Station Eleven

This seemed to her a silly question. She’d assumed, she realized, that everyone remembers the date of their divorce, the same way everyone remembers their wedding date.

“Eleven years,” she said.

“Please, have a seat. Can I offer you something?”

“Do you have any tea?”

“I have tea.”

“I thought you would.” Miranda shed her coat and hat and sat on one of the sofas, which was exactly as uncomfortable as it looked, while Arthur fussed with an electric kettle on a countertop. Here we are, she thought. “How are the previews going?”

“Fine,” he said. “Better than fine, actually. Good. It’s been a long time since I’ve done Shakespeare, but I’ve been working with a coach. Actually, I guess coach isn’t the right word. A Shakespeare expert.” He came back to the sofas and sat across from her. She watched his gaze flicker over her suit, her gleaming shoes, and realized he was performing the same reconciliations she was, adjusting a mental image of a long-ago spouse to match the changed person sitting before him.

“A Shakespeare expert?”

“He’s a Shakespearean scholar. University of Toronto. I love working with him.”

“It must be quite interesting.”

“It is. He has this extremely impressive pool of knowledge, brings a lot to the table, but at the same time he’s completely supportive of my vision for the part.”

Supportive of my vision? He’d adopted new speech patterns. But of course he had, because since she’d last seen him there had been eleven years of friends and acquaintances and meetings and parties, travel here and there, film sets, two weddings and two divorces, a child. It made sense, she supposed, that he would be a different person by now. “What a great opportunity,” she said, “getting to work with someone like that.” Had she ever in her life sat on a less-comfortable sofa. She pressed her fingertips into the foam and barely made an impression. “Arthur,” she said, “I’m so sorry about your father.”

“Thank you.” He looked at her, and seemed to struggle to find the right words. “Miranda, I have to tell you something.”

“This doesn’t sound good.”

“It isn’t. Listen, there’s a book coming out.” His childhood friend Victoria had published the letters he’d sent her. Dear V.: An Unauthorized Portrait of Arthur Leander would be available for purchase in a week and a half. A friend who worked in publishing had sent him an advance copy.

“Am I in it?” she asked.

“I’m afraid so. I’m sorry, Miranda.”

“Tell me.”

“I mentioned you sometimes, when I wrote to her. That’s all. I want you to know that I never said anything unpleasant about you.”

“Okay. Good.” Was it fair to be as angry as she was? He couldn’t have known Victoria would sell the letters.

“You might find this difficult to believe,” he said, “but I have some sense of discretion. It’s actually one of the things I’m known for.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but did you just say you’re famous for your discretion?”

“Look, all I mean is, I didn’t tell Victoria everything.”

“I appreciate that.” A strained silence, during which Miranda willed the kettle to start whistling. “Do you know why she did it?”

“Victoria? I have to assume it was the money. The last I heard, she was working as a housekeeper in a resort on the west coast of Vancouver Island. She probably made more on that book than she’d made in the previous decade.”

“Are you going to sue?”

“It would just be more publicity. My agent thinks it’s better if we just let the book run its course.” The kettle whistled at last; he stood quickly, and she realized he’d been willing the water to boil too. “Hopefully when it comes out it’s only a story for a week or so, then it sinks and disappears. Green tea, or chamomile?”

“Green,” she said. “It must be infuriating, having your letters sold.”

“I was angry at first, I’m still angry, but the truth is, I think I deserved everything I got.” He carried two mugs of green tea to the coffee table, where they left rings of steam on the glass.

“Why do you think you deserved it?”

“I treated Victoria like a diary.” He lifted his mug, blew on the surface of his tea, and returned the mug very deliberately to the table. There was a studied quality to the movement, and Miranda had an odd impression that he was performing a scene. “She wrote to me at first, in the very beginning. Maybe two letters and three postcards, back when I first started writing to her from Toronto. Then a couple of quick notes telling me about changes in address, with a cursory note at the beginning, you know, ‘Hi, sorry for not writing more, I’ve been busy, here’s my new address.’ ”

“So all the times I saw you writing to her,” Miranda said, “she never wrote back.” She was surprised by how sad this made her.