Chapter 23
NOELLE
Her mother didn't call. Her mother texted.
It came through at nine in the morning, while Noelle was behind the counter unpacking a box of estate-sale hardcovers she'd driven to Evanston for the previous weekend.
The phone buzzed once on the counter beside the cash register, and the screen showed her mother's name.
Beneath it, a video attachment and a single line of text: Someone at the Corton gala filmed this last night. I thought you should see it. — M.
Noelle looked at the screen. She didn't open it immediately.
She set down the book about English ferns she'd been holding, wiped her hands on her jeans and picked up the phone.
She held it for a moment, because her mother didn't send videos.
The fact of a video meant the video contained a thing her mother had decided couldn't be conveyed by voice alone.
The shop was empty. It was early; the first customers wouldn't come for another hour.
Noelle pressed play.
The footage was unsteady — a phone held low, at table height, the angle slightly upward.
The room was a hotel ballroom, the lighting warm, the kind of room she'd been in a hundred times and would, she'd assumed, never be in again.
At the edge of the frame she could see the backs of heads, the glint of glassware, the white of table linen. The camera found the podium.
Elias was at the podium.
She watched the whole of it, and she didn't move for the duration of the video. When it was over, she stood behind the counter for a long time.
She thought about the books, which had been arriving for weeks.
She hadn't, at first, known what to do with them.
The Age of Innocence. She'd known the novel, and she'd known, opening the front cover to his note, that a man who'd chosen Wharton was a man who'd crossed a line from sending books about her interests to sending books about his own heart.
She'd read the quote, set the book down on the counter, gone to the back room and stood there for a while.
Each time you happen to me all over again.
And then there had been Marcus Aurelius.
Meditations. A book about discipline. Except his note had pointed to the one line in it that wasn't about control: "When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive — to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.
" It's a book about discipline. This is the only line in it about love.
I think he buried it there on purpose. E.
She'd read the note and laughed. A man about discipline with one line about love buried in him on purpose.
The laughter had surprised her more than the note.
The Dickinson. "I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.
" I think she wrote it about something else.
I'm sending it because it's what I've been doing on Clark Street.
E. She'd held the note for a long time after reading it.
A man with lanterns on Clark Street, looking for himself.
A man who'd spent a marriage watching her for evidence and was now, on the same street, watching her for herself and calling it a search for who he was.
Whitman. Leaves of Grass. The note: "I exist as I am, that is enough.
" I don't know if it's true yet. I'm trying to find out whether existing, without producing an outcome, without managing a room, without converting a thing into an instrument, is something I'm capable of.
You made it look possible. You made it look possible in a bookshop on Clark Street with a hand-lettered sign in the window. E.
That had been the one. That had been the one that had cracked something in her she'd been holding closed since the sidewalk on Clark.
You made it look possible was a sentence that said, underneath its surface, I've been watching you build a life without me, and the building of it taught me something I couldn't learn from you when I had you.
That was the sentence underneath the sentence, the one that had kept her awake and made her, the following morning, look at the shelf in the back room where she kept his books and wonder, for the first time, whether the shelf was going to stay in the back room forever.
She'd put each book on that shelf. The shelf was filling. It was the first thing she looked at when she came into the back room in the morning, and the last thing she looked at before she turned off the lights.
Noelle wasn't responding to the books. She could've had Henry send a letter and the books would've stopped.
She hadn't had Henry send the letter.
Noelle was aware that the not-sending was a decision she was making every week, and that the decision was, in its way, a response.
The response of a woman who wasn't ready to say stop, wasn't ready to say continue and was, instead, letting the books accumulate on a shelf where no one else could see them.
In fact, Noelle was looking forward to them. She'd admitted this to herself in the bathtub on Astor Street on a Sunday night, lying in the water with her eyes closed. She'd caught herself wondering whether a book would come this week, and the wondering had told her she was in trouble.
A man she'd told she was done with was sending her Wharton and Aurelius and Dickinson and Whitman.
The notes were in a handwriting she'd once watched write for tonight on a card tucked into a midnight dress, her response to the handwriting hadn't changed, and the not-changing was the piece of information she was going to have to sit with.
Another book arrived on a Thursday.
The courier came in through the front door and set the package on the counter. Noelle stood behind the counter with a customer browsing the garden section and looked at the brown paper with her name on it in his handwriting.
She waited until the customer had paid and gone.
She locked the front door — it was nearly closing — and carried the package to the back room.
She sat down in the chair she'd put there for exactly this purpose, though she hadn't, when she'd put the chair there, admitted to herself what the purpose was.
It was a volume on the public gardens of Chicago, published in the 1920s, with hand-tinted photographs of Lincoln Park, Grant Park and the conservatories on the West Side. Beautiful. Exactly the kind of book she'd have spent an hour with even if it hadn't come from him.
She opened the front cover.
His note was longer than the others. The same narrow handwriting, the same blue ink, the stationery.
Noelle —
This is the last book I'm going to send without asking you something, so I'm going to ask it now.
You suggested, once, that we go to a film at the Music Box. I said no. I said it because I was afraid that saying yes to a film would be saying yes to something I wasn't ready to say yes to. You were right to suggest it. I was wrong to refuse.
The Music Box is showing a matinee on Saturday at two. I'll be in the lobby at one-forty-five. If you come, I'll buy the tickets. If you don't come, I'll watch the film alone. I won't send another book and I won't come to Clark Street again.
I'm not asking you to forgive me. I'm not asking you to come back. I'm asking you to sit in a dark room with me, and I'd rather be in that room with you than in any other room without you.
E.
Noelle set the note down on the shelf beside the other books from Elias.
She locked up the shop and walked to the corner of Clark and Dickens and stood there for a moment.
She'd discovered it was the corner where she did her best thinking.
The light at this corner in the late afternoon was the light she'd come to associate with the arrival of a thought that hadn't quite decided whether it was going to stay.
She thought about the film she'd suggested months ago, on a night when she'd still been a woman who believed a film could be the thing that cracked a marriage open.
That isn't what this is, he'd said. It's not a film, he'd said.
He'd been right, it hadn't been a film. It had been a woman reaching for the nearest thing she could reach for, and a man refusing the reach.
That had been one of the things that had put her on the path to the Mathieus' apartment and the shop on Clark Street.
Noelle thought about what it would cost her to walk into the Music Box on Saturday. She thought about what it would cost her not to.
I'd rather be in that room with you than in any other room without you.
Noelle walked home to Astor Street and let herself in.
Saturday was in two days. The elms on Astor Street were in full leaf now — the bare winter branches she'd looked at from this window for months had gone green without her quite noticing.
The season was changing.
She was going to have to decide, before Saturday, whether she was changing with it.