"I know that too."
A silence.
"All right," Henry said.
She did not sleep that night either. She lay in her old bed in her parents' house and watched the ceiling she had traced with her eyes through every illness of her childhood. She turned over, without wanting to, the image she could not put down — the image of her husband's hand on Yvonne's jaw, the image of her husband's mouth finding the mouth of another woman.
She loved him.
That was the thing. That was the hard piece at the center of everything she’d arranged with Henry, her mother and the Mathieus' empty apartment on Astor Street, the piece that had arrived in her in a room full of two hundred people and had not, since, left.
Noelle loved her husband. She did not want to love her husband. She did not have a single thing to do with the loving of him now that the thing itself had been demonstrated, at a gala, to be the exact wrong thing to have done.
Noelle closed her eyes. Again, she did not sleep.
The conference roomon Madison was small and under-furnished. That was Henry's taste. A long dark table, two chairs on each side, a window that looked out onto a smaller building.
Noelle arrived early. She sat at the far side of the table, facing the door. Henry sat beside her. He did not speak. He had a folder in front of him he did not open.
Elias arrived at the hour. She heard him in the hallway before she saw him: the low exchange with a secretary, the pause while he took off his coat. She did not know, until the door opened, how her body was going to behave when he walked in.
Her body misbehaved: pulse racing, heat spiraling in her belly.
He came in with his counsel, a lean, silver-haired man Noelle half-recognized from a board she had sat on once with his wife. Elias crossed to the opposite side of the table without looking at her. When he sat, folding his hands on the wood, he looked at her.
The look was composed. She had expected the composure and had prepared for it, and the preparation held by perhaps a margin.
"Noelle."
"Elias."
His counsel spoke first.
He spoke for perhaps ninety seconds. He said the things counsel said at the opening of a meeting of this kind: the expression of surprise at the filing, the expression of willingness to discuss terms, the expression of an interest in keeping the proceedings out of the public record. Henry listened without interrupting. When Elias's counsel was finished, Henry said,"My client has no interest in discussing terms. The filing is the filing. She has asked for a meeting because your client requested one. She is prepared to listen to what your client would like to say to her. She is not prepared to negotiate."
Elias's counsel looked briefly at Elias. Elias studied Noelle.
"Could we have the room?”
He did not say it to either counsel. He said it to her.
Noelle looked at Henry. "Five minutes," she said.
Neither attorney looked pleased. They let themselves out, and Noelle sat across from her husband at the long dark table, set her hands in her lap and waited.
"I want to talk to you about Gordon Vanders."
She had expected this. She had rehearsed, in the bed in her old room the night before, exactly what he was going to try to do with the minutes of a room alone. She had rehearsed, also, what she was going to give him in it.
What she was going to give him was nothing. He had made his public act. He was not going to be allowed to convert his cold certainty about her into a conversation in which she’d be expected to defend herself.
She looked at him.
"No."
"Noelle — "
"There's nothing to talk about."
