Chapter 35
Chapter Thirty-Five
A FORTNOTE
LOUISA
Two weeks is not a long time. In the grand scheme of a life, a fortnight is a rounding error, a footnote. A fortnote. (Get it?) The kind of time that disappears into the seam between seasons without anyone noticing it went.
But I have noticed every single minute of it.
I know this because I have been paying attention in a way I have never paid attention to anything.
The sound of his coffee cup set down when he sets it against the marble, the way he reads the newspaper on his phone, the way we get swallowed by the bedding that felt like frosting to him before, but now are clouds we live in.
And every morning, the way he says my name, first thing, before either of us has said anything else, or his voice has anything to give, like it's just the only word his mouth can comprehend to reach for.
While my mouth constantly reaches for him.
Two weeks of this. Two weeks of waking up tangled in him, two weeks of not a single performance except those I do in the booth.
(The same booth we tested the ‘soundproofness’ when he found me recording, and I explained how I could use a little inspiration.) It’s a reality I didn’t think we would live in, my husband, whose arms find me in the dark, while my face finds his neck.
I thought I knew happiness, I thought I had enough of it, even when I didn’t.
I was always able to find the pool of joy that people needed from me.
But he refills it. He had been, in ways I wasn’t ready to accept.
And I know, because I have a certainty, a permanence I’ve never felt.
When something is honest, not just true.
And I honestly never want this to end.
Chandler already has a margarita in hand when I arrive and the bowl of chips in front of her is half full.
“You look disgusting,” she says when I sit down, as she waves over Paul (not Matteo) for another margarita.
“Why thanks, how kind.” I know she doesn’t mean it, so clearly dripping in jest, because she doesn’t actually have a cruel bone in her body.
“You’re actually glowing, I thought that was only when people got pregnant,” she says.
“I’m not,” I say. “Just good ol’ marital bliss.”
“Well, marital bliss seems to have hit you months later, because you’re oozing glow.”
“Ew,” I say. “Truly, the grossest way you could have said that.”
“No, I could have said you're oozing his—”
Paul steps up to the table to top off the chips and salsa, dropping off my margarita.
I wrap both hands around the glass and look at her as she licks the salt from the rim of her own. “I'm so in love with him, Chan,” I say. The words come out like they've been waiting so long they've lost some of their volume. “I'm disgustingly in love with my husband.”
Chandler stares at me for three full seconds and laughs, her whole body responds. It's like she’s just heard the punchline of a joke she was waiting for. “Lou,” she says. “Babe. We know.”
“You don’t though, none of it was real. Not in the beginning,” I say. Realizing we’ve lasted this long. Realizing that now, it's real, there’s nothing I need to hide behind because he will stand with me in it. “We both got something out of it, but, now, it’s all different now.”
She’s looking me over with such skepticism. More than she had when I originally told her we were getting married.
“No” is all she says. The corner of her mouth pulls up to match her quirked brow. “I don’t buy it.”
“You don’t buy what? That it was an arrangement?”
"I don't buy that it was ever just an arrangement," she says, setting her glass down.
"I buy that you both told yourselves that.
I buy that it was a very convenient story for two people who were absolutely feral about each other and needed a reason to be in the same room.
" She tilts her head. "But an arrangement?
No. I was there at that wedding, Lou. He stood there and watched you walk toward him like you were the only thing worth looking at, so don't tell me that was a performance.”
“We had to make it convincing—"
“I’m glad you finally convinced yourselves.
” I open my mouth, but she just pushes the bowl of chips towards me.
“He doesn't even come in anymore,” Chandler says, trying to soften the blow but still provide reinforcement to her point. “You know that, right? You must. He ordered the same drink, sat at the same table four days a week for the entire time you worked there, and then the second you weren’t behind that counter, he stopped coming entirely. Toby is devastated for the data set.” She laughs.
“But that's a man who only wanted the coffee because you were the one making it.”
The margarita glass is cold in my hands and I let myself have it, this one moment of being completely, humiliatingly, happily in love.
I'm still warm from the tequila when I turn the corner toward home. The walk takes longer than it should, but that never bothers me because I am a ‘stop to smell the roses’ kind of person. And when you’re happy, really happy, the world tends to smile back in the small ways you can only see if you're looking for them.
I pick up cherries at the fruit stand, although Ramon still isn’t back, and the new kid does make me pay.
The florist is arranging a vase in the window, deep-colored dahlias and I wonder about the brides who handed me an Altoid and pushed the door to meet my fate.
I can see The Richmond from here, large and on the corner, and therefore the only reason any of this happened at all.
I think about that sometimes. (A lot lately.) The unrepeatable chain of coincidence that put me in this building, on this floor, on the other side of his wall.
It’s enough to make a person believe in something. The collection of small moments we miss in life that all are willing to carry us to a happily ever after we imagined but didn’t trust.