The Billionaire's Wife (25 page)

She fixed me with her beady old-lady eyes. “That's why you're
bawling?” she said.

I nodded. “Yup.” I sniffled and settled back against the door
again, just to let her know that I was Very Sad and Not Planning on Being Sad
Elsewhere, so she had Better Get Used To It.

“Well, call the landlord!”

I'd neglected to take my phone with me as well, and told her so.

She sighed again and slammed her door. I pulled my knees up to
my chest and put my cheek on them, trying to get back in the crying groove. I
may hate crying, but getting interrupted when you're having a good cry is the
worst. I'd had a good head of steam going, probably on the brink of losing my
mind with sorrow and rending my clothes, and now I'd been cut off at the pass.
I shivered in the cold hallway and closed my eyes, exhaustion sweeping over me.

Mrs. Andersen opened her door again and it was my turn to sigh
with exasperation, but before I could passive-aggressively comment on how I
wanted to be alone with my grief, thank you, she stomped over to me.

“Get up,” she ordered. “Stop sniveling.”

Ouch,
I thought. For a moment I thought about not doing
it, but then I realized that since I had no plans, going along with whatever
Mrs. Andersen had in mind was probably a net gain in forward momentum. I could
use a little push. Crying wasn't going to help anything, except maybe my mental
health, and who needed that?

I stood.

Mrs. Andersen stepped forward, clearly ready to do battle with
something, and shoved me out of the way none-too-gently.

"Hey!"

"You want to get into your apartment or not?" she
asked me, her voice clipped. Then she squatted down in front of the door, her
old knees creaking, and stuck two lock-picks in my door.

My jaw dropped open. "What are you doing?" I said.

"Picking your lock, what does it look like?" she said
as if I were stupid. She jiggled the picks, turning and fiddling. I don't know.
I'm not a master criminal. But she certainly looked like she knew what she was
doing.

"I..." I stared at her. "I didn't know you knew
how to pick locks."

"Very valuable skill," she said. "You should
learn a valuable skill yourself."

Ouch, I thought again. "I have a couple," I said.

She snorted at that. "Sure. So what are you really crying
about? Your pervert husband spank you too hard?"

My face flared. Of course she would know about that. Everyone
knew about that. She was just the only person I knew who would be so gauche as
to say something about it to my face. "No," I said. "He..."

"Cheated?"

"No. He broke my trust, though."

Mrs. Andersen made a very expressive sound. "Of course he
did," she said. "That's the way of men."

I sighed. I didn't need life lessons from a woman who once told
me to cough more quietly when I'd come down with bronchitis.

"Well, you wanna work it out with him?" she asked.

"I don't know yet," I answered truthfully. "I
came home to think."

"Good luck with that," she said, and then something
made a little sproing noise and she pulled herself to her feet.
"There," she said. "Should be open now."

I reached out and turned the knob. The door swung open and the
old, comforting smell of mold and dust and clay brushed against my face.

"Ugh," Mrs. Andersen said. "Figure it out soon,
your place stinks."

"Thanks," I said. She just hrmphed at me and tottered
back to her apartment, slamming the door behind her.

What a peculiar old woman, I thought, and went inside.

In the dark, the place was stripped and empty except for the old
mattresses that I'd been using as my bed—now without linens—and my sculptures
and tools, now just hulking shadows in the light spilling in from the
streetlamps outside. They sat in my lonely apartment, the last remnants of
myself that I didn't take with me into my new life with Anton. Anton hadn't
touched them. My last piece, done while drunk the day after I had first met
Anton, was a goat tied up and blindfolded. A crude metaphor to say the least.
Clearly I was the sacrificial goat. But when I had become Anton's wife, I
hadn't quite felt that way. I didn't know how I had felt. I still didn't know.

I walked over to the area where I'd worked. It looked so small
now, after Anton's enormous mansion, and now that there was nothing left in my
apartment I realized I could spread out. I could make whatever I wanted here.

I sat down on the bed and tried to think of something to make,
but nothing came to mind. All I could think about was Anton, and the great
sadness yawning inside me.

I lay down and looked at the ceiling, full of cracks and old
water stains. The mattress under me was scratchy and sagged, and I tossed and
turned, unable to get comfortable.

What was I going to do?

I reached down inside myself, searching for the answer, but
nothing came to hand. I was lost. I wanted to talk to Sadie. I wanted to talk
to my mom. But I didn't have my phone with me. And what would they be able to
tell me anyway that I didn't already know? That I'd married a guy for money and
shock of shocks it hadn't turned out very well? Who would have seen that
coming? Clearly not me.

You should learn a valuable skill, Mrs. Andersen had told me,
and she was kind of right. I was pretty helpless. Being Anton's wife... it had
been somehow freeing in the way that solid ground frees you up to run. I had
enjoyed the idea of no longer fighting to survive, no longer struggling to make
it on my own. I had enjoyed being subject to his needs, knowing at any time I
could stop what he was doing with a word. I had enjoyed trying to get under his
skin, trying to make him laugh. I had enjoyed being the one who made him come.
A powerful man, but he was still a slave to his own desires no matter how he
tried to control them. And I was just a girl who wanted to give up the fear and
the exhaustion and let him take it out of my hands.

Pretty stupid of me to think love could grow from that. Love had
to be there first before we could be those things to each other. And trust had
to be there.

I closed my eyes. I was just going around and around in circles
and getting nowhere. Thinking was stupid. I hated thinking. Thinking about Anton,
who was nothing but feelings inside me, jumbled impressions and bright flames
of desire, was even stupider. It was like trying to think about... about
something like food. You could think about it, sure, but it could only be
experienced. Anton was purely experiential to me. I experienced him. I didn't
know him. I didn't love him. And I probably never would now.

I curled up on my bare mattress and tried to sleep.

*

I dreamed about Anton. We floated together, high in the sky
above the city. Lights gleamed on his skin, flashed in his eyes, and when he
reached out and touched me I flew with him. Or perhaps I was falling. My
stomach tipped and turned as we tumbled in midair, his mouth finding mine, his
hands on my body. Everything went upside down, and I lost track of the
difference between the lights on the ground and the stars in the sky.

When I woke up I was nauseous, my empty stomach rumbling and
roaring at me to put food in it. I'd neglected it all yesterday since the
moment I'd found out my mother was going to rehab instead of chemo. 
Unfortunately I'd left everything at Anton's house, including my wallet. Not
that I had anything in it except credit cards linked to Anton and the three
faded dollars I'd had to my name the day Anton came into my life.

I rolled off my old mattress, stumbled into my kitchenette and
spat bile into the sink for a few minutes until I felt less like death. Then I
went over to Mrs. Andersen's door an knocked.

The old woman opened the door on the third try, wearing curlers
in her hair and a lacy bathrobe in a startling shade of chartreuse. “What do
you want?” she said.

I blushed. “Could... could I borrow a few dollars?” I asked. A
few dollars could get me almost a week's worth of ramen. I wasn't sure what I
would cook it in, but if worst came to worst I could just eat a block of dried
noodles and call it a day. I'd done it before. I have a lot of flaws, but
pride, I don't think, is one of them.

“Haven't you made up with your husband yet?” she demanded.
“Seems like you should talk to him or something.”

I stared at her. “I haven't even been gone for a full day,” I
said.

“So?” She waved a bony hand at me. “Time is wasting. Isn't your
head on straight by now?”

I barked out a disbelieving laugh. “I've been trying to get my
head on straight for years,” I told her. “I did therapy with, like, three
different counselors before—”

“Bored,” she said. “You are boring me. If I give you five
dollars will you go away?”

I shut my mouth and nodded.

She slammed the door in my face. I heard her rummaging around in
her apartment before the door opened again and she shoved a five dollar bill in
my hand. “Here,” she said. “Go get something to eat, and then for God's sake go
home.”

“I am home,” I told her.

“You are married now, this is not your home!”

My eyes stung. “What matters to me is still here,” I said, and
it wasn't a lie. My clay. My tools. My art. Why had I left it here? Why hadn't
I come back? Had I really been so swept up with Anton and planning my stupid
wedding, pleasing my husband and my mother, that I'd just... stopped being an
artist?

Stopped being me?

Well, yeah. I'd already had that little revelation about ten
times. But the realization that I hadn't touched clay in almost a month hit me
like a bolt of lightning. I needed to sculpt. That would help me work through
my problems, wouldn't it? And even if it didn't I'd have a nice piece of art at
the end.

“Yes, well,” Mrs. Andersen said, oblivious to the personal
revelations occurring in front of her, “go get to it. And be quiet while you
do.” And she shut the door again.

Thoughtfully, I walked downstairs and out of the building,
running on autopilot to the nearest S & S. The wind was fierce and the sky
full of clouds, but I barely noticed the weather. I was too busy thinking about
clay.

Just like Anton, clay was experiential. It could only be
experienced, rather than thought about, but that didn't stop me from trying. By
the time I checked out with ten packages of ramen and two dollars and change
left over, my fingers were itching to get to work. Flipping my hood up over my
head, I jogged back to my apartment. I was almost in the front door when I
realized someone was watching me.

He wasn't even being subtle about it. Just sort of standing
there, huddled in the wind and sucking on a cigarette, staring at my building
door. The second he saw me, he reached inside his jacket and pulled out a
camera.

Paparazzo. Fuck.

I thought about flipping him the bird while he took my picture.
I really did. But then I realized that any attention I gave him would just be
juicy fodder for the gossip mill, and I turned my head away so he wouldn't
catch my face, which probably looked horrible since I'd slept in my makeup.
Keeping my hood between him and me, I ran up the steps and into the building,
and I didn't breathe easily until I was in my apartment again, locking the door
behind me.

I ate two packages of ramen, raw and dry. They reminded me of
the really lean times, the times when I had no money for anything but clay and
shit food, and when I let the rent notices pile up. I could have called my
parents and had money, but I hadn't. I'd wanted to be my own person. Sure,
sometimes Mom sent me a hundred bucks just because she worried about me, but
I'd only had to ask her for money a couple of times, and those were to move out
of a place I could no longer afford. The rest of the time, I'd been going it
alone. Being a starving artist. It wasn't half as romantic as it seemed. Dry
ramen noodles get pretty old after a while, but right now, they were my
connection to what I'd wanted to do, what I'd wanted to be when I was younger.

I'd never wanted to marry a rich man who didn't love me. But I
had.

I munched on the noodles and stared into space until I finally
felt like a shadow of my old self.

I should sculpt,
I thought to myself.
I should make
something.
Making something would calm me down. Soothe me. Some kind of
purpose. Anything other than knocking around this shitty apartment, waiting for
my heart to heal back together.

I stood up and brushed the ramen noodle crumbs from my hoodie
front. I'd left Anton's house wearing my old work clothes, and there was
nothing I wanted to do more than get them filthy with clay.

I stalked over to my work area. I kept my clay in huge buckets,
sealed well so as to keep them wet and easy to work with. It was cold in the
apartment so it was going to be a little bit harder than I normally liked, but
a good challenge would get my mind off things. My fingernails had grown in the
past few weeks, between when I had ceased making art and started fucking Anton.
I didn't have anything to cut them with, though, so I went ahead and dug in.

Huge lumps of cold gray clay came up in my hands, and I began to
knead them together, pushing and pulling, squeezing and pounding. The rhythm
relaxed me, putting my head into a soft space, a place where it was okay that I
wasn't thinking, or eating, or sleeping, or crying. I just was. The smell of
clay filled my nose, sweet and earthy and familiar.

I worked for a while, not letting myself think or feel anything,
just letting myself build and move. I didn't have an armature to work with, but
that was okay. I didn't have a plan, but I could always scavenge something from
the dumpsters to use. I mean, I'm not picky or anything. An old kitchen chair
is really solid. A lot of my pieces are kind of weird looking because I used
whatever I could find to support the clay while I built my work. It's rare I
don't start out with a plan and have to adjust to what I can afford, but right
now I didn't have any kind of a plan. No plan for my life. No plan for my art.
I was betting they would work out with equal degrees of success.