4. Allison
ALLISON
“Seven months,” Gavin says.
The car keeps moving like nothing happened.
Manhattan slides past the window, all wet black streets and taxi light, and a guy runs across Park holding a newspaper over his head that gave up on him a block ago.
For a second I honestly think I heard him wrong, because everything outside looks so normal.
“Seven months in London?”
“Until the base opens and it can run without me.”
“With Rebecca.”
He does that thing with his mouth where he’s deciding how reasonable to be. “With the whole London team. Rebecca’s the COO.”
“I know what her job is, Gavin.”
“Then don’t say her name like I booked a vacation with another woman.”
“Maybe don’t say vacation tonight,” I tell him, and he rubs a hand down his face and says I’m right, which doesn’t help at all.
“When do you leave?”
He looks out the window, and that’s how I know. My husband can stare down a room full of billionaires without blinking, but he can’t look at me and say it.
“Gavin.”
“The plane’s at six-thirty.”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Yes.”
I laugh, and it comes out wrong, thin and cracked, the kind of laugh you’d back away from at a party.
“So you took me to a party where everybody already knew you were moving to London. You let me read an article about your true partner in front of the whole room. And then you waited until the car ride home to tell me you’re leaving in a few hours. ”
“The clients only said yes tonight.”
“Rebecca knew three nights ago.”
“Rebecca wrote the plan.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s kind of my whole point.”
The car pulls up outside our building before he can answer.
The driver opens my door and I’m out and across the lobby before Gavin’s even unfolded himself from the back seat.
He catches the elevator doors with his hand at the last second, because of course he does, and then we ride all the way up in silence with my reflection staring at me from the mirrored wall and my hands so cold I tuck them under my arms.
I’m still in the dress from our third date.
I picked it on purpose tonight. It’s the one I wore the night a client stranded his family in Boston and Gavin spent half our dinner on the phone fixing it, and I finally took the pen out of his hand, wrote the restaurant’s address on his napkin, told him I’d be at the bar until he was done being important, and ordered fries.
He was off the phone and sitting next to me before the fries came.
I used to tell that story at parties. I thought if I wore the dress, some part of him might remember that he used to know when to hang up.
He looked at me tonight like he remembered. Then he went and took the client call anyway.
The penthouse doors open on a kitchen that’s never had a speck of dirt in it.
I drop my bag on the counter, and Gavin shuts the door behind us, pulls off his tie, and tosses it on the marble.
My husband folds his ties before I’ve even decided where to kick my shoes, so the tie lying there in a heap tells me more than his face does.
“If London falls apart, everybody we moved over there loses their job,” he says. “The clients signed because I promised I’d be there running it myself.”
“You promised them before you told me.”
“Before they’d said yes.”
“That’s the kind of difference that only matters to you, Gavin. It doesn’t mean anything in a kitchen.”
“It means something to the company.”
“Well, obviously.”
“The article was wrong,” he says, like that’s the thing we’re fighting about. “The way they described you.”
“And the way they described her?”
“She’s my business partner.”
“She knows where you’re going to live until Thanksgiving.
I found out in the car.” I can hear my voice climbing and I let it.
“She has your mind, Gavin. She gets the plans before they’re plans.
She knows what scares you about a new job and what gets you excited.
She gets the inside jokes in meetings and the first draft of every decision you make.
Tonight she knew our life was changing before I did. ”
“Nothing is happening between me and Rebecca.”
“I know that. I told you three nights ago I know that. I’m not accusing you of sleeping with her.”
“Then what are you accusing me of?”
“Of building a marriage where not sleeping with her is the only rule you think you have to keep.”
He goes quiet in the way I hate most. Gavin doesn’t yell when we fight. He gets reasonable, and when he gets reasonable he can make anything sound like the weather, like it was always going to rain and I’m silly for being upset about getting wet.
“She has access because she runs operations,” he says. “That’s not intimacy.”
“To you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you give her the best hours of your day and call it an org chart.”
He walks over to the windows and stands there for a minute with the whole lit-up city behind him, and then he turns around with a plan on his face. I know that look. He had it at the gala, right before he left me standing next to a plastic palm.
“I’m not asking you to stop your life,” he says. “Come to London whenever you want. The townhouse has room for an office for you. I’ll fly home twice a month, more if I can swing it. Luis can run the greenhouses when you’re over there.”
He means it. He honestly thinks he’s being generous. In his head he’s made space for my life, a nice neat little space, and it fits inside the edges of his.
“Do you know what happens to a greenhouse full of live plants when the owner runs them from a desk in London?” I ask.
“You have good people.”
“So do you.”
“The clients won’t sign unless I’m there.”
“Because you let them.”
“I’m the CEO, Allison.”
“And I run Barrett. You know that the same way that article knows it. Lovely. Tasteful. Easy to move.” I point at him, and my hand’s shaking, which makes me even madder.
“You put a desk for me in your London townhouse. You picked out the place where my business gets smaller so yours doesn’t have to. ”
He looks at me a while, and when he finally asks it, there’s no meanness in his voice at all. He actually wants to know.
“What do you want me to do?”
I could chicken out right here. I could ask for time, or ask him to come home sooner, and let him talk me into something we’d both pretend was fair. That’s what I’ve done for years.
I’m too tired to do it anymore.
“Don’t go.”
“Allison.”
“Don’t get on that plane tomorrow.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“You can. You just don’t want to pay for it.”
“It’s not about what I want. It’s people’s jobs. People who moved their families across an ocean because I asked them to.”
“It’s also this marriage.” I have to swallow before I can finish. “If you leave for seven months after tonight, we’re not going to make it. I can already feel it breaking.”
His face goes hard. “Are you threatening me with a divorce over a work trip?”
“I’m telling you what’s happening.”
“That sounds like an ultimatum.”
“Call it whatever makes you feel better.”
That gets him. His eyes flash, and some small, awful part of me is glad, because I’d rather have him angry than calm enough to explain me away.
“One emotional night can’t decide what happens to a company this size,” he says.
“You’re deciding what happens to us tonight.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No, you’re right. Your decisions come with spreadsheets, so you respect them more.”
“If I walk away tomorrow, the clients walk too, and the base never opens. A year of work goes down the drain, and the pilots who sold their houses to move over there are out of a job.” His voice finally climbs to meet mine.
“I know you’re lonely. I know I haven’t been here.
I know tonight was insulting and I should have told you before the gala.
But this is temporary, and I love you, and I’m not leaving our marriage by going and doing my job for a while. ”
“You don’t get to decide whether it feels like leaving,” I say, “when you’re the one standing in the doorway.”
He looks hurt, really hurt, and I want to take it back the second I see it, because I love him. I’ve loved him the whole time, even tonight.
“Come with me for the first two weeks,” he says, softer. “Let’s start there.”
“I’ve got a hotel install on Monday and two trucks of annuals on Tuesday, and payroll on Wednesday, and forty people who don’t stop existing just because London wants my husband.”
“Then come next weekend.”
“You still think this is about finding the right flight.”
“And you think me staying tomorrow fixes everything.”
“No.” My eyes are burning now and I hate it. “I think it would show me that for once, I come before the company.”
He doesn’t say anything.
And that’s my answer.
I head for the bedroom.
“Where are you going?”
“To take off the dress.”
He closes his eyes like I hit him. I’m glad, and then right away I’m ashamed of myself, hot all the way up my neck.
“Sleep in the guest room,” I say.
“Allison.”
“Please.”
He nods, and I shut the door. The dress hits the floor in a soft pile, and I leave it there, because I’m not hanging it up nicely for him tonight.
I don’t sleep. Sometime in the night I hear him walk down the hall, and water runs in the kitchen, and a cabinet shuts. Later there’s the sound of a zipper in the guest room, and I lie there and listen to my husband pack.
Before it’s light out I get up, put on black pants and a gray sweater and flats, and fill my little rolling suitcase with enough clothes for a week.
I don’t take any pictures off the walls.
I don’t take the dress. I tell myself this isn’t a real move, and then I tell myself again, because the first time didn’t sound true.
When I open the bedroom door, my legs are shaky and hollow from no sleep.
He’s at the other end of the hall in travel clothes with his suitcase beside him and his coat folded over his arm.
He looks at my suitcase, and I look at his, and neither of us says a single word.
I think he’s waiting for me to tell him I didn’t mean it.
I’m waiting for him to set his bag down.
He picks his up.
“I told the car to take you wherever you want after the airport,” he says.
I never said I was going to the airport. He just knew. It stings that he still knows me that well.
“Thanks.”
He holds my hand most of the way to Teterboro, and I let him, because apparently I’m a fool who can’t stop being married.
At the terminal his plane’s sitting behind the glass with its lights on while the ground crew loads black cases into the belly of it.
Rebecca’s already there in a black suit and flat shoes.
She tells Gavin the Farnborough call moved, gives me one short nod, and goes to the far side of the lounge without anybody asking her to.
There’s nothing romantic about it at all. It doesn’t help.
They call the flight, and Gavin turns to me. He finally looks as tired as I feel.
“I’ll be back in a couple weeks for a client dinner in the city,” he says.
“You’ll be back for work.”
“I’ll come home.”
I look past him at the plane. “This was your chance.”
He takes my hand again. “I love you.”
I could keep it from him, and some women would. I’m not one of them.
“I love you too.”
His whole face lifts. I take my hand back.
“And I meant what I said.”
He kisses my forehead and stays there a second too long, long enough for both of us to pretend this isn’t what it is. Then he picks up his bag and walks out to the plane. He turns once at the top of the stairs and looks back at me through the glass.
I don’t wave.
My driver steps up behind me and asks if I want to go back to the penthouse, and I keep my eyes on the plane while it rolls out toward the runway.
“Barrett Greenhouses,” I say.
The engines roar and the plane lifts off and climbs into the gray morning until the clouds swallow it.
He heard me, and he went.