Chapter 13
What Love Isn't
She put the ring back on in the car.
She did it at seven-fifteen, in the staff parking lot, with the engine ticking and the sun coming up pale gold over the roof of the laundromat. She sat for a long time with it in her palm. It was a small, clean, perfectly ordinary piece of jewelry. It did not look like anything that could weigh so much. She slid it on, and it was cold, and it went down over the knuckle with a small dry click that she felt in her teeth.
You've got a boyfriend, she told herself. You've got a fiancé. You've got a wedding with a hundred and forty people.
You fell asleep on a couch.
It was a ridiculous thing to be ashamed of. Nothing had happened. A man had read her a book about a bear. She had slept. He had put a blanket over her. At no moment in the whole night had either of them said, or done, a single thing that could not have been described, truthfully, to a priest.
She started the car.
She did not tell Mark about the library until Thursday, and when she did, it was in a bright, light, unforced voice, over the phone, as an amusing story. The power went out, and I stayed, you won't believe the, I slept on the couch in the staff room. He said, Poor baby. You must have been freezing. He said, Was anyone with you? And she said, Daniel, for a bit. We had noodles. She said it in the same voice, and held her breath, and heard, down the line, a very small silence.
"Oh," said Mark. "That's nice. That you weren't alone."
"It was fine."
"I'm glad."
"It was only for a, he went home at, eventually."
"Sure."
"It was noodles, Mark."
"I believe you," said Mark, in a very warm, very gentle voice, like a man talking down a ledge.
That was the Thursday.
On the Friday, he sent flowers. On the Saturday, he took her to dinner. He was sweet to her all weekend, and light, and funny, and never once raised his voice. It was a strange feeling. It was like being tucked into bed by someone who had just been in the room with a knife.
It happened on the twelfth of April.
She would think about the date, afterward. She would think about how ordinary it was. It was a Saturday. It was one of those pearly spring mornings, with a thin warm wind coming through the open window, and the smell of wet earth from the little garden behind the dry cleaner's. She had slept at Mark's. She had woken at eight to the sound of the espresso machine. She had gone into the bathroom in his white robe and turned on the shower, and called through the door, "Is that mine?" and he had called back, in the best of moods, "It's yours! I made you a decaf!"
She left her phone on the bedside table.
She stood under the water for twelve minutes. It was a very good shower. It had a rain head the size of a dinner plate, and a built-in bench of white stone, and a little shelf with her own shampoo on it, which he had bought in January because she had once said she liked the smell. She washed her hair slowly. She thought about nothing. She thought about the roof, and the Robotics Fair, and a clue she had half-solved the night before in the car. She hummed.
When she came out, wrapped in the robe, with a towel on her head, he was sitting on the end of the bed.
He had her phone in his hand.
He was not doing anything with it. He was only holding it, in both hands, between his knees, with his head bent, and the screen was dark. The morning sun fell across his shoulders. He was wearing a pair of gray sweatpants and no shirt, and his back was very straight. He did not look up. He did not seem to have heard her come in.
She stopped.
"Mark?"
"It's a nice morning," said Mark.
"What are you doing?"
"Nothing."
"That's my phone."
"I know." He raised his head. He was perfectly calm. His face had a mild, courteous, very pale look, as of a man at a funeral, and his eyes were dry. "It buzzed. While you were in there. I thought it might be your mother."
"Is it?"
"No."
The towel slipped from her hair and fell to the floor. She did not pick it up. She stood in the doorway of the bathroom with the steam curling behind her, and a cold small pressure on the back of her neck. It was a feeling that she knew, but could not place, like the first note of a song.
"Who was it?" she said.
"It's all right."
"Mark. Who."
"I think you know."
She crossed the room. She did not remember doing it. She held out her hand, and he put the phone in it. It was warm from his palms. She turned it over, and the screen lit, and she saw it, the little gray list of names, and the one at the top, and the pale gray words under it.
Daniel (Dog-Approved): hey. was thinking about the roof, did the bucket thing ever work? also pickles has a new trick. no pressure to reply
And under it, a bubble of a different color. A blue one. Her own. It had been sent at 8:41.
She stared at it.
It was the first time in her life that she had seen a message from herself that she did not remember writing.
Stop contacting my fiancée, it said. She doesn't need you. I'd appreciate it if you respected that.
For a moment she could not feel her hands.
She sat down. She did it slowly. She sat on the end of the bed, a yard from him, in a white robe, with a wet braid dripping on her collar and a phone in her hands, and she read it again. And again. She read it so many times that the words came apart. They were plain. They were set in the clean small type of her own telephone.
My fiancée.
I'd appreciate it.
"You sent that," she said.
"Yes."
"You sent that. From my phone."
"I did."
"To Daniel."
"To the man who's been texting my fiancée at eight o'clock on a Saturday morning," said Mark.
His voice had not risen. It was, if anything, lower. It had a smooth, careful, reasonable gentleness, a voice of the sort that doctors use in hospitals. He had folded his hands between his knees. He was looking at her with a deep, steady, mournful attention, and she saw that his eyes were bright and fixed.
"I'm not angry," he said.
"I'm, you, how did you know the code?"
"It's my birthday. You told me."
"I told you that in October."
"I remembered."
"You read my messages."
"I read the top one."
"You read all of them." She heard it as she said it. She knew it was true. It came to her whole, and cold, and flat, as one knows without looking that a step is missing. "You scrolled up. You read months. You read, you read all of them."
He did not deny it.
He sat there with his eyes on hers, still. A muscle jumped in his jaw. After a long moment he said, in the same low voice, "Do you want to know what I found?"
"No."
"I think you should."
"Mark, I don't."
"I found a man who sends you pictures of a dog at midnight. I found a man who knows what you eat for breakfast. A man who knows what your father's voice sounded like." His throat moved. "He knows about the voicemail."
She closed her eyes.
"You told him that," said Mark. "You told him. In December. In the middle of the night. You never told me. I've been with you for three years, and I've never heard that. I sat with you in a funeral home. I picked out the flowers. And you gave it to a stranger in a text message."
"He's not a stranger."
"No. He isn't." He leaned forward. "That's what I'm saying. He isn't. Do you understand? He's, I read it all, Sarah. I read the one about the soup. I read the, you said that's the best story I've heard in a year. You said that. I read it on the, I sat here with my coffee, in my own bedroom, and I read the sentence where you said I can't delete it either."
"That's private."
"It was private from me!"
It was a shout.
It went off in the room like a shot. She flinched. She had her hand up before she knew it, a little way, open, palm out, the way you put up a hand against a bright light. He saw it. He saw her do it. She saw his face change.
It was a very terrible thing to see. It was not rage. It was a kind of collapse. All the blood went out of it. His mouth fell open, and for one second he looked at her raised hand as though it were a thing he had never seen before, and had been told, in a dream, was his own.
"No," said Mark. "No. No. Sarah. Don't. I'd never."
"I know."
"I would never hit you."
"I know you wouldn't."
"Then why did you."
"I don't know. I don't, it was just the, it was loud." She was shaking. She put her hand in her lap, and held it there with the other. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean, I just didn't expect."
"I scared you."
"A bit."
"God." He put both hands over his face. "God. I'm so sorry. I'm, look at me. I'm shaking." His shoulders were going. "I'm not a man who does that. I don't shout. My father shouted. I swore I never would. I swore when I was ten. And I'm sitting here, in a, I've scared the woman I love."
"It's all right."
"It's not. It's not all right."
"Mark, please, listen, I'm."
"I'm just so afraid of losing you," he said, in a broken voice. "I read that, and I thought, she's already gone. I thought, she's been gone since October. I thought, I'm the last to know." He took his hands away. His face was wet. "I'm not a stupid man. I saw you at the coffee shop. I saw how you looked. You looked like you used to. When we met. And you've never, not once, in three years, looked at me like that."
She said nothing.
It was true. That was what she could not get past. It was the thing that sat, small and cold and plain, at the center of the room, and he had put his finger on it, without a tremor, with a clarity that was almost a kindness. You've never looked at me like that.
"I'm not," she said, and stopped. She tried again. "It isn't what you think. We haven't. There's nothing, we've never even."
"I know."
"Then why did you send it?"
"Because I couldn't think of anything else." He wiped his face on the back of his wrist. "I wanted him to stop. I wanted to make it, I thought if he were just gone, we could go back. I thought, if I took away the thing you were looking at, you'd look at me." He gave a weak, awful laugh. "I know how that sounds."
"It sounds like you took my phone."
"I did."
"It sounds like you wrote a message in my name."
"I did. It was wrong. It was a terrible, wrong thing. I'll text him. I'll apologize. I'll say it was me." He was crying openly. "Tell me what to do. I'll do anything. I'll go to the, I'll see someone, I've told you, I'll do it. I'll start on Monday. Just don't, please. Please. Don't look at me like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you're deciding."
She looked down.
She had not known her face was doing anything. She put her hands up to it, in a vague way, and felt the cool damp of her own cheeks. She was not deciding. She did not think she was. She was only sitting on the end of a bed in a white robe, in the pale spring light, with her fiancé weeping on the pillow, and a small, strange, clear idea slowly rising in her mind, like a bubble in a well.
It's the third time, she thought.
She went home at noon.
She did it calmly. She said that she needed to go and think. He said of course. He said it in a small humble voice, with his hands hanging, and stood at the door of his apartment in his bare feet, watching her. He did not try to stop her. That, she thought, was the worst. He kissed her on the forehead, very tenderly, and said, "I love you. Whatever you decide." He said it with such truth, and such awful simplicity, that she had to put a hand on the wall.
She walked down the eleven flights.
She had never taken the stairs before. She did it as in a dream, her feet slapping on the concrete, round and round and down. She came out into the lobby, past the doorman, and into the street, and stood on the pavement among the pedestrians in the thin spring sun. It was a lovely day. A woman went by with a baby. A man was selling pretzels from a cart.
She walked to Pearl Street.
It took forty minutes. She did not take a bus. When she got there, she climbed her own stairs, and unlocked her own door, and went into her own yellow kitchen, and stood in the middle of it with her coat on.
Three times, she thought.
She said it aloud. She said it to the radiator.
She took out a pen. It was a blue one, from the cup by the phone. She took a sheet of paper from the pad on the fridge, the kind with a magnet, with a little cartoon cat on top that said Don't Forget! She sat down at the table. She looked at the blank page for a long time.
She did not know what she meant to write. She only knew that she had to see it. She had a sense, sudden and physical, as of a thing that had been lying in the dark for years, in a pile, and had to be taken out, piece by piece, and laid on a table in the light.
She wrote, at the top, in her small neat hand:
THINGS HE'S DONE.
She stopped.
Things he's done sounded wrong. It sounded like a charge sheet. It sounded like something that other women wrote, women in a different sort of story, whose men had hurt them in obvious ways, with fists, or lies, or other women. She crossed it out. She wrote THINGS THAT HAPPENED. That was no better. She put a line through it, and sat with her pen over the paper, and her heart going very fast.
She tried again.
WHAT I'VE STOPPED DOING.
It came by itself. It came up from her wrist, and she wrote it, and looked at it, and the room seemed to get quiet. She sat very still.
Then she began.
Wearing the oatmeal sweater.
Going out with Tessa. (Not a decision. Just stopped.)
Answering the phone if I'm on a bus.
Saying where I'd rather eat.
Laughing in front of him if I don't already know he'll think it's funny.
Telling him when I'm sad about Dad. (He gets sad too. Then I look after him.)
Wearing the silver scarf. The blue one. Dad's.
Turning my phone face up.
She stopped. She read it. She turned the pen over in her fingers, and felt her pulse in her throat. She had not known there would be so much. She had not known that it was all in her, in a single pile, waiting for someone to ask.
It's a lot, she thought.
It's not a lot. It's a few little things.
It was only that when she read the whole list down, from the top, slowly, in the quiet kitchen, she saw that every item on it was not a thing she had done at all. It was a place where a thing had been. It was a row of empty rooms. And there was a line of them, running back, three years, down a long hall, with the doors all closed, and not one of them had ever been locked.
They just closed, she thought. One at a time. And I thanked him for the quiet.
She turned the page over.
On the other side, in the same small hand, she wrote WHAT LOVE IS. She stared at it. She did not know. She put the point of the pen to the paper, and held it there, and a drop of ink spread, blue and slow, into a small round mark.
Love is, she wrote.
She stopped.
She could not finish it. She sat in the yellow kitchen with the sunlight crawling across the table, and the dry cleaner's machine starting up below, and she tried a dozen endings, and every one of them was a thing that Mark did. Love is flowers. Love is a week off work. Love is knowing my size. They were all true. They were all kind. They were all, she saw, empty, like beautiful boxes, with nothing in them but the wrapping.
She put down the pen.
She did something that she had not done since she was fourteen. She put her head down on her arms on the kitchen table and cried, with her whole body, without a sound, for a long time.
Her phone buzzed at four.
She had not touched it since noon. It lay face up on the counter, where she had thrown it. She looked at it, for a while, from the table, with a slow, dull, careful dread.
It buzzed again.
She got up. She crossed the floor. She picked it up as one picks up a hot pan.
Daniel (Dog-Approved).
I got a message this morning. I don't think you wrote it. If you did, that's fine, and I'll respect it completely. If you didn't, I'm sorry for whatever it cost you. Either way I'm not going to reply to it, and I'm not going to ask. I just want you to know that I'm here. As a friend. Whatever you decide. No pressure, ever. I mean that.
She read it standing up.
She read it twice. It was a long message, for him. It was perfectly steady. There was not a joke in it, or a dog, or a hook. It was a plain small structure, like a footbridge, put across a river by someone who was not going to stand on the other side.
I'm not going to ask.
She sat down on the kitchen floor.
She sat suddenly, with her back against the cupboard, and her knees drawn up. She held the phone to her chest. She was aware of the cold of the linoleum, and of the radiator's slow tick, and of a long ribbon of light lying across the room, going gold.
He knew.
He knew straightaway that it wasn't me.
It was not the knowledge itself. It was the shape of it. A man had been sent a cruel, cold message, from a number he trusted, in the middle of a Saturday morning, and he had stood there in whatever place he was and looked at it and thought, no. He had thought it so fast, so surely, that he had not even asked. He had not said, Did you mean it? He had not said, Are you all right? He had not said any of the things she would have said herself.
He had just said, I don't think you wrote it.
She put her forehead on her knees.
That's what it's like, she thought.
She did not mean love. Not yet. She meant something smaller and firmer and much more useful. She meant that there was a thing in the world that could be called being known, and that for three years she had mistaken it for being watched, and that they did not look at all alike, once you had seen them side by side.
She picked up the pen.
On the back of the page, under WHAT LOVE IS, in her small, neat hand, she wrote the first thing that came.
Not being afraid to answer a text.
She looked at it. It was not enough. It was not nearly enough. But it was true, and it was the first true thing on the sheet, and it sat there in blue ink, in the setting sun, like a small door left open at the end of a long hall.
She wrote a second.
Someone who doesn't ask.
She sat for a long time. And then, very slowly, as the room went from gold to gray, and the lamps came on in the street, she wrote under it, in smaller letters, the thing she had not yet let herself think.
And I don't know if I've ever had that.