Chapter Twenty-Two #2
He sat in his office for a while after the call, not doing anything in
particular, which was unusual for him. He was, by temperament and by
habit, a person who filled available time with productive activity, who
found idleness uncomfortable in the specific way of someone whose
self-worth had always been organized around usefulness. He sat anyway,
in the particular quiet of a man who has just said the true thing out
loud for the first time and is discovering, in the aftermath, that the
silence it leaves behind is not as painful as the anticipation of it had
been.
He thought about what he’d said on the phone about the structure he’d
been building, and understood, sitting quietly with it, that he had been
accurate in a way that cost him something real. He had loved Elena with
total sincerity and had also, beneath the sincerity, been using the
loving as a place to live that didn’t require him to risk anything. The
loving had been genuine. The safety of it had also been genuine. Both
things were true, and the second one, named out loud at last, did not
diminish the first but did require him to revise the story he’d been
telling himself about the kind of man he was.
He was a man who was going to have to figure out how to want things for
himself rather than through other people, which was a project he
suspected would take considerably longer than nine years and would
require a great deal more discomfort than standing at the edge of a room
waiting to see which way someone else turned. He was, he decided, going
to start with something small. Something that had nothing to do with
Elena or Damian or the foundation or anyone else’s story. Something that
was simply, entirely, his own.
He opened his laptop and booked, without overthinking it, a two-week
trip to Lisbon he had been meaning to take for four years and had
consistently failed to schedule because there had always been something
else, something more immediately useful, something someone needed from
him first. He booked it for January. He looked at the confirmation for a
long moment, at his own name on a ticket going somewhere he had chosen
for no reason other than that he had always wanted to go, and felt —-
quietly, imperfectly, with considerably more ambivalence than the moment
probably deserved —- something that was tentatively and correctly
identified as the beginning of being all right.
* * *
DAMIAN
Elena called him Saturday evening, which was the first time she had
called him rather than texted or responded since before any of this had
begun, and he picked up before the second ring with a restraint he was
proud of, given that he had seen her name on the screen and felt
something unlock in his sternum that had apparently been closed for a
very long time.
“Marcus called me today,” she said, without leading with anything
smaller. “He’s stepping back. From —- the other part of things. Not
from the foundation, not from my life, just from —- the rest of it. I
wanted you to know.”
Damian sat with this for a moment, which required him to sit with the
complicated fact that his first reaction was not relief, or not only
relief, but something more honest and considerably less comfortable: a
recognition that Marcus Wren, in stepping back at the precise moment
when staying would have been easiest and most justified, had done
something Damian had not managed in eleven months of marriage, which was
to put Elena’s actual wellbeing ahead of his own claim on the outcome.
“He’s a good man,” Damian said, which was the truest thing available and
the one that cost him most to offer without qualification.
“He is,” Elena agreed, simple and without any particular edge to it.
“You’re going to have to be better than him, you know. Not better than
him in general —- he’s been at this for nine years and he’s very
practiced. But better than the version of you I lived with for the last
year. Significantly better. Consistently and without being reminded.”
“I know,” he said.
“I’m not saying it to be cruel. I’m saying it because I need you to hear
it plainly, without softening, and to know that I mean it as the actual
terms and not as a figure of speech I’ll soften later when I’m feeling
generous.”
“I hear it as the actual terms.” He looked at the window, at the city,
at the view he had spent eleven months not seeing. “Elena. I’m not going
to ask you to believe me before I’ve given you anything to believe in.
I’m just going to do the things, and you can decide what you think of
them after you’ve seen them done. That’s all I’m offering right now.
That and the fact that I’m going to be at whatever appointment you’ll
let me be at, in whatever capacity you’ll let me be there, for as long
as it takes for the capacity to expand into something that actually
resembles what I should have been from the beginning.”
She was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke again her voice had the
particular quality of someone who has just received the exact right
amount of something and is deciding not to ask for more in case the
asking diminishes it. “The anatomy scan is in three weeks. If you want
to come, the appointment is at nine on the fourteenth.”
“I’ll be there,” he said, and meant it with the full and unencumbered
weight of a man who had finally, belatedly, understood that showing up
was not a gesture but a practice, and that he had three weeks in which
to make sure there was nothing in his calendar, his company, or his
lifelong habit of managing things from a distance that was going to be
allowed to interfere with nine o’clock on the fourteenth.