He watched, instead, the long marbled length of the foyer down which his wife had walked a minute earlier without looking back. The foyer was empty. She had collected her coat. She had gone out through the tall front doors.
The photographers were still outside; in the morning, there would be an image of her exit, the dark green dress, thecomposed face, the absence of any visible response to what her husband had just done.
He had planned for the image. It had been part of the calculation. A public act gave a woman no room to negotiate it down afterward; a public act, correctly performed, ended a thing in a way that could not be reopened by a long conversation at a kitchen island.
It also gave a man no room to walk it back.
That had been the point. The choice of Yvonne had, he was aware, been designed to land on Noelle in a specific way. They had gone on one date years ago, she had bored him beyond belief, and even though he’d made it clear he had no further interest in her, she made it a point to act in a proprietary manner toward him in the social circles they both navigated. But for his purposes tonight, she was perfect.
A man who kissed another woman in front of two hundred people shut the door on any type of warm relationship with his wife.
He was going to need to be the other version of himself again, and he wasn't going to be able to return to the other version by discipline alone. Discipline had failed him.
He had wanted, more specifically, to end the version of himself that had almost given his heart to his wife.
He watched the empty foyer for a second longer than was useful.
Elias rejoined the room.
It was a thing he had been doing his whole adult life. A room that had just watched him do something difficult did not expect to see him leave it; a room expected him to move back into it, produce the next courteous sentence, allow the collective attention to settle elsewhere. He moved. He collected a new drink from a passing tray. He exchanged a word with a banker he hadn’t seen since the summer, a word with the banker's wife,a word with one of the museum trustees. The room allowed him to keep doing so.
He did not see Gordon Vanders again.
He noted the absence. It was the correct choice on Vanders's part, and he would have made the same choice in Vanders's place. A man who had been in the room at the moment of a public rupture and who had, earlier, been seen speaking to the wife of the man who had produced it did not linger. Vanders had gone. Vanders had, Elias did not doubt, already been in a car by the time Elias had returned his attention to the foyer.
Elias drove himself home.
He had sent the driver home at the start of the evening, because he had not wanted a driver to be in a position, afterward, of having heard anything. It was the same instinct he’d followed the night he had gone to the Wentworth. He noted, parking the car in front of the building, that he’d been following the instinct more often lately than the instinct itself could sustainably explain.
He went up.
The penthouse was dark. He set his keys in the crystal dish.
Her keys weren't there.
He saw this and the seeing was, for a second, without content. His wife's keys were often not in the crystal dish. She had been moving them recently into a small lacquered tray she kept on the console in her dressing room, a domestic relocation he had tracked without quite admitting he was tracking it. And so the absence of the keys was not, in itself, evidence of anything.
He crossed the foyer and turned on the hall lamp. He went to her dressing room.
The door was open. The lacquered tray on the console was empty. The keys she had left with were not there, and the room which had always, since the wedding, borne the faint organized presence of his wife inside it bore, tonight, the absence of it.
She hadn't come home.
He stood in the doorway of her dressing room for a moment, absorbing the piece of information.
Then he went to his study.
He sat at his desk with the lamp on.
He didn’t read. There was nothing, tonight, to read: the file on Vanders had been returned to the drawer, the addendum had been filed, the recent communications from his senior counsel had been attended to earlier in the day. He’d had walked out of the Art Institute with no task remaining before him except the one he had already completed.
He sat at the desk anyway.
He turned over, without meaning to, the evening. The sentence she had said to him at the end of it. He had expectedI see, orI understand, or the formal inclination of her head followed by a clean, composed exit. She had given him the inclination. She had given him the exit. She had not given him any of the sentences he had been prepared to answer.
You don't have to pretend anymore.
It was, on its surface, the sentence of a woman releasing him from an obligation. Its surface was what had allowed her to deliver it in a public room. Its surface was what had allowed him to answer it, or fail to answer it, without appearing to have failed.
