Benjamin
Benjamin’s new apartment had good light and nothing on the walls.
He had told himself, moving in, that he would take his time decorating it, that a bare wall was a canvas and not, as his sister had suggested over the phone with more bluntness than he’d wanted, “a place where a man goes to avoid deciding anything about his life.” Eight months later the walls were still bare. He had bought a coffee table he didn’t need and a lamp he didn’t like, and both sat in the living room as evidence that he was, technically, still capable of making choices, just not the kind that meant anything.
The emptiness had a sound. On quiet evenings it pressed against the windows the way weather does. He would stand in the center of the living room with a glass of water and feel the lack of pictures as a kind of accusation: no shared history framed, no proof that twenty years had ever occupied any space at all. Sometimes he thought about hanging the coast photograph—the uncropped one, the version that still showed Georgia’s shoulder—but the idea of looking at it every morning felt like another kind of arithmetic he no longer trusted himself to do correctly.
In the seventh month he did something about it, or tried to. He drove forty minutes to a home store he had no other reason to visit and stood in an aisle of framed prints—a lighthouse, a stretch of mountains, an abstract in gray and orange he couldn’t have explained the appeal of—until he picked one at random, the way a man picks a stall rather than deliberates over it, out of a need to stop choosing rather than any real preference. He bought a level he didn’t need and a box of picture hooks he already owned two of. At home he measured the wall across the couch, hung the lighthouse too high, then too far to the right, and stood back sweating faintly in a cold apartment, looking at a print he felt nothing for, centered now on a wall he had failed to touch for eight months. It changed nothing. There were still thirteen blank rectangles waiting behind him. But it was the first thing in the apartment he had actually decided, however small, however wrong, and he found, straightening it one last time, that he did not want to take it back down.
He thought about Georgia more than he told anyone, including himself.
She kept arriving in his day uninvited. He’d see a couple at a restaurant sitting the way they used to sit, not talking, entirely comfortable in the silence, and look away. He’d hear a song from their wedding on the radio and change the station before he knew why his hand had moved. Once, in the grocery store, he reached for the brand of coffee she preferred and only realized what he’d done when the cashier asked if he needed a bag. He put it back. The small decision felt like practice for larger ones he kept postponing.
He had not fought the settlement. His lawyer, a man who billed in six-minute increments and enjoyed his work, had spent an hour explaining what Benjamin could reasonably expect to keep, and Benjamin had listened to all of it and then said Georgia could have the house.
“You’re leaving money on the table,” the lawyer said.
“Yes,” said Benjamin.
On the last day they sat at opposite ends of a conference table while a paralegal flagged the pages. Georgia signed each flag without looking up, her pen steady. He watched her hand. When it was done he stood, and said, “Georgia,” and she turned her head toward the window as if someone had called from outside. The paralegal asked whether either of them needed a parking validation.
He knew what he’d done. He was not a man without a conscience. He had simply been very good, for a very long time, at keeping it in a separate room, like a smoke detector with a dead battery: aware it was there, choosing, day after day, not to deal with it.
The pattern had started almost gently. A late night at the office that became a drink that became a conversation that felt, for an hour, like being newly interesting to someone. Then another. Then the second woman, who had been, if he was honest, less about desire than about proving the first had not been a fluke. He had told himself each time that the marriage was still the main room of his life and these were only brief, windowed corridors. He had never admitted, even to the part of himself kept in the separate room, that the corridors had begun to feel more real than the furniture he walked past every evening.
He had loved her. That was the part no one would believe, so he had stopped trying to explain it. He had loved Georgia the entire time he was betraying her, which was either the most human thing about the story or the most damning. He hadn’t left because he’d stopped loving her. He had let the marriage become furniture, reliable, in the room, taken for granted because it wasn’t going anywhere, and he had gone looking, again and again, for the feeling of being chosen that a twenty-year marriage stops manufacturing on demand, without noticing that he was the one who had stopped choosing her, a long time before any of the others.
Some nights he picked up his phone and opened her contact, her name unchanged, the same photo from the coast trip he had never bothered to update, and sat with his thumb over the call button, composing sentences he never sent.
I’m sorry. Too small.
I think about you. True, and also somehow worse than saying nothing.
I don’t expect anything. I just wanted you to know I still—He never finished that one, not even in his head. He would set the phone face-up on the bare coffee table and stare at the blank walls until the urge passed, telling himself that reaching out too soon would only look like he was trying to relieve his own guilt. There was some truth in that, though not as much as he wanted. Mostly, if he was honest with the part of himself he kept in the separate room, he was afraid. Afraid of what her voice would sound like if she answered. More afraid of what her silence would sound like if she didn’t.
His sister called on Sundays, and on the third Sunday of the eighth month she asked it straight. “Have you talked to her?”
“She doesn’t want to hear from me.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
He looked at the bare wall across from the couch. “I’m giving her time.”
“Giving her time,” said Lena. “Or giving yourself some.” She waited long enough that he could hear her deciding not to say the rest, and then told him she had to go.
After he hung up he walked the perimeter of the apartment, counting the empty stretches of wall the way other people might count blessings. There were fourteen blank rectangles of light-colored paint. He had measured them once, idly, with a tape measure he’d bought for a picture he never hung. Fourteen spaces waiting for decisions he kept postponing.
So he waited.
Eventually, he told himself, closing the phone, setting it face-up on the bare coffee table, in the apartment with the walls he still hadn’t decorated. Eventually I’ll call. Eventually there’ll be a better time. Eventually she’ll be ready to hear it, and so will I.
He believed, the way people always believe when they still have every reason to, that eventually was a place he could always get to later.