Celeste won’t ask him when he’ll be home. There’s a part of her that wants to — it’s been more than long enough for her anger to fade, replaced by a longing she won’t yet fully admit to — but she won’t. She knows his patterns all too well and though she wishes he didn’t, though she wishes he could work through this with her, Celeste knows he needs this. It’s the only thing that makes kicking him out so easy for a woman so scared of loss. Beyond her own anger and her own need for a little break to decompress, there’s the knowledge that it will do him good. That he will return to her and that he will return as himself, not whatever person his cyclic restlessness and ever-present self-loathing turn him into when they get together.
She won’t outright ask him what he’s been up to either. It’s the kind of thing she would normally want to know, the kind of thing she might pester him about if he didn’t tell her of his own accord, but Celeste doesn’t want to hear how much he’s enjoying the distance while she herself is so ready for it to end. She doesn’t want to hear, while she’s stuck bored and alone in their too-big mansion, about the fun he’s having without her. With other people. There’s no concern about disloyalty or infidelity, Celeste trusts her husband wholeheartedly, but no intimacy is needed to kick up a little jealousy in her after so long apart. Whatever he’s doing now, he’ll tell her what she needs to know and then give her the rest later when they’re together again and she can appreciate the benefits of their separation.
So instead, Celeste lets the line fill with silence, eyes wandering the empty room around her, trying to feel for the familiar presence the phone pretends to lend her. A presence still only palpable to her in its weakest, most inaccessible form. The telephone line feeds her his voice but it doesn’t make him feel any closer than he felt before she’d picked it up. The sigh that passes through her lips is so quiet.
“It’s good to hear from you,” she says when the silence lingers too long, and despite how telling the pause was, her voice holds the same gentle, cheerful lilt as always, if perhaps a touch less natural. “Though it would be nice if someone could invent a way to see each other too. I pulled out my old painting stuff and I’ve been working on a few things. I know I want to hang the one I finished last night somewhere but I haven’t decided where yet. I thought about the foyer but…”
That room — with its gothic sconces and blood-red draperies, its fountain of dyed-black water and his dumb optical illusion — was decorated more to his tastes. The colorful nature of her latest painting felt wrong in the midst of it.
“Maybe the dining room, or the living room. Either way, I’ll have to show you when you get back. It might be one of my favorites so far.”