I just sat with him.
The documentary moved on.
Outside, the city did its Saturday thing , unhurried, ambient, the particular quality of a late morning in a place that had been up late and was taking its time.
We finished the dumplings.
We watched the penguins.
We didn't talk about Felix again.
We didn't need to.
Later, when I got home, Henry was reading in the armchair by the window , the specific, settled, complete version of him that still, after everything, caught me off guard sometimes. The man who had spent six weeks choosing the version of himself that didn't need anything, now in my armchair, in my house, wearing my old university sweatshirt because he had decided at some point that it was his and I had decided at the same point that he was right.
He looked up.
"How is he," he said.
"He'll be okay," I said. "Not today. But he'll be okay."
Henry nodded. He looked back at his book.
"Felix called you," I said.
Henry turned a page.
"Henry."
"He called," Henry said. Not looking up. "We talked."
"What did you say."
Henry was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that meant he was deciding how much to give me, which was a calculation he made sometimes , not to keep things from me, but because Henry believed that some things belonged to the person who said them and shouldn't be passed around.
"I told him," Henry said, "that the window doesn't stay open forever."
He turned another page.
I looked at him , at the sweatshirt and the armchair and the particular, complete, unhurried fact of him , and I thought about six weeks, and about windows, and about the thing Shay had said on the couch.
He still chose his career over me.
He hasn't chosen yet, I had said.
I believed it.
I believed it because I knew what Felix looked like across dinner tables and in parking lots and in the way a person's face behaved when it was in the presence of the person it had decided on.
I believed it because I had been on the other side of that look, and I knew what it meant, and I knew that Felix Wren , for all his systems and his columns and his carefully maintained distance , was a man who, when he finally said a thing, meant it completely.
The question was whether he would say it in time.
I sat down on the couch. Henry's feet migrated to my lap in the automatic, proprietary way they did. I put my hand on his ankle.
Outside, the city continued.
I thought:come on, Felix.
