Chapter Three
Jill
Robert came home a little after midnight, the garage door sounding before his footsteps reached the stairs, the sequence of sounds I could have identified in my sleep after twelve years, the electric hum of the door, the click of the interior door, his keys landing on the entry table, his footsteps taking the stairs two at a time the way he always did when he was tired and wanted the climbing over with quickly.
By the time he reached the bedroom I had already changed into pajamas and turned off the lamp, though I wasn't asleep and he probably knew it, some shift in my breathing giving me away the way it always did.
"I'm sorry about tonight," he said, dropping his keys on the dresser with the clatter that meant he was still thinking about something else, his voice already moving past the apology and into the next item on whatever list occupied him.
"Legal sent back a mess on the acquisition.
Three pages of redlines an hour before we needed to sign.
We can do the anniversary Saturday. I'll have Olivia clear the whole evening. "
I didn't answer right away, and he must have taken my silence for sleep, because he moved around the room getting undressed without waiting for a response, the sound of his belt coming loose, his shirt buttons, the rustle of a man performing a routine he could have done blind, the way he did when a conversation had already resolved itself in his own head, as though naming a new date was the same as making good on the old one.
"There's bass in the fridge," I said finally, my voice flatter than I intended. "And a torte."
"We'll have it Saturday," he said again, like the food itself could simply be moved forward on the calendar along with everything else, reheated and served two days late as though two days made no difference to a fish that had been resting under foil since seven o'clock, and something in the easiness of that assumption sat wrong in my chest in a way I couldn't yet name.
He sat down on the edge of the bed to pull off his socks, and for a moment neither of us said anything, the room lit only by the streetlight filtering through the curtains, and I found myself watching the outline of his shoulders and thinking about how many nights had ended exactly like this one, him arriving home late and apologetic and already halfway toward tomorrow, me lying still and pretending the apology had landed somewhere it hadn't.
"You could ask me how the dinner went," I said, before I'd decided to say it. "Since I made it. Since I stood there for two hours."
He turned, surprised by the edge in my voice, an edge I rarely let show. "How did it go?"
"It went cold," I said. "Same as the last one. Same as the one before that."
"Jill." He said my name the way he said it when he wanted a conversation to slow down, patient and a little wounded, as though I'd struck at something he hadn't seen coming. "I'm doing everything I can right now. This acquisition is going to set the company up for the next decade."
"I know what it's going to do for the company," I said. "I don't know what it's doing for us."
He didn't have an answer for that, or didn't reach for one quickly enough, and the silence stretched out until he finally said, quietly, that he was sorry, and reached for my hand in the dark, and I let him take it because it was easier than explaining that an apology delivered at midnight, after the third missed evening in a row, had started to feel less like comfort and more like a formality we both performed out of habit.
He came to bed smelling like the shower a few minutes later, his hair still damp against the pillow, and he reached for me the way he always reached for me, a hand at my hip, his mouth against my shoulder, the same opening he had used for years, patient and practiced and entirely familiar, the choreography of a marriage that had learned exactly how to move without ever once asking whether the movements still meant anything.
I let him turn me toward him because turning toward him was easier than explaining why I didn't want to, and for a while I let my body do what it had learned to do on autopilot, the same rhythm, the same quiet, the same careful economy of motion that asked nothing of either of us beyond what we already knew, a well-worn path through a familiar wood, comfortable in the way that comfort sometimes becomes its own erosion.
He kissed my collarbone the way he always did, and I thought about a hotel in Rome I had never seen, and about the man in the conference room who couldn't remember what night his own anniversary fell on until an assistant stood in his doorway and made him look at it, and I thought about how strange it was that a body could keep participating in something the mind had already started leaving.
"Robert," I said, and he lifted his head, already half undone, his eyes finding mine in the dark with an expression that still, after everything, carried something like tenderness, and I asked him the only question that mattered. "Do you want me?"
He looked at me the way a man looks at an equation he's confident he can solve, a small furrow between his brows, the focus he brought to a problem he assumed had a clean answer.
"We're married," he said. "I love you." He said it like the two facts were sufficient answer to the question, like wanting and loving were the same verb wearing different clothes, and he leaned down to kiss me again, expecting the conversation to be over, his hand already moving lower, already assuming the question had been rhetorical.
"That's not what I asked."
He stopped, propped on one elbow, studying me in the dark. "What are you asking, then?"
"I'm asking if you still look at me and want me.
Not out of habit. Not because it's Thursday and this is what Thursday looks like when you finally make it home.
" I felt my throat tighten around the words.
"I'm asking if there's still a version of you that's actually here, in this bed, instead of somewhere back in that conference room. "
He didn't answer right away, and the not-answering told me more than anything he could have said. "Of course I want you," he said finally, but the words came a beat too late, and we both heard it.
I turned my face so his mouth landed on my cheek instead, and I told him I was tired, and he didn't argue, because arguing had never been his instinct with me, only retreating into whatever came next on his schedule, rolling onto his back with a small exhale that wasn't quite disappointment and wasn't quite relief, some third thing I didn't have a name for.
He fell asleep within minutes, the fast unconsciousness of a man who had spent all day making decisions and had none left over for the space beside him in bed, his breathing settling into the slow, even rhythm I'd fallen asleep to a thousand nights, and I lay awake beside him for a long time, staring at the ceiling, running the conference room sentence through my mind on a loop until the words lost meaning and became only sound, syllables detached from sense, the way a word repeated too many times stops being a word at all.
Sometime after two, I got up. I didn't decide to get up so much as find myself already standing, already walking down the hall past the closed door of the home office Robert never used, toward the guest room closet where I kept the box of things I had never fully unpacked from the apartment I'd lived in before I married him, contact sheets and a battered leather portfolio and, underneath all of it, a folded piece of paper gone soft at the creases, the paper thin as cloth from years of handling before I'd stopped handling it at all.
I sat on the guest bed and opened it under the lamp, the light throwing long shadows across walls I'd painted a pale gray a decorator had called morning fog.
It was the itinerary Robert and I had written together twelve years ago, in his handwriting and mine both, two columns of a life we had planned before either of us knew what the next decade would cost. Italy for the food and the beauty, written in Robert's cramped, decisive hand.
Japan for the quiet, in my own looser cursive.
Costa Rica for a freedom neither of us had ever let ourselves want out loud, the two of us trading the pen back and forth at a diner table on Van Ness, laughing at how impossible it seemed that we'd ever have the money or the time for any of it, certain, in the way only the young and broke can be certain, that someday would arrive right on schedule.
We had promised each other this trip after his next deal closed, and then the deal after that, and then the deal after that, until the promise became a joke we no longer bothered to make, a line item quietly dropped from every conversation we had, the way a habit stops being remarked on once it becomes simply how things are.
I remembered, sitting there with the itinerary in my lap, the exact night we'd stopped joking about it, four or five years into the marriage, when I'd brought up Japan over dinner, half teasing, and Robert had looked at me with an expression I hadn't been able to name at the time, something between exhaustion and apology, and said only, "Not this year, Jill, you know that," in a tone that closed the subject so completely I hadn't raised it again for years afterward.
I understood now, turning the memory over in the lamplight, that the tone itself had been the real message, not the words, a tone that told me the trip had stopped being a shared dream and had become, instead, one more thing I was expected to understand without requiring an explanation.
I read the list three times, tracing the ink with one finger, feeling the slight ridge where the paper had been folded and unfolded so many times over the years that the crease had nearly worn through.
I thought about the diner where we'd written it, a place on Van Ness that had closed years ago and turned into a bank branch, gone the way so many things from that version of our life had gone, quietly, without ceremony, replaced by something more permanent and less alive.
Then I folded it back along its old creases and sat holding it in the dark, and for the first time in longer than I could remember, I let myself wonder what my life would look like if I stopped waiting for permission to want something, if I simply took the itinerary at its word and went, alone if I had to, twelve years late but not, perhaps, too late to matter.