Chapter 16 #2
"And then a girl on a bus asked me a question at two in the morning."
He stopped for a second.
"I want to say this part right," he said, "because it's the ugly one and I've had a year to find the words and I still don't have good ones.
"I wasn't in love with her. I never was, not for one hour. I never touched her, and I've said that before like it was worth something and it isn't worth anything, and I'm not saying it now to get credit. I'm saying it because it makes it worse and you're entitled to the worse version.
"I gave her everything I'd stopped giving you.
The two in the morning. The scared part.
The truth about the drawer. I told a twenty-seven-year-old girl I'd never write anything good again, and I did it because she had no idea who I was supposed to be, so it didn't cost me anything to be a man who was afraid in front of her.
"You'd have known what it cost. That's the whole crime. I gave the middle of myself to somebody it was cheap with, because with you it was expensive."
The refrigerator cycled on and neither of them heard it.
"And then in May," he said, "when I knew she had those tapes — I want you to have this one straight too, because I've been trying to make it into something better for a year and it will not go.
"I sat in a parking lot in Wichita on the ninth of May and I worked out what would happen if I told you, and what would happen if I didn't. That's not a man in a panic. That's arithmetic. I did arithmetic about your heart and then I came home and made you coffee for six weeks.
"That's the man you married, Georgia. Not the one on the bus — that one's just a fool. The one in the parking lot doing sums. That's the one I've spent this year trying to get out of my own house, and I'm not all the way finished and I might never be."
He sat back.
"That's all of it," he said. "There's not any more. If there was I'd tell you, and I'd tell you first, and it wouldn't matter what it cost me."
Georgia sat at her kitchen table with tears running down her face and did not wipe them off.
"Four years," she said.
"Yeah."
"You had that in you for four years and you sat across this table from me."
"Yes."
"I'd have — " Her voice went. She let it.
"Jesse, I'd have taken that. That's the thing that's going to keep me up for the rest of my life.
If you had walked in this kitchen four years ago and said the drawer's empty, I'd have put my whole life down and sat with you in it.
I'd have been glad. Do you understand what I'm telling you? I'd have been glad to be needed."
"I know it. I've known it since about October."
"Then why —"
"Because I'd rather have been a fraud in front of eighteen thousand strangers," Jesse said, "than be an ordinary man in front of you."
She got up.
She went and stood at the sink with her back to the room and put both hands on the edge of it, and outside the light was going long and orange over the pasture the way it had a year ago on the worst day of her life.
She said, "There's a deal on that table."
"I heard."
"Two records and forty-two rooms and I'd be gone fourteen months out of twenty-four. They want an answer by Friday."
"That's a hell of a thing."
"I haven't answered it," she said. "I'm not going to answer it today, and I'm not going to answer it in this conversation, and you do not get a vote."
"Take it," Jesse said.
She turned around.
"I didn't ask you."
"I know you didn't, and I'm not voting. I'm telling you what I want, because you told me a year ago I never say what I want, I just arrange things.
" He had his hands on the table. "So here it is.
I want you to take it. Not for me — I'd be in a house by myself for a year and a half and it'd be about what I deserve.
I want you to take it because you're thirty-eight and you're better than everybody and I've had the last sixteen years of it. "
"Marlee says it'd ruin the record."
"Then don't take it," he said immediately. "Marlee knows and I don't. I've been out of that business a year and I was never any good at the part of it that mattered."
Georgia stood against the sink and looked at him.
"You just changed your mind in four seconds," she said.
"I did."
"That's not very impressive, Jesse."
"No," he agreed. "But it's the truth, and you've had about enough impressive out of me."
And that — after a year, after the tapes and the locks and the ballroom, after everything — was the thing that finally did it.
Not the confession. Not Nashville.
A man sitting at her kitchen table changing his mind out loud in front of her, badly, with no performance in it at all.
"Here's how we're going to live," she said.
He looked up fast.
"Georgia —"
"Don't talk. You'll ruin it and I've only got it once.
" She stayed at the sink. "The three things I said in April stand, and they're not conditions, they're a description, and I'm not going to be checking on you.
This is not probation and I'm not your parole officer and if we ever get to a place where I'm supervising you, then we've failed and we should have stayed apart.
"I'm going to work. You're going to be in this house.
Some years you'll be gone and some years I will.
We're going to have an ordinary marriage between two people who are about equally difficult, and I am done — " her voice cracked and she pushed through it — "I am done being the woman who waits.
Not for you and not for a label and not for anybody.
If I'm here it's because I want to be here. "
"Okay."
"Say something back. Don't just say okay."
"All right," Jesse said, and he stood up. "Then I want two things and one of them's going to make you mad."
"Go on."
"One. You never mention the year again. Not once, not at Christmas, not in a fight. It's not a thing I'm serving and it's not a thing you're owed, it's a year I'm taking because I need it. If it ever gets to be a debt I'd rather not have paid it."
"All right."
"Two." He came around the end of the table. "You said you'd leave quiet. You said it in April — I won't fight with you about it, it'll be quiet, there won't be a conversation."
"I meant it."
"I know you did. I'm asking you not to." He stopped four feet from her, which was where he had stopped every time since February.
"You can leave. Any day of your life, for any reason, and I'll help you load the truck.
But you don't get to go quiet, Georgia. You say it to my face and you give me the fight.
I'll take the leaving. I will not take one more year of a woman in this house handling something by herself. "
Georgia stood at the sink with her hands behind her on the edge of it.
"That's a real thing to ask me," she said.
"It's the only thing I want."
"You know that's the hardest one on the list."
"I know exactly how hard it is," Jesse said. "That's why it's mine."
She crossed the four feet.