Chapter 11 #2
"You said something like that, and you had this — " Margot moved a hand vaguely at her own face " — this completely closed thing going on, and I walked out onto that terrace and I thought, she's the most competent person in this building and nobody in here is looking at her."
Clara did not say anything.
"And I did not follow that thought anywhere," Margot said. "That's the part I'm apologizing for. I had it, and I put it down, because following it would have cost me something."
She picked up her bag.
"I ended it in October," she said. "Two days after it broke.
He didn't argue. I want you to know that he didn't argue, and I want you to know that it made me feel like nothing at all, and that I have thought about that every week since.
" A small, awful smile. "He didn't fight for me either, Clara.
I don't think that man has ever fought for anything in his life. "
Then she left.
Clara sat in the café for another twenty minutes after she had gone.
She had come in there expecting the thing everybody expects, which is that the reckoning would make it bigger. That she would find a love story, or a great passion, or at minimum a woman who was better in some specific way that Clara could then carry around like a stone in a shoe.
What she found was smaller.
It was so much smaller.
It was a man who had told the same sentence to two women eight years apart in the same reasonable voice, and had experienced saying it as a form of decency, and had never in either case asked the woman opposite him what she actually wanted.
It was a plan for somebody's life drafted without consulting them.
It was a lunch in Los Olivos that had cost him nothing and that he had not fought for.
It was not a love story. It was not a better woman.
It was a smallness — a specific, repeatable, entirely characteristic smallness — and it had been in the room for nine years and Clara had been calling it restraint.
She paid for two coffees nobody drank.
Outside on State Street it was one of those March afternoons where the light comes in flat off the water and everything looks temporary. Clara stood on the sidewalk and found that she was breathing differently, and it took her a block to identify why.
She was not carrying the made-up woman anymore.
That was all. That was the entire result of an hour. There was no revenge in it and nothing to tell anybody and no scene she could ever describe to Imani in a way that would sound like a victory.
Six months of a rival in her head, and there had never been one, and the ground under her was steadier than she had any right to expect.
She tried to tell Imani that night and could not do it.
"So?"
"So it was fine."
"Fine." Imani had waited up. There was a pot of something on the stove that did not need to be on the stove. "You drove six hours round trip to sit across from that woman and the report is fine."
"She didn't know about the schedule."
Imani stopped stirring.
"She'd never met Willa," Clara said. "She didn't know her name until October.
He never asked her about the fourth of October or the weekend of the eighteenth.
He never asked her anything." She sat down at the table.
"He wrote a plan about her life and didn't consult her, and handed it to me to run. "
"Okay." Imani sat down too. "Okay. So she's — what. Innocent?"
"No."
"Then what?"
And this was the part Clara could not get across, and she tried three times.
"She's the same as me," she said, finally.
"She is not the same as you."
"Imani —"
"Don't do that." Imani's voice was sharp. "Don't you dare go generous on me at this table. That woman had months to ask one question and she didn't ask it, and she has said so herself, and you are going to sit here and let her off because she said the right thing at the end."
"I'm not letting her off."
"Then say what you actually mean."
Clara looked at the pot on the stove.
"I mean he did the same thing to her," she said. "Not the same size. Not the same cost. But the same move. He told her the terms in a reasonable voice, and she thought that was honesty, and then he decided what her life was going to be without asking her, and when she ended it he didn't argue."
"And that helps you how?"
"Because I've spent six months thinking I lost to somebody," Clara said. "And I didn't. There was nobody to lose to. He wasn't choosing a better woman. He was doing the only thing he knows how to do, twice, in the same voice, eight years apart."
Imani sat back.
"That's not nothing," she conceded, after a while.
"No."
"It's also not the thing you were hoping for."
"No," Clara said. "I was hoping to hate somebody."
Imani reached over and put a hand flat on the table next to hers, not on it, which was so precisely the right amount that Clara had to look at the ceiling for a second.
"Yeah," Imani said. "That would have been easier."
Adrian found out three days later, and not from either of them.
Somebody had seen them. Of course somebody had seen them — a café off State Street on a Tuesday, in a town of that size, in that year. It got to Esther, who did not mention it, and then to the chair, who did, and Adrian heard about it in a meeting on a Friday.
He called Clara that evening.
"I'm told you saw Margot."
"I did."
There was a pause, and Clara waited through it, and she was aware of exactly what she was waiting for.
She was waiting for the question — what did she say, or are you all right, or worse, what did you tell her — and she had a response prepared for all three, and she was slightly ashamed of how much she wanted him to ask.
"Okay," Adrian said.
"That's it?"
"That's it." A breath. "It's not mine. Whatever happened in that room isn't mine and I'm not going to ask you for a report on it."
"Adrian —"
"I'd have managed it," he said. "Six months ago.
If you'd told me you were going to do that, I'd have called her first, and I'd have called you after, and I'd have arranged the whole thing so that it went well.
" He said it without any self-pity at all, which was new, and which she noticed.
"And I have worked out that arranging things so they go well is the thing I do instead of letting people have them. "
Clara stood in her kitchen above a hardware store.
"That's a very good line," she said.
"I know," Adrian said. "I've had a lot of time."
And then he said goodnight, and hung up first, which he had never done in nine years.