Chapter 18 #2
"You were right, and you're allowed to be right and it's allowed to have turned out like this.
" Clara took her friend's hands. "You told me not to go back to him and every single reason you gave was correct.
I went back anyway, with my eyes open, and I got this.
Both of those are true and I'm not going to let you take yours back to make me comfortable. "
Imani looked at the ceiling of the Santa Barbara County Superior Court for a second.
"Okay," she said. "Then I'll take the other thing."
"What other thing?"
"That I was the only person in your entire life who ever told you to take something." She squeezed hard. "And look at you now."
They went to lunch.
It was a completely ordinary lunch, at a completely ordinary place near the courthouse, and it went on for three hours, and at some point Willa and Imani got into an argument about a television program that neither Clara nor Adrian had heard of, which became a two-way alliance against the adults, and Clara sat with her arm along the back of her husband's chair and watched her daughter be seventeen and obnoxious in public and thought: this. This is the whole thing.
Adrian turned his head and said, quietly, "What?"
"Nothing."
"Clara."
"I'm allowed a private thought."
"You're not, actually," he said. "That was the deal. You said you'd answer everything."
And she leaned over and told him, in his ear, exactly what she had been thinking — all of it, unedited, which took about a minute — and watched his face do the thing it did now, which was not to arrange itself at all.
Here is what an ordinary week looked like, because that is the part that turned out to matter.
Willa lived with them. That had not been assumed — she was seventeen and had been asked, properly, at the kitchen table, whether she wanted Carpinteria or the apartment near her school with her father's assistant checking on her, and she had said "Carpinteria, obviously, what is wrong with you people" with such genuine offense that both adults had had to leave the room.
She drove now, badly. She had a boy she would not discuss and a job at a bookstore in Summerland that she loved and that paid nothing.
Sunday nights the three of them ate at the long table, which had come out of Ladera Lane and which nobody had eaten at nine times in seven years and which now got used every week.
Willa's rule: phones in the drawer. Adrian's rule: nobody talks about the company.
Clara's rule — and she had had to be asked four separate times, in April, before she produced one, and had produced it with the specific discomfort of a woman who had never in her life been asked what she wanted from a Sunday — was that everybody had to say one true thing.
They were extremely bad at it for about two months.
By September they were good at it, and Adrian had said things at that table that Clara did not believe he had said out loud to another human being in forty-eight years, and Willa had once said, into a silence, "I still get scared you'll go," and Clara had said, "I know.
I'd be scared too," and had not promised anything, and Willa had nodded and passed the salt.
That was the marriage. Not the courthouse and not the letterhead. A long table on a Sunday and three people who had all been trained out of saying things, saying them badly, once a week, on purpose.
Margot married someone in the spring, in the valley, and Clara knows this because it was in a magazine that ran a photograph of a hotel Clara's company does not own, and she looked at it for about four seconds and felt precisely nothing, and then she put the magazine in the recycling and went to look at a roof.
That is the entire remaining footprint of a woman who once took up six months of her life.
Twice a year, maybe, the name goes past and lands nowhere.
That is what the distance looks like from here.
Malcolm did not come to the courthouse.
He was not asked. That was Willa's decision and she made it herself, out loud, at the kitchen table, in one sentence, and neither adult argued with her.
He sends a card at Christmas. Adrian reads it and puts it in a drawer and does not discuss it, and once, in June, Clara asked him whether he wanted to and he said, "Not yet," and she said, "Okay," and that was allowed to be the answer.
Some things do not close. She had spent a year expecting the last act of her life to tie every thread and had discovered that it does not, and that this is survivable, and that a man who can say not yet to his wife instead of it's fine is a different man entirely.
That night, in the house in Carpinteria, with Willa at a friend's and the whole place theirs, Clara came out of the shower and found her husband sitting on the end of the bed with his tie off, doing nothing at all.
"You're brooding."
"I'm not brooding. I'm forty-eight and I've had a large day."
"You're brooding."
"I'm brooding," Adrian admitted.
She stood in front of him and he put his hands on her hips through the towel and leaned his forehead against her sternum, which he did now, often, and which had been the single most surprising development of two years.
"Say it," Clara said.
"I keep thinking about the corridor."
"Adrian —"
"No, it's fine. It's not — " He looked up.
"It isn't guilt. I've done guilt and I've bored both of us with it.
It's just that today a judge asked my daughter a question and she said yes, I've read it, twice, and two years ago I put her on a schedule and handed it to you between a lamb service and a speech. "
Clara put her hands in his hair.
"Yes," she said. "You did."
"That's it. That's all I wanted to say."
"Good." She tipped his head back. "Because I'm not going to tell you it was all right. It wasn't all right and it's never going to be all right and I'd like you to stop waiting for me to say it is."
"I'm not waiting."
"You are a bit."
"I am a bit," he said.
"So stop." She bent down and kissed him. "It's the worst thing anyone has ever done to me and I've built a life on the other side of it and both of those are true at once and neither of them is going anywhere."
He got the towel off her and pulled her down and she landed on him laughing, which was the thing that still astonished her — that this was funny now, that they got tangled and got it wrong and made noise and did not do any of it beautifully.
Nine years of a marriage where the sex had been technically excellent and completely silent.
Two years of this instead, which was neither.
"Wait — your elbow —"
"Sorry."
"That's my ear, Adrian."
"I'm aware of where it is, I'm dealing with a strap."
"There isn't a strap. It's a towel."
He stopped and looked at her, and both of them lost about a minute.
Then he rolled her under him and it stopped being funny.
He took his time the way he did now — which had been the largest single change in two years and the one nobody would ever know about.
There was a version of Adrian Whitmore that had existed for nine years in that bed, and he had been confident and skilled and entirely elsewhere, and Clara had never once suspected there was anything missing because she had never once been present herself.
This one kept his eyes open.
That was the whole difference and it had taken her about six months to be able to stand it.
He looked at her the entire time, in the low light from the hall that they left on now, and the first dozen times she had wanted to turn her face away and had made herself not, the way you make yourself not flinch at a needle.
"Where are you?" he said, against her mouth.
"Here."
"Good."
"I'm here." She got a hand up into his hair and pulled, which she had learned in March that he liked and had spent two weeks being too shy to do. "Ask me."
"What do you want?"
And Clara — who had spent a decade lying silently in the dark being extremely good at working out what somebody else wanted — told him. Out loud, in plain words, in a full sentence, twice, without softening either one.
She got it both times.
It went on for a while, and it was very good, and the reason it was very good had nothing to do with technique and both of them knew it.
He had been technically excellent nine years ago.
What he was now was paying attention — stopping when her breath changed, going back, staying with something long past the point where he would once have moved on to a thing he preferred, and once, when she made a sound he had not heard before, actually laughing with delight against her collarbone and saying, "What was that? Do that again."
"I don't know what I did."
"Well, find out," Adrian said, "because I'd like it on the record."
She found out.
Near the end she got her heels against the backs of his thighs and said his name, and he said, "I know," and then, "Clara, look at me," and she opened her eyes and did — and it went through her like the floor dropping, and she came with her eyes open and her hand fisted in his hair and his name still in her mouth, and heard herself, and did not manage it, and did not make it easy, and did not do one single thing for anybody but herself.
He followed her about four seconds later with his forehead against hers, saying something she did not catch and did not need to.