CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT #2
He followed me up three flights of stairs. At the door of 3B, he waited while I unlocked it, and then he waited again in the doorway until I said, “Come in.”
He stood in my living room the way everyone did the first time, looking. At the green chair. The oak table with its water ring. The lopsided bookshelf with the matchbook under one leg. Mia’s drawing on the refrigerator. The Portofino photograph on the shelf, the two of us squinting into the sun.
He looked at that one longest.
“You took it,” he said.
“It happened. I wasn’t going to pretend it didn’t.”
He nodded slowly. He didn’t touch anything. He didn’t sit until I told him he could sit, and then he sat on one of the kitchen chairs, not the green one, as though he understood without being told that the green one was mine.
I made coffee in the mismatched mugs. He got the lighthouse. He held it in both hands and looked at it, and something in his expression softened.
“This place is you,” he said. “All of it. I’ve never seen a room that was only you.”
“Luca said the same thing.”
“Luca’s smarter than I give him credit for.” He looked around again. “I’d have hated that chair. Six months ago. I’d have said it was worn out.”
“And now?”
“Now I think it’s the best chair in the building, and I’d never presume to sit in it.”
I laughed, and then I stopped, because he was looking at me, and the rain was loud on the window, and I’d stopped being able to tell how far across the kitchen he actually was.
I put my mug down. I crossed the three steps between us. He stayed exactly where he was, in the kitchen chair, looking up at me, and I understood that he would not move toward me unless I told him to, that he’d sit there all night if that was what I wanted.
I put my hand on his face. His jaw was rough under my palm. He closed his eyes.
“Vivienne,” he said, very low. “You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t.”
I kissed him.
It had been three months. It felt like much longer and like no time at all. He made a sound against my mouth I remembered from seven years of mornings, and his hands came up and stopped, hovering at my waist, not quite touching, until I took them in mine and put them there.
“Are you sure?” he said again, against my lips.
“Stop asking,” I said. “No. Keep asking. Just not right now.”
He laughed, shakily, and stood, and I took his hand and led him down the short hallway to the bedroom, past the lemon shower curtain, and at the door I turned and kissed him again, slower, and he let me set the pace, all of it, and I closed the door behind us.
* * *
I woke in gray early light to the sound of rain still falling and a weight on the other side of the mattress, and for one disoriented second I thought I was back in the house, that the last three months had been a long bad dream.
Then I saw the lopsided bookshelf in the corner, and the green sweater I’d dropped over the chair, and I knew exactly where I was.
He was awake. He was lying on his side facing me, with one arm under the pillow, watching me.
“You’re staring,” I said, my voice rough with sleep.
“I’m allowed,” he said. And then, after a moment, more carefully, “Am I?”
“You’re allowed.”
We lay there for a while without speaking. The rain eased. Down on the street, Carol was taking Pickles out, and I could hear her telling him to hurry up because she wasn’t standing in the wet all morning.
“I should tell you something,” Dante said eventually.
“All right.”
“I don’t think last night means anything it doesn’t mean. I want to be clear about that. I’m not going to assume you’re coming home, or that we’re fixed, or anything else. If you want me to leave right now, I’ll leave, and I’ll wait for you to call me.”
I looked at him in the gray light. He meant it. I could see that he’d been lying there awake working out how to say it without it sounding like a question.
“I don’t want you to leave right now,” I said. “I want coffee.”
“I can do that. If you’ll show me where things are.”
“You don’t know where things are?”
“It’s your kitchen. I’m not going to go through your cupboards.”
He made coffee while I sat at the oak table in my robe and told him which cupboard, which drawer, how much.
He put the lighthouse mug in front of me without thinking, and then caught himself and asked whether I wanted a different one, and I said the lighthouse was fine, and he looked so relieved I almost laughed.
He left at nine. At the door, he stopped with his hand on the frame.
“Can I call you tomorrow?”
After seven years of him never once asking whether he could call me, the question undid something in me I hadn’t known was still knotted.
“Yes,” I said. “Call me tomorrow.”
He did. At seven in the evening, when I’d have been home from the gallery, and he asked how my day had been and listened to me complain for twenty minutes about a curator’s humidity requirements, and at the end he asked whether I’d like to have dinner on Saturday, and I said I would.
I did not move home.
We slept together twice more that summer.
Each time he asked. Each time, in the morning, he made sure I knew it didn’t mean I owed him anything, until finally I told him that if he said it once more I’d throw the lighthouse mug at him.
He laughed and stopped saying it. He didn’t stop meaning it. I could see that he didn’t.
At the end of July, Priya called to ask whether I still wanted her to hold the divorce petition in draft or whether I’d made a decision.
“Hold it,” I said.
“For how long?”
“I’ll tell you when I know.”
* * *