10. Lena
LENA
Marisol leaves first, because she has a client at noon who wants to talk about drapery for a room she hasn’t finished measuring. The property manager locks up behind us and goes off up the block with his clipboard, still apologizing about the gutter.
So it’s the two of us on the sidewalk with the shutters closed behind us and the cold coming up off the pavement through my shoes.
Andrew has his notebook under his arm and he isn’t leaving. He’s not a fidgeter. He just stands there and lets me watch him decide.
“I’m going to hand the day-to-day to Erin,” he says. “My associate. She’s better than me at drawings anyway—she’ll run the survey and the scope, and she’ll be your contact. I’ll stay on the project. You’d be paying for me and you’d get me. But the phone calls and the site visits go through her.”
My stomach drops before I know why.
“Why?”
“Because my interest in you is no longer purely professional,” he says.
Just like that. No throat-clearing, no joke in front of it. He says it the way he’d tell me a beam was undersized.
The street noise goes strange. Somewhere behind me a truck is backing up, beeping, and I’m standing there with my ears hot in the cold air.
“Andrew—”
“I had this in better order in the basement,” he says, and shifts the notebook to his other arm.
“What I mean is, I’m not going to be a man who bills you by the hour with that sitting underneath it.
It isn’t fair to you, and it turns out it isn’t something I can do.
So Erin runs the job, the work doesn’t suffer, and you never have to be careful with me just to keep your architect. ”
“You’ve known me since this morning.”
“I know.” He almost smiles. “I’ve also read the same newspaper as everybody else in this city.
That’s its own problem. I don’t want you thinking I looked you up and thought, there’s an opportunity.
If it helps at all, I made this decision standing in a basement listening to a woman explain sistered joists.
Least romantic room in the building, and that’s where it happened. ”
And I laugh, God help me, a short one that gets out before I can stop it, and I hate how good it feels to be looked at by somebody who isn’t apologizing to me.
“I’d like to take you to dinner,” he says. “Not now. When you’re ready, if that’s ever. And if it’s never, Erin still runs the job and you still get my eyes on every drawing. I’m divorced. I know how long it takes.”
“You know how long what takes?”
“All of it,” he says, and some of the ease goes out of him.
“The firm ate my marriage. I was—” He stops, looks up the block, comes back to me.
“I used to tell people she left me, because that’s a shorter story.
She’d been gone a long time before she said it out loud, and I was at the office, not noticing.
I didn’t get dumped by a hurricane. I did that one to myself, slowly, with a calendar. ”
I stand there and hold the edges of my coat and think about how much I’d like a life where somebody says something true to me on a sidewalk before noon.
“Not yet,” I say.
He nods, once. “Not yet is clear.”
“I mean it as a real answer. I don’t know what it is yet. I’m not—” I stop, because I was about to say I’m not free, and I don’t know if that’s true either. “I’m still wearing my ring.”
“I noticed that in the basement, too.” He says it easily. “Lena. Not yet is an answer. It isn’t a door slamming, and I can carry my own feelings without handing them to you on top of everything else you’re carrying. Erin will call you tomorrow about the survey.”
Then he puts his hand out, and we shake hands like people who’ve done a morning’s work. It’s somehow the kindest thing anybody’s done to me all week.
He gets a little way up the block and turns around.
“One more thing,” he says. “The payroll answer. Best one I’ve ever gotten to that question, and I ask it every time.”
I stand on the sidewalk after he’s gone, in front of a building with the shutters closed, with one warm spot glowing under my breastbone, and I’m embarrassed by it.
It has almost nothing to do with him. A man said a difficult thing to my face in daylight instead of arranging the room first, and I lit up like a porch light.
It’s humiliating, how little that takes right now, in a week when I’m this thin, and I don’t like knowing it about myself.
I put my hand in my pocket and turn my ring around with my thumb the whole walk down the block.
I don’t go back to my coffee shop. I’m not ready for Sophie’s face and the table by the radiator, so I walk in the other direction until the storefronts stop being ones I know, and I find a place with a chalkboard menu and a girl at the counter who looks at me exactly as long as she’d look at anybody.
I take the table in the back with the binder.
It’s the renovation binder from the boxes.
The real one, the one my grandmother and I put together the last winter she was well, a fat ring binder of graph paper and vendor quotes and a swatch of the blue tile stapled to a page.
I’ve been marking it up all week. Half of it’s useless now. The other half is a map.
I’ve got a pen in my teeth and my hand flat on a page of stair details when a shadow comes across the table.
“Do you mind?” Genevieve Foster says, and sits down.
I take the pen out of my mouth. My heart is already going, out ahead of me, the way it lives now.
She’s in a gray coat with the collar up and she looks the way she always looks, like a woman who has never once been photographed with her eyes half closed. She puts her bag on the floor and doesn’t take the coat off. She isn’t planning to be here long.
“I saw you through the window,” she says. “My father’s office is up the block. You probably don’t know that. I stood on that sidewalk a while deciding, and then I came in.”
“Okay.”
“The photographs were deliberate.”
Heat climbs my neck so fast my ears ring. I put the pen down on the binder, slowly, because slow is the only way to do it without my hand shaking where she can see.
“I knew there’d be somebody in the alley,” she says. “I didn’t know which paper, and I didn’t know about—the other thing, at the fundraiser. Nobody told me that. But the alley I knew about, and I put my hand on his arm at the car.”
“I know,” I say.
That stops her, just for a second. “You know.”
“I zoomed in.” I hear how it sounds and I don’t care. “I know my husband’s body better than I know my own. His hand wasn’t on your back and he wasn’t laughing, and his weight was turned away like he was standing next to a wet dog. Nobody had to tell me it was a set.”
Her eyebrows go up. Surprise first, and then a flicker that looks unpleasantly like respect, and I hate that part of me is glad to have it.
“Then you know he didn’t know,” she says.
“Yes.”
“Good.” She folds her hands on the table. “That’s most of what I came in for.”
“That’s not what you came in for.”
She looks at me for a long moment. My face is burning and I leave my hands flat on the binder, pressed down, steady because I am making them be steady, and the effort of that is its own small humiliation on top of the big one sitting across the table in a gray coat.
“No,” she says. “It isn’t.”
Genevieve Foster doesn’t flinch and she doesn’t decorate. I’m learning that at a small table in the back of a café, with my pulse in my cheeks.
“I want him,” she says. “I have wanted him, off and on, since I was about twenty-three, and I’ve never done anything about it, because he was married and because I liked you.
I still like you. It’s inconvenient.” Her chin comes up.
“I let those photographs happen because I wanted to see what it looked like.”
She turns her water glass a quarter turn on the table.
“It looked good.”
Under my sternum a coal catches. She watched a camera do that to me so she could see how it looked, and she’s telling me so over a table the size of a dinner plate, and I’m matching her anyway, calm for calm, because I learned that trick in her world, from her people.
My tea’s gone cold in front of me and I want to throw it.
“You want me to admire the honesty,” I say.
“I don’t need you to admire it. I’d just rather do it this way than the other way. The other way is what your mother-in-law does, and I’ve watched it my whole life, and it’s made everybody in that generation of my family completely insane.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because in about a year, when this has all settled, somebody is going to put me next to him at a dinner, and I want to have already told you.” She says it plainly.
“Our families fit. It was decided before either of us could read—my father’s resorts, their hotels, one board sitting inside the other since our grandfathers.
Nobody would have to explain me to anybody. I’d be—easy.”
“You’d be easy.”
“Easier than you were.” She doesn’t say it cruelly.
That’s what makes it land where it lands, low under my ribs, where the whole morning goes sour.
“I’ve sat at those tables since I was a child.
I know which fork, I know which senator’s wife not to seat by the window, I know when to leave.
You had to learn all of it in public, in front of people who were waiting for you to get it wrong?—”
“Don’t.”
“—and you did it anyway, and you were better at the actual work than any of us.” She leans back.
“I’m not being nice to you. I’m telling you what I am.
I’d be a very good Kingsley and a completely mediocre wife for him, because I don’t think I’d ever say a single thing to that man that he needed to hear. I keep tripping over that.”
“Can I tell you the thing you haven’t thought about?” I say.
“Please.”
“You’d be marrying Diana.” I say it quietly, because it isn’t meant as a shot.
“Her, personally. She’s going to send you a dress with a card on it, and the card is going to be beautiful, and you’ll wear the dress.
And it’ll be so small the first time that you won’t be able to say a word about it without sounding insane.
And then you’ll do that a few hundred times over a few years, and one day you’ll be standing somewhere thinking, I don’t know how I got so agreeable. ”
Genevieve doesn’t say anything.
“You said you’d never tell him a thing he needed to hear,” I say. “You’d never tell her one either.”
“I know how to handle women like her.”
“So did I,” I say. “I ran a hotel.”
The urge is right there, and it’s ugly. She’s handed me the whole map of herself—where she’s proud, where she’s lonely, exactly which sentence would take her skin off—and my face is so hot I can feel my heartbeat in it, and it would be easy. God, it would be easy.
I don’t. Not for her sake. If I do it here, in the back of a café, to a woman who at least came and said it to my face, then I’ve used my one real swing on the wrong target, and I’ve got a swing coming that I’m going to need.
“He loves me,” I say.
“I know.” No hesitation at all. “Everybody knows. He talks about you when nobody asks. It’s a little embarrassing, honestly.”
“Then what exactly are you waiting for?”
And Genevieve, who has been so composed this entire time, has to think about that one.
“I’m not sure,” she says. “For you to go, I suppose. That’s what I was waiting for. I don’t feel good about it. I told his mother yesterday I’m not doing any of it anymore—not the seating, not the exits—and I meant that.”
“That isn’t what I asked. I asked what you’re waiting for.
” And then I answer my own question, maybe because she put her cards on the table, maybe because I’ve been carrying it alone all week and my arms are tired.
“I’m waiting to find out whether loving me is enough to make him choose differently.
It was never whether he loves me. I’ve never doubted that for one day of it.
It’s whether it moves him when it costs something. ”
I mean to say it evenly. I don’t manage it.
My voice drops out under the last few words and I have to press my lips together and look down at the binder, eyes stinging, here, in a café, in front of her, of all the people on earth.
That thought has lived behind my sternum for a week, and out loud it’s worse.
Out loud it sounds like a woman who already suspects the answer.
The café is loud and neither of us says anything for a while. Somebody’s steaming milk. A chair scrapes.
“That’s a hard thing to wait for,” Genevieve says finally.
“It’s the only thing worth waiting for.”
She picks up her bag. She stands and buttons her coat, top button and then down, slowly, and I’d bet anything this is the first time she’s had to leave a room without knowing how she did.
“For what it’s worth,” she says, “I hope he manages it.”
“That’s a strange thing for you to hope.”
“Yes,” she says. “It’s been a strange month for me too.”
And she goes. Out past the counter, out the door, and through the window I watch her stop on the sidewalk and stand there in the cold before she goes left, back toward her father’s office.
The breath I’ve been holding at the top of my chest comes out shaky, and when I finally lift my hands off the binder they aren’t steady at all. So much for poise.
My phone starts buzzing on the table, face up, and turns itself around against the binder.
It’s the property manager.
I look at it and my stomach drops like I’ve missed a step in the dark. He shook my hand this morning. He locked the door behind me an hour ago. There isn’t a single good reason for him to be calling me this afternoon.
I pick it up.
“Hello?”