Chapter 15 #2
"I want to say what I'd ask for, though.
Not to get it. So it's said out loud in a room instead of managed into the right week.
" He turned the pencil over once. "I would like to be married to you.
Not the way we were. I'm aware I have no standing to want it and I'm aware what I did in September, and I'm not going to describe it as anything other than what it is, which is that I looked at my own wife for seven years and never once thought to ask her what she wanted, and then I put my daughter on a schedule and handed it to her in a corridor. "
Clara sat very still.
"That's not an argument," Adrian said. "There isn't an argument. I know that."
"Then why say it."
"Because you asked me a question you'd been not-asking for seven years," he said, "and it seemed like the wrong night to keep something back."
Clara drove home at eleven and got as far as the on-ramp at Castillo before she had to pull over into the lot of a closed gas station.
She sat there with the engine running.
What she felt was not happiness and it was not relief and it was very specifically not the softening she had been braced against since November, and it took her a long time to find the word for it, and the word was fear.
Not of him. She checked that carefully, sitting in a parking lot at eleven at night, and it was not that.
She was afraid of herself.
Because she had sat in that room for two hours and had been, for the entire time, completely and continuously happy — not moved, not tempted, not persuaded.
Happy. In the plain, unremarkable, sitting-in-a-room-with-someone way that she had assumed at thirty-eight was simply not available to her, and that she had gone nine years inside a marriage without once experiencing.
And that was the thing that frightened her, because it meant she could not tell herself the story anymore.
She could not say it was duty, not love, which she had been saying since December.
She could not say I could build a whole life from here, which was true, and which she had proved, and which had turned out not to be the question.
She was going to have to choose, on the merits, with a company in her own name and a man in Ojai holding thirty-one pages and a bound book of her own handwriting in a shoebox under her bed — and there was no version left where the choice got made for her by his failure.
Clara Whitmore sat in a closed gas station on Castillo Street and put her forehead on the wheel and said, out loud:
"Oh, no."
She walked down to Imani's on the Sunday and told her everything.
It took forty minutes. She started with the padded envelope at the Ellwood in July and went all the way through — the four hundred and eleven cards, the nineteen pages in his handwriting, the storage rooms, the forty-one letters, the woman in Los Osos who had kept a drawer of Clara's paper for nine years.
The three answers and a shelf number. The second week of November.
Two hours in a room with no camera in it.
Imani did not interrupt once, which was the second time that year.
When Clara finished, Imani got up and put the kettle on and stood with her back to the room for long enough that Clara said, "Say it."
"I'm choosing my words, which I have never done in my life, so give me a minute."
She turned around.
"That's the best thing I've ever heard a man do," Imani said.
Clara had not expected that. She actually flinched.
"Don't look at me like that. I'm not soft." Imani leaned against the counter. "I've been waiting a year for that man to do one single thing that wasn't about being seen doing it, and he went in a basement for five months. Fine. Credit. It's real."
"But."
"But." Imani folded her arms. "Clara, I need you to hear the next part and I need you to not defend him while I say it, because you've started doing that and you don't notice."
"I don't —"
"You did it twice in the last forty minutes." Flat. "Okay. Here it is. He spent five and a half months learning who you are." She let that sit. "And you were married to him for seven years."
The kettle started to make its noise.
"He is currently working extremely hard at knowing a woman he could have just asked," Imani said.
"Any Tuesday. For nine years. And I want you to notice that he only started once you were gone and once the company was on fire and once your name was on a register — and I am not saying that's why.
I don't think it's why. I've watched the man and I don't think it's why. "
"Then what are you saying?"
"I'm saying you don't get a prize for reading the manual after you've wrecked the car."
Clara sat with that.
"That's fair," she said.
"It's more than fair, it's true, and here's the rest of it." Imani came and sat down across from her. "You are going to walk into that dinner in thirteen days and you are going to have to decide something, and I want you to decide it on the right question."
"Which is?"
"Not whether he's changed. He has. I'll sign that." She put a hand flat on the table. "The question is whether you want it. That's all. That's the only question there's ever been and everybody in your life has been helping you avoid it for a year, including me."
Clara looked at the table.
"I don't know how to want things," she said.
"I know, baby," Imani said. "That's what he took."
Thirteen days to the Founders' Dinner.
Ten days after that, an answer owed to a man in Ojai.
Clara drove home at dusk with the window down and the road going gold ahead of her, and she thought, for the first time since the twentieth of September, not about what had been done to her.
She thought: what do I actually want.
And found, with something close to panic, that she had absolutely no idea, and that nobody was going to be able to tell her, and that she had thirteen days.