The Version Where She Tells Him
He came back at ten past one.
Jo was dressed by then and sitting on the sofa with her shoes on, which she registered afterward as its own statement and had not meant as one. The folder and the folded page were on the counter where she had put them. He looked at them on his way past and did not stop.
“You should take it,” Alexander said.
She had spent an hour building nine versions of this conversation. That sentence was in none of them.
“What?”
“The job. You should take it.” He put his keys down. “I’ve had an hour and that’s the part I’m certain about, so I’m saying it first, before the rest, because if I say it later it’ll sound like something I arrived at.”
“Alexander —”
“You have wanted this since before you met me. You told me so in my own kitchen and I have thought about that conversation every day since.” His voice was level and it was costing him.
“You’d be extremely good at it. Lasker is right about you and Ferrante is right about you and the two of them together are worth more than any opinion I’ve got. Take it.”
Jo sat on his sofa and found she had nowhere to put her hands.
“That’s the last thing I expected you to say.”
“I know. That’s why I’ve spent an hour deciding to say it correctly.” He stayed standing. “So that’s the job. It’s dealt with. I’m not going to raise it again and there is nothing you need to manage about it.”
“Then what are we —”
“The three weeks,” he said.
“I know.”
“You keep saying that.” He said it without raising his voice, which he did not do. “You’ve said I know four times since I walked in and every one of them has been a way of getting to the end of the sentence faster.”
Jo stopped.
He was right, and she had not caught it, and she had been doing it since he came through the door.
He had not taken his coat off.
She noticed it and could not stop noticing it after that. He had come up thirty-eight floors and put his keys down and started talking, and he was standing in the middle of his own kitchen in a coat at one in the morning like a man who had not decided whether he was staying.
Through the doorway behind him she could see the end of the bed. Neither of them looked at it.
The kitchen was the only light on in the apartment.
Past the island the whole place ran off into dark rooms with the blinds up and the city doing its small hours business behind the glass, and the refrigerator came on and ran and shut off again, which was the only sound in the room that neither of them had made.
“I want to be accurate about what I’m upset about,” Alexander said, “because I’ve had an hour and I’ve narrowed it, and if I’m imprecise you’ll agree with the wrong thing and we’ll both feel better and nothing will have happened.”
“Say it.”
“You had a thing that was going to change your life and you carried it alone for three weeks in a building where I was twelve feet away.” He was still standing. “That’s it. That’s the whole of it. Not the lying, because you didn’t lie. Not the job, which I’ve just told you to take. Three weeks.”
“I know.”
“I don’t think you do, and this is where I stop being reasonable.
” Something in his voice changed and he let it.
“Do you know what I did in those three weeks? I built you a firewall. I asked Naomi to evaluate you as though I’d never met you.
I sat here on a Sunday and worked out how to be good about news I didn’t have yet.
I stood in a kitchen and told you out loud that you’d outgrow this job and that I’d already made my peace with it, and I did that on purpose, so that you’d know the door was open, and you said thank you for thinking about it. ”
Jo could not breathe properly.
“And the entire time,” he said, “I was being handled.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No. It’s accurate. Fair is a different question and I’m not interested in it tonight.
” He let go of the chair. “Do you know what the worst part is? I was pleased with myself. I stood in that kitchen last Saturday and I thought: I have got better at this. I thought I’d learned something.
I was proud of the door, Jo. I have been quietly proud of that door for six days. ”
Jo pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth.
“And the whole time, the door was the reason it was getting harder.” His voice cracked once, in the middle, and he did not stop for it.
“Every good thing I did made the next day worse for you. I was building the thing that trapped you and I was pleased about it. That’s what I’ve been sitting with downstairs. ”
“That’s not —”
“It’s exactly what it was. Not maliciously.
You’d have been kinder to a stranger, Jo, you’d have told a stranger in an elevator.
” He put both hands on the back of the chair.
“That’s the part I can’t get past. Every good thing I did in those three weeks made it harder for you to tell me, and you knew that, and you let me keep doing them. ”
“Yes,” Jo said.
He stopped.
“Yes. I did.” She stood up because sitting through it was cowardice of the same family.
“You want me to fight you on that, and I’m not going to, because it’s true and I worked it out on about day nine and I kept going anyway.
Every time you were decent to me it went in the ledger.
I have a whole file on how good you were while I wasn’t telling you. ”
“Then why.”
“Because I wanted all of it for one more day.”
“That’s not a reason.”
“It’s not a reason, it’s the reason.” Her voice had gone somewhere she did not recognize.
“Then give me the mechanism. Not the feeling. You do mechanisms — do this one.”
“Fine.” She turned around. “Day one, it was too soon and I didn’t have the facts.
Day three, I had the facts and it would have been dramatic.
Day six, you asked me a question in your kitchen and I answered a different one and I told myself that was almost telling you.
Day nine, Priya saw me in the street and the sum got bigger by one person.
Day thirteen I asked Corinne Lasker for a third week specifically so that I could tell you, and then I spent the first day of the third week proving I could get through a meeting. ”
“Jo —”
“I’m not finished, you asked for the mechanism.
” She was crying and her voice was level and she hated both.
“Every day it aged, telling you cost more, so every day the reason to wait got better. That’s the mechanism.
It’s compound interest. I have run a spreadsheet on eleven buildings I don’t own and I could not see that I was running one on you. ”
“Jo.”
“You want me to have a strategy. There wasn’t one. There was a woman who has known since she was nineteen how to get ready to lose things, being handed a professional way to lose the best thing she’s ever had, and taking three weeks to do it because every single day of the three weeks was good.”
“Then say the other part,” Alexander said.
“What other part.”
“The part where the reason you didn’t tell me is that telling me would have meant finding out.”
Jo went still.
“You had a plan for losing me before anybody offered you anything.” He said it without any cruelty in it, which made it unsurvivable.
“You told me that. In an atrium, in daylight. You said you kept a version of your life without me in it and you tested the key in the lock. I have thought about that sentence every week since and I never once used it against you.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m using it now. Once.” He held her eyes.
“You didn’t tell me because if you’d told me, I would have said take it, we’ll work it out, which is what I would have said on day one, and then the plan would have been useless, and you would have had to live for eighteen months not knowing whether it was going to hold. ”
“Stop.”
“Three weeks alone with it was easier than one conversation where I might have said yes.”
Jo put her hand over her mouth and took it off again.
“Yes,” she said.
The room was entirely quiet.
It went on. Jo had never in her life been inside a silence she wanted less to end, because ending it meant one of them saying the next thing, and there was no next thing that was not worse.
She counted the distance without deciding to.
Eleven feet of floor between where she was standing and where he was, and neither of them had crossed any of it since he came through the door.
In five months she could not remember one conversation they had held at this range.
They were people who touched — he put a hand at the back of her neck to say hello, and that was most of what they had instead of words, and it was not available tonight, and she could feel it missing in her hands.
Somewhere below them a truck took the corner and the sound came up the side of the building and went away again.
Neither of them had eaten. She thought about it with a clarity that felt obscene: that it was past one in the morning, that he had come home from a dinner he had not finished and she had been in his bed at midnight, and that in any other version of tonight one of them would have opened the refrigerator by now and made the other one eat something standing up.
“I don’t know how to not do this,” she said.
“I’ve said that to three people this month and every one of them was kind about it and I’m starting to think the kindness is the problem.
Everybody keeps telling me it’s a coping mechanism, like naming it does anything.
I know what it is. I’ve known what it is since Mara said it on a Tuesday.
I did it anyway. I’m still doing it. I’m doing it right now, standing here, because some part of me is already —”
She stopped.
“Finish it.”
“Already checking whether I’ll be all right after this,” Jo said. “That’s what’s running. Right now. While you’re talking.”
He turned away from her then, and picked his phone up off the counter, and Jo watched him look at it.
She knew exactly what was on the screen and exactly what he was considering, and so did he, and neither of them said it.