Opening Belle (33 page)

“We do. We live here,” he said softly.

“This”—I waved my hand, my throat catching—“makes no sense.”

Henry whipped his hand through his thick hair and began. “Baby, I need you to sit down to tell you this. I promise, no funny business.”

I sank into that perfect bed while he pulled up a delicate desk chair across from where I sat. I found myself looking into his eyes without blinking so I forced myself to instead look down, to not notice his giant forearms. I determinedly hung on to my friend named Control.

He sighed. “A few years ago, before you called me about that nursery school application for your son, I was in some mad depression. I worked seventy hours a week, had these fabulous sons and a wife who really loved me. I had everything, and yet I was so sad. I hated myself for giving in to depression, like it was a character flaw I couldn't toss. In my head I constantly lectured myself about the audacity of letting myself get to that state.”

I didn't say a word.

“When I met my wife . . .”

“You mean when you were screwing a woman while you were engaged to me? You mean that time?”

He sighed. “Yes. When I did that, I was distracted by something temporary, which in retrospect was a terrible human weakness of mine that I believe I've fixed. I never cheated again.”

I chose to not point out the bed we shared in Florida. It seemed we both decided to not label that as cheating. “We were so immature,” I said. “We had bad timing but that was a long time ago and we've both moved on with our happy lives.” I searched his face, trying to see if he knew I was being ironic, but he didn't seem to.

He continued, “Danielle was already pregnant then.”

“No kidding. I'm still pretty good with math, you know. We date for almost eight years; you suddenly have a new girlfriend and have a baby four months later.” My voice sounded like someone on one of those angry-person talk shows so I told myself to stop talking.

“So I did the right thing, became totally focused on being a great dad and nailing my job instead of women.”

“How poetic you are.”

“Anyway, I read a lot, tried to consider what was the gaping hole in my life, and the hole was my unfinished business with you. I imagined going back, building a life with you, and just started doing that. Being with you was the happiest time in my life. I wanted to feel that again.”

“So you feel that again how?”

“By buying this place, imagining us being together here.”

There it is. “Oh, you mean you bought an apartment for us to screw in because we were really good at that and by taking it up again, like an old sport, we would both revisit the dewy glow of our youth?” I said this in a flat monotone. “Like we could really go back to . . .”

“Australia.” We said this at the same time.

The pause in the room was long, filled only with a siren noise from the street and a curtain catching the breeze of the forced air heating system. We were both thinking.

Henry spoke first. “I bought this place a few years ago and fixed it up with a designer I knew you'd like. I thought we could have our life together again without ruining our other lives. We could have those intense times again . . . so funny, so carefree.”

“Henry, I want to tell you I know exactly what you mean but it wouldn't work the way you think. We are different people now. We are . . . married people.”

He ignored me. “When I started this project I felt excited again, felt closer to being me again and the cloud in my head cleared up. When I'm in this place that connects us it feels like we live together again, like you are about to walk in. I send you emails from here. I buy you things that I leave here. I got everything ready.”

“Ready for what?” I asked softly.

“Just ready.”

“And then what?”

“And then I've just been thinking about how to, you know, respectfully ask you to start meeting here.”

“Meeting here to start everything up again? You did notice that I ignored your non-work emails? That they went unanswered? You noticed that, right?” I whispered.

“Yes, it was perfect. We both had a piece of each other again without destroying the lives we have with our families. I knew you wouldn't answer those emails because I knew you'd be great at being married. That's one of the reasons I asked you to marry me. You're so loyal.”

“Henry, your reasoning is like nothing I can even follow. And that insane performance of yours at the Four Seasons? Where you pretended we never met? That was to make me want you again? 'Cause if that's true, it didn't work.”

“It killed me to be so mean to you. But I had to be. I had gotten this apartment all ready but on that day, I freaked out. On the way to the restaurant I still hadn't told Tim I knew you and then it seemed too awkward to mention so I just acted like we never met. I confessed to him later but that day my head was spinning. I was thinking about us doing business together, about this apartment, how you had turned into such a big shot that you had probably changed and what if you weren't the Belle I remembered? But then you dropped your earring on your plate and your hose was torn and you seemed so clumsy and adorable and it reminded me that you're so capable and so vulnerable all at the same time. It let me know you were still you and that this”—he swept his arm around the room—“that this was possible again.”

“Henry, I'm not going to say I saw this coming”—I choked for a second—“but don't you think we're a little old to play make-believe?” I asked this gently because Henry seemed unrecognizably shaky and vulnerable. While I wondered many times about his character, I had never once considered him to be mentally ill.

“Belle, you're right. I've been having this pretend life without you. You know,
you.
” Henry said this with both hands outstretched.

I was trying to follow his gorgeous mouth and the words coming out of it, but this whole thing made me woozy. “Look, I'm not exactly riding on the same train track as you. Um, if you think I'm dumping my life for this beautiful room? Henry.” I shook my head. “I'm speechless.”

“I bought you those clothes, had a moment of Christmas with you right here for the past few years. I gave you these earrings two years ago,” Henry said as he pulled out some shiny earrings with rubies surrounding them from a nearby drawer. Casually he tossed them toward me like they were something he'd bought on the sidewalk. “Can I put them in your ears?” he asked like a little boy.

“No,” I said, though I did take a second to really look at those beautiful stones.

“I bought you underwear I imagined you wearing for me. I filled your bookshelves with your favorite books,” he said.

“You should be committed,” I sighed, feeling overwhelmed that someone could care for me so much, someone I had loved so completely. “Henry, you went from being super-supportive of my career to hating that I even worked to being a cheerleader for me, all in one lifetime. You start dating your wife while I'm in Atlanta, and then there's the Four Seasons, and interrupting me at the media conference, and how about not sticking up for me when my son yanked your wife's underwear?” I smiled. I wanted him to smile, to see how silly this was. To prove to me that he wasn't crazy.

“Belle, baby, how else could I keep you at a distance? How else could I have you in my life but not destroy my own life? This apartment is the solution. What if we had an understanding? A place that always stayed in 1998, and the moment we cross that doorway we get to care for one another the way we used to, where we could be free to be twenty-seven and fully alive again?”

I thought about this, about how I loved his body, and his brain that was always firing new ideas. I thought of how he liked to whip my milk for my morning cappuccino and put peppermint oil in my bathwater before climbing in the tub with me. I thought of how he loved to pick out my panties and brush my hair. It had all been so lovely. It had all been so long ago.

Somewhere deep down I felt the resolve I had looked for but could never completely find when I thought about making the emails stop. It wasn't a firm thing at that moment, but it felt just a little bit clearer. Henry was good at taking care of people and sometimes I wanted to be taken care of, but I certainly didn't need to be saved. I just needed to become strong again, the way I was before I worked in a place that made me feel battered.

He went on. “Do you think it was an accident I ended up working where I work? Taking a job at one of your clients? A place I knew you had to call every single day so we'd get to speak again? I had a few job offers and the only reason I chose Cheetah was because I chose you.”

“You chose me? You didn't choose me, Henry. You chose something else. I thought we chose each other and then you unchose what we chose.”

“It was a horny, three-month decision. I'm not asking you to leave your family, Belle, and I'm not leaving my own family. I'm just a guy who loves you, who has always and will always love you, fiercely, and wants to be able to express that again.”

“You've said that to me before,” I said.

“I didn't.”

“You did. That's what you said when you proposed to me. I remember 'cause I didn't want to get married before thirty and then you said that and I thought if someone will always love me fiercely, then nothing in my life can ever go wrong and it shouldn't matter when I get married.”

Henry put the defeated champagne glass onto a bureau, stopped for a second to put a piece of linen under it, and turned away from me.

“I need you. I need us.”

There it was again, Henry talking about Henry and what works for him. I felt a wave of calm at both the clarity and unattractiveness of this; sometimes it's nice to know that something that is over is really over. Henry's shoulders caved forward and he could even have been crying.

I came behind him and hugged him tightly. I had loved this man so much and with everything I had but we had split and grown and formed new branches and we had to nurture those now, not something we gave up on long ago. I spoke into his back.

“The problem with us, Henry, is that we never broke up. We never had the crying scene, the one where we sadly admit it isn't going to work. Instead, we had this thing that began in college that was great. We traveled, we started careers, we moved in together, and our lives kicked in. I left New York City for three short months when my dad was in the hospital and even though I came back to see you every other weekend, and even though we were having nonstop, mind-blowing sex at that very same time, when I moved back to New York I find that not only have you been seeing someone else, you're expecting a kid with her.

“Losing my dad and you all in a few months—” My voice caught, I wiped my face on the back of his shirt but was determined to finish saying what I had to say. “You and I never even had what humans call a conversation, an admission that it wasn't going to work out. We never had the scene where we ask who gets the toaster or where I accuse you of stealing my tennis racquet.” I was sniffling into his back but wouldn't let him turn toward me. I didn't want this to lead to kissing. I wanted to just speak.

Henry leaned forward and put his head in his hands. His back started heaving. In all our time together, I never once saw Henry Wilkins cry. “It was too painful to break up with you because I wasn't sure it was what I wanted.”

“So let's say that today.” I snort-laughed. “Let's break up, ten years after we stopped seeing each other. We've got six kids between us with other people, it's hot time we ditched this thing!” This thought was suddenly hilarious to me, so freeing that I couldn't stop talking. I'd made a giant soggy spot on the back of his shirt. I started to pat it, to clean up my mess. I suddenly found everything to be funny. “Let's break up because you never shut up when I drive or because you dress like a golfer from Nantucket or because I hate the way you sing Beatles songs,” I gurgled.

But Henry wasn't laughing. He just looked sad. He hadn't taken his head from his hands. Trysting away at odd moments in this beautiful place would be so fun until it wasn't. Then it would have done irreparable damage to everyone else in our lives, and relationships aren't inert. It would have to go somewhere and any scenario I thought of ended in tears and broken promises. There was nothing I could do to help him with whatever it was he really wanted. I wasn't his.

I held on to his giant body, inhaling every bit of his tight form and following his waves of sadness. It was my last time to hold him, to know what he felt like and know why I was letting it go. It felt good that this was my choice. Henry could never have saved me. It would be up to me to do that.

•  •  •

We are now first in line for takeoff. Stuart Little has driven off in his shiny little sports car to find Margalo, the bird. Henry is taking the family to their ski house in Jackson Hole on their Gulfstream IV and Bruce is sleeping with his mouth open in coach and snoring very softly. Owen has removed the old woman's headphones and she's actually playing with him. I begin to talk to her and find she's a sweet French grandmother who doesn't laugh at my terrible French. I feel an overpowering love at that moment for United Airlines and their ability to finally get things moving, for my kids, who still seem to like me despite myself, for my imperfect situation, and for my imperfect family that somehow suits me very well.

A
LARGE BLOCK
of snow has found its way into the top of my boot. I feel it melting, sliding down over my ankle and surprising my foot. Why am I wearing bulky, suede, and impractical UGGs on a tiny portion of the majestic Mont Blanc? I'm the equivalent of the North Dakota tourist showing up in Times Square wearing five-inch stilettos to fit in with the presumed natives, only to discover that New York is a walking city and that her shoes start squinching her toes five blocks into walking and nobody is noticing her fabulously chic footwear. Not a soul admires my fat boots, not even the ladies in their fur-trimmed ski jackets, making their way toward the Aiguille du Midi, the main ski lift, wearing gold-rimmed sunglasses and speaking Russian. Only Russian women get away with walking uphill in thousand-dollar ski outfits while puffing on a cigarette.