CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Courting My Wife
He didn’t contact me for two weeks.
I kept waiting for it. A text, a letter through Priya, flowers delivered to the gallery.
Nothing came. On the fourth day I checked my phone at lunch and felt foolish.
On the ninth day I understood that he was doing exactly what he’d said.
He was waiting for me, and leaving me room, and the silence was the room.
I didn’t know what to do with the room. For seven years he’d filled every space around me with his schedule, his family, his crises. Now he’d stepped back so completely that the decision about whether he came any closer sat entirely in my hands, and it was heavier than I’d expected.
In the meantime, I worked.
The exhibition opened on a Thursday in late April.
Elliot had called it Small Faces, which I thought was a little precious until I saw the wall with ten miniatures hung at eye level under careful lights, each with a card beside it.
The woman in the lace cap hung at the center.
Dana’s letter to the London archive had come back two days before the opening.
William Wood’s sitter book listed a portrait painted in May of 1794 of a Mrs. Eleanor Pryce, aged twenty-six, wife of a Bristol shipping merchant, in a lace cap and a gray-green ground.
“Eleanor,” Dana said, holding the letter as though it might evaporate. “She has a name.”
“She always had a name. We just found it.”
The card beside her read: Mrs. Eleanor Pryce, 1794, by William Wood. Identified and restored by V. Castellano.
I had chosen the name myself. Elliot had asked what I wanted on the cards, and I’d thought about it for a full day and then told him my maiden name. The card was about who had done the work, and I had done it as the girl who wrote that paper in college, long before anyone arranged anything for me.
I had not invited Dante to the opening.
I thought about it. I wrote the text three times and deleted it three times.
In the end I didn’t send it, and the reason I didn’t was simple and a little shameful: I wanted one evening that belonged completely to me, where nobody’s eyes in the room moved between me and my husband, where I wasn’t anyone’s wife or anyone’s cautionary tale.
I wanted to stand next to Eleanor Pryce and be the person who’d found her.
It was a good evening. Ruth Okafor came and brought a curator from one of her museums, a quiet man who spent ten minutes asking me about ivory supports and then gave me his card.
Dr. Fenwick came in a purple coat and cried a little in front of the lace cap and told Elliot, loudly, that she had said so in 2016.
Carol from across the hall came, which I hadn’t expected, and stood in front of the boy with the spaniel for a long time and said he looked like her grandson.
Luca and Nadia came and stayed an hour and bought nothing, because nothing was for sale, and Luca took a photograph of me beside the card with my name on it.
“For the family archive,” he said. “Somebody should start one that you’re actually in.”
At nine o’clock my phone buzzed. It was Dante, his first message in two weeks.
Luca sent me a picture. Congratulations. She’s beautiful. So are you. I won’t come unless you want me to.
I read it standing in the middle of the gallery with a glass of cheap prosecco in my hand, and I didn’t answer that night. But I didn’t delete it either, and when I got home I read it twice more in the green chair before I went to bed.
* * *
The next morning I texted him.
Thank you. I didn’t invite you because I wanted it to be mine. I hope you understand that.
He wrote back ten minutes later. I do. It should have been yours. I’m glad it was.
Two days after that, he asked if I’d have coffee with him. Café Lucia, any day I liked, fifteen minutes or an hour, my choice.
I said no.
I said it plainly. I wasn’t ready, and I had a deadline for a condition report due to Ruth by Friday, and I didn’t want to sit across a table from him and feel the ground go soft under me when I was trying to stand on it.
He wrote back: Understood. I’ll ask again in a couple of weeks, if that’s all right. You can tell me not to.
I didn’t tell him not to.
Twelve days later he asked again, and this time I said yes.
* * *
We met at Café Lucia on a Tuesday morning at eight, before the gallery opened. He was there before me, and he’d ordered nothing this time. He’d waited to ask.
“What are you working on?” he said when we’d sat down.
I had expected him to ask how I was. Or about the divorce, or his mother, or anything to do with us. Instead he asked about my work, and he sounded as if he wanted to know.
So I told him. Ruth had sent me a job through her museum, a condition survey of forty miniatures in a private collection that was being donated.
It was painstaking, dull, wonderful work, and I was being paid for it, properly, by the hour, by someone who didn’t know or care that I had once been married into anything.
I talked for ten minutes about ivory warping and humidity logs before I noticed he was leaning forward with his chin on his hand, listening.
“You’re bored,” I said.
“I’m really not.”
“You’re being polite.”
“Vivienne, I’ve sat through forty years of my uncles talking about shipping containers. This is the most interesting conversation I’ve had since March.” He turned his cup. “What happens to the warped ones?”
“Depends how bad. Some you humidify slowly and flatten under weight. Some you leave alone, because forcing them flat would crack the paint.”
“Some things you leave alone because forcing them would break them,” he repeated. He said it slowly, turning it over, as though he meant to come back to it later on his own.
He asked about Eleanor Pryce. He’d read about her and looked up William Wood, and he’d found out on his own that Wood had died young and his sitter books were in a London library, and he’d found out that Bristol shipping merchants in the 1790s were mostly involved in things he said he wouldn’t discuss before nine in the morning. I laughed. It surprised both of us.
At eight forty-five his phone buzzed on the table. I saw him look at the screen, and I saw the old expression cross his face, the tightening that meant something needed him.
He turned the phone face down.
“Do you need to take that?”
“It’s Luca. He can handle it.” He looked at me. “Unless you’d like me to go. I don’t want to keep you.”
“I have fifteen minutes.”
“Then I have fifteen minutes.”
The phone buzzed again. He left it where it was.
* * *
We saw each other perhaps once a week through May and June. Never at the house. Never at a family event. Always somewhere I chose, and always ending when I said it was time to go.
He remembered things: the almond croissants at Lucia’s that I liked better than the plain ones, the name of Carol’s terrier and his feud with mail trucks, the Friday Ruth’s report was due.
The second time he walked me back to the gallery, he asked whether Elliot minded him standing outside, and I said it was a public sidewalk, and he said he knew that, he’d just wanted to ask.
He asked about everything. That was the strangest part.
He asked where I wanted to sit, and whether I’d rather walk or take a cab, and whether it was all right if he mentioned his father’s hip surgery or whether I’d rather not hear about the family.
I had never in my life been asked so many questions by one man.
At first they grated on me. It felt performed, too careful, a man who’d read a book about apologizing.
By the fourth week I understood he simply didn’t trust his own assumptions anymore, and he was relearning me from the beginning, one question at a time.
Once, in June, walking along the river after dinner, he said, “I have news, but it’s about the family, and I don’t want to dump family things on you if you’d rather not.”
“Tell me.”
“My mother called me Sunday. She wanted to have Easter at the house next year. The way she always did. Walk in, take over the kitchen.” He glanced at me. “I told her no. I told her if Easter’s at our house, it’ll be because we decided to host it, and if it’s not, she’s welcome to host it at hers.”
“Our house.”
He stopped walking. “I’m sorry. That was an assumption.”
“It’s all right. I noticed it. I’m not angry about it.”
“It’s still your house. Legally. Whatever you decide.” He started walking again, slower. “She took it better than I expected. She said, then I suppose I’ll have to learn how to do the lamb. I nearly fell over.”
“Your mother has never once cooked the Easter lamb.”
“I know. It should be a disaster. I’m looking forward to it.”
I laughed, and he looked over at me, and for a second neither of us looked away.
That was the problem, of course. It had never stopped being the problem.
I had left him, and I’d been right to leave him, and I had built a life that didn’t need him in it.
And none of that had done anything at all to change the fact that when he laughed on a riverwalk on a June evening, with his sleeves pushed up and the light going gold on the water, I wanted him so badly my hands ached.
I didn’t trust it. I didn’t trust the wanting, because I’d spent seven years mistaking wanting him for being safe with him.
But it didn’t go away because I distrusted it.
It sat there every time he held a door and stepped back to let me through.
Every time he asked instead of arranged. Every time he put his phone face down.
* * *
In early July, he came to my apartment for the first time.
I invited him. I’d been thinking about it for a week. We’d had dinner at a Lebanese place near the gallery, and it had rained, and we were standing under the green awning of my building with water running off its edge.
“Would you like to come up?” I said. “For coffee. Only coffee.”
He looked at me for a long moment. “Are you sure?”
“I asked you, didn’t I?”