Chapter 14 – June
JUNE
The hotel on Madison has a suite on the ninth floor with a sitting room and a view of a limestone wall, and I take it for a week, and the man at the desk, who has seen me twice before, both times with Matt, years ago, for board dinners, does not ask where Matt is, and I tip him forty dollars for not asking.
I don't sleep. I sit in the chair by the window with my coat still on until two, and then I take the coat off and sit in the chair until four, and at some point I grade an essay, because it's in my bag and it's there.
At six I order coffee and eggs and eat all of it.
Then I shower and put on the flat shoes and take a cab to Eighty-Ninth Street, because it's Thursday, and third period has a quiz.
My phone has eleven messages from him by the time I turn it on in the teachers' lounge.
I read them in order. The first one is Please.
The second one is Please come home. The fourth one is a paragraph.
The seventh one says he's called the broker and the broker has said what I said, that you can't unclose a closing, and he's asked the broker to list it.
The ninth one says he hasn't called Tanya. The eleventh one, sent at five-fifty this morning, says he doesn’t know how to fix this.
That makes two of us.
I put the phone face-down on the lounge table and give a quiz on chapters three and four.
Diane meets me at the hotel at five with a bottle of wine in her bag and her coat still buttoned, and she looks at the suite, and at the limestone wall, and at me, and sits down on the sofa without taking the coat off.
"Well," she says. "You're not on my couch."
"I told him I wasn't going to a friend's couch."
"Good. My couch has a spring." She takes the wine out. "Priya's coming at six. She had a thing. A real one, for once. Tell me."
I tell her. The pasta. The card. Thirty-eight B. Four million two hundred thousand dollars. The paint. A purpose. She listens without interrupting, which she's done maybe four times in the twenty years I've known her, and when I'm done she pours two glasses and hands me one.
"The paint," she says.
"The paint."
"She picked the paint before you knew the apartment existed."
"Terrace side for the nursery. For the light."
Diane drinks. "I'm going to say the thing now, and then I'm not going to say it again, because you don't need it said twice. He's not sleeping with her."
"I know he's not."
"I know you know. I'm saying it because you're going to spend the next month being told by everyone who hears this story that he must be, and he isn't, and that's the whole problem.
If he were sleeping with her you could leave him for it.
Everyone would understand. Your sister would understand.
Instead he bought her a four-million-dollar apartment under your floor because he loves her and he loves you and he's never in his life had to choose, so he's never learned how. "
I look at my wine.
"You should call Ruth," she says.
"I don't want a divorce lawyer."
"Ruth isn't a divorce lawyer. Ruth is my cousin who happens to be a divorce lawyer, which is different, and you don't call her for a divorce.
You call her so that when he says the words 'let's not involve lawyers,' and he will say them, in that voice, you'll already know what's yours.
" She takes out her phone. "I'm texting you her number.
You'll call her Monday because it's the responsible thing and you've never skipped a responsible thing in your life.
Now drink that, Priya's bringing Thai food and she'll want to hear it all again from the top. "
I call Ruth Monday at lunch from the stairwell by the gym.
Ruth talks fast and bills faster, and she's already read the public filings on Matt's company by the time I've finished spelling my last name, and she asks me three questions in a row and I answer them and she says, "Okay.
Here's what you have, and I'm going to say it plainly because Diane says you're a person who likes plain. "
What I have is this. The half of the 2016 stake sale he put in my name is in my name; it's mine before, during, and after anything, and it's been sitting in an account at a bank on Park earning interest I've never looked at, and Ruth reads me the number, and I have to sit down on the stairwell step.
There's the joint account. There's the penthouse, which is marital, and the old house, which he kept and rents, which is marital, and the company, which is complicated and also, in the part that matters, marital, because seventeen years of marriage in this state means seventeen years of it is half mine to argue about, and Ruth would very much enjoy arguing about it.
"I'm not asking you to argue about anything," I say.
"I know. I'm telling you that you could, so that when you decide what you want, you're deciding with the numbers in front of you and not in a stairwell. Do you want me to send a letter?"
"No."
"Do you want me to send anything?"
"I want to know what a furnished apartment costs, for six months, with a doorman, downtown, and I want to pay for it myself, and I want to know whether that's stupid."
Ruth laughs. It's short and it sounds genuine.
"It's not stupid. It's ten to fifteen a month for what you're describing, and you can pay for it out of the interest on the account you just found out about, and you'll want a broker who doesn't know your husband's name, and I have one. She'll call you tonight."
She does. Her name is Mira and she has three places to show me on Wednesday after school, and by Thursday I've signed a six-month lease on a two-bedroom on West Eleventh with a doorman named Felix and a working fireplace and somebody else's art on the walls, eleven thousand a month, furnished, and when Mira asks, at the signing, with her pen already out for the second line, whether my husband will be cosigning, I say no, and she crosses out the line without looking up.
"It's a good building," she says. "Quiet. The woman in 4C is a judge."
I put the whole thing on my own card and the card goes through and I stand on West Eleventh Street with a set of keys in my hand and my school bag on my shoulder, and Felix holds the door, and I walk into a lobby where nobody knows how I take my coffee.
I call Mark the next morning. The company account. He picks up himself.
"Mrs. Tierney."
"I need a small move, Mark. Very small. A study's worth of books and half a closet, from the penthouse to an address downtown, on Saturday, while my husband's at work."
There's a pause, and I hear him not asking.
"Saturday's fine," he says. "Nine o'clock. I'll bring the good boxes."
Matt texts every day. I've stopped counting.
He doesn't call, which I recognize as effort, because for him a phone call has always been the answer to everything.
On Saturday, while Mark and two of his crew are wrapping my teaching texts in my own dish towels, forty floors up, I sit on the floor of the study with my back against the empty shelves and I write him one message.
June
I'm safe. I'm downtown. I've signed a lease and I'm teaching through June and I'm not coming home this week or next. Don't send Denise. Don't send flowers. Don't send Tanya, and don't tell her where I am. If you want to say a thing to me, say it yourself, and don't say it every day.
I read it three times. I send it.
The reply comes while Mark's taping the last box.
Matt
Okay.
One word. I read it several times. In seventeen years he has never answered me with one word when eleven were available, and I don't know what it means yet, and I put the phone in my pocket and carry a box of books to the freight elevator myself, and Mark says, "I've got that, Mrs. Tierney," and I say, "I know. I want to carry one," and he lets me.
The study looks wrong with the shelves half empty.
Fiction on the left, all of it still there.
The right side, the teaching side, gone.
I stand in the doorway with my coat on and I think about whether to leave a note and I don't, because he'll see the shelves, and I'd rather he read those than anything I could write.
Felix helps carry the boxes up. The apartment on West Eleventh has built-ins on either side of the fireplace, and by nine that night the teaching texts are on them, by subject, and Of Mice and Men is on the coffee table with my notes from 2011 and a fresh pencil, and there's a bottle of the good wine open, and I've graded thirty essays at somebody else's dining table, and it's quiet.
I've been rich for a long time. This is the first night I've spent any of it on myself, alone, on purpose, and the fireplace works, and I sit on the floor in front of it with the wine and the pencil and I don't wait up for anybody, because there's nobody to wait for, and I sleep for nine hours in a bed that nobody gets into at one-oh-three.