Chapter 14
XAVIER
Doctor Harlan had a phrase she used: sitting with the discomfort. The first time Xavier heard it he'd wanted to throw something across her calm, spare office.
"I don't sit with discomfort," he'd told her. "I eliminate it. That's literally what I do for a living."
"How's that working out for you right now?"
He hadn't had an answer. He still didn't, weeks into their sessions, but the question had stopped making him want to throw things.
He was learning to sit with it. The discomfort.
The not-knowing. The empty apartment, the white walls and the silence where Isabelle's voice used to be.
He sat with all of it, week after week, in the chair across from Doctor Harlan, and he talked about things he'd never said out loud and discovered that saying them didn't kill him, which was itself a revelation, because some part of him had always believed it would.
His mother. The coat on the hook. The birthday cards he'd thrown away for twenty-two years without opening. The locked room.
Doctor Harlan didn't call it a locked room.
She called it an attachment wound, which sounded clinical and insufficient but also, he was beginning to recognize, accurate.
He'd been wounded at nine years old and he'd spent the next two decades building an empire on top of the wound so no one could see it, least of all himself.
And then Isabelle. The love of his life, who he had also seen as a possession. She had gotten pregnant, Douglas had come back and the empire hadn't been enough to keep the wound covered, and everything he'd built had caved in.
He was learning. Slowly, painfully: he'd spent his whole life fluent in one language and was now trying to speak another.
He was learning that love and control were not the same thing.
He was learning that trust was not the absence of fear but the decision to act as though the fear didn't get a vote.
He was learning that he'd married the most remarkable woman he'd ever met and spent ten years treating her like something he owned.
After his most recent session, he drove to Fillmore Street.
He parked a block away from Douglas's building because he needed the walk.
He needed time to talk himself out of turning around, which he wanted to do with every step.
Douglas had no reason to welcome him. Douglas had looked at him on Margaret's doorstep with contempt so clean it could have cut glass, and the contempt had been entirely earned, yet Xavier was walking toward it voluntarily because Doctor Harlan had said something in their last session that he couldn't shake.
"You keep talking about who Isabelle is to you," she'd said. "Have you ever asked anyone who she is outside of you?"
He hadn't. He'd never once asked anyone to describe his wife in terms that didn't reference him.
Isabelle was his wife, his partner, his home.
She was the woman who made his house beautiful, who stood beside him at dinners, who held his arm in her sleep.
He'd defined her entirely in relation to himself, and he was beginning to recognize that this was its own kind of wound, quieter than the accusation but possibly deeper.
Douglas's building was a narrow Edwardian with a green front door and a brass knocker that needed polishing.
Xavier noticed the knocker because he was noticing things like this now: the details, the finishes, the surfaces.
Isabelle had taught him that without either of them knowing it.
He stood on the step and knocked and waited.
Douglas opened the door. He looked at Xavier and his expression cycled through surprise, suspicion, and something that wasn't quite hostility but was very close.
"Xavier."
"I know I should have called."
"You should have called." Douglas leaned against the doorframe. He didn't step aside. He didn't invite Xavier in. "What do you want?"
"I want to talk to you about Isabelle."
"I'm not your marriage counselor."
"I know. That's not what I'm asking."
"What are you asking?"
He studied Douglas Torres, who had been his wife's closest friend for nearly a decade and who knew things about her that Xavier had never bothered to learn.
"I want to know who she is. Outside of me. I want to know what I missed."
Douglas stared at him. His expression didn't change. The seconds stretched. Then he stepped aside.
The apartment was small and immaculate. Good light.
High ceilings. The crown molding was, in fact, extraordinary: 1890s egg-and-dart, intact and unpainted, running the full perimeter of the living room.
The bathroom was visible through an open door and Xavier could see why Isabelle had called the tile criminal.
But the bones were good. Even he could see that.
Douglas didn't offer coffee. He sat in an armchair and gestured Xavier toward the sofa, folded his arms and waited.
Xavier leaned forward. He put his elbows on his knees and looked at his hands.
"I've been married to Isabelle for eight years.
I've known her for ten. And I'm asking you to tell me about her because I've realized that I don't actually know her.
Not the way I should. Not the parts that don't involve me. "
Douglas was quiet. Xavier could see him weighing the request, testing it, looking for the strategy underneath. Looking for the angle. Xavier couldn't blame him for assuming the worst.
"This isn't a tactic," Xavier said. "I'm not here to gather intelligence so I can win her back. I'm here because my therapist asked me if I'd ever thought about who Isabelle is when I'm not in the room, and I—I couldn't answer."
Douglas's face shifted. The hostility didn't disappear but it rearranged itself, made room for something else. Curiosity, maybe. Or recognition.
"What do you want to know?" Douglas asked.
"Everything. Anything. What was she like at Berkeley?"
Douglas looked at him for a long moment. Then he unfolded his arms and leaned back in the chair. His posture changed, loosened, as though he'd made a decision.
"She was extraordinary," he said. "She's still extraordinary, but at Berkeley she was extraordinary in a way that was almost aggressive.
She'd walk into a studio and take apart a building with her eyes. Structurally, aesthetically, historically. She could look at an elevation and tell you the decade, the architect, the regional tradition. She could read joinery from across a room. She was the smartest person in every room she walked into and nobody knew it because she was pretty, quiet and her last name was Monroe. And then Grant.”
Xavier listened.
"She was studying art history because her mother told her it was appropriate.
She hated it. She wanted to build things, to restore things, to put her hands on surfaces and bring them back.
But Monroe women didn't do that. Her mother barely approved of her older sister being a doctor. Monroe women had taste. So Iz, desperate for her mother’s approval, buried the rest of it, and then she met you and she kept burying it because you gave her a beautiful life that didn't require her to use any of the things she was actually good at. "
"I didn't know," Xavier whispered.
"You didn't ask."
The sentence was simple, devastating and true. Xavier sat with it.
"She talks to the houses now,” Douglas said, quieter now.
"When she's working. She talks to the wood, the plaster and the fixtures.
She narrates what she's doing, like she's explaining it to the building.
I've seen her do it on the Soto project.
She stands in front of a piece of original trim and she says, 'There you are, I see you,' and she means it.
She's talking to something that's been covered up for forty years and she's welcoming it back. "
Xavier's throat tightened.
"That's who she is," Douglas said. "That's who she's always been. Someone who finds the things that got buried and brings them back into the light."
They sat in silence. The light from the window moved across the floor.
"She loves you," Douglas said, finally. "I want you to know that, even though I'm not sure you deserve it right now. She loves you, she misses you and she plays your voice message before bed some nights. She told me not to tell you that, so if you ever mention it I'll deny everything."
Xavier pressed his hand over his eyes.
"Don't do that," Douglas said. "Don't fall apart in my apartment. I don't have the furniture for it."
"I'm not falling apart."
"You're two seconds from falling apart. I can see it."
Xavier took a breath. He sat up straight. Douglas watched him with an expression that was still wary but had shifted toward something almost like grudging respect.
"You hurt her," Douglas said. "You hurt her badly. I don't know if you can fix it. But the fact that you're here asking me to tell you about her instead of asking how to win her back... it's something."
Douglas studied him. "Don't blow it."
Xavier left the apartment twenty minutes later. He took out his phone and recorded a voice message.
"Isabelle. I have an idea and you can say no.
I've been thinking about the appointments, how we see each in a doctor's office and then we go our separate ways.
I want us to have baby lunches. Once a week, maybe twice, wherever you want, wherever you're comfortable, and we just talk about the baby.
What you're feeling. What you need. What's coming.
I want to be part of this pregnancy even though I'm not in the house.
I want to hear about the cravings, the nausea and the weird dreams you're probably having because I read that pregnant women have vivid dreams and I want to know what ours is dreaming about while it's the size of a... whatever fruit it is this week."
He paused. He sounded nervous but earnest. "You pick the place. You pick the time. I'll show up. That's the whole proposal. Let me know."
He sent it. He drove to Russian Hill and sat in his apartment and waited.