CHAPTER TWENTY

We had a lie-in. This was not like her. She was a morning person naturally she had always been one.

But that morning after graduation she got up at exactly eight thirty, and pretty much languished in bed in the particular frame of mind of a body that has just accomplished something big and is hesitating before embarking on the next.

The apartment was silent except for some far off noise of Marianna coming in, the hall door, the focused movement of a woman restoring order to her own proper sphere.

And further off, the door to the study. He was in his desk chair. Naturally. Wading in bed she thought about the papers of divorce.

She did not bring them up last night. She had decided at the island, eating chicken across from him while he posed his questions, that last night was not the night.

Last night was the buffet and the dinner and the exacting, deliberate glow of two people who had arrived at a stage in the thing between them that was neither resolved nor going anywhere.

The papers were filed. She had the confirmation of her lawyer. Everything was a done deal.

The contract provided that whenever either of the seven may choose to dispose by mutual agreement, the separation could take place. She has signed as an initiation while he hadn't. She had signed because she had wanted to be able to say for her own self that there was a door.

Not that she was going through it. But there was one.

That she had the ability. That her being here now was her choice, not her lot. Also, the distinction was enormously important. One she had been through a marriage just to stay because that was what you had to do because it was too big to leave. She hadn't yet realized she had to choose to stay every day or it became something else.

A circumstance instead of a conscious decision. The path of least resistance instead of the one she was actually choosing. She was choosing. Anything she chose. She stood up.

The eight-thirty kitchen was different to the sevenam kitchen.

It had been an hour and the smell of coffee and pie baking was in it, the way it is in a kitchen you go into after good things have already been happening.

She glanced down at her when she arrived. Saya, it was late.

Not a dig. Merely an observation. Graduation, Aria said. Correct.

And he put a plate in front of her. Eggs. But he had been studying since five-thirty. I am aware.

He arrived in the kitchen at seven. He prepared his coffee and didn't move until this time end.

Aria watched her. You actually timed it, I observe things, ' said Marianna.

'Eight minutes is a very long time for him to be at a window. He's normally very fast at windows.

Eight minutes of Aria eating her eggs and thinking about a man at her kitchen window at seven. It was Marianna, she told us.

Certainly. The yogurtThe one kind he told you to order. When did he tell you to? His eyes rested on her.

Second week. He directed: find out what she likes and order it. I asked how he knew I would know. Said: you always know.

And you did know. I watched you at breakfast for a whole week. It was nothing.

She finished her eggs and sipped her coffee and thought about the second week of October and a man who had inhabited the same apartment for nine days and who had begun paying attention in a language that was very much his native tongue.

She had been assessing him for exactly the same nine months; she knew the truth that she had discovered.

And now she was living in it.

He went to the kitchen at nine thirty.

There's also something about me that [He's] a master of that while you've been in front of..something.

He was one of those fellas who had finished whatever he needed to finish and who'd left off being in any rush. He refilled his second coffee and sat down on the island, directly opposite her. She had her collection notes out on the table.

Not because she was working, the collection finished, but because having them there was a way of having the morning she wanted, which was the morning that had the work. He said this was Delacroix. What was it that she had said?

That this book will be talked about for many years to come. But what does that mean for her in particular? Aria wondered. For Delacroix, that is the highest. refers to the things you do, and resoundingly is the highest.

She doesn't say the things were good, or impressive, or talked about. They are too weak. Talking about it for a long time means it said something worth talking about. What did it say? She looked over the collection notes.

The coat. The tenth piece. The anchor. It said: the inside of things matters, she said. in particular.

It claimed that the interior of a human body and the interior of a piece of clothing are three-dimensional objects with worth comparable to their exteriors than that which is unseen over there no longer present, but still influences what one can see.

He was shy.

That, he said slowly, is not just a statement about fashion.

No, she said. It isn't.

He glanced at the collection notes. She glanced at the collection notes. Neither of them spoke for a while. It was the kind of silence that was well full.

I was just gonna be doing something, he finally announced. For last night. A dinner. I was about to start saying a few words. And she looks at him... The meeting happened, he said. And when I got there the moment was wrong. I didn't say.

I shouldn't have. What was the thing, she said. He waited. This is the quiet of a man who is arriving at a destination he has been traveling toward quite of a specific sort.

That the contract was the wrong sphere for the right thing, he said. That I regret having arranged something serious on a transactional basis. That the transactional was not what this has been. She kept remarkably still.

She said, The well. Yes. He brightened. And all of it. He looked at his coffee. knew I was starting something when I wrote the contract. I do not think I knew then.

But the not-knowing made exactly the wrong thing, a document incomplete and wrong for its purpose, since it was something that neither of us had foreseen. She thought: there it is.

The neat, tidied-up, carefully accurate version of what he's been trying to tell her.

The papers, she said. I filed them yesterday.

The dissolution papers. He was completely motionless. So I started off a little prematurely, "As an initiation..." Not as a completion.

My lawyer had told me that clause simply states that either party can initiate, and by initiating I was confirming that I am here because I choose to be because I wanted to be, rather than because the paper asked me to be.

It doesn't accomplish anything.

I just had to know I was choosing. He glanced at her.

Yes he said. I see. Do you. Yes.

That's what I understand. It's the difference between a situation and a decision. Between being in something and deciding it. And he met her eyes.

And you are deciding. I am thinking of picking, she said. That is not the same thing just yet. He nodded.

Yes. That's honest. And you. I've been choosing for months he said.

I've been choosing and haven't thought it's been the right time to say so. That's a failure to time, not a failure of choosing.

She gazed across the kitchen island at him, the collection notes lying between them, while the morning sun and Marianna on the side corridor and the city outside, busy midmorning busy, shone through.

“I need some time” she said,  sitting with what you said.

Yes, he said. Yes of course he said. Not. This is not necessarily a bad sign. It is simply that I need to think and I can't think clearly the moment someone has said something that I need to absorb. I am slow. You think carefully before you send something. he said.

That's not slow. That's correct. She was close to smiling. That is like you would say that.

Yes, he said.

The way Marianna coming in and made them both refills without being asked, constitute and the operation of ordinary household morning with extraordinary normality, and Aria was listening:that she has totally heard everything and that she is coping with it by making it the normal morning it is actually the right response.

She picked up the collection notes. He picked up his phone.

Marianna stepped back into the kitchen. The morning went on. 

She went to the studio room at noon. It hadn't been in since the hours before the new arrivals, everything resting before the flood.

Everything was quiet and just as she had left it the collection of the ten dress forms, the sketches tacked on the boards, the fabric samples and the scribbled notes. Everything there, ready and waiting for whatever was to come. She was in the doorway. She told herself: this room is mine.

Not mine, professionally. But mine truly really. She had loved this room for nine months more: worked with it so that it was filled with her every thought, word, and breath.  Whatever may follow, this room belonged to me. From here I created something that I was happy to create. She went in.

She sat at the drafting table. She opened the sketchbook to the first blank page following the collection. The next collection had not begun.

She was not beginning it today.

But she was opening the pagethe act in its own right the bright recognition that the next thing was waiting, graduation was an end and a beginning, the work was not finished.

At the top of the blank page she wrote: and then what?

After arriving? That was the question. The problem was, she didn't have the answer.

The collection would be the project of working it out. She shut the book and turned to look for him. He was in the study.

He glanced up as she came in. On Saturday I wanted to go to the Garment District, she said.

I want to look at lining fabrics for the new collection and I don't yet know what I want.

He looked at her for a moment. Will be ready with the car at nine, he said. Yes, I was thinking about going on foot.

It takes twenty minutes to get there and I tend to walk when I am looking for something that I don't know the name of. Then I will go with you, he said. She stared at him. 

She remembered the counter with two stools and the coffee George the importer brought and the morning in February when she found the perfect lining material.

Yes, she said.

Okay. She returned to the studio room.

She opened her sketchbook again. And she wrote below the question: the next collection is about what you arrive at.

No, it is about the landmass, not the way there.

She stared at what she had written. Yes, she was thinking.

That's the start. She looked southward toward the June city, at the angle of a day where, in the harsh light of afternoon, much of the day remained.

And she thought: I am here. I have done this. Tomorrow I will get up and do something else.

She was thinking:this is the second thing he'd said to me this morning that's sitting with me.

I'm going to sit with it until I know what I think about it and then I'll say it.

and I said:. Thinking: Saturday.

The Garment District. Walking. The mindblowingly great thing I haven't learned the name of yet.

She thought: so much is coming. It was not over. This was the particular, full-quality of a day that had more before it than behind it. The work was waiting.

She was going to continue. She sat there again staring at the blank page. He started.