The city in the failing light lay below him, and he permitted himself — briefly, as an exercise — to consider the possibility that what his wife had said on the sidewalk was what his wife had meant. The thought was permitted for several seconds. Then it got put away. The thought wasn't operative. If permitted to develop, it produced outcomes he wasn't going to accept.
A man who accepted that his wife meant what she'd said when she'd said she wasn't going to let him touch her was a man who'd, in the act of accepting, completed the transition from married to unmarried, and that transition wasn't one hewas making. The filings his wife had initiated were filings; the sentence she'd said on Clark Street was a sentence. Filings could be delayed. Sentences could be, given the right conditions, revised.
He didn’t go back to the apartment. The club on Michigan did — the club where he'd eaten dinner on the odd evenings of his unmarried years and on the few evenings in the months of the marriage when a dinner in the apartment with his wife hadn't been, for one reason or another, a thing he'd been prepared to perform. The club had a library and a quiet dining room and, above all, a staff who'd been trained not to register the presence or the state of their members in a way that might, later, become information.
Dinner was eaten alone. Less got drunk than could have.
After dinner, the library: the chair his father had sat in, a book he'd read several times before, he didn't want to encounter anything new. The brass light. The silence of a room built by people who understood that a man occasionally needed a room to be silent in. For the duration of the reading, the corner of Armitage and Clark didn't get thought about.
He thought about it when the book closed. He thought about it all the way back to the apartment in the car. The apartment had been dark since the morning of the divorce papers: Maura hadn't been told to turn on lights in the evenings before he came home. Keys went into the crystal dish without looking at the dish. The study door opened. The lamp turned on.
At the desk, he got no work done.
Instead, a he took out a sheet of paper. At the top of it went the sentences he was going to say to his wife when the conditions were produced. Good sentences: he'd been writing versions of them since the afternoon, rejecting several rounds. The sentences he'd arrived at by the time the evening had gotten late were clean, specific, and accurate. They named what he'ddone without attempting to diminish it. They acknowledged that the thing he'd done couldn't be undone, and they proposed, in the language of a man asking for something he didn't, strictly, deserve, that the two of them might nonetheless attempt, together, to live in a version of their life in which the thing had been done and was being lived with rather than refused.
The sentences got read through. They were, as sentences, correct.
He spent a long time staring at them.
The curb on Clark Street came back. His wife's palm up between them, flat, the gesture of a line. Her voice, firm.
Elias told himself that the sentences were going to work because the sentences were what he had, and the alternative to believing the sentences were going to work was an alternative he wasn't, alone in his study at night, going to take.
The phone rang as he was heading to bed. James.
"I spoke with Feldman."
"And?"
"He's going to oppose the extension. Which you knew."
"Yes."
"He said something when we were wrapping up." A pause. "He said — he said to convey to you that his client had no interest in a negotiation, that his client wasn't available for any form of conversation outside the formal proceedings, and that any attempt to contact her through channels outside the formal proceedings would be construed by his client as harassment. He asked me to convey it."
Silence on the line.
"Feldman doesn't say that kind of thing for effect," James said.
"No."
"She's instructed him to say it."
"I understand that, James."
"She's saying it to you through him because she doesn't want to say it to you directly."
"I understand, James."
"All right."
Neither of them asked whether the extension should be withdrawn. Neither volunteered. The line held for several seconds, and then James saidgood night, Elias,and Elias saidgood night, James,and the line went down.
The phone went on the desk. The sheet of paper with the sentences lay beside it.
Any attempt to contact her through channels outside the formal proceedings would be construed by his client as harassment.
His wife had just told him, through her counsel, that any room he produced would be met as a violation. There was no room. There was the formal proceeding, the filings, and in the weeks ahead a courtroom in which the two of them would appear across a bench from each other in the presence of a judge and their respective counsel, and there were no other rooms.
