Chapter 17
NOELLE
The Mathieus' apartment was on the seventh floor of a limestone building on Astor Street that her mother had been visiting for twenty years and Noelle had been visiting for slightly less.
She'd been there for Christmas dinners, for the lunches the Mathieus gave before they left for France, for the occasional early-evening cocktail her mother dragged her to whenever her mother had a thing she wanted her daughter to be seen at.
She'd always been a guest. She'd always, at the end of an evening, gone home.
Noelle wasn't a guest now.
She stood in the entryway of the apartment with the valise her mother's driver had carried up, the leather handbag that contained her keys, wallet and phone.
She looked at the rooms around her: the parquet, the heavy grey drapes, the pale blue sofa Adèle Mathieu had imported from Paris and never, in the years Noelle had known her, once allowed anyone to sit on …
and she saw that she was going to live here.
The housekeeper had left a note on the console in French.
Bienvenue, Madame. La cuisine est ravitaillée.
Appelez-moi si vous avez besoin de quoi que ce soit.
Mardi. Noelle walked through the rooms, the long main room with the grey drapes and the blue sofa, the dining room with the round table that seated six, the library the Mathieus used as a study, the kitchen with the copper pans hanging over the island, the two bedrooms at the back, the one she was going to sleep in and the one she wasn't.
She stopped in the larger bedroom. The bed had been made. A vase of anemones sat on the nightstand. The closet doors stood open and empty, awaiting whatever she was going to put in them.
Her whole life, to this moment, had been put in her closets by other people. She closed the closet doors and went to unpack.
Noelle went to the bank in the morning. It was the branch on LaSalle that her grandmother had used.
She had her own accounts there, accounts her grandmother had opened for her when she was eighteen and had added to, quietly, over the years.
The accounts hadn't been touched by the marriage.
Henry had seen to that, in the arrangements he'd drawn up before the wedding, which had kept the separate property separate and the joint property joint and the question of which was which clearly documented.
The woman at the bank remembered her from girlhood.
She called her Miss Laurent, not Mrs. Strathmore, and she didn't correct herself.
Noelle said nothing about the correction.
She signed the forms that needed signing, authorized the transfers, and had the address on the statements changed to the Astor Street apartment.
The woman at the bank typed the new address into the system, handed Noelle a new set of cards.
She walked down LaSalle afterward in the cold.
She'd had, she found, the unfamiliar experience of being a woman walking down LaSalle in the middle of the morning with nowhere she was expected to be.
She'd lived, for as long as she could remember, inside a schedule another person had set: her mother's schedule when she was a girl, her father's once she'd come of age, her husband's since the wedding.
She stood at the corner of LaSalle and Madison and waited for a light that didn't need waiting for.
She registered, with mild surprise, that the next hour was hers to place.
Noelle placed it in a bookshop. She bought a book about Morisot she'd already read, because she'd left the one she'd been reading at the penthouse and had no intention of sending for it.
A book on the restoration of European gardens she'd been wanting to read for months, and a novel she had no prior interest in because the cover was blue and she liked the weight of it in her hand.
She paid for the books with the new card, carried the bag out of the shop, walked back to the apartment on Astor Street.
She sat down on the sofa, opened the Morisot book.
But she didn't read. Instead, she held the book open on her lap and looked at the page for a long time without reading it.
She thought about her husband's hand on Yvonne's jaw, her husband's mouth on Yvonne's mouth, and she let the ache in her chest do what it was going to do.
Noelle went to the kitchen and made tea.
She carried it to the dining room, sat at the round table and drank it in the bright cold light of the late morning.
She wrote, on a sheet of Mathieu stationery she'd taken from the library, a list of things she was going to need to do over the course of the week.
The list included phone to be transferred to my account, new boots, note to Adèle, health insurance, and groceries I actually like.
It was, when she looked at it, the list of a woman beginning a life.
She set the pen down and sat with the list, letting the ache settle. She picked the pen back up and added therapist to the list, underlined it once, and set the pen down.
The phone rang at a little past three. She was in the library with the garden book, and the ringing of her phone on the table beside her was the first thing since she'd walked into the apartment the day before that had belonged to the outside world. She looked at the screen.
His name.
She hadn't deleted his name. She hadn't done anything with his contact in her phone.
It went to voicemail. A moment later the screen produced the notification that a voicemail had been left.
Noelle didn't listen to it.
She opened the garden book to the page she'd been on, and read about espalier fruit for a while. She turned a page, then another. The words on the page were words, she read them in the order they appeared, and at the end of the chapter she closed the book and just sat.
She didn't listen to the voicemail. She didn't want to listen to it.
She was aware, as she sat with the book closed, that the not-listening was a decision she was making and would have to make again.
The voicemail wasn't going anywhere, it would be there in an hour, in a day, in a week.
She was aware also that the strength of her decision rested on how many times in a row she could make it without exception.
She made it this time. She'd make it the next time.
She set the book aside and got up.
The phone rang again a little after seven.
Noelle was making dinner — she'd bought groceries at the market on the corner of Astor and Division, not the Whole Foods her mother used.
She'd bought the foods she'd liked as a girl and had stopped buying once she'd begun buying groceries.
The kitchen was warm with the smell of garlic, lemon and the pleasant domestic sound of a pan on a gas flame. Her phone sat on the counter. It rang.
His name again.
She didn't pick up. She didn't pick up the second time either, when it rang again a few minutes later. The third time it rang, she muted it.
Noelle finished making dinner, plated the food, carried it to the dining room and sat at the round table that seated six, ate alone, and she was fine.
She hadn't expected to be fine. She'd expected, in some version of herself that she'd outlined in the bed in her old room, to be a woman who wouldn't be able to eat in the evenings for weeks. She was eating.
She was fine.
She was, underneath the fineness, something else. She was aware of this — aware of the layer beneath the fineness — and she wasn't pretending the layer wasn't there. She was also not, tonight, going to go down into it.
Noelle finished the fish, washed the dish, went to the library and lit the lamp and opened the garden book again. The phone, muted on the counter, produced no further noise.
She read until ten.
Noelle didn't sleep well. That was the part she'd been expecting, and the expected part arrived on schedule.
She lay in the Mathieus' guest bed under a duvet that was too heavy, a pillow that wasn't her pillow, and she looked at a ceiling she'd never looked at before.
Her body produced the fidgeting rebellion of a body that had been taken, without warning, out of every rhythm it had been organized around.
She thought about a great many things. She thought about her husband.
She thought about her husband's hand on Yvonne, she thought about her husband's hand on her not many nights earlier, and the contrast between the two thoughts was the engine of what kept her awake.
She tried to put one of the thoughts down and the other came up.
She tried to put both down and a third arrived — the image of her husband across the conference table in the morning, his hazel eyes on hers, the face he'd worn that she had, at one edge of her attention, seen for the first time look uncertain.
Noelle turned onto her side. She thought about the morning her father had told her the marriage was necessary.
She thought about the long, steady composure her mother had built a life on, the composure she'd taught her daughter without ever calling it teaching.
She thought about the photograph of her mother at twenty-two on the steps of Holy Name Cathedral with the peonies, the smile of a woman who hadn't yet learned.
She'd learned. She'd learned, she saw now, a great deal.
She'd also, in the course of the learning, begun — against every training her mother had ever given her — to love a man.
She hadn't intended to. She hadn't asked to.
She'd watched herself do it in the private way she watched herself do most things, and she hadn't, to her knowledge, allowed it to reach her face.
It had reached her chest regardless. It had taken up residence.
It had been sitting in her chest the night he'd kissed her in the living room, and after he'd withdrawn into his study, and the night of the gala when he'd chosen, in front of two hundred people, to end a thing a wife couldn't unend.
Noelle still loved him. She acknowledged it because refusing to acknowledge it would've required her to expend attention on the refusing, and she wasn't going to spend the attention.
Her attention was a resource now: the one resource, other than her grandmother's money, that was entirely hers.
She was going to need it for the list on the dining room table, the cards in her wallet and the life she was going to have to build out of the items on the list in the weeks and months ahead.
She wasn't going to spend it on a man who'd chosen to hurt her instead.
Noelle closed her eyes. She didn't sleep for a while after that, but the eventual sleep, when it came, was the sleep of a woman who'd been, for the first time in a long time, alone in a bed that belonged to no one else.
In the morning she listened to the voicemail. The first one, the one he'd left at a little past three the previous afternoon. She made herself coffee, carried it to the library, sat in the chair and held the phone and pressed play.
His voice.
"Noelle." A pause. "I understand you're not going to return this. I'm not leaving it because I expect you to. I'm leaving it because I've been — "
Noelle pressed stop. She sat with the phone in her hand.
She'd heard his voice. That was what had happened.
She'd heard the low familiar register of the voice that had been the soundtrack of the worst months of her life and also, despite her every defense, the soundtrack of a handful of moments she wasn't, tonight, going to allow to return.
She held the phone and didn't finish listening.
Noelle deleted the voicemail and put the phone down on the side table. She drank her coffee. She looked out the window of the library at the bare winter branches of the elms on Astor Street.
She was, she saw, fine. She was fine for the reason she was going to be fine tomorrow, the week after and the year after.
She was going to survive it by doing the things on the list on the dining room table, by reading books in the Mathieus' library, by making dinner in a kitchen that was, for as long as the Mathieus stayed in London, hers.
She was going to survive it without being the kind of woman who checked her phone to see if her husband had called.
Noelle drank the last of the coffee and got up.
Outside, the city did what the city did on a weekday morning.
The sound of it was distant from the seventh floor.
She hadn't been, before this week, a woman who lived in the sound of a city from a height: she'd been a woman who lived in the sound of her husband's apartment, and before that her father's house, and the sound of a city from a height wasn't a sound she'd ever, in her whole life, listened to on her own.
She listened to it now.
It was, she thought, not a bad sound.
She'd get used to it.