Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
That changed six months ago. I haven’t slept in this room once since the wedding. Every single night I’ve gone home, and every night I told myself it was efficiency, or habit, or the simple sense in not wasting the commute, and every night I knew those were lies and told them to myself anyway and slept fine. I went home because she was there. Because the apartment was warmer for having her in it, an actual degree warmer, and because I had discovered, against every plan I ever drew up, that I enjoyed my wife. Her company across the breakfast table. Her company in the dark. Her sleeping weight fitted along my side as though the two of us had been cut from a single pattern.
Apparently I was not the only man who enjoyed her company.
I lie down on the narrow bed among the ghosts of Richard’s trophies, the cold of the room settling over the silver and the crystal and me along with them, and I don’t sleep, and when I finally do it turns out to be worse than the not-sleeping was.
Because the articles come back to me then, in that thin country between waking and sleep, and I read them all again the way I never once bothered to read them the first time. There were so many of them. I remember now, with the terrible clarity of a man counting up his own blindness in the dark, how the Manhattan pages used to ache openly over the two of them. The Waymaker princess, they called her, Richard’s lovely daughter who grew up in the stands and the locker rooms with sawdust on her shoes, and Barrymore, the golden boy who carried her father’s franchise on his back for twelve seasons. The fans wrote the fairy tale years before there could have been one. They were heartbroken, that was the very word the columnists used, heartbroken, when she didn’t end up with him. When the princess of the Waymakers married a cold stranger from nowhere instead of the prince the whole city had already chosen on her behalf.
I never paid it the slightest attention. Why would I have. I had her signature on a contract and her warmth in my bed and her grief in my two hands to be careful with, and I told myself the public romance was so much noise, the kind of tidy story crowds invent because they can’t abide an ending that doesn’t resolve.
I pay attention now. Now that I know the whole city saw it before I did. Now that I know they were grieving a thing that hadn’t ended at all, only gone quiet, only moved itself to cemeteries on weekday afternoons and park benches where she tips her head to rest on his shoulder over two cups of cooling coffee.
Everyone saw it. The fans. Raymond. The only man in all of Manhattan who somehow didn’t see it was the one who let her fall asleep against his chest every night and mistook the weight of her for being chosen.
And then I dream, and the dream is merciful at first, which is the only way I’ll understand afterward that it meant to be cruel.
I’m home. There’s no seam in it, no moment of arriving, I’m simply there, in our bed, in the dark of the apartment with the city humming faint and far below the glass, and the weight of the blanket is right, the particular weight she needs, the one I bought four of so we’d never be caught short. The pillow smells of her. Everything is ordinary, and ordinary turns out to be the most dangerous thing the dream could have handed me, because a man braced against grand betrayals has no defense at all against the plain fact of his own bed on a quiet night.
She comes to me the way she does. I feel the mattress give under her, the cool slide of her in beneath the blanket, the small contented sound she makes when she finds me already warm. Her knees fit in behind mine. Her arm comes around my waist. And for a moment I let it happen, because there’s nothing awake in me yet that remembers to refuse her, and the peace of it is so total that some clenched thing I’ve carried in my chest all day without naming begins, against my will, to loosen.
Then I remember. Even here, even folded into the warm dark with her breath against the back of my neck, the day comes back to me, the grey coat and the upturned laughing face and Chip’s voice going careful on the phone, and the fury rises up through the peace the way cold water rises through warm. I turn away from her. I put my back between us and I mean it to be a wall, the kind of wall I’ve built against better and worse than her, because I have just learned exactly what she is and a man does not lie still in the dark and let himself be held by a thing that’s been lying to his face for months.