Chapter 13 – June
JUNE
He's home at five-forty.
I hear the lock from the bedroom, where I'm changing out of the flat shoes and the chalk, and I stand there in one shoe listening to him come down the hall, and he's alone, and he's early, and he's carrying grocery bags. I can hear the bags.
"Don't come out," he calls. "Twenty minutes. Don't come out, I mean it, I'm doing a thing."
I put on the other shoe and then take them both off and sit on the edge of the bed and grade four essays on Candy's dog, and through the wall I hear him swearing at the stove, and at six-oh-five he knocks on the bedroom door.
He's taken his jacket off and rolled his sleeves. He holds out his hand.
The dining table is cleared. Every brochure, every swatch, every folder with a tab.
He's put them in the study, he tells me later, in a box, labeled, and he's put the two dying centerpieces down the chute.
On the table there are two places, the good plates, two candles from a drawer I didn't know he knew about, and a pot in the middle on a trivet, and in the pot is the pasta.
The pasta. The one thing he can make. Garlic, oil, red pepper, too much parmesan, the dinner we ate three nights a week in the old kitchen when the first store was losing money and we counted the change in a jar. The garlic is burnt. It's always been burnt. I've never told him and I never will.
"Phone," he says, and takes it out of his pocket and walks it to the kitchen, and opens the drawer by the fridge where we keep the takeout menus, and puts it in, and closes the drawer, and comes back. "Off. Since five. Denise has the driver's number for a building fire and nothing else."
"You cooked."
"I cooked one thing. I've been cooking it for eighteen years and I've never gotten better at it." He pulls out my chair. "Sit. Happy anniversary."
I sit. He pours the wine, and it's the Assyrtiko, the one from the fridge, the one I bought in June and never opened, and he must have found it in the fridge and understood what it was, and he doesn't say anything about it, and neither do I.
We eat. He asks about the boy who won't read and I tell him the boy took the book out of my hands on Tuesday and said "You're doing the voices wrong" and read the next two pages himself in a voice that was, in fairness, better.
Matt laughs so hard he has to put his fork down.
He tells me the spring line's first ad ran in Milan and the shoes look wrong in it and it's too late.
I tell him about Harold's cardigan. He tells me about a woman on the board who's started calling him Matthew in a tone that means she's going to make him fire someone.
The candles get shorter. Nothing buzzes, nothing lights up, and at one point, halfway through the wine, he stops with his glass in the air and just looks at me across the table for four or five seconds without talking.
"What," I say.
"Nothing. You. This." He drinks. "I forgot this was available."
There's a card by my plate. Heavy cream stock, his handwriting. Seventeen years, it says on the front. Inside it says: I'm not going to write a speech because you'd grade it. I'm here. I'm going to keep being here. M.
I put it in my lap and keep my hand on it.
So when it comes, I'm not braced. That's what I'll keep turning over, later, in a hotel room with the curtains open. I wasn't braced. I'd put everything down. I'd let the day be the day.
"Okay," he says, and pushes his plate an inch away, and puts both forearms on the table, and I know the posture.
It's the one he uses on suppliers when he's about to announce good news that's already been decided.
"I've got news. I wanted to wait for tonight because I wanted you to hear it here, from me, properly, not from Tanya, not from a text. "
"Okay."
"Thirty-eight B."
I wait.
"The Kestlers' unit. Two floors down. The one with the terrace on the east side, the three-bedroom, they've been trying to sell it since spring and the price was stupid and then it wasn't." He's smiling.
He's been holding this. I can see he's been holding it for days.
"I bought it. It closed Friday. Tanya moves in December first, once the baby's cleared to travel and Carla's gone back. "
I set my fork down.
"June. Listen. Think about it. She's two floors down.
You're there in ninety seconds. She's got nobody here permanently, her mother's useless and Carla's got her own kids in Portland and the boys are at their father's and Rob's gone, and now she's got us.
Both of us. And you'll have the baby right there.
Whenever you want her. You want to hold a baby on a Sunday, you take the elevator.
" He reaches across the table for my hand and I let him take it because I haven't decided yet what my hand is going to do.
"No more three a.m. calls from across town.
No more her on the couch. Her own place, her own door, and us upstairs.
This is for you. I want you to hear that. I did this for you."
The candle nearest me gutters and comes back.
"When did you close?" I say.
"Friday. I told you."
"Did she see it? Before?"
"She had to see it, baby, she's the one living in it.
She picked the paint. We went through it Wednesday with the decorator, she wants the nursery on the terrace side for the light.
" He laughs. "She wanted to ask you about the nursery and I told her no, tonight, let me tell June tonight, it's a surprise.
I'm bad at keeping things from you and I'm not sure I liked it. "
Wednesday. Wednesday I was on Eighty-Ninth Street with a yogurt telling Denise to stay out of it.
"Did you tell her about the delivery room?"
He blinks. "What?"
"You said you told her in the car. After the class. That you wouldn't be in the room. I'm asking you again, now, on our anniversary, with your phone in a drawer, whether that's what you said."
"I told her I'd be right outside."
"That's where you'd be standing. I'm asking what you told her. Did you tell her no."
He takes his hand back. Not fast. He picks up his wine and doesn't drink it.
"I told her Carla would be in the room and I'd be outside.
She said okay. She said she'd rather have me, and I said I know, and that was the conversation.
What do you want me to say, June, that I made a pregnant woman cry harder than she was already crying?
I got it done. Carla's in there. I'm not. "
"So you didn't actually tell her no like you told me.
You told her where you'd be sitting. And she heard where you'd be, and she didn't hear a no, because she's Tanya, and she'll be telling the nurses to fetch you from the hallway the second Carla goes for coffee, and you'll come.
You'll come, Matt. I've watched you run to her for seventeen years. "
"That's not fair."
"And then you bought her an apartment in our building."
"For you."
"Stop saying that."
"It's true." He's not angry. He's baffled, and he's leaning forward, and it's worse.
"June, I don't understand what you want.
I've done everything you said. I'm here.
I'm early. The phone's in the drawer. I cooked the pasta.
I bought her the apartment so she'd stop being on our couch, so you'd have your own home back, so she'd have her own door, that's literally the point of the door.
And you're sitting there with that face. "
"What face."
"The one from the car. The one from the birthday." He puts the glass down. "I'm trying, June. I've been trying since May. What do you want from me?"
There's an answer to that. I have it. Years of speeches, filed. It goes: I wanted to cross your mind first. Once. Before her. I wanted to be the person you called from the broker's office. I wanted to walk through the rooms.
I don't say it. I've said it. In a car on Twenty-Third with the hazards going, I said it, in plain words, and he said it back to me, and he said yes.
"What did the apartment cost," I say instead.
"What does that matter?"
"I'm asking."
"Four-two. It's a good price. It appraised at four-six in the spring."
"Four million two hundred thousand dollars. For a woman who isn't your wife. Two floors down from your wife. Decided, walked through, painted, and closed, before your wife was told, on the one night your wife asked you for. And you want me to say thank you."
He sits back.
"Okay," he says. "You know what. Okay. I thought you'd like having her close.
I thought, you've got the shower done, you've got this school thing for a few months, but you don't have, you know.
" He waves one hand at the apartment. At the windows, the skyline, the forty feet of glass.
"Anything else going on. I thought you'd like the company. I thought you'd like having a purpose."
The card is still in my lap. I feel the edge of it under my hand.
"Say that again," I say.
"June."
"Say the last part again."
"I didn't mean it like that."
"You said it like that. You said it exactly like that, on our anniversary, at a table I set for your best friend's baby for five months, in an apartment I unpacked alone while you took calls in the hall. I have a purpose. I'm looking for it right now and I can't find it in this room."
I stand up. The chair scrapes. He stands too, and for a second we're both standing at either end of the table with the burnt garlic between us.
"Where are you going?"
"To pack."
"To pack." He makes one sound. It isn't a laugh. "You're leaving. Over an apartment."
"I'm leaving over being told what I'll like by a man who has no fucking idea who I am.”
I walk down the hall. He follows. I take the suitcase down from the top shelf of the closet, the same one, the Athens one, and the passport is still in the front pocket where I left it in May, and I take it out and put it on the duvet and start with the flat shoes.
"June. Stop. Stop, talk to me. I'll fix it. I'll call the broker in the morning and put it back on the market. I'll tell Tanya tonight, I'll get the phone out of the drawer right now and tell her she's not moving in."
"You can't unclose a closing. You closed.
That's what the word means." Sweaters. The good linen pants.
My binder, from the desk in the study, which means I walk past him twice.
"And don't call her tonight. Don't call her from this.
She'll come over. She'll be on the couch in twenty minutes making it about her, and you'll let her, and I'll be zipping this bag while you make her tea. "
"That's cruel."
"Yes."
He stands in the bedroom doorway with his hands at his sides.
He doesn't come in. I give him that. He stands there and watches me pack, and he doesn't reach for his phone, because it's in the drawer, and I think this may be the first night in three years he's had a crisis without it in his hand, and I don't know what he does with his hands, and neither does he.
"Where will you go?"
"Somewhere with room service."
"June."
"I have my own cards, Matt. I have my own accounts.
You put half of what you got for the first stake you sold in my name in 2016 and I've never touched it and I'm going to touch it now.
I'm not going to a friend's couch. I'm forty-seven years old and I've got a job in the morning and I'm going to a hotel. "
I zip the bag. I put on my coat. He steps back from the door to let me through, and then he follows me down the hall, past the wedding photo, his tie loose, both of us laughing at a thing off-camera, and into the living room, where the candles are still going on the table.
"Please don't do this," he says. Quiet. "Please. Stay tonight. Yell at me. I'll sleep in the study. Just don't walk out of this door with a bag on our anniversary, I'm asking you, I'm begging you, I can't."
I stop at the door with my hand on it.
"You said you forgot this was available," I say. "At dinner. You said it and you meant it and I believed you. It's been available for seventeen years. I've been sitting at this table the whole time."
I open the door.
He doesn't stop me. He's never stopped me, in seventeen years, from doing anything, and I used to think that was freedom.
The elevator takes a long time. I stand in the hall with my suitcase and my school bag and I don't look back at the door, and it doesn't open, and the car comes, and I ride down forty floors with my hand around the card in my coat pocket.
The doorman asks if I need a cab.
"Please," I say. "Madison and Seventy-Sixth."
He gets one. He puts the bag in the trunk. He doesn't ask.