Chapter 15 #2
She did not sleep that night either. She lay in her old bed in her parents' house and watched the ceiling she had traced with her eyes through every illness of her childhood.
She turned over, without wanting to, the image she could not put down — the image of her husband's hand on Yvonne's jaw, the image of her husband's mouth finding the mouth of another woman.
She loved him.
That was the thing. That was the hard piece at the center of everything she’d arranged with Henry, her mother and the Mathieus' empty apartment on Astor Street, the piece that had arrived in her in a room full of two hundred people and had not, since, left.
Noelle loved her husband. She did not want to love her husband. She did not have a single thing to do with the loving of him now that the thing itself had been demonstrated, at a gala, to be the exact wrong thing to have done.
Noelle closed her eyes. Again, she did not sleep.
The conference room on Madison was small and under-furnished. That was Henry's taste. A long dark table, two chairs on each side, a window that looked out onto a smaller building.
Noelle arrived early. She sat at the far side of the table, facing the door. Henry sat beside her. He did not speak. He had a folder in front of him he did not open.
Elias arrived at the hour. She heard him in the hallway before she saw him: the low exchange with a secretary, the pause while he took off his coat. She did not know, until the door opened, how her body was going to behave when he walked in.
Her body misbehaved: pulse racing, heat spiraling in her belly.
He came in with his counsel, a lean, silver-haired man Noelle half-recognized from a board she had sat on once with his wife. Elias crossed to the opposite side of the table without looking at her. When he sat, folding his hands on the wood, he looked at her.
The look was composed. She had expected the composure and had prepared for it, and the preparation held by perhaps a margin.
"Noelle."
"Elias."
His counsel spoke first.
He spoke for perhaps ninety seconds. He said the things counsel said at the opening of a meeting of this kind: the expression of surprise at the filing, the expression of willingness to discuss terms, the expression of an interest in keeping the proceedings out of the public record.
Henry listened without interrupting. When Elias's counsel was finished, Henry said, "My client has no interest in discussing terms. The filing is the filing.
She has asked for a meeting because your client requested one.
She is prepared to listen to what your client would like to say to her. She is not prepared to negotiate."
Elias's counsel looked briefly at Elias. Elias studied Noelle.
"Could we have the room?”
He did not say it to either counsel. He said it to her.
Noelle looked at Henry. "Five minutes," she said.
Neither attorney looked pleased. They let themselves out, and Noelle sat across from her husband at the long dark table, set her hands in her lap and waited.
"I want to talk to you about Gordon Vanders."
She had expected this. She had rehearsed, in the bed in her old room the night before, exactly what he was going to try to do with the minutes of a room alone. She had rehearsed, also, what she was going to give him in it.
What she was going to give him was nothing. He had made his public act. He was not going to be allowed to convert his cold certainty about her into a conversation in which she’d be expected to defend herself.
She looked at him.
"No."
"Noelle — "
"There's nothing to talk about."
"There is a great deal to talk about."
"Not with me."
She said it levelly. She watched his face, the face she had learned to read at close range, the face she had loved against her will. The face that had turned, toward a woman who was not her. She saw him reach, inside himself, for the tools he had used on her for months.
Yet nothing moved in her face. She loved him, and none of it was going to be allowed to reach her face in this conference room, because allowing any of it to reach her face would be handing her husband the last instrument he’d ever used on her and which she was not going to give him again.
"I'm not going to explain anything to you,” she said. “Because all you had to do was ask. And when you asked, even though I was only trying to protect you, I would have told you everything.”
He didn't speak, and she watched him take the last sentence in.
"Noelle — "
"You don't get to know, Elias. You had every chance to ask, and I am not going to give you the answers you didn't trust me enough to ask for. You chose to hurt me instead.”
Her voice broke on the last word, which she hated.
Noelle stood, picked up the black bag she’d set on the floor beside her chair. She crossed to the door of the conference room and said, to Henry:
"We're done."
Henry followed her toward the elevator. She did not look back.
In the backseat of the car, Noelle sat with her hands folded in her lap and watched the building recede in the window. She held her face for the length of two blocks, and finally put her hand against her mouth. She let the thing in her chest move, once, all the way through.
She did not make a sound.
Noelle understood that she had just said the last sentences she was ever going to say to her husband. Saying them had cost her exactly as much as she had known they would cost her, but she was going to survive the cost the way she’d survived every other thing her mother had trained her to survive.
She loved him.
She was done.
Both were going to have to be true for a long time.