He carried the drink to the window on the other side of the living room from her. He did not sit. He stood at the glass with his back to her, and he looked out at the city , and he let himself, for the space of , think about what he was doing.
He had been thinking about her.
That was the thing, reduced to its simplest shape. He had been thinking about her at times and in rooms where she had no business being in his head — at his desk, in meetings, in the car on the way to a closing on Monday when he had been mid-sentence with his senior counsel and had caught himself, with a jolt, turning an image over in the back of his mind that had been an image of her hand on the rim of a teacup at breakfast. He had not registered the hand at breakfast. He had not realized hehad registered the hand at breakfast. And yet the hand had been there in the car, patient, waiting to be noticed, and had been noticed.
It was attraction. He was not going to pretend it wasn't. He was not a man who pretended things he could simply acknowledge.
He was not, however, obliged to do anything about it.
Attraction was a data point. Attraction was a pressure in the system. A man of discipline could register the pressure without altering the course. He had done this with other women in other years without difficulty. He had done it, in fact, with women who had been easier to want than his wife was — women who had been warmer, more accessible, more obviously on offer. He had survived those. He would survive this.
Except that this was different.
He let himself name it, standing at the glass. It was different because the woman he was married to was not on offer. She had offered, once —we could sit for a while— and he had refused her, and she had absorbed the refusal with the clean efficiency of a woman who had understood that she had tested a boundary and would not test it again. She had not offered since. She was not going to offer again. He knew this the way he knew the shape of his own hand.
And the wanting, now that the offering was off the table, was not subsiding.
It was, in fact, doing the opposite.
She was still in the chair. She had not looked up. The strand of hair that was always working its way out of whatever she'd pinned it into had fallen across her cheekbone. She was reading through it without bothering to push it back. He watched her read for a second longer than he needed to, and the inconvenient thing moved in him again. He was not, in fact, going to survive this by ignoring it. Ignoring it was feeding it.
She had learned him.
The thought, when it surfaced, surfaced cleanly. She had adjusted herself around what she’d learned. The reading chair. The rhythms of the apartment. The silences she no longer tried to fill. The questions she no longer asked. She had adjusted herself to him with a level of attention that was, objectively, the most flattering thing any woman had ever paid him, and she had done it without asking for anything in return.
People did not pay that kind of attention without a reason. He had been circling the reason for weeks now and had been unwilling to land on it. He was, he admitted now, unwilling because he had two explanations and he was not willing to choose between them.
The first explanation was the one that had walked into the Wentworth with him. A woman who had been placed inside his life by her father for operational reasons, and who was executing her portion of the operation with more intelligence and more patience than he had expected.
The second explanation was the one he did not want to hold. The second explanation was that his wife had begun to care for him.
Neither explanation was good.
The first required vigilance. The second required something worse than vigilance. It required him to decide what kind of man he was going to be about it. He had not yet decided what kind of man he was going to be about it. He was not going to decide tonight.
"You don't have to stay up," he said.
He heard himself say it. She looked up. She did not put the book down.
"I'm not."
He waited for the rest of the sentence.
There wasn't any rest. She hadn’t saidI'm not staying up for you. She hadn’t saidI was going to bed soon anyway. She’d given him two words, and she had gone back to her book.
He went to his study. Inside the study the air was different. Colder. He had always found that the study reset him. He crossed to his desk. He set his drink down. He didn’t sit.
He stood at the desk with his hand resting flat on the blotter, and he stared at nothing, and he thought:I’m not going to be able to keep doing this.
He let the thought go. He reached for the files on his desk, read the first paragraph without retaining it and he read it again. But he was thinking about his wife.
He finished the file. He closed it. He opened the next.
Late into the night,he heard Noelle go to bed. He had learned her footfalls in the hall the way she’d learned his rhythms in the apartment, which was a symmetry he had no intention of examining. He heard her bedroom door close with the same care she closed every door with. He heard the silence settle in the hall, and he sat at his desk with the next file open in front of him and realized that he hadn’t registered a single sentence he had read in the last half hour.
Elias closed the file. He stood up and walked to the window of the study. He let himself, briefly, consider what was happening to him.
He could leave the marriage. It was not a possibility in practice: the operational cost would be catastrophic, and he had not agreed to incur catastrophic costs for his own feelings. But he allowed himself, as an exercise, the clarity of thinking itthrough. It was useful, sometimes, to look at a door you were not going to open.
