17. Connor
CONNOR
The corridor outside my grandfather’s room has a runner down the middle of it that’s older than I am, a window at the far end that looks over the kitchen garden, and a chair nobody has ever sat in.
I’ve been coming every day since the archivist gave me that drive. I don’t go in every time. Some afternoons the nurse says he’s sleeping, and I stand out here for a while and then drive back to the city, and I couldn’t tell you what I think I’m doing.
Today I’m early. I can hear the machine going through the door, and under it his voice saying something to somebody, and then a laugh. Good sign.
Some days I get as far as the handle and turn around. I keep thinking I’ll walk in there with something worth saying, and every time I get to this floor I remember I’ve got nothing yet except a drive I already gave away and a wife who lets me stand on her sidewalk.
Then my mother comes around the turn in the corridor.
She’s got a folder against her hip and reading glasses pushed up into her hair, and a strip of card samples in her other hand, the kind the calligrapher sends over—the same cream, over and over, in versions.
She’s been up here doing the Jubilee correspondence at the little table by the window because the light’s better than in her office.
“Connor.”
“Is he awake?”
“He’s with the physiotherapist.” She stops in front of me. “This is convenient, actually. I have something for you.”
My stomach goes cold before she’s finished the sentence. Her face has changed since the roses. It isn’t anger. It’s the opposite of anger. She looks the way she looks the morning of an event, when the whole thing is already handled and she’s just walking the room.
“Not here,” I say.
“Here is fine.”
She shifts the card samples into the folder hand and squares up to me in the middle of that runner.
“When I spoke to you about this before, you were upset,” she says.
“I do not think you heard me. So hear me now.” Her voice is the one she uses on caterers—level, unhurried, nothing in it at all.
“The house is held by the company. On the dissolution of your marriage, or on any conduct the trustee finds an irreparable embarrassment to the family, it reverts to the holding company within thirty days. You would need to be out by then.”
The corridor gets very bright at the edges. Somewhere under my sternum a slow drop starts, and I stand on my grandfather’s runner and take it, because there is nowhere in this house to put it down.
“Your distributions are suspended pending a review. The review has no fixed length. It concludes when the trustee is satisfied, and the trustee will take my view into account.” A pause that isn’t hesitation. “I am not in a hurry.”
“Mom.”
“The aircraft is a company asset. The flat in the city, the flat at the coast—company. Your memberships can be moved to another officer in a morning.” She takes a breath, and it’s steady.
“Your salary continues. You do the job and you do it well. You will discover very quickly what a salary alone buys in the life you currently have.”
I can hear my own pulse in my ears now. I put my hand flat against the wall behind me, low, where she can’t see it.
“The attorneys have already begun drafting. You will have the letter this week. I would rather you read it in your own house with a drink than be handed it by a stranger. So I am telling you now.”
Down the corridor, through the door, my grandfather laughs at something the physiotherapist has said.
“Does the letter mention her?” I ask.
“Why would it?”
“Because all of this is about my wife. Every line of it. I’d like to know whether her name is written anywhere in the thing that takes my house off me, or whether you’ve managed to do this to her without putting her in it.”
“The letter concerns your interests. Not hers. She has no interests here.” A small tilt of her head. “That has been the situation from the day you married her, and it is not something I invented this autumn.”
That’s the closest she has ever come to telling me the truth about my marriage, and she says it holding a strip of cream-colored card.
“You did this before the ballroom,” I say.
Her eyes come up.
“That’s not a guess. Your firm was asking the trustee about revision timing weeks ago.
I know because a paralegal called my phone by mistake and read it out to me.
” My voice is doing something strange, going quieter instead of louder.
“So I want to know. Did you have this drawn up before that clip played, or after?”
For the first time in my life, my mother takes a moment to choose an answer in front of me.
“I have always kept my affairs current,” she says.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is the only one you are getting in a corridor.”
So she had it ready. She had it ready before she put my wife on a screen, and she’s been walking around this house for weeks with both halves of it in her pocket—arranging flowers, asking whether I’d eaten.
My chest goes tight and strange, like the air up here is the wrong mixture.
I look at the woman who taught me to swim.
She held my chin above the water a whole summer, patient as stone, and I keep looking for that woman in this one and can’t find her anywhere.
“Say the rest of it,” I say. “You’ve got more. You’ve had the folder in your hand this whole time.”
“I do have one more thing. Howard Foster telephoned me.”
“No.”
“You have not heard it.”
“I have heard it. Genevieve told the room she was done being staged, and she told you to explain it to her father yourself, and instead of doing that you called him.” My jaw is locking; the words come out through it. “No.”
“He would like a formal understanding announced,” my mother says, exactly as though I hadn’t spoken.
“Nothing binding. An intention, stated publicly, between two families, timed for shortly before the Jubilee, so the Jubilee reads as a celebration rather than a wake. He is an old friend and he is being generous. He knows what the last month has done to your name.”
“Genevieve won’t do it.”
“Genevieve is twenty-nine, she is fond of you, and she has been raised to understand what she is for. She said no in a garden room. She will say something else in a month, because Howard has spent his whole life being patient with women who say no first.” She says it without cruelty.
The lack of cruelty is what makes it filthy.
“And you would not be asked for anything except your presence in a photograph.”
“I’m married.”
“You are separated. It is on a court’s docket.
That makes it a fact rather than a mood.
” Her voice doesn’t move. “It is insurance, Connor. If your wife comes back, the understanding quietly lapses and everyone is polite about it. If she does not, you have a landing place instead of a hole. I am not asking you to choose Genevieve Foster. I am asking you to stand next to her for an hour.”
There’s a smell up here I hadn’t noticed until now, bleach under eucalyptus, and it’s suddenly the only thing in my nose.
“No,” I say.
“Think about it.”
“No. Not this week, not next month, not the week after she serves papers, not ever.” My voice comes up and I let it, and it goes down that corridor and probably through the door.
“You put my wife on a screen in front of the city, and now you want me standing in a photograph with another woman before Christmas. Do you hear it? Have you actually listened to the sentence?”
“I hear a man who thinks the worst has already happened.”
“I hear my mother selling my marriage twice.”
That lands. Not much. Her chin comes up slightly, and there’s a flicker behind her eyes, and it’s gone.
“You will want to be careful,” she says.
“Why? What’s left? You’ve just read me the list yourself. Tell me what’s underneath it, because you clearly think there’s something.”
“There is.” She says it simply. “Every door. You’ve never once had to open one yourself. You have no idea how heavy they are.”
The physiotherapist’s voice comes through the door, cheerful, telling my grandfather he’s done enough.
My mother looks at that door, and her face goes somewhere I can’t follow—soft isn’t the word, but it’s the direction—and then she looks back at me.
“I hope you’re right about her,” she says. “I do. It would be a great relief to me to be wrong about that woman before I die.”
“You’ve never been wrong about her. You just decided about her before you met her.”
“Perhaps.” She takes her glasses out of her hair and sets them on her nose, and she looks down at her card samples, comparing two creams that are identical. “You hope, Connor. I prepare. It is why there is anything left for you to lose.”
Then she walks off down the corridor with her folder and her cards, and the runner takes the sound out of her shoes.
I watch her the whole way. She sits down at the little table by the window, puts her glasses on properly, and picks up a pen. Inside a minute she’s moving a name from one table to another, and her face has gone smooth and interested. She’s enjoying it. That’s her afternoon now. Back to normal.
I don’t go in to see him. I can’t take this face in there yet.
I sit down in the chair nobody has ever sat in.
My legs make the decision before I do—one moment I’m standing and the next the chair has me, and my hands are hanging off my knees like they belong to somebody else.
They won’t quite close. I look at them not closing and think, in plain words: she can turn my whole life off from a corridor, and it will take her less time than choosing a cream.
There’s a weight sitting on my breastbone like a knee. Every breath has to get past it. So this is the thing my wife lived inside all those years, the pressure of a person who can end you without ever raising her voice, and I stood next to her the whole time and called it family.
At the far end of the corridor the window has gone the color of dishwater, and below it the kitchen garden is stripped for winter—every bed cut back to black earth, everything that grew this year carted off, the shape of the thing still there under the frost, waiting. I sit and look at it for a long time.
And underneath the weight, when I finally get a clean breath, what I find is shame. All those dinners where I was the heir apparent. All those rooms arranging themselves around me. My wife being told what to wear by a woman with a folder.
What I want, sitting in a chair nobody has ever sat in, is to drive into the city and stand on Marisol’s sidewalk and tell my wife.
I don’t want comforting. I want the one true sentence she’d say about it, and I want her to know I finally got there—she worked all of this out on a phone in her friend’s apartment, alone, with a lawyer on the other end, long before I did.
Through the door, my grandfather starts coughing, and the machine picks up, and the nurse’s voice comes in over the top of it.
I get up off that chair. I wipe my face with the flat of my hand, once, hard. Then I knock and go in, because he’s awake, and because whatever they take off me, it won’t be this hour.