“Emma,” I said. “I’ve spent thirty-two years talking to a photograph. I deserve a conversation with someone who can actually answer.”
That night, I couldn’t sleep.
I lay on the narrow hotel bed and listened to motorbikes buzzing past on the street below. I kept seeing that picture. Richard on the bridge, his hair blowing, his arm around her.
I tried to remember if I’d ever seen that tan jacket. I hadn’t. I knew every piece of clothing that man owned. I’d ironed all his shirts for fourteen years. I’d sewn the buttons back on his coat. I’d never seen that jacket in my life.
Around three in the morning, I got up and opened my notebook to write to him.
Dear Richard,
I sat there with the pen over the page for a very long time.
Then I closed the notebook without writing another word.
The next morning, I bought flowers.
There was a flower stall on the corner by my hotel, run by an old man with a white mustache. I pointed at some yellow roses and some little white flowers I didn’t know the name of. He wrapped them in brown paper and tied them with string. I paid him too much. He tried to give me change. I shook my head.
Then I took a taxi back to the narrow street with the trees.
I climbed the stairs again. Slower this time. I stopped on every landing.
I knocked on the blue door.
The same woman opened it.
She looked tired. Like she hadn’t slept either. Her glasses were on her nose this time, not on her head.
When she saw me, she sighed.
“You again?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I told you…”
“I’m not here to take your apartment,” I said.
She hesitated. Her hand stayed on the door.
“I don’t want it,” I said. “I promise you. I don’t want your home. I don’t want anything from you except to talk.”
She didn’t close the door. But she didn’t open it wider either.
“My husband was Richard,” I said. “Richard Hale. He died thirty-two years ago. A heart attack in our driveway. He was thirty-eight.” I swallowed. “And I’m very ill. I have cancer. The doctors say I don’t have much time left. I don’t know how much. Months, maybe.”
Her face changed again. Slowly this time. Her shoulders came down a little. Something in her eyes softened.
“I only want the truth,” I said. “That’s all I came for. I’ve been wondering since the airport in Chicago. I don’t want to die still wondering.”
She looked down at the flowers in my hands.
“Why did you bring those?” she said.
“Because my mother taught me not to arrive empty-handed.”
For a second, almost against her will, the corner of her mouth moved. She almost smiled.
“My name is Claire,” she said.
“Mrs. Wilson,” I said. “Margaret.”
“I know,” she said.
My heart sank all the way into my shoes.
“You know me?”
She took the flowers from my hands. She held them against her chest.
“I’m sorry about yesterday,” Claire said quietly. “When I saw you, I panicked.”
“Why?”
“Because I thought you’d come to take the apartment.” She looked down at the yellow roses. “And I was terrified you’d discover the truth about Richard.”
“What truth?” I said. My voice came out sharper than I meant it to. “What are you hiding from me?”
She hesitated for a long moment.
Then she stepped aside.
“Come inside,” she said.
The apartment was beautiful.
That was the first thing I noticed, and I hated that I noticed it.
It was small, just one big main room with a kitchen at one end and a hallway leading to a bedroom. But it had tall ceilings and wooden floors that creaked and big windows full of morning light. There were books everywhere. Plants on the windowsills. A soft blue couch with a knitted blanket over the back. And the balcony, with its two little chairs and the round table.
It smelled like coffee and old paper.
It was exactly the kind of place Richard and I used to dream about, lying on that blanket on the floor above the dry cleaner, eating popcorn out of a mixing bowl.
Claire put the flowers in the blue vase on the shelf.
Right next to the photograph.
She picked it up and looked at it for a moment.
“He loved this picture,” she said.
I stood in the middle of her living room with my purse in both hands.
“Did you work with Richard?” I said.
She shook her head.
“Then how did you know him?”
She put the picture down. She turned around to face me. She folded her arms across her cream sweater like she was cold.
“Richard and I were together,” she said, “for almost four years.”
I felt the room tilt.
The floor seemed to slide a little under my feet, the way the stairs had the day before.
“Together,” I said.
“Yes.”
“As friends?”
“No.”
I sat down.
I didn’t mean to. My legs just did it. There was a wooden chair by the little dining table, and I sat in it, hard.
“Four years,” I said.
She nodded.
“His business trips brought him to Paris,” she said. “That’s how we met. I worked at a bookshop near his hotel. He came in looking for a French phrase book.” She almost smiled again, then stopped herself. “He said his was falling apart. He said he could only say one sentence.”
“Où est la bibliothèque,” I said.
Claire stared at me.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “That one.”
I put my hand over my mouth.
The phrase book. The one we bought at a garage sale for a quarter. The one he practiced with in our bathroom mirror.
He’d used it to meet her.
“He was married,” I said.
My voice sounded flat and strange. Like someone else’s voice.
“I knew,” Claire said.
“From the beginning?”
“From the second time he came into the shop. He showed me pictures of his children. Emma with her missing tooth. Daniel on a tricycle.” She looked at the floor. “He talked about you.”
“And you continued?”
“Yes.”
I had a terrible feeling, sitting in that chair, that the affair wasn’t going to be the last secret Richard had kept from me.
“He bought this place for you?” I said.
“For us,” Claire said. “He purchased it in his name.”
“He wrote that it was for me.” I took the letter out of my purse and held it up. My hand was shaking. “I finally bought that little apartment in Paris we always dreamed about. That’s what it says. For your anniversary.”
Claire looked uncomfortable. She looked at the letter, and then away from it.
“I know about that letter,” she said.
“You knew?”
“Not everything. But enough.”
“Then why is this apartment yours?” I said. “Your name was on those papers you showed me yesterday.”
Claire went to the drawer and brought back the folder. She sat down across from me at the little table. She opened it and turned the papers around so I could see them.
“Richard transferred it into my name,” she said. “A few months before he died.”
“Wait.” I shook my head. “How would he know he was going to die? His heart attack was sudden. He was thirty-eight years old. He was scraping ice off his car.”
Claire looked at me with something like pity.
“He’d been having serious heart problems,” she said. “For almost a year. There was something wrong with one of the valves. Something he was born with. He had pains in his chest. He fainted once, here, in this kitchen. I took him to the hospital. The doctors here told him he needed surgery. They warned him another attack could happen at any moment.”
I stared at her.
“He never told me,” I said.
“He didn’t want to worry you.”
I laughed. It wasn’t a happy laugh. It came out of me like a cough.
“He didn’t want to worry me,” I said. “He had a broken heart, and a mistress, and an apartment in Paris, and he didn’t want to worry me.”
Claire didn’t say anything.
I thought about the last year of Richard’s life. He’d been tired. He’d been quiet. He’d started taking little pills he said were for heartburn. Once, he’d sat down on the stairs halfway up and stayed there a long time, and when I asked him what was wrong, he’d said, “Nothing, Sparrow. Just getting old.”
He was thirty-seven.
I’d believed him. I’d believed everything.
“Then why did he give you the apartment?” I said.
“He wanted to make sure I had somewhere to live,” Claire said, “even if we separated. Even if something happened to him.” She pushed a paper toward me. “I had very little money. I lived in one room above the bookshop. He said if anything happened to him, he didn’t want me left with nothing.”
I looked at the papers. A date thirty-two years ago. October. Five months before the ice in the driveway.
“So that’s why I never knew about it,” I said slowly. “That’s why the lawyer never mentioned it. That’s why nobody found it.”
Claire nodded.
“It was no longer part of his estate.”
I sat there and looked at the papers for a long time.
At least I finally understood what had happened to the apartment. That part made sense now. It was a clean, simple, legal fact, the kind of thing you could write down in a notebook.
But everything else was falling apart.
I was beginning to wonder whether I’d ever really known the man I’d married. The man I’d written twenty-six notebooks of letters to. The man whose picture I said goodnight to every night for thirty-two years.
“I can’t believe Richard lied to me,” I said. “All those years.”
Claire lowered her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But there’s something else he never told you.”
I stood up.
My chair scraped on the wooden floor.
“I don’t think I can hear another thing,” I said.
“Please.”
“Did he have another family?” I said. “Is that it? Are there children? Do my kids have a brother or sister walking around Paris?”
“No,” Claire said quickly. “No. Nothing like that.”
“Then what?”
She got up and went to the drawer again. She took out an envelope. A plain white one, old and worn soft at the corners.
“He was going to tell you everything,” she said.
I laughed bitterly.
“Dead men make wonderful promises.”
Claire flinched like I’d slapped her. But she didn’t put the envelope back. She placed it on the table between us.
“This was written shortly before he died,” she said.
I looked at it. There was handwriting on the front. Just one word.
Claire.
Those loops. That T crossed too far to the right.
“Why do you have it?” I said.
“Because he gave it to me.”
I didn’t pick it up. I couldn’t make my hands do it.
“Read it,” I said. “Please. I can’t.”
Claire sat back down. She unfolded the paper with careful fingers. She read it silently first. I watched her lips move a little. Her eyes went shiny.
Then she cleared her throat.
“He wrote that he couldn’t continue living two lives,” she said. “That he’d been selfish. That he’d been a coward.”
“Go on.”
“He wanted to end our relationship,” she said. “And return to his family completely.”
I stared at her.
“He was leaving you?”
“Yes.”
“Then why didn’t he tell me?” I said. “If he was coming back to us? If it was over? Why didn’t he just come home and tell me?”
“He was afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Of losing you,” Claire said.
“He’d already betrayed me,” I said. “He’d already lost me. He just didn’t know it.”
Claire looked down at the letter.
“He also wrote about the apartment,” she said.
“What about it?”
She read for a moment, then looked up.
“He admitted that he’d turned the apartment he’d bought for you into our secret home,” she said. “He said it was the worst thing he’d done. Worse than the rest. He wrote that he wanted to tell you everything. All of it. And then, if you’d ever forgive him, he wanted to finally take you to Paris. The real way. The way he’d promised you.”
Tears were coming into my eyes. I didn’t wipe them.
“So the anniversary letter?” I said. “The one Emma found?”
“He wrote that letter before our relationship began,” Claire said softly. “He told me about it. He bought this apartment for you, Margaret. He really did. He’d been saving for years. A little from every trip. He was going to bring you here for your anniversary and hand you the key.”
“Then he met you,” I said.
She lowered her eyes.
“Yes.”
I walked to the window. I looked out at the balcony. At the two little chairs.
One day, we’ll sit on the balcony together. I’ll bring the coffee. You bring the phrase book.
“So he turned our dream,” I said, “into a place to meet his mistress.”
“I’m sorry…”
“And he never even gave me the letter,” I said. “He hid it in his cufflink box. Under the felt. For five years. While he came here. To my apartment. With you.”
“I think he was too ashamed,” Claire said. “To give it to you. After.”
I turned around.
“Did he tell you he was leaving? To your face?”
“Yes.” She folded the letter carefully along its old creases. “He came here in February. One month before. He gave me this letter, and then he told me himself, sitting right there on that couch. I begged him to stay. I cried. I said terrible things. But he’d made his decision. He said he’d come back once more in March to bring me the last of the papers and say goodbye properly.”
March.
The Tuesday in March. The suitcase by the door. The ice on the windshield.
“He was coming here,” I said. “That morning. When he died. He was going to the airport to come here.”
Claire nodded slowly.
“I waited at the café on the corner for six hours,” she said. “He never came. I called his hotel. They said he’d never checked in. Two weeks later, his company sent a letter to the bookshop. To all his European contacts. We regret to inform you.” Her voice broke. “That’s how I found out. A typed letter to the bookshop.”
“Thirty-two years,” I whispered.
Claire looked at me.
“I spent thirty-two years believing Richard was a faithful husband,” I said. “I wrote him letters. I told him about our children. I told him when Daniel got married. I told him when Emma had her first baby. I told him every single thing. And he was…”
I couldn’t finish.
“I’m sorry,” Claire said.
I sat back down in the wooden chair. I was so tired. My whole body felt like it was made of wet sand.
“Did he love you?” I asked.
She took a long time to answer.
“I believe he did,” she said.
“Did he love me?”
“He said he did,” Claire said. “All the time. Even when it hurt me to hear it.”
I laughed through my tears.
“Apparently,” I said, “Richard had a very generous heart.”
Claire gave a sad little smile. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
“I hated you for years,” she said.
“Me?”
“He chose you,” Claire said. “In the end. He chose you, and the children, and that house in Ohio. I thought you had won.”
I stared at her.
“Won what, Claire?” I said. “Won what? A husband who lied to me? A husband who sat in my kitchen and kissed my neck and told me Paris was for the mortgage? Thirty-two years of mourning someone I didn’t truly know? Is that what I won?”
She didn’t answer. She looked away, out the window, at the balcony.
“I never thought about it like that,” she said quietly.
“Neither of us got an honest choice,” I said. “He made all the choices. For both of us. He decided what I got to know. He decided what you got to have. And then he died and left us both holding the pieces.”
We sat there for a while without talking.
Down on the street, someone was laughing. A church bell rang somewhere far away. The yellow roses I’d brought sat in their blue vase next to Richard’s picture.
Finally, I picked up my purse.
“Thank you for telling me,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” Claire said.
“So am I.”
I went to the door. My hand was on the knob when Claire said, “Margaret.”
I turned around.
She was holding out the white envelope. The one with her name on it.
“This should be yours,” she said. “I’ve read it a thousand times. Most of it is about you anyway.”
I looked at it for a long moment.
Then I took it and put it in my purse next to the other letter, and I walked out of the apartment that was supposed to be mine, and I went down the stairs very, very slowly.
Outside, I walked.
I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t care. I walked along the narrow street with the trees, past the bakery, past a café where people were eating breakfast in the sun like nothing had happened. I crossed a bridge. The river was green and slow beneath me.
I wondered if it was the same bridge from the picture.
I walked until my legs gave out, and I sat down on a green bench in a little park with gravel paths. Pigeons came over, hoping I had bread. I didn’t.
My illness was draining my strength. I could feel it, sitting there. Every day there was a little less of me.
And I’d already wasted so much of my life mourning Richard.
Thirty-two years.
I’d turned down that gym teacher. I’d gone home early from the dentist’s dinner. I’d stopped going to the teachers’ Christmas party because I couldn’t stand being the only one without a husband there. I’d never gone on the summer trip to the Grand Canyon that the other teachers took. I’d never learned to swim. I’d never gone dancing again.
Because I was Richard’s wife. Even after he was gone.
I sat on that bench for a long time.
An old woman sat down at the other end of it, with a little white dog on a leash. She smiled at me. She said something in French. I smiled back and shook my head. She patted my knee anyway, like she understood something about my face, and then she and the little dog went on.
That evening, back in my hotel room, I opened my notebook.
Not to write. Just to read.
I flipped through the pages. Then I opened my suitcase and took out the two other notebooks I’d brought. The newest ones.
