Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
And I am one cold syllable from no, one breath from putting her in a car the way the old Trey would have put her in a car ten minutes ago, when I make the single mistake I will spend the rest of the night and possibly the rest of my life paying for.
I look across the room.
I don’t decide to. It’s the same broken animal instinct that’s had me clocking that door all night, and it turns my head at the worst possible instant and shows me the worst possible thing, which is Barrymore. Troy Barrymore, crossing the floor of my ball in my building toward my wife with the unhurried certainty of a man walking toward something that has always, in some essential way, belonged to him. He’s making straight for her. Who else would it be. The one night in six months I am not standing at her side, the one night the whole watching city knows she came in alone, and the golden boy materializes out of the crowd inside the hour, the way he materialized on the cemetery steps, the way he materialized in the corridor, the way he has materialized in every photograph in the folder locked in my desk.
And the thing happens that I have no defense against, because I built no defense against it, because I never once believed I would need one. The cold arithmetic I do on everything starts running itself without my permission and it runs straight to the ugliest sum on the page. They’ll have it planned already, I think. They’re standing in a ballroom full of cameras and they don’t even have to lower their voices, because who in this room would suspect a thing, who wouldn’t simply see an old family friend comforting poor abandoned Camilla. They’re arranging it right now. The timeline. How long is decent. How soon she can be seen on his arm without the city counting the days. I can see it laid out the way I can see the back end of any deal, every clause, every contingency, and the rage of it comes up through me hot and total and I despise it, I despise that it is in me at all, because a man balancing an account does not feel this, a man who married a woman to own a hockey team does not stand at the edge of a ballroom wanting to put his hands through another man for crossing a floor.
And underneath the rage, lower down, in the place I do not go, there’s the other thing. The guilt. The absurd, contemptible flicker of guilt, as though I am the one doing something, as though a dance I haven’t agreed to and a woman I don’t want make me the guilty party here, when she is the one with the photographs, she is the one with the grey coat and the park bench and the upturned laughing face.
Damn her. Damn him. Damn the both of them standing on opposite ends of this room, and damn me most of all, for the guilt, for feeling it over nothing, over a thing I have every right in the world to do, in a marriage she emptied out months before I ever lifted a hand against it.
I turn back to Ronna.
“One dance,” I tell her.
Her smile is a small triumph she has the grace not to gloat over for more than a second. “One dance.”
I set my untouched glass down and offer her my arm, and she takes it the way she takes everything, as though it were owed, and I walk her out onto the open floor where the orchestra is doing something slow and the cameras are angled exactly where she said they would be. I put my hand at her waist where the choreography of the thing requires it and not one inch nearer, and we move, and it means nothing, it means less than nothing, it is the emptiest thing two people have ever done with music playing.
And I don’t look at my wife.
I want it understood what that costs. I can feel her. Across the whole width of the room I can feel her eyes on me the way you feel a held match approaching skin, and under the eyes I can feel the other thing, the pain coming off her in a wave I have no instrument for and no need of one, because I put it there, I have been putting it there for two months with surgical care, and tonight I have outdone myself without even trying. She is watching her husband dance with the woman the whole city has spent a week pairing him with, and it is hurting her, and I can feel every degree of it, and I keep my eyes on the far wall over Ronna’s bare shoulder and I do not look, because looking is the one thing I have left that I am not allowed, and a man who has given up everything else learns to guard the last small forbidden thing like the crown jewel it has become.