Chapter 22
ELIAS
The second book was a mistake. He knew it was a mistake when he bought it, he knew it was a mistake when he wrapped it, he knew it was a mistake when he wrote the note and put it in the front cover and sent it. The knowing didn't stop him.
The second book was Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence.
He'd found it at a dealer on Michigan Avenue he'd been walking past for years without going in.
He'd gone in because the window display had caught him mid-stride: a row of novels from the twenties with their original dust jackets.
The Wharton had been at the end of the row.
He'd stood on the sidewalk looking at it and known, before he'd gone through the door, that he was going to buy it and send it to her.
The note was brief. "Each time you happen to me all over again." — Wharton. I passed the shop today. You were rearranging the window display. E.
That was all. He didn't ask how she was. He didn't ask anything, because asking was the thing he'd forfeited.
She didn't respond. He hadn't expected her to.
The third book was Marcus Aurelius. Meditations.
He'd been reading it at the club in the evenings.
He'd been reaching for it every night for weeks, and it had been, mostly, giving him what he'd reached for.
Except for one line. One line in the whole of it that had stopped him, alone in the brass-lit library with a glass he wasn't finishing, and that had sat in him for days before he'd understood why.
The note: "When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive — to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love." It's a book about discipline. This is the only line in it about love. I think he buried it there on purpose. E.
The fourth was a volume of Emily Dickinson he'd found at the same book store he’d found the Wharton. He'd opened it at random, read a line, bought it and driven home with it on the passenger seat without opening it again.
The note: "I am out with lanterns, looking for myself." I think she wrote it about something else. I'm sending it because it's what I've been doing on Clark Street. E.
The fifth was Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass.
The oldest edition he could find. The giving of it was, he knew, a departure from every book he'd sent before.
The garden book had been about her. The Wharton and the Aurelius and the Dickinson had been about him.
The Whitman was about both of them, or about neither of them, or about the thing between them that he'd spent a marriage refusing to name and was now, alone in his study with a pen in his hand, trying to find a way to say.
The note: Noelle — "I exist as I am, that is enough.
" I don't know if it's true yet. I'm trying to find out whether existing, without producing an outcome, without managing a room, without converting a thing into an instrument, is something I'm capable of.
You made it look possible. You made it look possible in a bookshop on Clark Street with a hand-lettered sign in the window. E.
She didn't respond to that one either.
He couldn’t help himself. He was a man in love. He kept sending them.
Elias saw her through the window of the bookshop again. He'd been walking on Clark, which was the street he walked on now. He'd slowed without deciding to slow, and he'd looked.
The shop was open. The handwritten sign was in the door — OPEN — COME IN — WE HAVE WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR — and through the front window he could see the shelves full of books, the pendant lights throwing their warm pools down onto the honey-stained floor and a customer, a woman in a red coat, standing at one of the shelves with a book open in her hands.
And behind the counter, in the back of the room, was Noelle.
She was talking to someone he couldn't see: a person on the other side of a bookshelf, maybe, or someone in the back room. Her hair was down. She was wearing something soft and dark he hadn't seen. She looked radiant.
He watched her for a while. The traffic moved between them.
A bus passed and took her out of sight for a second, and when the bus had gone she was still there, still talking, still gesturing.
The woman in the red coat had come to the counter with two books, Noelle was taking them from her, looking at the spines and saying something about them.
He could see her mouth moving, could see the woman in the red coat laughing at whatever she'd said.
Elias turned and walked north. He didn't look back.
He came back the following week. And the week after that.
He never crossed the street. He never went in.
He stood on the far sidewalk and watched his ex-wife sell books, arrange displays and talk to customers.
The watching was, he'd come to understand, the closest thing to being near her that his life was going to permit.
The watching was doing something to him he hadn't anticipated.
The watching was making him, in increments he could only measure across the span of weeks, into a man he hadn't been before.
The man he'd been before had watched her for evidence.
The man he was becoming was watching her for herself. The woman he loved.
Michael Warren and Holloway Partners took less time to dismantle than Elias had expected.
James had been running the counter-operation since the afternoon of the dossier revelation, and the work had been, by the standards of the work James did, straightforward.
The trail from Holloway Partners's contractor to Michael Warren's shell company was documented.
The timestamps were documented. The chain of intake was documented in a binder that sat on James's desk and that would, if it ever needed to be used in a courtroom, end several careers.
It didn't need to be used in a courtroom.
James made two calls — one to Lionel Holloway, one to a partner at Warren's firm in New York — and within the week both men had agreed to terms that included the permanent withdrawal of all personnel from any matter touching Elias's interests, the dissolution of the shell company, and the quiet retirement of the contractor on the third floor.
Michael Warren himself didn't take a call from James.
Michael Warren's senior partner did, and the senior partner conveyed, in the language senior partners used when they were conveying things they didn't want recorded, that Warren would not be a problem again.
Elias read James's summary of the calls, filed the binder and closed the drawer.
The operation that had cost him his marriage had been, in the end, a thing that could be unwound in a week by a competent lawyer with the right documents.
The marriage could not be unwound. The marriage had been unwound already, by him, in a different way.
In the unwinding, the full picture of the Laurent finances had surfaced.
James had brought it to him on a Thursday afternoon: the older debts, the creditors the due diligence hadn't found, the obligations Edmund had been carrying since before the marriage was proposed.
The debts Noelle and Gordon Vanders had been, for the duration of the marriage, quietly managing on Elias's behalf.
Elias had read the summary. He'd sat at his desk for a long time after the second reading, and what had moved through him was the clarity of a man finally seeing the full cost of what his wife had been carrying while he'd been watching her for evidence of wrongdoing.
"Handle them," he'd told James. "Resolve the outstanding obligations. Use the firm's resources. Don't tell her."
James had looked at him. "The cost will be significant."
"I understand that."
James offered him a nod and left. The debts were resolved by the end of the month.
The Corton Foundation gala was in the spring.
He hadn't been planning to attend. His assistant had placed the invitation on his desk without comment and then placed, beside it, a summary of the guest list that included many names that had been in the room at the Art Institute the night he'd kissed Yvonne.
He'd looked at the guest list for a long time.
He was going to go.
He was going to go because the thing he was going to do in the room was a thing that could only be done in front of the people who'd watched him do the other thing. A public act had ended his marriage. A public act was going to be the instrument by which he accounted for it.
He wasn't doing it for her. She wasn't going to be there: he'd confirmed that Noelle had declined the invitation.
He was doing it because the man who'd kissed Yvonne in front of two hundred people had done it to make a version of himself unreachable.
The version of himself he'd made unreachable was the version who kissed Noelle, and that version — he'd come to see this, in the weeks of walking on Clark Street and watching through windows — was the only version of himself that had ever been worth anything.
The other version, was the version who'd spent a career reading rooms and managing outcomes.
That version had, in the end, managed the outcome of his own life into an empty apartment and a silence that was never going to be filled by anyone because the woman who'd once tried to fill it had been, by the managing version, driven out.
He was going to stand in front of the same room and undo the managing.
The gala was at a hotel on the lake, and the room was as he'd expected: the same chandeliers, the same flowers, the same faces arranged in the same clusters with the same choreography of attention and avoidance.
The speeches came after dinner. The foundation's director spoke.
A board member spoke. A donor spoke. The program moved through its schedule with the smooth institutional rhythm of a well-run evening, and at the end of the program the director invited any guests who wished to say a few words to approach the podium.
Elias stood and crossed to the podium.
He didn't bring notes. He'd written notes, he'd read them through, put them in his jacket pocket. He didn't take them out.
He looked at the room.
The room looked back at him. Two hundred faces, more or less.
All of them, by now, knew the story: the kiss, the wife who'd walked out, the divorce that had followed.
The story had made its way through the rooms of the city the way stories of that kind made their way, which was quickly and with the embellishments that each retelling added, until the story bore only a passing resemblance to what had actually happened, which was worse than any of the embellishments could've made it.
"I'm here to say something I should've said a long time ago, and I'm saying it in this room because the thing I need to account for was done in a room very much like this one, in front of people very much like you."
The murmur stopped.
"Several months ago, at a gala at the Art Institute, I publicly humiliated my wife.
I did it deliberately. I did it in front of a room full of people whose opinion of our marriage mattered to both of us, and I did it by kissing a woman who wasn't my wife in a way that was designed to be seen.
I did it because I'd made a decision about my wife that was wrong — a decision about her character, her loyalties, her intentions.
Rather than going to her privately and asking whether the decision was correct, I chose to act on it publicly, because acting publicly meant I wouldn't have to risk being wrong in front of her. "
He paused. The room was very quiet.
"I was wrong. I was wrong about every piece of it.
My wife had been, for the duration of our marriage, acting in my interest and not against it, and I misread her actions because misreading them was easier than believing what they actually meant, which was that she cared for me.
I found it easier to believe a lie about her than to accept the truth, because the truth would've required me to be a man I hadn't yet learned how to be. "
He looked at the room. The room looked back.
"I'm not asking for anything tonight. I'm not asking for sympathy or understanding or forgiveness.
My wife told me, on a sidewalk not long ago, that some things can't be closed by a sentence, and she was right.
What I did to her can't be undone by standing at a podium.
I'm standing at one anyway, because the people in this room saw what I did, and the people in this room deserve to hear me say that it was wrong, that she deserved none of it, and that the woman I was married to was braver, more honest and more worthy of love than the man she was married to. "
"I love her," he said. "I didn't know how to, and I didn't learn in time, and the not-learning cost me the only thing in my life that was ever worth more than the career I built to avoid having to love anyone.
I'm saying it here because I said the other thing here, and because she's not in this room tonight, which means I'm not saying it to get her back.
I'm saying it because it's true, and because the last time I stood in a room like this I did something that wasn't."
Elias stepped away from the podium.
The room was silent for a beat longer than rooms were usually silent after a man had spoken, and then the room did a thing he hadn't anticipated, which was nothing.
No applause. No murmur. Just the collective held breath of two hundred people who'd heard a man say a true thing, and who were, for the moment, letting the truth sit where he'd put it.
Elias left, walked out into the cold of the lakefront, stood on the sidewalk for a moment and breathed.