Chapter 10 #2
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 is watching 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 of what 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.
I get my hands on her shoulders and I push her off me, hard, fast, a full pace of cold air opening between us, but I already know from the heat climbing the back of my own neck and the particular new pitch the room has taken that the half-second was enough.
A half-second is always enough. It’s the whole principle the folder in my desk is built on.
Everyone saw. Three hundred people and every camera Ronna so carefully arranged, and not one of them caught the shove, only the kiss, only the picture, time-stamped and high-resolution and worth a fortune to exactly the kind of people who deal in such things.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I bite out.
“I’m sorry.” She doesn’t look sorry. She looks like a woman who has just been handed something enormous. “I couldn’t resist it, can you just imagine what this will do for my?—”
I don’t hear the end of the sentence. I’m already turning, already leaving her standing alone in the middle of the floor with her career and her camera angles, because the only thought left in my head is a single hard imperative that has burned everything else out of it.
I need to find my wife. I need to get to her before the picture does, before the whisper does, before she watches the thing the room just watched and adds it to the two months of evidence I’ve been so careful to build against myself. I need to find Camilla?—
Someone screams.
And I am running before I have decided to run.
I have not run in years. I have not needed to.
I am a man who arrives at a walk and waits for the room to come to him, and I am running now, full out, through a crowd of the most expensive people in the city in their gowns and their black tie, and I am shoving them out of my way with both hands and I do not care, because I know.
That is the thing I will never afterward be able to explain to anyone, least of all myself.
I know before I’ve reached her, before I can see anything past the wall of backs and bare shoulders closing in around a point on the floor, before a single person has said a single word to me.
I know the way you know your own name. Something has happened to her.
Something has happened to Camilla, and I damned her ten minutes ago across a ballroom and danced with another woman to prove I didn’t care, and now I am running and the knowing is the worst thing I have ever carried and I carry it straight through the crowd, I know, I know, I know.
I push through the last of them, and there she is.
On the floor, in a ring of horrified faces, my wife is unconscious in Barrymore’s arms.
He’s gone down to one knee with her gathered against him, her head fallen back over the crook of his elbow, her face the wrong color entirely, no color, the careful blush standing out against a paleness that stops my heart in my chest as cold as hers looks stopped in hers.
His hand is at her throat, two fingers under her jaw, and his face when he lifts it to mine is white and savage and afraid.
“You—” The word comes out of me with nothing behind it, because there is nothing behind it, there is no arithmetic left anywhere in me, the entire cold machine has gone over the side at once.
I drop down across from him. I get my hand against her cheek and it is cool, too cool, and her chest under the red of her dress is doing something shallow and wrong and uneven.
“If anything happens to Camilla,” I hear myself say, and I do not recognize the voice as mine, it has come up out of the part of me I locked away in a room full of another man’s trophies and swore never to open again, “I’ll kill you.”