Somewhere With Chairs #2
“I have a version of my life that doesn’t have you in it,” she said.
“Not as a plan. As a — readiness. It’s very detailed.
It has been getting more detailed for months and I didn’t put it together until this week that I’ve been maintaining it the entire time, like a spare key I keep testing in the lock to make sure it still turns. ”
“Jo.”
“Let me finish, because if I stop now I’ll edit it.
” She put both hands flat. “You didn’t do that.
That’s what I want you to actually hear.
My sister said it to me on Tuesday and it took me two days to be able to say it out loud without it sounding like an accusation about you.
It was in my bag before I met you. It’s the reason I’m good at my job.
It kept me upright at nineteen and it has never once failed me, and the fact that it has never once failed me is starting to look less like a strength and more like something that never got tested by anything I actually wanted to keep. ”
Alexander was quiet for a moment.
“Is that what the last twelve days were?”
“I think the last twelve days were me finding out I can be very calm about losing you.” Jo’s voice stayed level and she let it.
“And I don’t want that. I don’t want to be good at it.
That’s the whole thing I came here to say and I’ve been rehearsing it since Tuesday, which my sister also predicted, so. ”
His face gave. Not a break. A slackening, the way a rope goes when the weight comes off it.
“Can I tell you something I noticed?” he said. “You can tell me it’s nothing.”
“Go on.”
“You’ve stopped leaving your bag at your desk.”
Jo did not move.
“Since your first week you’ve left it under the second drawer when you go into a meeting.
I know that because I’ve walked past it maybe four hundred times.
” He was not looking at her; he was turning the cup again, and he put no weight on the sentence at all, and the flatness was the effort, not the absence of one.
“Eight days ago you started taking it with you. Every meeting. Including the ten o’clocks, where you sit for an hour with it on the floor against your ankle. ”
The atrium went on around them as before.
“I noticed because I notice things,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do with it. It seemed like a thing a person does when they’re getting ready to not come back to the desk.”
There was a version of the next ten seconds where Jo said: there’s a piece of paper in it.
I wrote two columns on it on Tuesday, and one of the columns is you, and I’ve been carrying it around because putting it in the shredder felt like a bigger decision than I was ready to make at six-forty in the evening.
It was right there. It was, in fact, easier than most of what she had already said that afternoon.
“It’s not that,” she said.
“All right.”
“There’s nothing in it. It’s a habit, it’s not a—” She heard herself constructing and stopped, which was worse. “I’ve been keeping my own notes on the remediation. That’s all. I didn’t want them sitting on the floor.”
Alexander nodded once and moved on to something else and did not come back to it, and Jo sat without moving, hands around a cup and understood that she had just done it.
First time. Out loud, at a table anyone could have walked past, on the afternoon they ended it, over something that would have taken forty seconds to say.
She noted the ease of it, and it stayed with her.
“I thought you were being careful because you were deciding whether to stay.”
“I know. I could see you thinking it.” She almost laughed and it came out wrong. “And I let you think it, because correcting it meant explaining the rest, and the rest is embarrassing. Being sad at you wouldn’t have been.”
“It isn’t embarrassing.”
“It’s a little embarrassing.”
“All right. It’s a little embarrassing.” And then he did laugh, once, low and surprised out of him, and it changed his whole face for about a second and a half.
“Can I ask you something ugly,” Jo said.
“Please.”
“If I did go. Not tomorrow, not over this — if one day I worked out that the version of my life with you in it costs more than I want to pay, and I told you so, and I went.” She kept her voice ordinary, which took effort. “What would you do?”
He thought about it. That was the answer, before he said anything: that he thought about it for four full seconds instead of reaching for the thing that would have landed best.
“I’d try to talk you out of it,” he said. “Once. Badly, probably. And then I’d stop, because you’d have already done the arithmetic and you don’t do it twice.”
“That’s it?”
“You asked what I’d do, not what it would be like.
” The evenness went out of his voice on that, and he did not put it back.
“I’m not going to sit in a public atrium and tell you I’d fall apart, because you’d file it and you’d be right to.
I’d go to work. I’d be extremely good at my job.
That’s what I did last time and it is the single least reassuring true thing I can offer you. ”
Jo turned her cup a half circle on the table, which she recognized, distantly, as a thing she had picked up from him.
“No,” she said. “That one I believe.”
He got up and came back with two fresh coffees and put hers down in front of her and did not sit in his own chair.
He pulled it around to the quarter-turn, so that when he sat his knee was six inches from hers and his arm went along the back of her chair without touching her.
Jo registered it everywhere at once. Twelve days of twelve feet, and now his forearm lay a hand’s width behind her and the heat came across the gap without anything touching.
She wanted to lean back into it so badly her mouth had gone dry.