.
Our eyes meet across the room.
She smiles. Slow and satisfied, a woman who thinks she’s already won.
Then she starts walking toward us.
“Incoming,” I murmur.
“I see her.”
“Keep your hands where I can see them. I don’t want to have to explain to anyone why you hit a woman at a movie premiere.”
“No promises.”
Cecilia reaches us in a cloud of expensive perfume and manufactured sweetness, and she doesn’t come alone. There’s a man on her arm, silver at the temples, the producer whose name is on the invitation, and he has the look of somebody who agreed to this in a car and is regretting it in a room.
“Aster. Flora.” She lingers on my name like it’s something she found on her shoe. “How brave of you both to come tonight.”
“Cecilia.” Aster’s voice is flat enough to skate on. “Interesting interview.”
“Thank you. It was very cathartic.” She turns her attention to me, looking me over slowly, an assessment designed to make me feel small. “I have to say, Flora, you look tired. The stress must be just terrible.”
I don’t answer her at the volume she’s using. I answer her at the volume you’d use to be heard by the twenty people standing closest to us, because I decided in my mother’s garden that I was finished having this conversation quietly.
“You kissed a man who pushed you off in two seconds,” I say, “and then you sold the photograph. That’s the whole story.
That’s all that happened. You’ve spent a month building a tragedy around it on television, and everybody in this room has already worked out that it’s a tragedy with one person in it. ”
The nearest conversations stop. Not all of them. Enough.
“You’re upset,” Cecilia says smoothly, but her hand has gone to her earring. “Maybe you should sit down. Have some water. You’re looking flushed.”
“I’m not upset. I’m bored.” I take a glass off the tray going past and drink from it, deliberately, in front of her.
“I was upset in a foyer at two in the morning. I was upset in my mother’s kitchen.
I got all of that done a couple of weeks ago, in private, where it belongs.
What I am now is a woman at a party watching another woman perform grief about a marriage she was never in. ”
Her smile is still on. It’s the only thing on her face that is.
“You could have just talked to him, you know,” I add, because I’ve started and I’m not stopping.
“He’d have been kind about it. He’s kind about everything, it’s exhausting.
Instead you decided the fastest route to a man was through his wife’s life, and now here we both are at a party neither of us is enjoying, and only one of us gets to leave with him. ”
The producer takes his hand off her elbow. It’s a small movement. I watch her feel it.
“Aster,” she says, and it comes out too high. “Tell her.”
“Tell her what?” He hasn’t raised his voice.
He’s holding my hand and he hasn’t looked at Cecilia once since she opened her mouth.
“That you waited for me outside a bathroom? That I said no four different ways before you put your hand around my neck? She knows. She knew in the foyer. She’s the only person in this room who’s known the whole time. ”
Then he turns, and I see what he’s doing about a half second before he does it.
The director is ten feet away, pretending to talk to somebody, listening to every word. Aster walks the ten feet with my hand still in his.
“I’m out,” he says. “The rest of the promo. New York’s gone, and now it’s the rest of it. The LA press, the awards push, all of it. I’ll finish the record because I said I would, and I’ll do it from my house. Anything with a camera and her in the frame, I’m not in the frame.”
The director opens his mouth.
“I know what it costs,” Aster says. “Send me the number. I’ll pay it.”
He says it in a room full of people, and that’s what I’ll keep. Not that he said it, because he’s said things to me alone for two weeks. That he said it here, in front of the man who signs his checks and the woman in the photograph and forty phones, and that he didn’t lower his voice to do it.
The director looks at Aster for a long second.
Then he looks past him, at Cecilia, and says, not loudly, but not quietly either, “She’s off everything.
Should have been the day Dylan told me.” And he walks away from her toward the bar, and the producer goes with him, and Cecilia stands very still in the space where a circle used to be.
Somebody near the bar says her name, not to her, and she hears it, and I watch her decide not to turn around.
“Enjoy him while it lasts,” she says to me, low.
The last time she said that to me I stood there with nothing in my mouth and let her walk away, and I’ve thought about that silence more times than I want to admit to.
“I intend to,” I tell her. “And if he ever does what you said he did, I’ll leave again.
I’ve done it once. I know where the door is.
” I look at her for a second longer. “That’s the difference between you and me.
I can walk out of a room. You’ve never once in your life been in one you were allowed to leave. ”
I take Aster’s arm and we go, and nobody stops us, and the crowd does the thing it does, which is open up in front of us and close behind, and I don’t look back to see whether she’s still standing there. I know she is.
We make it as far as the valet stand before my legs decide they’re done.
“Sit,” Aster says, and I sit on the low wall by the planters in a two-thousand-dollar dress, and he crouches in front of me with his hands on my knees while I shake.
“That was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever watched,” he says. “And also the hottest. I’m very conflicted right now.”
“Save it. There are still cameras.”
“Let them.” He doesn’t take his hands off my knees. “You were magnificent.”
“I was terrified.”
“Those can both be true.”
Across the street the cameras have found us, and one of them shouts my name, not his, which is new. “Flora! Did you forgive him?”
I look straight down the lens. “Ask me next year.”
Aster makes a sound next to me that is almost a laugh and mostly not.
The car comes. Dylan is driving it himself, which he didn’t tell me he’d do, and he doesn’t say a word about the party. He just looks at us in the mirror, once, and something in his face that has been tight for a month lets go.
We’re on the freeway when Aster reaches into his jacket and takes out an envelope.
I know what it is before he unfolds it. It’s been folded and unfolded so many times the crease is going white.
“I’ve had these since the porch,” he says.
“In the cabin, on the plane, in my jacket tonight. I’ve been carrying them around like they’d protect me from something.
” He puts them in my lap. “I’m done holding them.
Sign them or tear them up. Whichever one it is, I’m still going to be standing in the kitchen tomorrow morning making your coffee.
But it’s yours to decide, and I’m finished pretending the decision is mine to refuse. ”
I look down at my own signature on the last page, the loops, the backward lean, a woman in a room in Vermont deciding something with a pen.
The freeway lights go over us in long slow stripes.
I don’t answer him. I fold the papers back along the crease and hold them in both hands, and I don’t say anything the whole way home.