Chapter 2 #3
I come awake in the black of a room full of another man’s trophies, alone, the narrow bed gone cold on the side where no one has lain, my heart slamming hard under a hand that isn’t there and never was.
The taste of a kiss that never happened.
The shape of a word I said out loud to no one in an empty room.
Yours. I lie still and listen to the building tick and settle in the cold around me, and I understand, with the slow drowning horror of a man surfacing from deep water, that none of it was real, that I gave myself away whole and entire to a thing my own mind built out of wanting, and that I would do it again this very second if she walked in through that bookshelf door and asked me to.
That’s what she’s made of me. A man who would say yours to a liar in the dark and be grateful for the chance to say it.
The rage comes back then, but it has nowhere to go. She isn’t here to aim it at. There is only me, and the cold side of a narrow bed, and the last dwindling taste of a kiss I dreamed for myself, and so the rage turns inward, because inward is the only door left standing open.
She’s done this to me. Made me grateful. Made me soft. Made me, of every man I have ever been, the fool who waited at home every night with the door unlocked while the city’s golden boy walked in and out of my marriage as though it were a building he already held the deed to.
I don’t sleep again. I lie still in the dark among the silver and let the cold finish setting in me, the way something poured out hot and left on a sill overnight goes hard and solid by morning, until by the time the city starts to gray there is nothing left in me soft enough to be hurt.
Bills finds me at the desk at seven for the weekly report, and his step hitches at the threshold when he registers that I’m in yesterday’s shirt.
“You slept here, sir?”
“I had work.”
He sets the coffee down at my elbow, careful, reading the weather in the room the way I pay him to read it. “Mrs. Flint might have something to say about that.”
He doesn’t mean a thing by it. I know Bills, and in three years he has never once meant anything by anything, which is exactly why I’ve kept him this long.
He means it only as the small human noise one man makes to another over morning coffee, your wife will miss you, the most ordinary sentence in the language.
It comes out of me before I’ve decided to let it.
“She can say whatever she likes. I’ve no interest in hearing it.
” The words arrive cold and even and I let them keep coming, because the cold is the only thing holding me upright in the chair.
“I married her to own the Waymakers. That is the beginning and the end of the arrangement. Now.” I open the report without lifting my eyes to him.
“Are you going to waste my morning with talk about my wife, or are we going to work?”
A silence. Then, quietly, “Yes, sir.”
I tell myself it’s true even as I say it.
I married her to own the Waymakers. I built an entire life on my ability to say the disciplined thing in the place where the wanted thing lives, and I have never in that life said anything less disciplined or more outright false, and I make myself believe it anyway, because the only alternative is to admit that six months ago I quietly threw the whole plan away for her, and that the woman I threw it away for has spent her weekday afternoons these two months with another man’s hand at the small of her back.
By the end of the day I’ve made the entire floor afraid of me.
I don’t set out to. It simply happens, the way weather happens, because the cold has to go somewhere and it will no longer go inward.
An analyst brings me a projection with a single transposed figure buried in the third tab and I take the whole thing apart so thoroughly that she leaves my office with her hands trembling around her laptop.
A vice president keeps me waiting four minutes for a call and learns, at length and in front of three of his peers, exactly what those four minutes were worth.
By noon the assistants have stopped meeting my eyes in the corridor.
By three they’ve stopped breathing audibly when they pass the open door.
Bills moves through all of it with the grim competence of a man walking the halls of a building during an earthquake, quietly rescheduling whatever I set fire to, apologizing in my wake to people I will never trouble myself to apologize to.
None of it helps. That’s the part not one of them out there could understand, watching me reduce grown professionals to silence over rounding errors.
The fury isn’t the problem. The fury I could live with for years.
It’s the thing underneath the fury, the cold empty room where six months of being chosen used to live, and nothing I do to anyone else puts a single grain of warmth back into it.
I think of her face turned up to his on a park bench. The grey coat I bought her. You’re mine.
I think of the man I let myself quietly become these six months, the one who went home every single night, the one who had four blankets delivered, the one who read the worst of the sports pages out loud in terrible voices just to feel her laugh shake against his side in the dark.
That man is finished. I can feel the exact place inside me where he ends, somewhere in the cold ground between the cemetery and the dream, and I do not intend to waste a single hour grieving him.
I lock the folder Raymond left me in the bottom drawer of the desk, the drawer where I keep the things I fully intend to use.
Camilla will not get away with this. Whatever she has been, whatever she has done, whatever the whole laughing city saw coming while I did not, she has made one mistake the golden boy never will.
She put her name down beside mine on a contract.
She swore the words to me every morning with her own soft mouth.
And I am, as everyone from Raymond Glasgow to the cheapest gossip page in this city will be glad to tell you, a man who has never once in his life let go of a thing that belonged to him.
She wanted to know what it was to belong to me.
She is about to find out.