The Silver Wand

My divorce papers came through on a Tuesday in March, and I remember thinking that the stamp looked smaller than it should have, that something ending nineteen years of my life ought to require a bigger piece of ink than that. I was forty-two years old, and I had been married since I was twenty-three, which means the entire shape of my adult life had been built around a man named Douglas who stood up in his lawyer's waiting room and told me, in his careful little voice, that I was cold. That was the word he chose. Cold. Not cruel, not distant, not tired of me, though maybe all of those were true underneath. Cold, like I was a slab of marble he had been living with and politely dusting for two decades while it never once warmed under his hand.

So I have been carrying that word around like a stone in my coat pocket ever since, and I have decided, in the stubborn way I decide most things, that I am going to prove him wrong. But I am not going to prove it the easy way. I am not going to find some warm-bodied man and perform softness for him so he can report back to the universe that Brenna Ruiz thawed after all. No. If I am going to prove it, I am going to prove it alone, on my own terms, in my own bed, and I am going to be so thorough about it that the evidence would hold up in court. I had been a paralegal for fifteen years. I know what evidence looks like.

That is probably why I started drinking at The Gilded Glass, though I would not have phrased it that way at the time. I told myself it was because it was six blocks from my studio apartment and the wine was cheap and nobody there knew Douglas, which was all true. What I left out of the story I told myself was that a bar full of strangers pitying a freshly divorced woman in a good blazer was somehow easier to sit inside than my own apartment at nine in the evening, with its immaculate counters and its single wineglass drying in the rack and all that clean, empty space where a marriage used to be.

The Gilded Glass is a dive in the old industrial district, the kind of place where the neon sign out front only spells GILDED GLA and flickers on the last letter like it is deciding whether to give up. Inside there are red vinyl booths cracked along the seams and a jukebox nobody plays and a bartender named Kasey, who is thirty and has been working there since she was twenty-six and who has the fine gift of never asking anybody anything. I like her enormously for that. She pours my pinot grigio into a tumbler because I once said I hate stems, and after that it just happens, and we are friends in the way of two people who agree not to need each other.

That is where I first noticed Cyrus Skinner, sitting two stools down from me on a Thursday night, a man of about forty-four with gray coming in at his temples and hands that looked like they knew how to be careful with things. He was a regular too, though I had never paid him any attention before that night, and I do not know what changed, except that when my eyes met his across the two empty stools between us, something in my chest went sharp and quick, like a needle finding a thread. I hated that. I hated it immediately and completely. I looked away first, and I finished my wine, and I left, and I told myself on the walk home that a woman who had just been called cold by her husband of nineteen years did not need to go catching feelings off a stranger in a failing bar.

Except I kept coming back, and he kept being there, and we never spoke. That was the arrangement, unspoken and therefore safe. He sat two stools down and drank whatever he drank, some dark beer out of a bottle, and I sat with my tumbler of wine and read the flimsy paperwork I brought sometimes, and once every hour or so our eyes would meet for half a second and my body would do that needle-and-thread thing and I would despise him a little more. A week of this went by. I was proud of my discipline. I told myself I was winning.

Then on the second Thursday he was not there, and I remember feeling something that was almost disappointment, which annoyed me so much I stayed for a third glass of wine just to spite myself. When I got up to leave, Kasey said nothing, the way she never does, and I put on my coat, and that is when I felt it. There was weight in my right pocket that had not been there when I came in.

I stood by the door and dug it out, and I will admit my first thought was that someone had slipped me a fake bill or a joke, because what came out into my palm was a small silver vibrator, maybe six inches long, smooth and slim, the kind they sell in boutique shops with lavender bags. There was a note folded around it, a square of paper torn from what looked like a legal pad, and the handwriting was unhurried and slanted, and it said only this: For when you're ready to be still. No signature. Of course no signature. He was two stools down for a week and I had never once heard his voice, so of course the man communicated through a sex toy and a note like some kind of quiet, infuriating magician.

My first instinct was to walk to the ladies' room and drop it in the trash, and I actually had it half raised to do exactly that when I stopped. Because I realized that throwing it away would be his win, in a way, or rather it would be my loss dressed up as dignity. Here was a challenge, and I have never in my life walked away from a challenge, especially not one issued silently by a man with careful hands. Douglas called me cold. Fine. I would take this ridiculous silver wand home and I would master it the way I mastered the certification exam study guides and the mortgage refinance and every other difficult thing that had ever been set in front of me, and I would not need anybody's help, and certainly not his. So I closed my hand around it, and I said goodnight to Kasey, who glanced at my fist and wisely said nothing, and I walked the six blocks home with the thing in my pocket like contraband.

My apartment is small and clean and I keep it that way, and I set the wand on the counter next to my sink while I washed my face and changed into an old cotton nightshirt, and I looked at it