Chapter 3
NOELLE
The first weeks of her marriage passed quickly.
Nobody explained the penthouse to her. Nobody sat her down. There was no housekeeper with a clipboard, no welcome breakfast, no orientation to a life Noelle was now expected to lead. The space simply operated, and she was invited, by its operation, to operate inside it.
The coffee was brought at six-fifteen. The curtains in the east rooms opened at seven.
Fresh flowers arrived twice a week from a florist on Oak Street, and the old flowers went into the service elevator in a neat green bag on Mondays and Thursdays.
The woman who did it, a slim, gentle woman named Maura, who had worked for Elias for ten years, never once asked Noelle what she preferred.
Noelle learned by watching.
She learned that Elias took his coffee black and standing, at the kitchen island, reading something on his phone.
That he left the penthouse at seven-twenty, almost never seven-twenty-one.
That he returned, on a good night, at ten; on an ordinary night, closer to midnight; on a bad night, after she'd gone to bed.
She learned that he preferred the study to the living room, that he didn't use the terrace, that he had a habit of closing doors behind him even when he was the only person in the apartment.
She learned that there was a pair of running shoes in the hall closet, still muddy at the toe, and that he came home from wherever he ran them in before she was awake.
She learned these things because there was nothing else to learn.
By the end of the first week, she'd attributed his distance to work. By the end of the second, to the adjustment of two strangers sharing a home. By the end of the third, she'd understood that what she was watching wasn't a phase that would pass. It was the shape of the life he intended to keep.
Still, she tried.
She was careful about it. She'd been raised not to push.
She'd been raised to suggest: to leave a room at a small angle, a chair turned slightly, a door half-open, so that if someone wanted to enter, they could, and if they didn't, no one was embarrassed.
She made sure dinner was available in the evenings without requiring him to come to it.
She learned the handful of subjects he responded to — markets, the firm, a news item in the Journal — and stayed on those and left the rest alone.
She asked Maura which wine he preferred with the fish and stocked it.
She didn't ask where he'd been when he came home late.
She didn't reach for him when he passed her in the hall.
And still, every evening, she dressed as though she expected him.
She hadn't meant to start doing it. It had simply happened.
The first week, it was because she'd dressed for dinner her whole life and didn't know how else to close a day.
The second week, it was because she'd caught her own reflection in a hallway mirror and been startled by how much she'd softened around the edges: as though the penthouse were absorbing her, too.
The third week, she admitted to herself the thing she'd been trying not to admit…
she was dressing in case he came home early enough to see her.
He didn't. Not once.
Five weeks in, on a Thursday, she waited too long.
She hadn't meant to wait. She'd come down to dinner at eight, the way she had all week.
She'd eaten a few bites, set her fork aside and sat with her wine while Maura cleared the table around her.
By nine-fifteen, she hadn't moved. By nine-forty, Maura had caught her eye from the kitchen doorway with the worried look of a woman who understood what waiting looked like and had the good sense not to name it.
Noelle had smiled — the practiced smile, the one her mother had taught her — and told Maura she could go.
Maura had gone. The penthouse had gone quiet.
Noelle had stayed at the table.
It was ten-fifty when she heard the door.
She didn't turn. She heard his footsteps and the soft sound of his keys being set down on the marble of the entry table.
The rustle of his jacket being folded over the arm of a chair in the study off the hall.
She knew every one of those sounds now. She could have drawn a map of him moving through the apartment with her eyes closed.
"You're still awake."
His voice was neutral. Curious, almost. As though it were simply a fact he was noting for later.
"I was waiting."
The words came out before she could file them down. She heard herself say them and wished, in the same breath, that she hadn't.
He paused in the doorway of the dining room. She still hadn't turned. She was aware of him, the shape of him at the edge of her vision, the dark of his suit against the amber lamplight of the hall. She could feel his attention on her.
"There's no need to do that."
"I wasn't aware it required justifying."
"It doesn't." A beat. "It's simply unnecessary."
Unnecessary.
She turned in her chair then. She turned slowly, because the alternative was turning fast, and she wouldn't give him that. He'd come further into the room while she wasn't watching. He was at the sideboard now, loosening his tie with one hand, pouring a drink into a short glass with the other.
"I thought we might have dinner," she said.
"I've already eaten."
He'd always already eaten. The entirety of her life in this apartment was built around his having already eaten. She'd been sitting in this chair waiting to offer a husband a meal he had, somewhere across the city, already finished.
"I see."
He crossed to the window with his glass, and she could see him now fully.
The lean line of him, the way he held the drink without drinking from it, the set of his shoulders that was, she'd started to notice, the set of a man who carried tension in his back and didn't know it. He spoke without looking at her.
"You shouldn't adjust your schedule around mine."
"I wasn't adjusting." She kept her voice level. It cost her. "I was making an effort."
He looked at her then. A slow look. And when he spoke, his voice was gentle in a way that was somehow worse than harsh would have been.
"For what?"
For what?
There was no unkindness in it. She could have managed unkindness. What he was giving her was indifference so complete that it hadn't even occurred to him to dress it up.
She held his gaze.
"For this," she said. "For the marriage."
He didn't answer immediately. He stood at the window with his glass. The city behind him threw its long cold light across his profile, and she watched him decide how to respond to her. She watched him choose — she saw the choosing — the lightest of the available cruelties.
"It isn't necessary."
The words moved through her slowly, the way cold water moves through a pipe before it becomes sound.
She set her napkin beside her plate. She rose from the chair. Smoothly. She'd been trained to rise from chairs smoothly.
"I understand."
"Noelle—"
"Good night, Elias."
She didn't look at him as she passed. She didn't let her shoulders drop until she was in the hall and around the corner, and even then she didn't let them drop all the way. She walked toward her bedroom, and she closed the door behind her.
She didn't cry. She stood in the dark of her bedroom with her back against the door for a long time.
Still. Noelle kept her schedule overlapped with his where she could.
She learned the conversations he'd respond to and stayed on them.
She stopped asking the other kind of question, the ones that might have mattered, if he'd wanted them to, because asking them and being met with his courteous silence was worse than not asking at all.
She made herself smaller, the shape of a woman who could live in this apartment without disturbing it.
She adapted. It was what she'd always done.
Weeks wore on. The distance remained. It had become, somewhere in there, the weather.
There were moments. There were always moments.
A conversation that went two minutes longer than it needed to.
A look she caught, once, on his face while she was speaking about something that should have bored him, and that she didn't let herself name.
The real warmth of his hand brushing hers when he passed her the salt at a dinner they'd had to attend together, the way the warmth lingered for a second past the transfer, the way his hand returned to his side as though nothing had happened.
Noelle began to catalog these moments without meaning to. She told herself she wasn't cataloging them.
She told herself a great many things.
It was a Tuesday when she walked into the study without knocking.
She hadn't meant to walk into the study. She'd been looking for a book she'd left on the coffee table two evenings before. She'd crossed into the hallway, and she'd seen the study door standing half-open. The lamp inside was on, and she'd heard no sound. She'd simply looked in.
He was at the window.
He wasn't working. That was the first thing she registered.
His laptop was closed on the desk behind him.
His phone was face-down beside it. He was standing at the long dark expanse of glass that looked out over Chicago, one hand resting flat against the window frame, and he was not in any of the postures she'd learned to recognize.
His shoulders weren't set. His weight wasn't balanced.
His head was tilted very slightly, as though he were listening to something she couldn't hear.
For a moment, he didn't know she was there.
And in that moment, she saw him.
The severity of his face had gone somewhere.
The mouth she'd learned to read as controlled was softer in the lamplight, and his eyes — staring out at a city that couldn't see him back — were not hunting anything.
They were, for the first time since she'd met him, simply open.
Open the way a face is open when a person believes they're alone.
He looked, in that moment, like a man. Tall, tired and holding something in his chest that he hadn't shown her in weeks of marriage and that, she understood with a terrible jolt, he'd probably not shown anyone in a long time.
Something pulled in her. Low and sudden, beneath the ribs, a pull she didn't have a name for and didn't want to find one for.
She took a step into the room without meaning to.
He turned.
The face reassembled itself so quickly she couldn't have sworn, afterward, that she'd seen the other face at all. His shoulders returned to their set. His mouth returned to its line. The hazel of his eyes went back to what she'd come to think of as their working temperature, cool and attentive.
"Is there something you need?"
The voice was even. The voice was, as always, perfectly courteous.
Noelle opened her mouth. She didn't know what she'd been about to say. Some ordinary thing. My book. I thought you were out. I'm sorry. Any of a dozen sentences.
What came out was nothing.
She stood in the doorway of her husband's study and looked at the man who had, a moment before, been a different man.
She could not find a word for what she'd seen that didn't sound ridiculous if she said it aloud.
She understood that she'd just been given something he hadn't meant to give her.
And she understood that he was already closing the door on it.
"No," she said finally. Her voice was her own again. Quiet. Even. The voice her mother had taught her. "I'm sorry. I was looking for something."
He didn't ask what.
Noelle inclined her head, stepped back into the hall and pulled the study door gently closed behind her. She walked through the silent apartment to her bedroom, sat down on the edge of the bed, held her own hands in her lap because there was nothing else to hold.
She knew what the pull under her ribs was.
What she told herself was that she'd been in the apartment too long without enough to do.
That what she'd seen at the window hadn't been what she'd thought it was.
That a man could stand at a window in the dark and look like anything and it meant nothing.
That she'd been lonely and her body was getting confused. That she would be more careful.
She almost believed it.
Somewhere past midnight, she heard him come out of the study and move through the apartment.
She heard his bedroom door close down the hall.
She lay in the dark listening to the silence return, and she understood that she was in trouble.
She was beginning to feel something she had not agreed to feel.
She hadn't meant to.
She wasn't sure yet what she was going to do about it.