Chapter 6
NOELLE
The penthouse was dark when they walked in. Elias hung his overcoat in the hall closet.
"Elias?”
"In a moment."
He went into the study. He didn't close the door. That was, she thought, a choice.
The dinner was already folding itself back into its parts in her head.
A dinner she had been asked to attend and had been told, without being told, was important.
Her father's request. Gordon in the private dining room in his navy jacket, going over what he had come to go over with her.
It had been, as meetings went, unremarkable.
A thing done. A thing finished. And then Elias in the doorway, unannounced, with a look on his face she had not been able to read and could not, now, stop turning over.
The look had been the part. She had spent months learning his faces.
She had learned the face he wore in boardrooms, the face he wore at breakfast, and the face he had worn the night of the engagement party when he had first looked at her across the room and kept looking a beat longer than a man at a party should have.
She had not, until tonight, learned this one.
It had been the face of a man arriving at a conclusion, and the conclusion had been about her.
She heard him cross the room behind her. She could see him in the reflection — jacket removed, one cuff undone and the other still buttoned as though he had begun unbuttoning and changed his mind halfway through.
"Noelle."
She turned, and she saw that whatever he had gone into the study to decide, he had not finished.
"Did you enjoy your evening?”
It was not what she had expected him to open with. She could feel, underneath the question, the coiled readiness of something waiting to catch her on the wrong foot.
"It was a dinner. I wouldn't call it enjoyable. I wouldn't call most of them enjoyable."
"No."
"Elias. Whatever you mean to say, please say it."
A silence. He looked at her. The look was steady, she could not read it. This was a man very good at keeping her from reading him when he chose to.
He chose to leave whatever question he had for her unasked.
She watched the choosing. She watched the door close behind his eyes.
Which meant he was going to go on not asking.
Which meant the silence between them was going to get colder and she was going to be the one trying, against all her better judgment, to find a way through it.
She tried anyway. She couldn’t stop herself.
"There's a film at the Music Box tomorrow. Early. I thought we could go."
She heard herself say it. It came out lighter than she had planned.
She had not meant to say it. She had chosen the Music Box because it was the least romantic place she could think of: an old theater, a weekday matinee, a film he would not feel cornered by.
A film could be refused without the refusal meaning anything.
If he said yes, a dark room and two hours of not having to look at each other might, for a little while, be enough.
It came out as a sentence an ordinary wife would say to an ordinary husband at the end of an ordinary night: a sentence with no weight in it, no request, nothing he could refuse without refusing more than a film.
"I have meetings tomorrow."
"Not early. After. Or the weekend."
"The weekend's full."
"Elias."
"That isn't what this is."
It came out calmly. The voice he used in boardrooms. The same voice he had used at the dining table late at night when she had been waiting for dinner he had already eaten. The words were different but the voice was the same voice, and she heard them tonight with a different ear.
"That isn't what what is?”
"This arrangement," he said. "We were clear about it. I was clear about it."
"It's a film."
"It's not a film."
There was no anger in his face. There was nothing she could rationalize as anger. There was the certainty of a man who had decided something and was not going to relitigate the deciding. Her husband had just taken the tentative thing she had offered and put an end to it.
She inclined her head. The formal inclination she had been giving him since the wedding.
"Understood."
The word was the steadiest thing she had said in an hour.
"Good night, Elias."
Noelle turned. She made it to the bedroom. She made it with the door closed behind her, and her forehead against the wood of it. She closed her eyes, and she realized she was going to cry.
It astonished her. It was not loud. It was the crying of a woman who had been holding something for a long time and had just been told, that the thing she had been holding was never going to be wanted.
She cried for a couple of minutes.
When she was done, she sat up. She dragged her palms across her face. She washed her face in cold water. She looked at herself in the mirror over the sink and she watched the face arrange itself, slowly, back into the face her mother had taught her to arrange.
It was still a lovely face. That was the thing.
You couldn't tell.
She sat back down on the edge of the bed and listened to her husband moving through the apartment: the soft sounds of a man preparing to go to bed alone. Again, she saw that the line she had crossed tonight was not a line she was going to be able to uncross.
She had asked. He had answered. She would adjust. She always did.
But somewhere underneath the adjusting, something quiet and tentative that had been holding its ground in her these months had moved, tonight, in a way it had not before. Not broken. Not yet. But no longer quite where it had been.
Noelle lay down on top of the coverlet, stared at the dark of her ceiling, and thought, Whatever I feel for him, I am going to have to stop.
She did not, yet, know how.