It’s one of the stranger parts of my life. Depending on the day, I’m his personal assistant, his wife, or some inconvenient combination of both. Nobody has ever sat me down and explained where one role ends and the other begins. Least of all Zane.
I wear a dress I bought myself. Floor length, deep green.
I stand in front of the mirror in my room for a moment before I leave. I look like someone who belongs at a function like this. That’s unsettling in a way I choose not to examine.
Zane is in the foyer when I come out. Dark suit, no tie again.
“Green,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Good choice.”
I walk past him to the elevator.
The room is enormous, all pale stone, chandeliers burning low over two hundred people who have decided to spend their Saturday evening being philanthropic in formal wear. A string quartet is doing its work in the corner. The air smells like lilies and old money.
Zane’s hand finds the small of my back when we walk in.
I don’t react. Three weeks ago, I would have. Tonight I understand that the hand is information, a signal sent to everyperson in this room who knows who he is, and I let it stay there because fighting it in a doorway would cost more than it’s worth.
What I don’t expect is how quickly the room becomes manageable.
The first couple we speak to are on the foundation’s board. He knows Zane through a business arrangement I’m vaguely aware of from the scheduling.
His wife is warm in the direct, no-performance way of women who have been attending events like this long enough to stop pretending to enjoy small talk they find tedious. She asks me how I find New York in winter. I tell her I grew up here. She laughs and says that explains the coat.
We talk for ten minutes. At the end of it, she squeezes my hand and tells me she hopes to see me at the spring luncheon. I smile and tell her I would like that. I don’t know if I mean it. The strange thing is, it doesn’t matter. I’ve been doing this my whole life in different rooms. I know how to make something real out of very little.
What I didn’t know was that I could do it here.
Three hours is a long time to perform.
I don’t mean perform the way an actor performs. I mean the sustained, deliberate work of existing in a room as someone’s wife when you arrived as someone else. Reading the social architecture of every interaction.
Deciding what to give and what to hold back. Laughing at the right moments. Asking questions that cost the other person nothing to answer, but tell me everything I need to know about them.
By the second hour, I stop thinking about it as performance.
That’s the part that unsettles me.
A man named Hargrove, sixty, a significant donor, asks me what I think about the foundation’s expansion into pediatric neurology. I have read every document that passed through our office related to this gala, and I know exactly what the foundation’s position is. I tell him. He looks at me over his champagne with the expression of a man who expected less.
“Your husband speaks highly of this initiative,” he says.
“I know,” I say. “He should.”
I look across the room at Zane talking to two men near the window. He is listening more than he’s speaking, which is how he always operates, the way a room gives its information to the people willing to stay quiet long enough to receive it. As though he feels the direction of my attention, he looks up.
Our eyes meet across two hundred people. He looks away first, goes back to his conversation. I look away for a second and go back to mine.
The car at eleven is the first quiet time we’ve had in four hours. The city moves past the window, the late Saturday version of it, lit differently from the weekday, looser. I take my heels off on the seat and put my feet flat on the floor and exhale.
I feel him look at me.
“What,” I say.
“Nothing.”
