Page 17 of Where Vows Collapse
"Did you enjoy your evening?”
It was not what she had expected him to open with. She could feel, underneath the question, the coiled readiness of something waiting to catch her on the wrong foot.
"It was a dinner. I wouldn't call it enjoyable. I wouldn't call most of them enjoyable."
"No."
"Elias. Whatever you mean to say, please say it."
A silence. He looked at her. The look was steady, she could not read it. This was a man very good at keeping her from reading him when he chose to.
He chose to leave whatever question he had for her unasked. She watched the choosing. She watched the door close behind his eyes. Which meant he was going to go on not asking. Which meant the silence between them was going to get colder and she was going to be the one trying, against all her better judgment, to find a way through it.
She tried anyway. She couldn’t stop herself.
"There's a film at the Music Box tomorrow. Early. I thought we could go."
She heard herself say it. It came out lighter than she had planned. She had not meant to say it. She had chosen the Music Box because it was the least romantic place she could think of: an old theater, a weekday matinee, a film he would not feelcornered by. A film could be refused without the refusal meaning anything. If he said yes, a dark room and two hours of not having to look at each other might, for a little while, be enough. It came out as a sentence an ordinary wife would say to an ordinary husband at the end of an ordinary night: a sentence with no weight in it, no request, nothing he could refuse without refusing more than a film.
"I have meetings tomorrow."
"Not early. After. Or the weekend."
"The weekend's full."
"Elias."
"That isn't what this is."
It came out calmly. The voice he used in boardrooms. The same voice he had used at the dining table late at night when she had been waiting for dinner he had already eaten. The words were different but the voice was the same voice, and she heard them tonight with a different ear.
"That isn't whatwhatis?”
"This arrangement," he said. "We were clear about it. I was clear about it."
"It's a film."
"It's not a film."
There was no anger in his face. There was nothing she could rationalize as anger. There was the certainty of a man who had decided something and was not going to relitigate the deciding. Her husband had just taken the tentative thing she had offered and put an end to it.
She inclined her head. The formal inclination she had been giving him since the wedding.
"Understood."
The word was the steadiest thing she had said in an hour.
"Good night, Elias."
Noelle turned. She made it to the bedroom. She made it with the door closed behind her, and her forehead against the wood of it. She closed her eyes, and she realized she was going to cry.
It astonished her. It was not loud. It was the crying of a woman who had been holding something for a long time and had just been told, that the thing she had been holding was never going to be wanted.
She cried for a couple of minutes.
When she was done, she sat up. She dragged her palms across her face. She washed her face in cold water. She looked at herself in the mirror over the sink and she watched the face arrange itself, slowly, back into the face her mother had taught her to arrange.
It was still a lovely face. That was the thing.
