Sloane Quincey calls Patricia's office on a Tuesday and asks if I will meet her.
I almost do not go. I sit at the kitchen island for an hour in front of the message Patricia forwarded me — please tell Mrs. Vale I will meet her wherever she'd like, on whatever terms — and I think: nothing she has to say to me can be worth this. And then I think: maybe it is. Maybe it is, in fact, the last piece I am missing.
We meet at the tea room at the Peninsula on a Thursday at three in the afternoon, because that is the most public, most observed, most paparazzi-immune location in this city, and because Sloane suggested it without me having to.
She is more beautiful than her photographs. She is wearing a white linen dress and her hair is pulled back and her hands, on the table between us, are a cellist's hands — long, calloused at the tips, faintly raw. She is the version of me that learned to play an instrument instead of running an indie bookstore. She does not pretend, when I sit down, that this is not difficult.
"Mrs. Vale," she says.
"Wren."
"Wren. Thank you for coming."
She pours my tea. She does not ask. The tea is jasmine. I do not drink it.
"I came," she says, "to say I'm sorry. To you. In person."
I wait.
"That night at the Chateau. I was not as drunk as I made myself look. I had been drinking, yes. But I knew what I was doing. I had a friend — a publicist friend, it doesn't matter — who tipped a paparazzo. I knew the photo would run. I knew which angle. I knew what it would imply."
She is looking at me steadily. Her eyes are wet. They do not spill.
"I did it because I wanted you to leave him."
"Yes," I say.
"You'd worked it out."
"Some of it."
She nods. "I have loved Caspian Vale since I was nineteen years old. I went to Berlin and I told myself it was a clean break and it was not. When the chair came open I told myself I came home for the chair and I did not. I came home because I thought — I thought I could re-enter his life through the back door of memory. He owed me, you understand, in my head he owed me, because I had been first and you had been a contract. I was —" She breathes out. "I was wrong. About every part of it."
She picks up her teacup. Her hands are very steady.
"I want you to know, exactly, what happened that night. He brought me to the Chateau. He brought me up to the lobby. He spoke to the night manager, who knows him, and asked the night manager to keep an eye on me until my assistant arrived. He gave me my room key. He told me, in the lobby, sitting on the edge of one of those velvet couches, that he was in love with his wife. He told me — and Wren, I want you to hear this exactly — that for years he thought he had loved a woman because he could hear her, and that he had been waiting to be terrified of losing her before he understood that he loved her because of who she was. He said it the way a man says something he has just figured out an hour before. He said he had been a coward. He said he was going to try to be less of one. And then he went out to his car and he sat in it for the rest of the night, in the parking structure of the Chateau Marmont, and he did not come up. I had the night manager check at three in the morning. He was still there. With his head against the steering wheel."
She sets her cup down.
"Wren, I am telling you this because I think you do not know. I think he has not been able to say any of it to you, because the words are difficult and because he is not, generally, a man of words, and because he is — terrified — that any of his words will arrive too late."
I look at her. I cannot, immediately, speak.
"I'm flying back to Berlin on Saturday," she says. "I have asked the orchestra to release me from the rest of this season. I am, in fact, terminating my American chair. I will not be coming back."
"Sloane —"
"It's not a sacrifice. It's a correction. I had already made my mistake by showing up." She produces a small, rueful expression that is almost a smile. "I'm sorry about the photo. I'm sorry about the timing. I'm sorry about the marriage. I — I would like, if it is not too much to ask, for the two of you to come out of this on the other side. He is an idiot. But he is not a liar."
She stands. She bows, very slightly, over the table — an old-world gesture I associate with European concert halls — and she walks out.
I sit at the table for a long time. The tea cools. The light moves an inch.
I do not cry. I do not, exactly, feel anything except the registration of new information settling into a shape I will have to live with.
I drive home.
The house is dark. He is not, after the courtroom, supposed to be here — Patricia has had a polite letter sent. He is, for the most part, staying at a friend's house in Malibu. But when I open the door I see, in the dim of the foyer, a single lamp on in the den.
I walk in.
He is asleep on the couch. He is on his side, his arm under his head, and pressed against his chest is the small body pillow I keep on my side of our bed when I travel. The white one. He has it pulled in tight, the way a child holds an animal.
On the coffee table, the lamp is lit, and under the lamp is a Moleskine notebook lying open. A pen rests across the seam.
I cross the room slowly, the way you approach something asleep that you do not want to startle.
The notebook is filled with handwriting. His handwriting. A hard, slanted hand I have only seen once, on a Christmas card he gave me last December that I keep in a drawer I have not opened since the Deuxmoi photo. The page is divided into columns. The columns are headed, in pencil, FROM IRIS, FROM HER MOTHER, FROM LETTERFROM LETTERBOXD, OBSERVED.
The entries:
— allergic to rose pollen. carry a small pack of antihistamines (Allegra, the gel cap not the pill — IRIS).
— hates cilantro. will not say so. order extra side without if dish can have it (IRIS).
— oat milk. no sweetener. one half-shot extra. (OBSERVED.)
— favorite film, all-time, Portrait of a Lady on Fire. second favorite, Past Lives. will rewatch Drive My Car every January. (LETTERBOXD.)
— sleeps with a body pillow on her left. has had it since college. her mother named it Phil. (FROM HER MOTHER.)
— cries at the second act of every film, never the third, and refuses to discuss this. (OBSERVED.)
— allergic to rose pollen — repeated. underlined twice. (REMEMBER.)
— prefers white peonies to roses to lilies, in that order, but actually prefers branches to flowers, especially manzanita and quince. (FROM IRIS.)
— anniversary, June 14. she will not bring it up. she will not bring up her birthday either. her birthday is November 9. (FROM HER MOTHER.)
The list goes on. Two and a half pages. Tiny. Some of the entries are crossed out, then rewritten correctly, with a small note in the margin: Iris corrected this on phone, 4/12. He has been on the phone with my friends. He has been on the phone with my mother. My mother — who did not know we were in trouble until last week — has told him my birthday and the name of my pillow.
Without telepathy he is doing what no man before him ever taught him to do. He is, with both hands, slowly and badly, building me from the outside.
I look down at his sleeping face. There is a faint, dried tear track from his temple to the corner of his mouth. He is holding the pillow the way I hold him, when I am allowed to hold him, when I have let him into the bed.
I do not wake him.
I take a throw blanket from the back of the chair. I cover him with it. I tuck it, gently, around his shoulder.
I stand there a long time.
Caspian Vale, you complete and absolute idiot, I think, because I cannot help it — but the brackets do not light up around the thought. He cannot hear me. The silence in my head is still mine. The thought stays where I put it.