[Scottie's apartment, Upper East Side — December 27, 2012, 2:19 PM]
She had called on Wednesday.
She had not called in urgency or in coldness. She had called the way she called when there was something specific to address — a particular quality of directness that said the social part of the conversation was not the conversation. She had said: "Can you come over on Thursday?" I had said yes.
The building had a lobby with a doorman who recognized me now. I had been recognizing the doorman for a year. He pressed the button for the eleventh floor without my asking. I rode up.
She opened the door before I could knock — she had been waiting, which meant she had been somewhere near the door for the last few minutes, which meant she was not entirely composed about this and was choosing not to perform the composure.
"Come in," she said.
The apartment was the apartment it always was: organized in the specific way that expressed her mind, everything having a place and the place being correct, the art on the walls the art she had chosen and placed at the specific heights they needed to be. She was not a person who kept things she didn't want. Everything in the apartment was there because it should be.
She was standing by the window. Her arms were crossed — not in anger, in the way people hold themselves when they have made a decision and are sitting with it. The afternoon light in December was low and the city outside the window was doing what it always did, present and occupied and offering no opinion.
I put my coat on the chair she indicated without words. I did not sit. We were both standing.
"I've been thinking since the restaurant," she said.
"I know."
"I know you know." A pause. She turned from the window. Her expression had the quality I had learned to recognize as her most honest register — the face she wore when the audience was exactly one person and she had decided the audience deserved the full signal. "I need to say some things. Not to change anything. Just to say them, so they're in the air."
"All right."
"I have loved this." She said it with complete precision — past and present tense occupying the same sentence, the way the most accurate things are said. "I have loved the parts of you that are visible. And I have been trying, for a year and a half, to decide if the parts that aren't visible are what I think they are or something I'm building in my own head."
"Scottie—"
"Let me finish." Not a request. The specific authority of someone who has found the right words and knows that interruption will cost her them. "I don't think I'm building it in my head. I think there is something you cannot tell me — not won't, cannot — and I think it is something significant, and I think it has been there from the beginning." She paused. "I also think you are one of the most honest people I have ever been in a relationship with, and that is true at the same time as the other thing, and that is the part I have been trying to understand."
I looked at her.
Detection: the room was fully honest. There was no manipulation, no leverage, no performance. She had finished grieving before I arrived — I had felt it in her voice on the phone — and the conversation on the other side of grief was clear in a way that grief's leading edge was not. This was the quiet after the storm had passed internally and the cleanup had not yet started.
She was not asking me to fix anything. She was telling me what was true so I would know she had seen it correctly.
"You are those things," I said. "Both of them."
"I know." She uncrossed her arms. Not a relaxation — a release. "I deserve someone who trusts me enough to be honest. I know that's not a small thing to ask for. I know it costs something to say it."
My throat had the specific quality of a closed door. I stood in front of it.
"You do," I said. "I'm sorry I can't be that person."
She looked at me for a long moment. The look was the look she had been giving me since October 2011 — the one with too many registers — but one of them had resolved now. The register that had been carrying hope had settled into something else, something that was not hopeless exactly but was clear about what hope was available and what it was not.
"You're allowed to be sad about it," she said. "I want you to know that. This isn't you failing at something. You're being honest, which is the thing you've always been. It just turns out honesty has a wall in it."
The sentence was the most accurate description of the situation I had ever heard from outside it. She had named the thing I lived inside from a distance of about three feet and had gotten it exactly right. I had been honest, consistently, in every way that was available to me. The wall was not a choice. It was a fact of what I was.
"I know," I said.
She nodded. The professional nod, the one that accepted the reality and moved to the next thing. But her eyes held the sadder register for a moment longer, and I held it back, and we stood there with the December light coming through the window and the truth of the conversation in the air between us.
"I don't want to be angry at you," she said. "I don't want this to become something that makes me angry at something that is just a fact."
"You won't be angry."
"How do you know."
"Because you're the kind of person who decides what to be. You've always been that."
A small pause. She almost smiled — not quite, but the specific adjacent thing, where the face does what a smile does without committing to it. It was the most accurate small thing she could have done.
"Take care of yourself," she said. She said it the way she said final things — like it was a reasonable request and she expected it to be honored.
"You too."
She opened the door.
I put on my coat. I walked into the hallway. The door clicked closed behind me — not hard, not soft, the specific sound of a door being closed by someone who was being precise about it.
The stairs were the stairs they always were. Eleven floors. I had taken them up once in February, when the elevator was out, and had counted them without meaning to: one hundred and four steps. I did not count them on the way down.
The lobby doorman registered my exit with the neutral professionalism of someone who had seen many people leave many buildings. Outside, the December afternoon was cold in the way December afternoons in New York are cold — direct and factual, not cruel, just present.
I stood on the sidewalk for a moment.
The city was doing what it always did. A cab went past. Someone walked by with a coffee. The Upper East Side was being the Upper East Side at 2:45 in the afternoon three days after Christmas, which was to say: occupied, purposeful, generating no particular opinion about one specific person standing on a sidewalk.
I put my hands in my coat pockets.
The thing I was carrying had been warm once. It was still the same shape — the shape of a real relationship with a real person, the shape of a year and a half of someone who had chosen to be honest about almost everything she carried. It was the same shape it had always been. The warmth was gone from it now. That was the distinction, and it was the only distinction, and it was the one that counted.
I walked south toward the subway.
The afternoon light was the specific low light of December, and it fell on the street at an angle that would not be available in any other month, and I noticed it the way I had learned to notice things in this life — specifically, without sentiment, as a fact that was worth recording. The afternoon light was this way. The person on the eleventh floor had said what was true. The wall was real. All of those things were simultaneously accurate.
I took the subway downtown.
The next thing was already waiting, because the next thing was always already waiting, and the competence to do it was not diminished by what I was carrying, and what I was carrying would eventually become background noise the way everything eventually became background noise.
Not yet. But eventually.
I pulled out my phone at 72nd Street and reviewed the Kellner Industrial brief Harold had sent that morning. It was excellent work. I wrote him back a single sentence: Good brief. The jurisdictional argument holds.
His response came back in two minutes: Figured it out on the second read. I'll have the reply brief by Friday.
The train continued downtown.
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