I don’t know how to answer any of their questions.
I really did think he’d be here tonight. I want to be fair to myself about at least that much. This is one of the most important nights of the entire year for the company, for my father’s foundation, the ball he built up out of nothing with his own name and his own stubbornness, and not once in six months of marriage did Trey let me walk into a single Waymakers function on anything but his arm. So I dressed the way a wife dresses to stand beside her husband. And then, an hour before the car was due, my phone rang, and it was Bills, and Bills is far too decent a man to have enjoyed one word of whathe’d been sent to say. I could hear how little he enjoyed it, the careful apology threaded through every pause. He was sorry, he said. So sorry to be the one calling. But Mr. Flint thought it best that I come to the ball on my own this evening.
On my own. As though I were a coat he’d thought better of bringing.
Inside, the tall doors swing shut behind me and the whole shrieking circus of the carpet falls away at once, and I let myself breathe, finally, four in and six out the way Dr. Meyers taught me a lifetime ago, because at least in here there is no press. In here I’m free of the questions, free of the bulbs and the rope and the shouted name that isn’t mine.
But I’m not free of her.
Ronna Roswell.
Everyone knows who Ronna Roswell is. You would have to have spent the last decade at the bottom of the sea not to know that face; it’s sold perfume from the side of every bus in this city and looked down forty feet tall from the billboards over the bridges, and in person, across the whole gleaming length of a crowded ballroom, she is somehow even more than all of that, tall and bright and laughing in a column of deep crimson that the entire room keeps quietly arranging itself around without seeming to notice it’s doing it.
And worse, so much worse, everyone also knows she used to date my husband.
Whom she is standing beside right now.
They’re talking, the two of them, close, her bright head tipped up toward his dark one the way a flower turns toward the thing it wants, and she’s laughing at whatever he’s just said to her, and she keeps touching him while she laughs. That’s the part I can’t stop watching, the part that gets in under my ribs and turns. Her hand on his arm. Her palm pressed to his chest, spread over the lapel I happen to know the cost of becauseI was there in the quiet little shop the morning it was fitted. Her fingers light at his jaw, brushing away something that was never there to begin with, touching him and touching him and touching him with the careless, fluent ease of a woman who has touched him a thousand times before and has decided, tonight, in front of all these watching people, to remind the entire room that she still might.
She is acting like my husband is hers.
And somewhere high above us the band finds the first low notes of something slow, and all around the bright edges of the room couples begin drifting out toward the open floor, and Ronna Roswell slides her hand into the crook of my husband’s arm as though it had been built to fit there, and turns him, gently, toward the music.
And that’s when I feel it begin, the very thing Dr. Meyers warned me about, my own heart picking up a rhythm it was never built to carry, the careful four-in, six-out of it coming quietly apart in my chest. The room tilts a half-degree. I must lose a little color, because that’s the moment I feel someone arrive at my side, and I turn, and it’s Troy.
The room notices him before I’ve finished turning. It always does. A woman near us touches her husband’s sleeve and says something behind her hand; two girls by the champagne go still and bright the way girls do; an older man I half recognize from the foundation board straightens out of his slouch and lifts a hand in a small salute, the kind men give to other men they’ve privately decided to be impressed by. Troy Barrymore walks into a room and the room rearranges itself to make him the center of the story it’s telling tonight, and he does it without appearing to know he’s doing it at all, which I’ve come to understand is the entire trick of him.
But right now he isn’t looking at any of them. He’s looking at me, and his gaze narrows.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he says.
No, not a ghost, but…am I seeing it right? Is my husband about to dance with his ex?
When he’s never even looked my way?
Chapter Ten
The first rule I ever learned about a mistake is that you do not get to take it back. You get to decide what it costs and who pays, and that is the whole of the freedom available to a man once the thing is done; the rest is sentiment, and sentiment is for people who can afford it.
So I stand at the edge of the long room at the Plaza with a glass I have no intention of drinking and I do not let myself regret the invitation. I made it. It is on the board now, face up, the way every move I have ever made goes face up the instant my hand leaves it, and a man does not sit at the table I have spent my life sitting at and then wince at his own cards. I invited Ronna Roswell to this ball to make a particular point to a particular room, and the point is being made; I can feel it being made, the same way you feel weather change before the window confirms it, in the angle of every head that turns when she laughs and then turns a half-second later to find me, to see whether I am watching her or watching the door my wife will come through.
I am watching neither. I have trained myself out of watching the way other men train themselves out of smoking, deliberately,against the grain of the body, and tonight the training is the only thing holding the shape of me together.
Across the room Glasgow has set up his small court near the orchestra, Crowther at his shoulder doing the thing Crowther does instead of having a personality, and Greaves moving between the tables with nineteen years of board chairmanship in the set of his back. They are all watching me. They have been watching me for two months, ever since the photographs, waiting with the patience of old money for the cheap stranger to do the cheap thing in public so they can be civil about removing him afterward. I came tonight to give them nothing. I came to stand here cold and unbothered with a beautiful woman on the guest list and a wife somewhere in the building and let the whole appetite of the room go hungry.
And then the door at the far end opens, and I know.
I do not look. I want that on the record, here, in the only court that ever hears my testimony, which is the one inside my own skull at one in the morning. I do not turn my head a single degree. But I know the exact instant Camilla enters the room the way I would know a change in cabin pressure, some animal barometer in me that has nothing to do with my eyes and everything to do with two months of lying awake cataloguing the exact distance between her room and mine. The noise of the room reorganizes itself around her arrival. I feel it move through the crowd toward me like a tide coming up a beach, and I set my jaw and I keep my eyes on the orchestra and I do not look at my wife, because looking is a thing I am no longer allowed.
“There she is,” says a voice at my elbow, warm and amused and entirely delighted with itself. “Right on schedule. And you didn’t even flinch. Impressive, Trey. Truly.”
Ronna has arrived. She fits herself in beside me with the ease of a woman who has stood beside me at a hundred of these before, in the years when I kept women the way I keep cars, foras long as they were useful and not one evening past it. She is in a deep red that the room has been arranging itself around all night, and she is smiling at me with a private, gleaming sort of enjoyment, and I understand at once that she has not come over to be looked at. She has come over to watch.
“Ronna.”
“You know what I noticed, standing over there?” She turns her glass slowly by the stem, taking in the room as though it were a painting she’d been promised was very good. “I noticed you’ve looked at that door four times in the last twenty minutes. The same door. Now, the Trey I knew didn’t look at doors. The Trey I knew made the door come to him.” She tips her head. “So either you’ve developed a nervous condition, or you were waiting for something. Someone.”
“I watch every room I’m in,” I tell her. “It’s a habit older than you are. Don’t read anything into it.”
