A Secret Space

TWO WEEKS after she and Mark were married, Hannah fell in love.

It was her first morning back in the office after the honeymoon, and a man she had never seen before was in the kitchen of the interior design studio where she worked, waiting for the kettle to boil. Although he appeared to be in his midtwenties, he still carried an awkward lankiness in his limbs, as if he hadn’t yet outgrown his teenage shape. This impression was supported by the gray jeans and faded black T-shirt he wore, with some band name or another displayed in gothic letters across the front. But it was his hands that caught her attention. The slow way he unfurled the filter, spooned grounds into the machine, then folded and refolded the open top of the foil bag to pinch it closed between his thumb and forefinger. When he offered her a cup, she realized she’d been holding her breath and exhaled slowly, afraid he would notice.

Hannah was holding the latest Architectural Digest, which featured Philip Johnson’s Glass House on page 53. On the train into the city that morning, she had photographed the page and texted the image to her husband, with the caption Like living inside a work of art.

“Did you see the article on Philip Johnson?” the young man in the kitchen asked, gesturing toward the magazine in her hand.

“Yes,” Hannah said.

“Living in his houses must be like living in a work of art,” he said.

“Yes,” Hannah replied, “exactly.”

The summer after she graduated from design school, Hannah backpacked around Europe with a friend. They rented bicycles to explore the side streets of Amsterdam, where they rode past gabled homes awash with summer blooms and greenery that dripped to the pavement. Bikes were stacked two-deep against the brick facade of the coffee shop where Hannah waited while her friend picked up their order. A passing woman, dressed neatly but with unkempt hair and wild eyes, grabbed Hannah by the arm and spoke urgently to her in Dutch. A man reading the newspaper at a nearby table said, “Negeren haar, ze is gek.” Ignore her, she’s crazy.

The woman repeated herself, this time in English: “You will fall in love with a man whose name begins with B.”

A decade later, sitting at her desk while her PA filled her in on the young man with the careful hands—he’s a summer intern, a student from the art school, he was born in Australia, he’s twenty-four, his name is Brandon—Hannah recalled that distant exchange in Amsterdam and thought, Well, here he is then.

As a child, Hannah drew plans for houses in meticulous detail. Drafted from above, she framed the layout, left spaces for windows and doors, included adequate storage, and positioned the homes on the property to take advantage of morning and afternoon light. She landscaped the grounds, illustrated each plant that edged the driveway—odd numbers, always—and filled standing pots at the front door with broad leaves and colorful five-petaled flowers. She outlined every flagstone, plotted each pathway, and marked grout between the tiles surrounding the swimming pool. She drew furniture in all the rooms: beds in the bedrooms, sofas and a coffee table in the living room, an eight-seater dining suite. She decorated with throw pillows in carefully selected color schemes, flowers in vases, and a pot of utensils on the kitchen counter. In every house she designed, Hannah included a hidden room. A secret space that opened up behind a bookcase or a floor-to-ceiling mirror or via a door disguised as a wall that swung on a concealed hinge. The only furniture in the secret room was a comfortable chair and a bookcase. It was soundproof and carpeted and, if the design allowed, lit from above with a glass ceiling that gave the room access to the sky but preserved its privacy.

Hannah and Mark spent their honeymoon in Thailand. They stayed in a wooden hut suspended on stilts over the turquoise water of a shallow bay, which ebbed and flowed beneath them while they lay together on the small bed in the afternoons. Sun-warm and naked, she would trace the dried salt in the hair on his chest as they discussed their pasts and their future and learned how to fit into one another’s bodies and one another’s lives.

Hannah described her dream house to Mark, the house they’d build together one day. Inspired by the simple Thai huts, she imagined a wooden home built near water. Constructed around a courtyard with a koi pond at its center, each room would be linked by open corridors hung with fabric blinds that could be lifted in the sunshine and lowered in the rain. As she spoke, she traced the rooms on his stomach, drew the corridors down his arms, and marked the focal points with her mouth. At the heart of their house, between the open-plan kitchen and the guest suite, Hannah imagined her secret space. Contained behind a seamless panel—which opened with a quick nudge and closed with a quiet click—it would be snug and silent and hers.

B. was younger than her, and although he had a dark sense of humor she liked to think was similar to hers, Hannah realized quite early on that they didn’t have a great deal in common. Where her designs showed a respect for containment and privacy, his were flung wide open, anarchic and disruptive. Where socially she tended toward no, he was usually a spontaneous yes. He kept his passport in his bag—“just in case”—and was effusive and excessive, which exaggerated his boyishness and made him unpredictable, almost dangerous. Her fierce attraction to B. made Hannah feel exposed, like the transparent moon jellyfish she had seen while diving in Thailand, drifting through the ocean with their pale reproductive organs on display. Although she was his senior, in age and position, she found herself trying to impress him, as if she were a twelve-year-old girl on the school playground making eye contact with the older boys, getting in the way of their pickup soccer game.

She talked herself out of him. Assured herself that the appeal was not real, that she was simply seeking some kind of unhealthy validation now that she was married and unlikely to sleep with another man. She had always been a committed person, and she prided herself on this. She loved Mark. This was only a harmless flirtation, she told herself, and a bit of sexual tension in the workplace was healthy, it kept everyone on their toes. Then B. would explain his thinking behind an idea or a design and his hands would flick and fold like wings, building empires out of air, and she’d fall for him all over again.

After a few months, they took their lunch break together and bought sandwiches from a kiosk in the park on one of those perfect summer days that made Hannah believe in God.

“That looks like a good spot.” She pointed to a silver maple that grew away from the path and away from the passing foot traffic, and they strolled toward it, their elbows brushing together.

Lying on his back on the grass in a wash of light, his eyes closed and his careful fingers laced across his stomach, B. told her that when he was a child growing up in Australia, he and his older brother had created a time capsule out of a biscuit tin.

“We filled it with all our treasures: the skull of a dead snake, a favorite toy car, the front page of that day’s newspaper, a lock of hair from each of our heads, a home-baked cookie, a soft toy that belonged to our little sister—an elephant, I think, mainly to torture her—and a photograph of the two of us together. I was eight and he was nine. We were wearing matching T-shirts, grinning like loons and squinting into the sun.”

The brothers sealed the tin with a blood oath by pricking their thumbs and crossing their pledge on the lid: a promise to each other that they would dig it up only when they were both thirty. An age that felt impossibly distant and very adult at the time. They buried the capsule under a thorn bush at the bottom of their property, where it was most unlikely to be discovered and where, as far as B. knew, it remained. A few years later, B.’s family moved to England, and ten years after that, his older brother shot himself in the mouth while high on heroin. There was no note, and the family was haunted by not knowing if he meant to do it or had been in the throes of some terrifying drug-induced hallucination.

“The worst part,” B. said, “is that the time capsule still contains a part of my brother, but it’s so far away.” He described the profound loneliness he felt at the thought of it lying beneath the thorn bush in his childhood garden in another country. “It’s almost unbearable.”

Hannah, sitting cross-legged on the grass next to him, rested her hand on his shoulder.

“I think of the everyday stuff he’ll never do. Like float in the sea,” B. said.

“Or pet a dog.”

“He’ll never call in sick and go to the cinema on a weekday morning.”

“Or run for a bus in the rain,” Hannah said.

“Or mug an old lady for drug money.”

Hannah smiled. She understood his need to defuse the emotion, to hold something back for himself. B. kept his eyes closed and lifted Hannah’s hand to his lips.

“He’ll never be in this park on this day in this patch of sun and eat lunch with you,” he said, his breath warm against her palm.

Hannah called her mother and asked her whether she believed it was possible to love two men at the same time. Her mother told her a story about her own youth, when Hannah was a girl, and she’d met a man on a beach holiday the family had taken. He was staying with his wife in the seaside cottage next door to the one Hannah’s parents had rented, with children similar in age to Hannah and her brother. When her mother said the man’s name, Hannah recalled a tall, bearded man who, in her child’s mind’s eye, she pictured as Barry Gibb, the lead singer of the Bee Gees, with long hair and a sun-bleached beard and a tan, wearing black swimming trunks. Her mother told her how she and this man had kissed one afternoon, stealing the opportunity on a hidden bend along the path as both families made their way back to the cottages from the beach. They trailed behind the main party of sun umbrellas and cooler bags and children with damp, sandy swimming towels swung across their sunburned shoulders and stopped in the low afternoon light, both understanding what it was they wanted.

“That one kiss was enough,” her mother said.

The man whom Hannah thought of as Barry Gibb continued to contact her mother for a few months after the holiday, sending her a gold chain hung with a pendant of Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lost things.

“I remember that necklace,” Hannah said.

“I wore it for a long time,” her mother said.

Hannah felt betrayed by her mother’s revelation. As a child, the mythology of the Saint Anthony necklace was that it had been a gift to her mother from Hannah’s grandmother. A lie to protect a secret that now gave Hannah pause. She appreciated the irony of this, understood that her grandmother was her mother’s confidante in the same way she was now asking her mother to be hers. She saw how a secret required complicity and bloomed to entangle the whole family.

“This is different,” she told her mother. “I’ve never kissed B.”

The last time Hannah saw B. was the day before she left to accept a job offer in another city. She spent her last day at the studio drinking champagne, tidying her desk, recycling redundant designs and mood boards, and dropping her collection of potted succulents on the desks of her favorite people. She took a short diversion past the art school on her way home and found B., leaning over a cardboard model of a house with a friend. As she arrived, the friend left the room, leaving her and B. alone. Hannah was pleased and embarrassed by this. Pleased to have the privacy with him, embarrassed that his friend should think they needed it.

He walked over and put his arms around her. She pressed her face into his T-shirt, aware of his collarbones, of his soapy, boyish smell, and the pressure of each of his fingers on her back. She lifted her face and decided that if he kissed her now, she would kiss him back. One kiss would be enough. But before that moment came, they pulled apart. Hannah drove home.

Mark met her at the door of their apartment, holding two glasses of champagne.

“I’m so proud of you,” he said, and gave her a lingering kiss that reminded her of hot, still air and lazy afternoons in houses on stilts and lapping waves and new beginnings.

The thing that Hannah had never told anyone was that when she was fifteen, her boyfriend had forced himself inside her. It was the first time she’d had sex. A few days or maybe weeks before, she’d sat in the passenger seat of her mother’s car and looked at her own slim, tanned thighs at the tops of legs that were bent at the knees, her feet in white socks resting on the dashboard, running shoes lying in the footwell. She had beautiful legs. Beautiful in the way that all young women are beautiful but never realize until it’s too late and their bodies no longer belong to them.

Traveling home from high school that day, Hannah had thought, Perhaps it would be best to just get my virginity out of the way, then things would be easier.

By things, she meant managing the constant pressure of her boyfriend’s advances, and by easier, she imagined it would be easy to give up this part of herself she didn’t entirely conceive the value of but that he seemed so urgently to want.

A few weeks later, when she felt him, hard and painful, filling the space between those young, bent legs, she said, “Oh, God, no,” and tightened her thighs around his hips, so he pushed into her with his pelvis and his cock, and both felt like bone, perhaps mistaking her tightening for encouragement and not resistance, or perhaps not caring very much either way, until he was done and she thought, Well, this was what I wanted, wasn’t it?

Afterward she told him she loved him because this significant thing had happened, and it meant more if you were in love, right? And he said he loved her back.

The weekend this happened, the boy who was now and forever Hannah’s “first” gave a school friend of hers a lift home after a party and fucked her. An important detail that Hannah would discover only much later, after she had allowed him to plow into her, in a most unsatisfying way, again and again and again, until he finally moved on to someone else and Hannah felt nothing but relief and shame.

A year into her new job and living in their new house, Mark and Hannah watched two positive pale-blue lines appear on the stick of Hannah’s pregnancy test. That weekend Mark disappeared into the basement with strict instructions for Hannah not to follow.

“It’s a secret. I’ll call you when I’m done,” he said.

When he was done and Hannah was allowed down the basement stairs, Mark revealed a scale replica of their home, a toy house he’d built for their child. The light balsa wood roof and each consecutive floor could be lifted off to reveal the layout of the rooms within. He had left them all unfurnished, apart from a tiny wooden cradle in the spare bedroom, the bowl of which revealed the gentle scraping of Mark’s sandpaper. He had painted the interior walls to match the real thing and stained the floors in the colors of their grown-up home. He showed her how the front door opened and closed on working hinges and how the sash windows could be unlatched to slide up and down.

“It’s a gift, for our little human.” Mark rubbed Hannah’s stomach.

“It’s perfect,” Hannah said. And it was.

A year later they moved again, this time for Mark’s job and to another country, where they had another baby and, without a work permit, Hannah stayed home with the children.

One afternoon, while the kids were napping and she was catching up on bills and laundry, her phone pinged with an email from an unfamiliar address. It was B. They hadn’t spoken in years but she had followed his career and she knew, through industry acquaintances and from stalking Facebook, that he too had moved to another country and was now, according to the email signature, head designer at a reputable firm. The email was written in French, which Hannah did not speak and which she did not know that B. spoke.

She used Google to translate.

Dear Hannah, I love my new job but I miss finding you in the kitchen in the morning. I wish Mark wasn’t such a nice guy, or that we had met before you got married, because given the chance, I’d jump your beautiful bones.

An abrupt thrust of desire for B.—for her youth, for a time she had been desired—erupted in Hannah. Followed by an aftershock of regret (why hadn’t she kissed him at the art school on that final day?) and relief—thank God she hadn’t, because look at the beautiful life she had to lose.

They began an irregular correspondence, which continued through the years. He shared his happiness in pictures of his wedding day and photos of his first child. She wrote of her fears about going back to work when she launched her own interior design business. She tagged him in a feature article she read about a design he’d completed in a celebrity’s home. He recommended her for a freelance job with a studio he had connections to in her city. She counseled him on a work crisis, and he reassured her when she doubted her abilities. They traded industry articles, Pinterest boards, design inspirations, and YouTube links to songs they liked. They remembered one another’s birthdays, and every Valentine’s Day B. texted her a single red heart.

When Hannah and Mark were first married, Hannah always enjoyed afternoon sex. Light, lazy, slow fucking, where she and Mark sweatily slotted their limbs together, and that left them relaxed and spent and blended with the drift into sleep. With full-time jobs and children, that delicious, damp time became increasingly unavailable. The first thing that went was the privacy, then the energy, then the opportunity, then the time, and, finally, the desire. It’s like any habit—the magazine articles that Hannah read taught her—the more you do it, the more you want to.

On Valentine’s Day, the year she turned forty, Hannah closed her messages on the red heart that had arrived from B. earlier that day and turned off her bedside light. She lay next to her sleeping husband and put her fingers between her legs. She pictured B. the first time she’d seen him, folding the coffee packaging over his fingers like a surgeon. She imagined those fingers on her skin, only the tips, stroking her nipples, her belly, resting on the peaks of her hips. She remembered the night, working late at the office, that he’d come up behind her as she leaned over the drafting table, ruling the dimensions of a lobby in a hotel their firm was designing. The office was quiet and Hannah thought she was alone, and B. ran his pen down the length of her spine—from the nape of her neck to the base of her backbone—and when she straightened up, he was standing right behind her and for a moment they pressed together.

She ached and nudged Mark’s back. Moving to spoon her sleeping husband, she slipped her hand under the elastic of his flannel pajama pants. He moaned appreciatively.

“Baby, I’m horny,” she whispered into his ear.

“Okay.” Groggy but responding, Mark rolled onto his back. “But do we have to have, like, full-on sex?” he asked.

Hannah decoded this to mean, How about you just give me a blow job?

The following morning, before Mark or the children were awake, Hannah messaged B. a line from Leonard Cohen’s Book of Longing: “I believe that you are standing in the place where I am supposed to be standing.”

Hannah joins her friends at a pub overlooking the Thames for a girls’ night out. This means dressing up in heels and putting on makeup and tottering uncomfortably over suburban paving stones to drink wine and complain about husbands and children and ambitious helicopter moms. Hannah resents the fact that she is officially a stereotype. As she moves carefully in the unfamiliar footwear—she spends her summer days in flip-flops and her winter days in Uggs—she wishes she were on the sofa with Mark and the kids, watching TV. Or single, living in Paris, with nothing but expensive black clothes in her wardrobe, effortlessly cool and well connected, on her way to an exhibition of her photographs at a fashionable gallery in the seventh arrondissement.

She opens the door to the bar and is met by a wave of noise and heat.

Hannah’s friend Josie is unhappy. This is not news. Josie has been unhappy for as long as Hannah has known her. Years before, they’d met for lunch and Josie had confessed to Hannah that her husband was a drinker, the kind who hid empty bottles in the garden and finished a half-jack of whiskey almost every night, after the bottle of wine he drank with dinner. She’d given Hannah the details of a lonely life; she was paralyzed by the thought of living with him, paralyzed by the thought of leaving. “It’s not easy, with the kids,” Josie had said.

Now, after a couple of drinks, Josie confesses that she is having an affair. Hannah isn’t surprised. The news is like any other news. If Josie had told her she was getting a promotion, or unimaginably, was having another baby, she would have been more surprised.

What Hannah wants is details: What is it like sleeping with another man, after so long? How did it start? How did you know you were capable of having an affair? Where do you meet? Are you afraid of being caught?

They leave the bar and go dancing at a Greek restaurant that creates a makeshift dance floor by pushing the restaurant tables back after 10 p.m. Josie flirts and dances with a man who tells them he is a plumber, at which Josie and Hannah shout with laughter and, when he goes to the bathroom, make obvious jokes about him checking Josie’s pipes. Hannah dances with a young man with long hair and a beard and a beatific look that verges on biblical, but it’s probably only because he’s stoned. He’s wearing sandals. She wonders what he looks like naked, but it’s clear he is not interested in her. She is a middle-aged woman wearing makeup, tight jeans, and high heels. The girls’-night-out costume. A brief disguise. Women like her do not draw stares from young men. She leaves and walks home alone, the straps of her high heels looped loosely through her fingers. She steps on the cracks where moss and small-leafed flowers grow, and as she turns into her street, a red fox runs into her path and stops, regarding her over its shoulder.

Earlier that day, tapping away at her keyboard, an advert for a well-known beauty brand told Hannah to “unlock youth,” as if it were hidden away temporarily but might still be released to bloom again, to firm the softening and soften the hard edges and dull her sharp mind with youthful anxiety and lack of experience. Standing in her bare feet on the cool pavement just after midnight, Hannah eyes down the fox and considers what it would be like to unlock her youth. She wonders about the infinite possibilities of the lives she has not lived because of choices she’s made along the way and what, given the opportunity (and access to some enchanted fountain), she would do differently. Which diverging path in the woods would she choose, knowing what she knows now? She pictures Mark—smiling in a hammock with the sun on his face—and B. in the park with his arm across his eyes. She travels back to the art school to the day they said goodbye. To the moment of the kiss that never was.

But to return to a time before her children is unimaginable and unwelcome, and it is with the thought of their pale eyelids, their quiet breaths, and their warm palms curled in sleep that Hannah knows. She’s honest enough with herself to admit that the reasons she yearns for B. are her reasons alone and have little to do with him. She loves the secret space in which her version of him belongs only to her. Where reality cannot undermine the fantasy of their attraction or that perfect, imagined kiss. He fills the gaps between the stable, more permanent blocks of her life, but she does not want the day-to-day of him. She does not want the adult life, the dirty laundry and the mundane workweeks, the wife, the child. She does not want to know his favorite food or favorite shirt or even how it feels to kiss him. She likes him suspended in a time capsule, laden with the promise of everything that might have been, while she knows—with clarity—exactly what is.

She claps her hands at the fox, and it darts away between the tires and bumpers of the parked cars.

Mark stirs when she crawls in next to him. She nestles against his naked back. It is warm and present and reliable.

“You smell like wine,” he says, his voice low and thick with sleep.

“There may have been wine.”

“Did you have fun?”

“Meh.”

“What did you do?”

“I danced with Jesus.”

He turns to her with an expression that asks, Should I be worried? Hannah presses her face into the known space between his shoulder blades.