Chapter 14
Margaret told her about the trust on the Tuesday, and did it badly, and was immediately sorry.
They were in the trailer. Margaret had driven up with a car seat that Roman’s mother had bought and that nobody had asked for, and they were arguing pleasantly about whether it would fit in Celia’s car, and Margaret said, entirely by accident, in the middle of a sentence about something else:
“—well, he can’t, he’s got no access to any of that now, since he took his name off—”
She stopped.
Celia looked up from the car seat.
“Off what?”
“Nothing.”
“Margaret.”
“I’m not supposed to know,” Margaret said. “I want to be clear that I only know because I was at Rhinebeck in April and my father was — Celia, my father was incandescent, and he told me, and he told me the way he tells you things, which is as though you’re supposed to agree with him.”
“Off what, Margaret.”
Margaret put the car seat down.
“The trust,” she said. “The whole family side. Rhinebeck, the ground leases, all of it. He signed it away in April and took the tax hit and Dad hasn’t spoken to him since — and I mean hasn’t spoken, not once, not at Easter.”
Celia stood very still in a construction trailer.
“That’s a great deal of money,” she said.
“It’s an obscene amount of money.”
“Does he know you’re telling me?”
“He’d be furious.” Margaret’s face was miserable. “That’s what I’ve just done, isn’t it. That’s exactly the thing I promised him I’d never — Celia, I’m so sorry, I’m not doing his work for him, I would rather chew glass than do his work for him—”
“I know you’re not.”
“Then say something else, because your face is doing what it did in the garden.”
Celia sat down on the good chair.
Two conversations. Two conversations in a café about a broker’s offer and a store room, in which she had held him to a subject and a clock, and he had come, and he had sat there, and he had not once said I took my name off the trust.
“He’s had four opportunities,” she said. “By my count. April, and three Thursdays.”
“He wouldn’t.”
“No,” Celia said. “He wouldn’t.”
* * *
Which was how she came to schedule a conversation with no subject, and then spend six days regretting it.
She had done it in a car outside a café in a state she would afterward describe to herself, generously, as tired.
She had known it was a mistake by the time she got home.
She had drafted three messages to Lydia amending it back to a subject and had sent none of them, because amending it would have said something, and not amending it would also say something, and there was no version of the week in which she came out of it having said nothing.
She turned up at the mill on the Thursday at two o’clock in a fury with herself.
He was already there — not early, exactly; the crew had gone at one because the pour was done and there was nowhere for him to wait, and so he had been standing at the bottom of the loading bay ramp in the sun for however long, and had not come in.
She had, without quite meaning to, chosen the one place on earth where she was largest.
“You can come up,” she said.
* * *
They sat on the edge of the loading dock with their legs over the side, four feet off the gravel, in the afternoon sun, and the whole thing was so unlike the café that for the first ten minutes neither of them tried.
The building went up behind them. It had a roof now, and glass in the east openings, and the north bay stood open to the sky the way she had fought for, and from the loading dock you could see straight through the ground floor and out into it — sixty feet of dark and then a column of light.
“You got the sky,” he said, eventually.
“I got the sky. It cost about as much as the engineer said it would.”
“Was it worth it?”
“Yes.”
He nodded and did not say anything else about it, which was the correct thing, and she noticed that too.
The sun was on her face. She was thirty-seven weeks pregnant and her back hurt and she had a foot that had stopped fitting into any shoe she owned, and the gravel yard smelled of hot dust and cut stone.
“There’s no subject,” she said.
“I know.”
“I want to be clear it wasn’t a gesture. I was tired and I couldn’t think of one.”
“All right.”
“You could ask me something.”
He thought about that for a while.
“Is the stair still bad?”
Celia turned her head and looked at him, and he was entirely serious, and something in her chest went sideways.
“The stair’s fine. The stair’s beautiful.
It’s the one thing in there we rebuilt properly and it cost a fortune.
” She looked back out at the yard. “The temporary handrail’s still on it, though.
Chuck put it there in February and every time somebody goes to take it off, somebody else stops them.
It’s become a whole thing. I think it’s going to be there when the building opens. ”
Lawrence laughed.
And she laughed — out loud, once, before she had decided to.
It was not even a joke. That was the appalling part.
It was a handrail. There was nothing funny in it whatsoever, and it had come up out of her exactly the way laughing at his sister had come up out of her on a phone in March, and she sat on a loading dock four feet off the ground and hated herself steadily for a full minute.
Lawrence had the grace to look out at the yard the entire time and not say a word.
* * *
“Ask me the thing you actually want to ask,” Celia said, when she had it back.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s forty minutes left and you’d have to end it,” he said, “and I’d rather have the forty minutes.”
She let out a breath.
“That’s the most honest thing anybody’s said to me all month,” she said. “All right. Then I’ll go. Why didn’t you tell me about the trust?”
He went very still.
“Margaret,” he said.
“Don’t be angry with her. It came out sideways in a sentence about a car seat, and she was so upset about it she nearly cried in my trailer.”
“I’m not angry with her.” He rubbed his face with one hand. “God. All right.”
“Four opportunities,” Celia said. “April in front of two lawyers, and three Thursdays, and I gave you the boathouse question directly and you looked at me and dodged it. Why?”
He was quiet for a long moment.
“Because you’d have to do something with it,” he said.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that if I tell you I gave up the trust, then you’re a woman sitting in a café being told that a man gave up an obscene amount of money over you.
” He turned his hands over. “And then it’s yours to carry.
Either you owe me something, which you don’t and never will, or you have to work out how to say that doesn’t change anything to a man who’s just told you he did it — and you’d have said it, and you’d have been right, and it would have cost you something to say.
So I’d have handed you a bill for my own — whatever it is. Repair.”
Celia stared out at the gravel.
“That’s not why people usually don’t tell things,” she said.
“No.”
“People usually don’t tell things because they want to be found out later and get more for it.”
“Yes,” Lawrence said. “I’ve done that too.
That’s the Ambler Street building. That’s every gift I gave you for nine years.
” He said it without any self-pity at all, which she found she could not fault.
“I know the difference now, is all. It took me about six months in a small house to work out that there’s a version of generosity that’s actually just invoicing on a delay, and that I’d been doing it since we met, and that you’d been paying it. ”
The sun moved. Somewhere down the creek a truck went over the bridge.
“I need you to understand something,” Celia said, “and I need you to not do anything with your face while I say it.”
“Okay.”
“The trust doesn’t change anything.”
“I know.”
“The foundation doesn’t change anything.
The letter you wrote to your father, the friend, whatever else you’ve — Lawrence, none of it changes anything, because that’s not the ledger.
There is no ledger. You can’t pay off nine years and I would rather you didn’t try, because the trying is the exact thing that broke it. You were always paying for things.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t tell you.”
“Yes.” She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “Yes. I’ve just walked all the way around it and arrived where you were. That’s very irritating.”
* * *
“Can I ask you something now,” he said, “or is that not how this works?”
“You can ask.”
“Are you frightened about the —” He stopped and started again, which he had never done in nine years of speaking in public. “You’re two weeks out. Are you frightened.”
Celia considered lying, and found she could not be bothered.
“Yes.”
“Of the birth or the after?”
“The after.” She watched a hawk go over the creek.
“The birth is a day. People have days. The after is a year in four hundred and ten square feet with a person who needs me to be a competent adult at four in the morning, and I’ve spent nine years being a woman who is very good in a room and I have absolutely no idea whether I’m good at four in the morning. ”
“You’re extremely good at four in the morning,” Lawrence said.
She turned her head.
“You are,” he said. “You’ve always been.
It’s the only hour I ever saw you not perform.
Every real conversation we ever had was after two — the cereal year, the night you told me about the bank, the night before your father’s surgery.
That’s when you’re actually there.” He was looking at the yard.
“I used to think it was because you were tired. It took me about five months in a gatehouse to work out it was because at four in the morning there was nobody to be contained for.”
Celia sat on a loading dock with her hands in her lap.
“That’s a horrible thing to be right about,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You could have told me that nine years ago.”
“I didn’t know it nine years ago.” He turned his hands over. “I’ve had a great deal of time to work things out and no one to tell them to. That’s most of what I’ve got now. It’s not worth much.”
* * *
They talked for the rest of the hour and it was, in the end, about the nine years.
Not the seven weeks. She noticed that afterward, driving home — that neither of them had said Sienna’s name once, and that it had not been avoidance, it simply had not been the subject.
She told him about the Denham party. Not accusingly.
She told him what it had been like: two hours ten minutes by her own watch, and three times he had gone past, and that the thing that had actually hurt was not being left, it was that she had made the decision not to say anything and had then had to keep making it, every twenty minutes, for two hours, alone, in a room full of people.
He did not defend himself. He did not say I don’t remember that, which was almost certainly true. He asked one question — “which window?” — and when she told him, he nodded slowly, as though he were writing something down in a place he could find it later.
She told him about the year the studio stopped. Not the whole of it. The Rockport site visit, and the north wing decision, and how each one had been correct.
“I’d have said yes,” he said at one point. “If you’d asked me to go to Lisbon later so you could do the site visit. I’d have said of course.”
“I know you would.”
“Then why—”
“Because you’d have said yes generously,” Celia said, “and I’d have watched you be generous about it, and I’d have known it cost you something, and the next time I wouldn’t have asked.
” She shrugged. “That’s not you doing something to me.
That’s just the arithmetic of being married to a man who is always doing something bigger than what you’re doing. ”
Lawrence sat with that for a while.
“I don’t know how to answer that,” he said finally.
“There isn’t an answer. I’ve looked.”
* * *
At three o’clock she said, “That’s the hour,” and he got up, and put his hand out to help her down off the dock, and stopped it halfway, and put it in his pocket instead.
She got herself down. It took a moment and it was not elegant.
“Thursday,” he said. Not a question. Not a request.
“I’ll send it through Lydia.”
“Right.”
He walked down the ramp and across the yard to a gray sedan parked badly, and Celia stood in the loading bay in the late afternoon with the whole ground floor running dark behind her out to the column of light in the north bay.
She was not, she noted with the clinical part of her brain, in any danger of forgiving him this afternoon.
The danger was completely different and she had walked directly into it with her eyes open.
For seven months she had held one thing absolutely steady: I have a life and it is good and it is mine, and he is a man I used to be married to.
She had built it out of a lease and a mill and a hard hat, and it had gotten her through a website and a photograph and nine minutes at the end of a file, and it had been true every single day.
It was still true. That was the trouble.
It was still true, and now there was a second true thing sitting next to it, which was that she had spent an hour on a loading dock in the sun and had not once looked at the time.
Celia put her hand flat on the doorframe of her own building.
“Oh, no,” she said, quietly, to nobody at all.
Because seven months ago, on the floor of his study, she had lost something and it had nearly killed her — and she had spent every day since making absolutely sure she would never be in a position to lose anything like it again.
And she had just done it. In an afternoon. On a loading dock. Over a handrail.
She was thirty-seven weeks pregnant, and she had a building, and a name, and a fortnight, and for the first time since October she had something to lose again, which meant that for the first time since October she was properly, comprehensively frightened.