“Mm.” She doesn’t believe me. She isn’t trying to make me think she believes me, which is the thing about Ronna I had forgotten and am remembering now with a certain grim clarity; she was never interested in winning the small exchanges, only in being proven right at the end of the long one. “I’ll tell you what else I remember about you, since we’re reminiscing. I remember exactly what it took to get dropped by Trey Flint. It wasn’t being difficult. I was difficult, and I’ll be the first to admit it.” A small laugh. “It wasn’t even being unfaithful. You’d have respected unfaithful. No. The one unforgivable thing, the thing that got a girl’s things couriered back to her by lunchtime, was trying to make you jealous. The faintest little effort to make you feel something you hadn’t approved in advance, and you were gone. You couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand the feeling, so you killed the source.”
“Is there a point arriving,” I ask, “or are you simply enjoying the sound of your own history?”
“The point,” she says, and her smile widens, because she has been waiting for me to ask and a woman like Ronna lives for the moment a cold man asks, “is that I have never once in all the years I’ve known you seen you let a woman make you feel anything at all and stay standing in the same room as her. And here you are. Standing. In the same room. Looking at the door.” She leans in, conspiratorial, thrilled. “She walks in, and you go to stone so you won’t turn around. That’s not a man who’s bored of his wife, Trey. A man who’s bored of his wife glances over, confirms she’s there, and goes back to his drink. You’re holding yourself still. There’s a difference, and I’ve made a whole career out of knowing it.”
I drink, finally, a single swallow of something I taste nothing of, because the alternative is to answer too quickly, and answering too quickly is how you tell a woman like this she has found the seam.
“You’ve mistaken discipline for feeling,” I say, when the glass is down again and my voice is exactly where I want it. “An understandable error. You’ve never had much acquaintance with the first one.”
She laughs outright at that, pleased, unwounded, because I have just confirmed for her that the blade went in somewhere by bothering to swing back. “Oh, this is good,” she murmurs. “This is so good. Do you know, I came tonight expecting to be bored. The famous Trey Flint, his sad arranged little marriage, a free dinner, some cameras. And instead I get this.” She gestures at me with her glass, head to foot, as though I am the entertainment she was promised and did not expect to receive. “You. Tormented. Over a girl. I have genuinely never seen you lose at anything. I’d have paid for a ticket.”
“You’re not watching me lose,” I tell her. “You’re watching me run a board for reasons that have nothing to do with you and would take a better mind than yours to follow. There’s afaction in this room that needs to see my marriage is a matter of indifference to me. You’re a prop in that, Ronna. A well-paid, very decorative prop. Don’t confuse the stage with the play.”
“There it is.” She points at me, delighted. “The numbers. You always go to the numbers when you can’t go anywhere else. It’s the tell you’ve never once managed to file off. The colder the arithmetic comes out of you, the closer somebody’s standing to the thing you can’t say.” She studies me a moment longer, and then her whole face changes, and I know the entertainment portion of the evening is over and the transaction is about to begin. “Anyway. I didn’t come over here just to admire the view. I came to collect.”
“Collect what.”
“A dance.” She says it lightly. “One dance. With me. Right now, while the orchestra’s doing something slow and the room is good and full and every camera that matters is angled at this exact corner.”
“No.”
“Dance with me,” Ronna says, and the warmth doesn’t leave her voice at all, which is what makes the next part so genuinely fine a piece of work, “or I’ll lie to your wife about the two of us.”
I turn and look at her, and I let her see the cold come up, the real cold, the kind I keep behind glass for men who’ve cost me money. “Are you trying to blackmail me?”
“Blackmail.” She tries the word out and seems to find it a touch dramatic for her taste. “I’m just making the most out of this evening for my career. I have a feeling you won’t be inviting me again.” A small, frank shrug, woman to wolf. “Well? Just one dance, and then we’ll call it quits.”
And I am one cold syllable from no, one breath from putting her in a car the way the old Trey would have put her in a car ten minutes ago, when I make the single mistake I will spend the rest of the night and possibly the rest of my life paying for.
I look across the room.
I don’t decide to. It’s the same broken animal instinct that’s had me clocking that door all night, and it turns my head at the worst possible instant and shows me the worst possible thing, which is Barrymore. Troy Barrymore, crossing the floor of my ball in my building toward my wife with the unhurried certainty of a man walking toward something that has always, in some essential way, belonged to him. He’s making straight for her. Who else would it be. The one night in six months I am not standing at her side, the one night the whole watching city knows she came in alone, and the golden boy materializes out of the crowd inside the hour, the way he materialized on the cemetery steps, the way he materialized in the corridor, the way he has materialized in every photograph in the folder locked in my desk.
And the thing happens that I have no defense against, because I built no defense against it, because I never once believed I would need one. The cold arithmetic I do on everything starts running itself without my permission and it runs straight to the ugliest sum on the page. They’ll have it planned already, I think. They’re standing in a ballroom full of cameras and they don’t even have to lower their voices, because who in this room would suspect a thing, who wouldn’t simply see an old family friend comforting poor abandoned Camilla. They’re arranging it right now. The timeline. How long is decent. How soon she can be seen on his arm without the city counting the days. I can see it laid out the way I can see the back end of any deal, every clause, every contingency, and the rage of it comes up through me hot and total and I despise it, I despise that it is in me at all, because a man balancing an account does not feel this, a man who married a woman to own a hockey team does not stand at the edge of a ballroom wanting to put his hands through another man for crossing a floor.
And underneath the rage, lower down, in the place I do not go, there’s the other thing. The guilt. The absurd, contemptible flicker of guilt, as though I am the one doing something, as though a dance I haven’t agreed to and a woman I don’t want make me the guilty party here, when she is the one with the photographs, she is the one with the grey coat and the park bench and the upturned laughing face.
Damn her. Damn him. Damn the both of them standing on opposite ends of this room, and damn me most of all, for the guilt, for feeling it over nothing, over a thing I have every right in the world to do, in a marriage she emptied out months before I ever lifted a hand against it.
I turn back to Ronna.
“One dance,” I tell her.
Her smile is a small triumph she has the grace not to gloat over for more than a second. “One dance.”
I set my untouched glass down and offer her my arm, and she takes it the way she takes everything, as though it were owed, and I walk her out onto the open floor where the orchestra is doing something slow and the cameras are angled exactly where she said they would be. I put my hand at her waist where the choreography of the thing requires it and not one inch nearer, and we move, and it means nothing, it means less than nothing, it is the emptiest thing two people have ever done with music playing.
And I don’t look at my wife.
I want it understood what that costs. I can feel her. Across the whole width of the room I can feel her eyes on me the way you feel a held match approaching skin, and under the eyes I can feel the other thing, the pain coming off her in a wave I have no instrument for and no need of one, because I put it there, I have been putting it there for two months with surgical care, and tonight I have outdone myself without even trying. She iswatching her husband dance with the woman the whole city has spent a week pairing him with, and it is hurting her, and I can feel every degree of it, and I keep my eyes on the far wall over Ronna’s bare shoulder and I do not look, because looking is the one thing I have left that I am not allowed, and a man who has given up everything else learns to guard the last small forbidden thing like the crown jewel it has become.
“You’re not even going to peek?” Ronna murmurs, amused, turning us. “She’s right there. Suffering beautifully, I might add. The girl has a gift for it.”
“Don’t talk about my wife.”
“There’s the husband.” She laughs softly. “He does still live in there. Good to kn?—”
And then I feel her hand leave my shoulder and rise to the back of my neck and I have one half of one second ofwhat the—before she’s pulled my head down and put her mouth on mine in front of the orchestra and the cameras and the entire watching room.
