Chapter 12 #2
"He can do whatever he likes with his own money.
You can stop it tomorrow and he can't stop you stopping it.
" A rustle of paper. "Mrs. Severin, I'll say the thing I've been not-saying for a year.
In twenty-three years I have seen precisely two men behave like this after a separation.
One of them was building a case for coercion and the other one was exactly what he looked like.
I've had this file for thirteen months and I cannot tell you which one this is, and I am usually able to tell you by March. "
She saw him in Providence on the second Tuesday in March.
It was entirely an accident. She was coming out of a meeting on Weybosset at ten past five and he came out of a doorway on the other side of the street, forty feet away, and did not see her.
He looked terrible.
Thin through the face — properly thin, not the winter kind — and gray, and he stood on the sidewalk for a second putting his collar up, and then he walked off toward the garage like a man who had been sat down for an hour.
Imogen stood on the other side of the street and did not call out.
She went back on the following Tuesday. She was not proud of that and she did it anyway.
She parked where she could see the doorway and at four o'clock he went in, and at five past five he came out, and she sat in her car with her hands on the wheel and watched her husband walk to a parking garage in the rain.
There was no plaque on the building she could read from that distance and she did not go and look.
She never asked him about it. Not once, that winter or ever.
She understood, sitting in a car on Weybosset Street in March, that this was the thing he had refused to tell her in November — if I tell you it becomes a thing I did that you have to have a feeling about — and that the refusal had been, of all things, correct.
It had been going on since the previous February. She worked that out from the way he had said anyone I've asked, and from a remark he made in January about "somebody" telling him that being useful was not the same as being honest.
Thirteen months of Tuesdays, in a building on Weybosset Street, with nobody to tell.
Her own life did not wait for any of it. That was the other half of the winter and it was the larger half, and she would have been offended by anyone who said otherwise.
The catalog ate her Saturdays. She drove up to Bristol most weeks from October and worked in an unheated shed with a space heater and a man who argued with her about hull tucks, and by February they had two hundred and eleven objects properly described and a fight going about whether the 1898 hull was worth finishing.
"It's a coffin," Imogen said.
"It's a boat."
"It's a coffin that somebody gave up on in 1974 and you want to spend four years—"
"It'll take nine."
"Nine years—"
"I'm forty-five," Rhys said. "I've got maybe three of these left in me and I'd like one of them to be stupid."
He asked her to dinner in November, once, at the gate, the way he had said he would. She said not yet. He said "right," entirely without injury, and the following Saturday argued with her about a mast step for two hours and did not refer to it again.
She thought about it, though.
She thought about it in a way she had not thought about anything in a year — not with guilt, which surprised her, and not with any particular heat either.
What she thought was: that would be an easy life.
A shed, and Saturdays, and a man who told her she was wrong about the tuck.
Nobody in it had ever done anything to her. There was no log in it anywhere.
She let herself have that thought, in full, on the drive home, and did not flinch from it.
The thing turned in the last week of March, and it turned on nothing at all.
She was in the kitchen on a Thursday night with a question half-typed — something about the Ingersoll dinner, some fresh piece of grit she had turned up while lying awake — and she stopped with her thumb over the send.
And she noticed that she had read his last answer twice.
Not that night. Three days earlier. She had read it on the Monday standing up, and then she had read it again on the Tuesday morning with her coffee, sitting down, the way you reread something you like.
Imogen put the phone on the counter very slowly, as though it might go off.
She had been doing this for four months. Four months of sending a woman's worst questions into a phone in Providence and getting back, every time, inside the hour, the exact truth with the skin off it. No excuses. No context. No let me explain. Not one single request for anything at any point.
And at some stage — she could not find the day, she looked for it and could not find it — it had stopped being an interrogation.
She stood in her kitchen at eleven at night and was suddenly, completely furious.
Not at him. That was the unbearable part; she would have given a great deal for it to be at him.
She was furious at the arrangement, and at four months of it, and at the fact that a man could be handed a shovel and told to dig for a hundred and twenty days and simply dig, patiently, without once looking up to see if she was watching — and that this would work on her, and that it was working on her, and that she could see it working from the outside and it made no difference at all.
She deleted the half-typed question.
Then she wrote, and sent before she could stop herself:
Why don't you ever ask me anything.
The answer took nineteen minutes, which was the longest he had ever taken.
Because the last time I had access to you I used it to keep something. I don't trust myself with a conversation I'm allowed to steer. If you want me to ask you things I will, but you'd have to tell me to, and then it'd still be you doing it.
Imogen stood at the window for a long time.
Then she picked up the phone and did not answer that, and went to bed, and lay awake until nearly three.
In the morning she called the contractor in Tiverton and asked what it would cost to take a safe room out of a house.