Page 31 of Love All
There are no more exhibitions after tonight. The two weeks are up. The marquee event has run its glorious course, the department has its money, and Coach Leon stands at center court thanking everyone for coming and announcing, to enormous applause, thatAstor and Prescott-Hawthornehave raised, he says the number, for the children’s wing. The crowd roars. Charlotte stands beside me in the white that photographs, accepting it with the gracious, lethal smile.
And I do the math nobody else in the building is doing.
No more mandated practices. No morewarm up at five.The scheme is finished too, Cole and Indie have spent forty-eight hours in the incandescent, can’t-stop-grinning early days of two people who finally quit pretending, which makes Operation Hero a closed case. Retired with honors. The bet isn’t settled, the gala’s still weeks out, the fundraising still live — but the bet never required us to stand four feet apart at five o’clock. The bet I could lose by email.
Which means that as of the moment this crowd goes home, there is not one official reason left on the books for Charlotte Astor to spend another hour beside me.
Julian told me this day was coming.You’re going to be standing in a room with her and no reason to be there, and you’re going to have to figure out, with no script, what you actually want.
I know what I want. That’s no longer the hard part. I knew it somewhere around the second straw of a milkshake. I confirmed it with a hand at the small of her back in a stranger’s kitchen. I signed it in blood while she shoved me off and called it pedagogy.
The hard part is that I built my entire life out of never reaching for things, because things came to me. And the one thing that never came to me is standing two feet away, signing autographs for boosters’ kids, pretending, with the full force of a will I have watched bury grown men, that two nights ago did not happen.
I’ve spent a fortnight teaching everyone else to be brave. Cole. Indie.Ask her. Just ask her. That’s the whole thing.
I pick up my bag. Across the court, she finishes with the last kid, and looks up, and catches me looking, and for one second, one second, before the wall goes back up — she doesn’t look away.
Physician,I think.Heal thyself.
The exhibition is over. Everything that forced us together is over save the fundraiser and that will be two people in a room. Not sitting together. On opposite sides of the court once again. I stand on an emptying court in a white shirt that photographs, knowing exactly what I want and exactly what it would cost to reach for it, and understanding, finally, why I’ve spent my whole life making sure I never had to.
There’s a freedom in having nothing to lose, and I’ve had it my whole life without once seeing it for the cage it is. When every win comes easy and every person who leaves can be charmed back or shrugged off, you never have to be brave. Brave is just the word for doing the thing when it could actually cost you. My stakes were never real.
She made them real, somewhere between a bet and a milkshake and a hand flat on my chest in front of four hundred people.
And I have never, until her, had anything I couldn’t afford to lose.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Charlotte
THE MORNING AFTER the last exhibition, I wake up to nothing on my calendar at five o’clock, and lie there, and feel the absence of it like a missing tooth.
This is exactly what I wanted. For two weeks I was chained to a charity event and a man I diagnosed in September, dragged out of my clean solitary mornings into doubles and donor galas and the relentless gravitational nuisance of Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne. Now it’s over. The marquee run has run. The department has its obscene number. Cole and Indie are a closed, triumphant, profoundly disgusting case, they held hands at breakfast, in front of me, repeatedly, like animals. The operation is complete. The mandate has expired. There is no longer one single line item on the entire ledger of my life that requires me to stand within four feet of that boy ever again.
I have won back my five a.m.
I lie there in the dark not wanting it, which is the most alarming thing I have ever had to admit about myself.
We haven’t spoken since the match. Not one word. No 6:48 text, nowear the white,no logistics, because there are no logistics left. The entire apparatus that was manufacturing reasons for us to speak got quietly dismantled overnight by a fundraiser running its course. The silence is the loudest thing inmy phone. I keep not looking at it. I look at it constantly. I have become, in three weeks, a person who checks her phone, which is a degradation I’d have charged a lesser woman rent for.
So I do what I do. I get up. I go to the empty court and serve into the deuce corner until the sun comes up, alone, the way I’ve done it for eleven years, before he came along and ruined the quiet, and I wait for the old clean feeling to come back.Just me, just the ball, just the honest question of whether I’m good enough this morning.
It doesn’t come back. The court feels enormous. Half of it keeps being a space where somebody is supposed to be. I serve, and some animal part of me is already moving to cover a poach nobody is going to make, and I catch myself, and stop, and stand there in the gray light feeling like a fool in front of an audience of zero.
You get used to playing doubles. It came without preamble, the thing I’d have sneered at three weeks ago. You spend your whole life certain you’re a singles player, certain the only person you can trust on your court is you, and then somebody covers your alley twice without being asked. Takes the ugly ball so you can have the pretty one. Stands between you and a word a sweating nobody wanted to call you. And one morning you wake up and the court is too big and too quiet and there’s a person-shaped hole in it, and you understand that you’ve been ruined, quietly, for the only game you ever knew how to win alone.
I serve the rest of the basket badly and go find my best friend, because I need to be reminded who I am, and Indie has always been the only reliable mirror I own.
I should know better. Mirrors show you things.
***
She’s in the kitchen, of course, eating cereal standing up, except now she does it with the lit-from-inside glow of a womanwhose phone keeps buzzing on the counter with texts she reads sideways, smiling, trying to hide the smiling and failing the way she fails at all concealment. Indie has the world’s most honest face. It’s the thing I love most about her, the thing that makes her useless at poker, and the thing that is, this morning, about to be turned on me.
“You were out early,” she says. “Even for you.”
“It’s over. The exhibition. I have my mornings back.”
