Page 57 of Where Vows Collapse
And then he realized exactly what he could do.
Through research of his own by way of his firm’s investigator, he’d found out about a book Noelle was looking for. He picked up the phone and made a call to a bookseller in New York he'd done business with once. The bookseller said he'd check his inventory and call back.
The bookseller called back in twenty minutes. He had it. Elias bought it over the phone and asked for it to be shipped overnight to his office.
The book arrived the next afternoon. The giving of it was going to be the last thing he did as her husband, and he wanted the last thing to be a thing she could keep.
Elias opened the front cover and took out a sheet of his personal stationery and wrote her a note. Then he sat at his desk.
He'd let her go. The letting-go hadn't been the grand thing he'd spent his life expecting difficult decisions to be: it hadn't been a closing argument or a signed contract or a firm handshake across a table. It had been a man standing on a sidewalk on Clark Street watching a woman adjust a sign in a window and knowing that the woman was going to be fine and that the fine was not going to include him.
And watching her through the glass, he'd also known that he loved her.
He'd loved her for longer than he'd allowed himself to know. He'd loved her since the chair by the window with the Morisot book and the strand of hair she hadn't bothered to push back.He'd loved her since the morning she'd saidI'm gladin a voice so honest it had gone into him at a depth he hadn't budgeted for. He'd loved her since she'd put her hand on his jaw and he'd closed his eyes because closing them was the only way to survive the warmth of her palm. He'd loved her before that — he'd loved her, he saw now, since the night of the engagement party, when she'd crossed a room to him.
Elias was going to love her for the rest of his life.
CHAPTER 22
ELIAS
The second book was a mistake.He knew it was a mistake when he bought it, he knew it was a mistake when he wrapped it, he knew it was a mistake when he wrote the note and put it in the front cover and sent it. The knowing didn't stop him.
The second book was Edith Wharton'sThe Age of Innocence. He'd found it at a dealer on Michigan Avenue he'd been walking past for years without going in. He'd gone in because the window display had caught him mid-stride: a row of novels from the twenties with their original dust jackets. The Wharton had been at the end of the row. He'd stood on the sidewalk looking at it and known, before he'd gone through the door, that he was going to buy it and send it to her.
The note was brief."Each time you happen to me all over again." — Wharton. I passed the shop today. You were rearranging the window display. E.
That was all. He didn't ask how she was. He didn't ask anything, because asking was the thing he'd forfeited.
She didn't respond. He hadn't expected her to.
The third book was Marcus Aurelius.Meditations.He'd been reading it at the club in the evenings. He'd been reaching for it every night for weeks, and it had been, mostly, giving him whathe'd reached for. Except for one line. One line in the whole of it that had stopped him, alone in the brass-lit library with a glass he wasn't finishing, and that had sat in him for days before he'd understood why.
The note:"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive — to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love." It's a book about discipline. This is the only line in it about love. I think he buried it there on purpose. E.
The fourth was a volume of Emily Dickinson he'd found at the same book store he’d found the Wharton. He'd opened it at random, read a line, bought it and driven home with it on the passenger seat without opening it again.
The note:"I am out with lanterns, looking for myself." I think she wrote it about something else. I'm sending it because it's what I've been doing on Clark Street. E.
The fifth was Walt Whitman.Leaves of Grass.The oldest edition he could find. The giving of it was, he knew, a departure from every book he'd sent before. The garden book had been about her. The Wharton and the Aurelius and the Dickinson had been about him. The Whitman was about both of them, or about neither of them, or about the thing between them that he'd spent a marriage refusing to name and was now, alone in his study with a pen in his hand, trying to find a way to say.
The note:Noelle — "I exist as I am, that is enough." I don't know if it's true yet. I'm trying to find out whether existing, without producing an outcome, without managing a room, without converting a thing into an instrument, is something I'm capable of. You made it look possible. You made it look possible in a bookshop on Clark Street with a hand-lettered sign in the window. E.
She didn't respond to that one either.
He couldn’t help himself. He was a man in love. He kept sending them.
Elias saw her through the window of the bookshop again. He'd been walking on Clark, which was the street he walked on now. He'd slowed without deciding to slow, and he'd looked.
The shop was open. The handwritten sign was in the door —OPEN — COME IN — WE HAVE WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR— and through the front window he could see the shelves full of books, the pendant lights throwing their warm pools down onto the honey-stained floor and a customer, a woman in a red coat, standing at one of the shelves with a book open in her hands. And behind the counter, in the back of the room, was Noelle.
She was talking to someone he couldn't see: a person on the other side of a bookshelf, maybe, or someone in the back room. Her hair was down. She was wearing something soft and dark he hadn't seen. She looked radiant.
He watched her for a while. The traffic moved between them. A bus passed and took her out of sight for a second, and when the bus had gone she was still there, still talking, still gesturing. The woman in the red coat had come to the counter with two books, Noelle was taking them from her, looking at the spines and saying something about them. He could see her mouth moving, could see the woman in the red coat laughing at whatever she'd said.
Elias turned and walked north. He didn't look back.
He came back the following week. And the week after that. He never crossed the street. He never went in. He stood on the far sidewalk and watched his ex-wife sell books, arrange displays and talk to customers. The watching was, he'd come to understand, the closest thing to being near her that his life was going to permit.
