Page 60 of Where Vows Collapse
It was a volume on the public gardens of Chicago, published in the 1920s, with hand-tinted photographs of Lincoln Park, Grant Park and the conservatories on the West Side. Beautiful. Exactly the kind of book she'd have spent an hour with even if it hadn't come from him.
She opened the front cover.
His note was longer than the others. The same narrow handwriting, the same blue ink, the stationery.
Noelle —
This is the last book I'm going to send without asking you something, so I'm going to ask it now.
You suggested, once, that we go to a film at the Music Box. I said no. I said it because I was afraid that saying yes to a film would be saying yes to something I wasn't ready to say yes to. You were right to suggest it. I was wrong to refuse.
The Music Box is showing a matinee on Saturday at two. I'll be in the lobby at one-forty-five. If you come, I'll buy the tickets. If you don't come, I'll watch the film alone. I won't send another book and I won't come to Clark Street again.
I'm not asking you to forgive me. I'm not asking you to come back. I'm asking you to sit in a dark room with me, and I'd rather be in that room with you than in any other room without you.
E.
Noelle set the note down on the shelf beside the other books from Elias.
She locked up the shop and walked to the corner of Clark and Dickens and stood there for a moment. She'd discovered it was the corner where she did her best thinking. The light at this corner in the late afternoon was the light she'd come to associate with the arrival of a thought that hadn't quite decided whether it was going to stay.
She thought about the film she'd suggested months ago, on a night when she'd still been a woman who believed a film could be the thing that cracked a marriage open.That isn't what this is,he'd said.It's not a film,he'd said. He'd been right, it hadn't been a film. It had been a woman reaching for the nearest thing she could reach for, and a man refusing the reach. That had been one of the things that had put her on the path to the Mathieus' apartment and the shop on Clark Street.
Noelle thought about what it would cost her to walk into the Music Box on Saturday. She thought about what it would cost her not to.
I'd rather be in that room with you than in any other room without you.
Noelle walked home to Astor Street and let herself in.
Saturday was in two days. The elms on Astor Street were in full leaf now — the bare winter branches she'd looked at from this window for months had gone green without her quite noticing.
The season was changing.
She was going to have to decide, before Saturday, whether she was changing with it.
CHAPTER 24
NOELLE
Noelle almost didn't go.
She'd gotten dressed twice. Once in the soft grey sweater she wore at the shop, which was wrong because it was too much like the woman he'd been watching through the window, and once in a navy dress she hadn't worn since before the divorce, which was wrong because it was too much like the woman she'd been when she was still his wife.
She'd stood in front of the mirror in the Mathieus' bedroom in the navy dress and looked at herself, taken the dress off and put on a cream blouse she'd bought on Division the week the shop opened, a blouse that didn't belong to any version of herself he'd ever seen. New. Hers.
The walk to the Music Box took twenty minutes. She could've taken a cab. She walked because the walking was the last space in which the decision was still hers to reverse.
The Music Box was on Southport. The marquee was lit, even in the afternoon, and the lobby smelled the way it had smelled when she was a girl: old carpet, popcorn butter.
Elias was standing near the ticket window. He'd come in the overcoat. He hadn't unbuttoned it. His hands were in his pockets and he was looking at the vintage movie posters on thelobby wall. She stood in the doorway for a second before he turned and saw her. The sight of him made her heart flutter; he was even more devastatingly handsome in person, the way she remembered. Relief was all across his face.
"You came," he said.
"I came."
They sat in the dark.
The film was Italian. A restored print of something from the early seventies, set along the Amalfi coast, all sunlight, stone and long shots of a woman walking through a village alone. She didn't recognize it and he probably didn't either, though she suspected he'd chosen it because an Italian film at a matinee on a Saturday was the kind of thing a woman who read Morisot biographies and books about the gardens of the Île-de-France might agree to sit through.
