Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
The first rule I ever learned about a mistake is that you do not get to take it back. You get to decide what it costs and who pays, and that is the whole of the freedom available to a man once the thing is done; the rest is sentiment, and sentiment is for people who can afford it.
So I stand at the edge of the long room at the Plaza with a glass I have no intention of drinking and I do not let myself regret the invitation.
I made it. It is on the board now, face up, the way every move I have ever made goes face up the instant my hand leaves it, and a man does not sit at the table I have spent my life sitting at and then wince at his own cards.
I invited Ronna Roswell to this ball to make a particular point to a particular room, and the point is being made; I can feel it being made, the same way you feel weather change before the window confirms it, in the angle of every head that turns when she laughs and then turns a half-second later to find me, to see whether I am watching her or watching the door my wife will come through.
I am watching neither. I have trained myself out of watching the way other men train themselves out of smoking, deliberately, against the grain of the body, and tonight the training is the only thing holding the shape of me together.
Across the room Glasgow has set up his small court near the orchestra, Crowther at his shoulder doing the thing Crowther does instead of having a personality, and Greaves moving between the tables with nineteen years of board chairmanship in the set of his back.
They are all watching me. They have been watching me for two months, ever since the photographs, waiting with the patience of old money for the cheap stranger to do the cheap thing in public so they can be civil about removing him afterward.
I came tonight to give them nothing. I came to stand here cold and unbothered with a beautiful woman on the guest list and a wife somewhere in the building and let the whole appetite of the room go hungry.
And then the door at the far end opens, and I know.
I do not look. I want that on the record, here, in the only court that ever hears my testimony, which is the one inside my own skull at one in the morning.
I do not turn my head a single degree. But I know the exact instant Camilla enters the room the way I would know a change in cabin pressure, some animal barometer in me that has nothing to do with my eyes and everything to do with two months of lying awake cataloguing the exact distance between her room and mine.
The noise of the room reorganizes itself around her arrival.
I feel it move through the crowd toward me like a tide coming up a beach, and I set my jaw and I keep my eyes on the orchestra and I do not look at my wife, because looking is a thing I am no longer allowed.
“There she is,” says a voice at my elbow, warm and amused and entirely delighted with itself. “Right on schedule. And you didn’t even flinch. Impressive, Trey. Truly.”
Ronna has arrived. She fits herself in beside me with the ease of a woman who has stood beside me at a hundred of these before, in the years when I kept women the way I keep cars, for as long as they were useful and not one evening past it.
She is in a deep red that the room has been arranging itself around all night, and she is smiling at me with a private, gleaming sort of enjoyment, and I understand at once that she has not come over to be looked at. She has come over to watch.
“Ronna.”
“You know what I noticed, standing over there?” She turns her glass slowly by the stem, taking in the room as though it were a painting she’d been promised was very good.
“I noticed you’ve looked at that door four times in the last twenty minutes.
The same door. Now, the Trey I knew didn’t look at doors.
The Trey I knew made the door come to him.
” She tips her head. “So either you’ve developed a nervous condition, or you were waiting for something. Someone.”
“I watch every room I’m in,” I tell her. “It’s a habit older than you are. Don’t read anything into it.”
“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 a faction 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.