Chapter Eleven
HE TELLS ME ABOUT HIS mother on the third night, and he doesn’t mean to, and that’s how I know it’s true.
We’ve reached the slow part of the country, the long empty stretch where there’s nothing out the window but dark and the occasional far-off ranch light, and the train has the hushed late feeling of a house where everyone else has gone to bed.
We’re not doing anything. That’s the truth of it. We’re just lying there not touching, a careful few inches apart, as we keep ending up, two people who’ve run clean out of reasons and haven’t admitted it.
I ask him an idle question about Greece, whether he misses it, and he’s quiet for so long I think he’s asleep.
Then he says, “My parents were the most in-love couple anyone in Athens had ever seen.”
I don’t say anything. I’ve learned that much about him, that he talks the way a wild thing comes to the hand, only if you hold very still and pretend you don’t want it.
“In public.” His voice is level and even, the voice of a man reading off a ledger he’s read a thousand times.
“At parties. In the papers. My father would kiss my mother’s hand at the opera and the whole box would sigh.
They were a performance other people aspired to.
And then we’d get in the car to go home, and the second the doors shut, the temperature would drop forty degrees, and by the time we reached the house they wouldn’t be speaking, and some nights it was worse than not speaking.
” A pause. “I used to think the house had two climates. The one with guests in it, and the real one.”
“Loukas.”
“They divorced when I was at university. Very civilized, for the cameras. My mother told a magazine they’d simply grown in different directions, and she was smiling in the photograph, and I remember looking at that smile and understanding I’d never once in my life been able to tell which of her smiles were real, the woman having spent twenty years teaching me that the realest-looking ones were the most expensive lies.
” His breath goes out of him, slow. “She died six years ago. Pills. They called it an accident and I let them. My father followed her inside two years, his heart, though between us I think the man simply ran out of audience and saw no further reason to go on performing.”
The dark holds itself still around us.
“So you see,” he says, and now there’s something terrible and gentle in it, something that frightens me worse than anger ever could, “I’m not a man who doesn’t believe in love, Blythe, whatever you think of me.
I believe in it completely. I watched it my whole childhood.
I just learned what it costs, and what it’s worth, and that the loudest love in the room is the one rotting fastest under the table.
So I decided I’d never perform it. I’d be honest instead.
I’d say the cold true thing out loud, up front, and I’d never lie to a woman the way they lied to each other and to me and to everyone who ever envied them. ”
And there it is, the whole architecture of him, laid bare in the dark.
I understand for the first time that the fortress I’ve been picturing was never built to keep love out. It was built to keep the lie out. He isn’t afraid of feeling. He’s afraid of becoming his father, of loving so loud and so false that the truth dies somewhere underneath it.
“That’s why the arrangement,” I say slowly. “Honesty up front. No performance. You thought if you just said it was nothing, plainly, to my face, it couldn’t turn into the thing your parents had.”
“Yes.” Barely a word.
“Loukas.” I turn toward him and lay my hand over the heart he keeps insisting is a column of figures, and it’s going hard and quick, all out of keeping with that even, careful voice, the most honest thing about him.
“Your parents didn’t lie because they said the loving words. They lied because the words weren’t true. That’s the whole difference, you beautiful idiot. It was never about whether you say it. It’s about whether it’s real when you do.”
He makes a sound in the dark I’ve no name for, the sound of something very old and very heavy shifting off its foundations, and then he reaches for me.
And what happens next is the one I’ll never be able to explain to you, the one I can’t dress up as a storm or a jealous quarrel or a tidy bargain gone briefly off the rails. There’s no anger in it and no excuse for it. He doesn’t take me apart this time. He puts me back together.
Slow, and wordless, and so careful it aches, his mouth and his hands learning me like a language he’s decided to be fluent in, the vow still kept, the line still uncrossed, but everything tender, everything given, everything two people do when they’ve quit pretending it’s anything other than what it is.
And somewhere in the middle of it I feel wet on my own face and realize, with a distant sort of astonishment, that I’m weeping, soundlessly, not from sorrow but from the sheer unbearable tenderness of being handled like something precious by a man who swore he hadn’t got it in him.
After, he holds me so tightly I can feel his pulse in a dozen places, and neither of us says the word, the actual word, saying it being the one thing that would make it a performance, and we’ve both just learned where that road ends.
But I feel him not-say it. I feel it in every place we touch.
And then I feel another thing entirely, one I don’t understand until it’s far too late.
I feel him go rigid against me in the dark, by degrees, the gradual stiffening of a man when a thought walks into the room behind his back.
I feel the tenderness curdle into something stricken.
I feel his arms, still wrapped around me, turn somehow into the arms of a man holding onto a thing he’s already decided he has to set down.
“Go to sleep,” he murmurs into my hair, and his voice has changed, pulled back and far away, the warmth banking itself behind a door I hear closing even now.
I should ask him. I know I should ask him. But I’m warm, and I’m wrung out, and I’m happier than a sensible woman has any business being, and so I make the only real mistake of the whole journey.
I go to sleep. I let him decide my fate alone in the dark, and by the time I wake the next morning the man who gentled me whole again has made up his mind to break me to save us both, and I don’t know it yet, and that’s the last good morning I’m going to have for a long while.