Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
There’s a price for everything. It’s the first thing my father taught me that turned out to be true, taught me with his fists and his absences and the particular silence he kept at the dinner table, and I built a life on it, the way other men build lives on luck or charm or the love of a good woman.
Everything has a price. Find it, pay it, take the thing.
I have never in my adult life wanted something I could not eventually afford.
I want to see my wife. I cannot afford it. They have finally found the one thing I have no currency for, and the joke of it, the thing that would make me laugh if I were still a man who laughed, is that the price isn’t money. The price is that I be someone other than the man who put her in here.
I stand on the wrong side of a closed door on the cardiac floor and I do not go in, because I have learned what happens when I go in.
They told me the morning after. Not to be cruel; the night nurse simply assumed I knew, the way a wife’s husband would know, and so she told me plainly while she updated a chart that after I left the room that first night my wife’s heart had come apart so badly the alarms had pulled the whole floor running, that they had nearly lost her, that whatever had passed between us in those few quiet minutes had cost her more than the collapse at the ball.
She didn’t say it was my fault. She didn’t have to.
I am a man who reads a balance sheet for a living and I can read the one that matters now: my presence is a cost her heart cannot carry.
The single thing I want in this world, to stand in a room and be near her, is the one thing guaranteed to kill her.
So I stand outside the door. I have stood outside it for the better part of four days.
Barrymore comes and goes through it like he was born with a key.
He has, I have come to understand, something close to it; he is on every list I am not, the family lists, the old lists, the ones written long before I bought my way into her life with a ring and a hockey team.
He nods to me in the corridor now, which is more than he did at first, a short hard civil nod that costs him something, because we have an understanding since the night in this same hallway, he and I, an understanding built on a name we both want to put in the ground.
But the understanding does not extend to the door.
When I asked him, once, plainly, to let me sit with her even for a minute, he looked at me for a long moment with those level protective eyes and said only, the doctor says no scenes, and you and I both know you’re a scene, and went in without me, and I had no answer, because he was right, and because a man who throws a punch in a cardiac ward to win an argument has lost more than the argument.
I send things. I am told they are received.
Flowers, the white ones she keeps in her father’s old study because they were her mother’s, which I know because I make it my business to know things, and which I now understand I learned the way you learn the specifications of an asset, and hate myself accordingly.
Books. The good tea she likes that isn’t sold in this country.
They go in through the door that doesn’t open for me and I am told, by Bills, who has taken to delivering these reports with the flinching care of a man defusing ordnance, that Mrs. Flint says thank you.
Mrs. Flint says thank you. Four days of Mrs. Flint says thank you, which is the most distant possible arrangement of two words that still counts as not being thrown out, and I take each one like a man taking the only water he’s going to get.
And in the long hours on the wrong side of the door, the machine does what the machine does. It runs.
I have tried to stop it. I have never once in my life tried to stop it before, the cold continuous accounting that has made me everything I am, and it turns out I don’t know how, it turns out you cannot unbuild the only thing you ever built, and so it runs and it runs and every number it produces is the same number and the number is you’re going to lose her.
Look at the arithmetic. I have. I’ve done nothing else for four days.
This is Camilla. This is a woman the city named a princess before she was old enough to vote, a woman strangers on the street call by her first name with their whole hearts, a woman so easy to love that an entire organization built a ring of standing ambulances around her rather than risk a world without her in it.
Men notice her. Men have always noticed her; I noticed her, and I am a man who notices nothing he can’t use.
There is not a ballroom or a boardroom or a hospital corridor she walks into that does not quietly reorganize itself toward her, and I know this because I have watched it happen and felt the ugly animal thing in me bare its teeth every time.
And against all of that, against a lifetime of being adored, stands the husband.
Me. Let us be honest about the husband, in the only court that ever hears it.
I married her for a hockey team. I told her so, near enough, in a room she turned out to be standing close enough to hear.
I demanded an heir from her the way you’d demand a clause in a contract and then a separation in the same cold breath.
I let her walk a red carpet alone into a wall of cameras.
I danced with another woman in front of three hundred people and would not turn my head while her heart stopped across the room.
I have set the bar for what a man can be to Camilla Flint so low that it’s resting on the floor of the sea, and here is the thing the machine keeps showing me, the thing I cannot make it stop showing me:
the bar is on the floor, and she’s surrounded, every day, by men who would not have to step over a pebble to clear it.
It’s only a matter of time. That’s the sum.
That’s all of it. A woman that easy to love, married to a man that easy to leave, and the only variable left in the equation is when.
Some kinder man, some warmer man, some man who would never have needed a near-death in a ballroom to work out that he was in love with her.
He’s out there. He’s probably already met her.
He’s probably sending better flowers. And he will not even have to try very hard, because I have done all the hard work for him, I have spent two months making the case against myself so thoroughly that all the next man has to do is be gentle to her once, just once, and mean it, and it will be the most extraordinary thing that has happened to her in a year.
And underneath that, lower, where the machine can’t reach because the machine doesn’t go there, is the other terror, the one I won’t write down even here.
That the when might not be a man at all.
That it might be her heart. That I might lose her not to someone better but to the thing I set off in her chest, that one morning the door I’m not allowed through will open and it will be Barrymore’s face and not a nurse’s, and there will be no next man and no separation and no winning her back, only the clean nothing-smell of this floor and a world that does not have her in it, and the certain knowledge for the rest of my life that I am the one who did it.
I would give them the team. That’s how I know.
That’s the diagnostic, the one clean reading I trust in all of this.
Glasgow is moving. Bills brings me that report too, between the others, the votes Glasgow is counting, the directors he’s turned, the special meeting he’s circling like the gambler he is, betting the one asset he was never supposed to be able to touch.
Two months ago that news would have been the only news in my world.
I married a grieving girl to keep my hands on that team.
I would have burned a great deal to keep it.
And now I find I don’t care. I have turned it over and over looking for the place where I still care and it isn’t there.
Let Glasgow have it. Let him sell it for parts to cover his debts, let the whole edifice my marriage was supposed to buy go down in flames, I would sign it over to him this afternoon, every share, with a smile, if signing it would buy me one thing.
One honest conversation. One quarter of an hour in a room where my wife let me tell her the truth and her heart did not try to kill her for hearing it.
That’s the going rate now, in the only currency that turned out to matter, and I cannot pay it, because the price of the conversation is her life, and so I do the one thing left to a man who has finally found something he can’t afford.
I wait. I stand outside the door and I wait, and I tell myself that when she’s stronger, when the doctor lifts the order, when her heart has learned to carry a little weight again, there will be a door I’m allowed through, and I will walk through it and I will say the thing I should have said before I ever lifted a hand against her, and she’ll be well enough to hear it.
It’s the only plan I’ve got. It’s a bad plan. It depends on time, and time is the one thing the machine keeps telling me I don’t have.
On the fourth evening they move her off the critical floor.
Bills tells me with something almost like hope in his voice, because off the critical floor means better, means stronger, means soon, and I let myself have the hope for exactly as long as it takes me to walk the two flights up to the new room, because off the critical floor also means a room with a door that doesn’t seal, a door left ajar the width of a hand, and as I come down the quiet corridor toward it I hear her voice for the first time in four days.
I stop.
She’s awake. She’s talking, low, and the sound of her goes through me like nothing on this earth has ever gone through me, because it’s the first proof in four days that she’s still in the world, and I stand frozen in the corridor like a thief and I drink it.
Barrymore’s there. I can hear the low rumble of him answering, too quiet to make out, just the shape of a man saying something gentle, and I cannot hear a word of it, not one, and I have one half-second of the old jealousy, the reflex of it, before it dies, because I know now what he is to her and the knowing has cost me too much to forget.
And then I hear her clearly. Her voice is wet, thick with tears I cannot see and would give the team and both my hands to wipe away, and it breaks in the middle the way a thing breaks when it has been bent too long, and what she says, what my wife says into the quiet of that room, is this.
“I can’t bear it anymore. This has to stop. He makes me sick.”
Barrymore murmurs something. I don’t hear it.
I will never hear it. Whatever it was, the thing he said back to her, the context that might have been a mercy, it stays in that room with the two people allowed inside it, and I stand in the corridor on the wrong side of one more door with the sum finally, fully, mercilessly worked.
There it is. Not a guess. Not the machine’s worst-case midnight arithmetic. Her own voice, her own words, the truth I have spent four days flinching from delivered at last in the only handwriting I would ever have believed.
She can’t bear me. She wants it to stop. I make her sick.
And the worst part, the part that tells me exactly how far gone I am, how completely the cold useful machine has failed at the one calculation that ever mattered, is that I cannot even argue with the verdict.
Because she’s right.