“What happens in this place anyway?” I asked again.
Henry looked crestfallen. “I told you. It’s for you and I thought you’d just love it,” he said softly. “Why don’t you go see the closet?”
I knew I shouldn’t, that I really had to get in that elevator, which by then had arrived. In the next awkward silence, the sound of an elevator leaving without me could be heard, swooshing with that noise of descent.
I walked back toward the one and only bedroom I could see, with its massive bed and eight pillows on the most delicate white duvet. The trim on the duvet was a pale blue gray that looked like—
“Sky before it snows,” said Henry, coming up behind me.
I used to say that was my favorite sleep color, the color of the sky right before snow fell. To me it is the color of calm and happiness and being somewhere safe.
“Yes,” I said. “Sky before the snow is what that color looks like when you’re in love. Now I would call it blue-gray.”
I walked over to the closet, full of cute dresses and sweaters and jeans too large for Henry’s matchstick of a wife. There were two pairs of Louboutin shoes that looked like works of art. They still had their price tags on them.
“So who lives here, Henry?” I asked, letting a delicate cashmere wrap come close to my nose so I could feel what perfect feels like. “Because it doesn’t look like a real human does.”
It was then that I saw a ring on the dresser. Not just any ring but a small diamond engagement ring I’d worn ten years ago, back when Henry had no money. I had loved it so but returned it to him via the U.S. Postal Service, dropping it in the mail as casually as a postcard, mailed to his parents’ home. I was never certain Henry had gotten the ring back. Now I knew.
“We do. We live here,” he said softly.
“This”—I waved my hand, my throat catching—“makes no sense.”
Henry whipped his hand through his thick hair and began. “Baby, I need you to sit down to tell you this. I promise, no funny business.”
I sank into that perfect bed while he pulled up a delicate desk chair across from where I sat. I found myself looking into his eyes without blinking so I forced myself to instead look down, to not notice his giant forearms. I determinedly hung on to my friend named Control.
He sighed. “A few years ago, before you called me about that nursery school application for your son, I was in some mad depression. I worked seventy hours a week, had these fabulous sons and a wife who really loved me. I had everything, and yet I was so sad. I hated myself for giving in to depression, like it was a character flaw I couldn’t toss. In my head I constantly lectured myself about the audacity of letting myself get to that state.”
I didn’t say a word.
“When I met my wife . . .”
“You mean when you were screwing a woman while you were engaged to me? You mean that time?”
He sighed. “Yes. When I did that, I was distracted by something temporary, which in retrospect was a terrible human weakness of mine that I believe I’ve fixed. I never cheated again.”
I chose to not point out the bed we shared in Florida. It seemed we both decided to not label that as cheating. “We were so immature,” I said. “We had bad timing but that was a long time ago and we’ve both moved on with our happy lives.” I searched his face, trying to see if he knew I was being ironic, but he didn’t seem to.
He continued, “Danielle was already pregnant then.”
“No kidding. I’m still pretty good with math, you know. We date for almost eight years; you suddenly have a new girlfriend and have a baby four months later.” My voice sounded like someone on one of those angry-person talk shows so I told myself to stop talking.
“So I did the right thing, became totally focused on being a great dad and nailing my job instead of women.”
“How poetic you are.”
“Anyway, I read a lot, tried to consider what was the gaping hole in my life, and the hole was my unfinished business with you. I imagined going back, building a life with you, and just started doing that. Being with you was the happiest time in my life. I wanted to feel that again.”
“So you feel that again how?”
“By buying this place, imagining us being together here.”
There it is. “Oh, you mean you bought an apartment for us to screw in because we were really good at that and by taking it up again, like an old sport, we would both revisit the dewy glow of our youth?” I said this in a flat monotone. “Like we could really go back to . . .”
“Australia.” We said this at the same time.
The pause in the room was long, filled only with a siren noise from the street and a curtain catching the breeze of the forced air heating system. We were both thinking.