ELEVATOR

The Metropolitan Hospital Winter Benefit was held every year on the third Saturday in January in the grand ballroom of the Plaza, and every year it raised eleven million dollars for a children's cardiac wing that had, by general agreement, the ugliest fundraising brochure in New York.

Win wore white.

She hadn't planned to. She'd planned to wear the green again, or the black; she'd stood in the dressing room of the Fifth Avenue apartment with a dozen dresses laid across the bed and tried each in turn, and each had hung on her like a coat on a hanger. At last, near seven, Mrs. Dray had come in with a garment bag over her arm and said, in her careful neutral voice, "Mr. Draycott sent this."

It was a column of ivory silk, cut on the bias, with a low back and long close sleeves and no ornament whatever. It fitted as if it had been measured in her sleep. She stood before the mirror in it for a very long time. She looked like a candle.

"It's too much," she said.

"He said you'd say that."

"What else did he say?"

"He said to tell you," said Mrs. Dray, folding her hands, "that nothing is too much if you're wearing it."

She wore the dress.

…

The Plaza ballroom blazed. Three thousand candles stood in the chandeliers, and the room was a roar of silk and diamonds and laughter, as warm and loud and gilded as the inside of a music box. There were eight hundred guests. There was a string orchestra on the dais. A tall man in a black tie, whom she recognized as the mayor, was telling a story with his hands.

She walked in on Callum's arm, and the room parted.

She had been to a number of these events in the last three months, and she had learned the choreography. A hush, a ripple, a long avid swing of heads. The women turned first. The men a beat after. It was not respect, exactly. It was the careful, covetous deference accorded to something that might go off. She had stopped minding. She had learned to carry her head at an angle that suggested she had not noticed, and to smile at no one, and to keep her left hand on the black sleeve at her side.

"You're gripping," said Callum, under his breath.

"I'm holding."

"You're gripping."

"It's an elegant grip."

"It's a grip I could hang a hammock from."

She laughed, and let go, and he smiled down at her with the careful, private, slightly dazzled look he wore now in public, the look of a man holding a candle in a high wind. A woman in emerald gave her a small cold nod. A man in a white tie raised his glass.

Look, she thought. We're a couple.

We look like a couple.

It was an absurd, giddy, dangerous thing to think. She put it away. She smiled at a senator, and shook the hand of a judge, and listened to a young surgeon with a scar on his chin tell her about a six-month-old girl whose heart he had rebuilt. She drank a glass of sparkling water. At eight o'clock she ate half a roll. At half past, she stood beside the grand piano and heard a soprano sing Puccini, and felt the room go slowly, gently, weightlessly out of focus.

Not yet, she told it.

Not yet. After the speeches.

…

The pain came at nine.

It came the way a lamp comes on in a dark house: all at once, from the inside. She was standing in the center of the ballroom with a plate of salmon in her hand and a woman in a turban saying something about a Montauk sunset, and a hot white wire went through her side and drew itself tight. The plate left her fingers. She heard it hit the floor, a long way off, with a small bright crash.

"Oh dear," said the woman in the turban.

"I'm so sorry," said Win.

She heard her voice come out perfectly level. She bent, with a smile, and began to gather the pieces of the plate; and somebody put a hand under her elbow, and a waiter materialized with a cloth, and a murmur of concern went round her. Quite all right. Not at all. Clumsy of me. She straightened. The chandeliers were wheeling slowly overhead.

Ten, she thought.

She was looking for the door. She found it, an arched exit on the far side of the dance floor, with a green EXIT sign hanging over it like a lantern in a mine. She turned toward it with the slow purposeful movement of a woman going to powder her nose. She did not look for Callum. She had left him at the bar, with the mayor, in a knot of dark suits, and she knew that if she met his eyes, he would know.

She made it to the corridor.

It was a cool, high, marble hall, hung with portraits, and it was empty. She leaned a shoulder against the wall. Her breath was going in short harsh pulls. She pressed her palm hard against the silk over her ribs and felt, under the cloth, the little hard shape of the compact in her bag, and thought the brown pill, now, take it, quickly, and could not remember in which hand she held the bag.

"Win?"

She didn't turn. She knew that voice.

"Win." He was beside her. She had not heard him come. His hand closed on her upper arm, and then, quickly, loosened, as though he had touched a hot thing. "You're white. Are you ill?"

"I'm fine."

"You're gray."

"It's the lighting."

"There's no lighting. It's a hallway." His voice was thin and fast, an octave off. "Sit. Let me find a chair."

"I need to go upstairs."

"Upstairs?"

"There's a ladies' room on the mezzanine." She turned her face to the wall so that he would not see it. "I'll be a minute."

"I'll take you."

"Callum—"

"I'll take you," said Callum, in a tone that admitted no argument, and put his arm round her.

…

The elevator was a small gilded cage, with a mirror and a brass rail and a red velvet bench that nobody had ever sat on. The attendant had gone off for a break. Callum drew the grille, pressed a button, and the cage began to rise with a long, slow, genteel hum.

She could feel him looking at her.

He stood very close, with one arm braced against the rail and the other round her waist, and he did not speak. She stared at the numbers over the door. Two. The light swung gently. In the mirror she could see two figures, one in black and one in white, pressed shoulder to shoulder, and the white one was swaying very slightly, as a flame sways in a draft.

Three.

Don't faint, she thought. Please. Not here. Not with him.

Not in a box.

She could feel the pill in her bag. She fumbled for the clasp and it would not come. Her fingers had gone numb, and her ears were ringing with a thin high whine, and from a very great distance she heard a voice that was not her own say, with a kind of dreamy surprise:

"Callum, I think—"

The floor went out.

…

It wasn't unconsciousness. It was only a kind of long, soft, weightless falling, like a dream of stairs. She felt arms. She felt the cold brass of the rail against her back, and then not; she felt the velvet bench rise to meet her, and a hand under her head, and a voice saying her name, over and over, in a tone she had never heard from anyone, a tone stripped of every shield.

"Win. Win. Win. Look at me. Please. Open your eyes."

She opened them.

The ceiling of the elevator was a pressed-tin rose. Around it, at the edge of her vision, a face hung in the dim gilded light, white as paper. It was a face she knew, and did not know. The eyes were enormous. The mouth was open, and moving. He had lost his jacket somewhere; his tie was off; he was kneeling on the floor of the cage with her head on his arm, and she could feel his hands, and they were shaking so badly that they could not keep still on her face.

"You're all right," he said. "You're all right. I've got you."

"I'm fine."

"Don't talk."

"I'm—"

"Don't. Don't. I've pressed the alarm. There's a doctor. There's one in the building, I've sent for Lowell. He'll be here in a minute." He was talking very fast. "You fainted. You were just standing there, and you went over. You went down. I thought—"

He stopped.

She saw the thought arrive on his face, whole, unbearable. She saw it hit him. She watched him close his eyes and open them and make a visible, terrible effort to put it down.

"I thought it had happened," said Callum.

"What?"

"I thought you had gone."

The word hung in the small gold room. The elevator hummed. Somewhere above, a long way off, a bell began to ring.

She put up a hand. It took all her strength. She laid it flat against his cheek, and felt the tremor in the muscle, and the wet; and she understood, with a slow cold horror that spread from the pit of her stomach to her scalp, that he was weeping. He did not seem to know it. The tears simply ran, silently, from the corners of his eyes down the sides of his nose, and he went on kneeling there, holding her head, with that stripped, stunned, uncomprehending face of a child who has seen something he cannot be told is not real.

"It's low blood sugar," said Win.

"What?"

"I didn't eat today. I had half a roll and I've been on my feet since six." She made her voice light. "It's hypoglycemia. It happens. I should have known better. I'm sorry I frightened you."

"Is that all?"

"That's all."

He stared at her.

It was the longest second of her life. She watched him weigh it, in his gray, level, ruthless fashion: the words, the color, the shaking of her hand. She watched him hold it up to the light and see the flaw. And she watched him, with a care that made her chest ache, put it down again.

"Yes," he said. "Yes. Of course. Low blood sugar."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be."

"You're crying."

"I'm aware." He drew the back of his wrist over his face, roughly, like a boy. "It isn't important. It will stop."

…

The doctor came at nine-fourteen.

He was a stout bald cheerful man in a dinner jacket with a leather bag and a lapel pin in the shape of a stethoscope, and he knelt beside the bench with a grunt and said, "Well, well, young lady, what have we here?" He took her wrist. He shone a light in her eyes. He took her blood pressure, and pressed two fingers under her jaw, and asked her a series of mild, brisk, cheerful questions to which she gave a series of mild, brisk, cheerful answers, and all the while she could feel Callum standing over them with his hands clenched at his sides.

"Her pressure's a bit low," said the doctor, at last. "Ninety over fifty-eight. Pulse a hundred and four. Hmm." He looked at her face. He lifted the lid of her left eye with his thumb. "Have you been unwell lately, Miss...?"

"Callaghan."

"Miss Callaghan. Any weight loss?"

"A little. I've been traveling."

"Any pain? Nausea?"

"The usual."

"Mm." His thumb lingered. He looked at her for a moment over the top of his glasses, and she saw in his round cheerful face something shift, very slightly, like a card turned in a deck. "I'd like to draw some blood. A simple panel. We could do it upstairs, in the suite, in ten minutes. Just to be safe."

"That won't be necessary."

"It would take—"

"Doctor," said Win, "I appreciate it. I do. But I'm under the care of a physician in Cleveland. I saw her last week. I'm taking everything she gave me." She smiled. "It's low blood sugar. Give me a glass of orange juice and a sandwich and I'll be dancing in half an hour."

It was a good smile. It had carried her through four thousand hearings.

The doctor's eyes dropped. He studied the tips of her fingers, which were yellowed at the nails. He looked at Callum.

"Mr. Draycott," he said gently. "A word."

"No."

The room went still.

"No," said Callum again. He had not moved. "I beg your pardon, Adrian. But no. If Miss Callaghan says she has a physician, then she has a physician. She'll tell me what I need to know." His voice shook very slightly. "And if she doesn't, then she's right not to."

"Callum, I really think—"

"I'm going to step outside," said Callum. "I'll be in the hall. You may take as long as you like. You may say what you like to Miss Callaghan, and she may say what she likes to you, and neither of you need tell me a word of it."

He turned to the door of the elevator. His hand was on the grille.

He paused.

"If you need me," he said, without looking at her, "I'll be on the other side of this door."

And he went out.

The grille closed behind him with a small metallic rattle.

Win lay on the velvet bench and stared at the pressed-tin rose.

He left, she thought. He knows, and he left.

He walked out of a room so that I wouldn't have to lie to his face.

She thought she was going to be sick again. She put the heel of her hand against her mouth.

"Miss Callaghan," said Dr. Lowell, very quietly.

"Yes."

"Your eyes are jaundiced. Your nail beds are yellow. Your liver is somewhere down near your hip." He spoke without any of the earlier cheer. "I'm not going to ask you what it is. I imagine you know. But I want you to hear me say that if you are under a doctor's care, she should be told you fainted in an elevator."

"I'll tell her."

"Today."

"Tomorrow."

"Miss Callaghan—"

"I'd like a glass of orange juice, please," said Win. "And a sandwich. And I'd like very much for you to say nothing to him."

He looked at her for a long moment.

"He already knows, you realize."

"Yes."

"And you're letting him."

"He's letting me," said Win, and her voice broke. "It's the nicest thing anyone's ever done."

…

It happened at two in the morning, in the bathroom of the suite on the twelfth floor, with the door locked and the taps running.

She'd waited until he slept. She had danced for forty minutes, as promised. She'd eaten a sandwich and drunk two glasses of juice, and shaken hands with the mayor, and smiled until her face ached; and at midnight she'd gone up in the lift with Callum's arm around her and let him lead her to the bed. He lay down beside her in his shirt. He took her hand. And she lay and listened to his breath, over a long hour, grow slow and heavy and, for once, truly deep, and watched the shadow of the curtain move on the ceiling.

She slid out of bed.

In the bathroom she did not turn on the light. She knelt by the toilet with the tap running, and the nausea took her all at once and without grace, and she was sick, in the dark, for what seemed a very long time.

When it ended she sat back on her heels. She reached for the switch.

The marble gleamed white. And in the bowl, bright and bold and strangely beautiful against the porcelain, like a spilled glass of wine, was a long red streak.

She looked at it.

She felt oddly calm. It was the calm of the adjuster, of the woman who had opened ten thousand files and seen, in each, the same black-and-white photograph. She noted the color. She noted the volume. She noted, with the part of her brain that went on working long after the rest had stopped, that this was the first time she had seen it, and that she knew exactly what it meant.

That's the esophagus, she thought. Or the stomach. Varices, probably. The liver backs up the blood. It was in the pamphlet.

Three months. Maybe less.

She flushed it. She rinsed her mouth. She washed her hands under the tap for a long time, watching the water go down the drain in a spiral, and wiped the basin with a towel, and folded the towel, and set it on the rail.

She was quite composed. She was so composed that she was a little frightened.

She looked up at the mirror.

The woman in it was thin and gray and lovely, in an ivory slip, with enormous eyes. She was thirty years old. She had her mother's cheekbones and her mother's hands. She was alive, and she was in a hotel bathroom at two in the morning, and in the next room, in a bed, a man she had known for four months lay asleep with a stopped watch in his fist, and she had never in her life wanted anything so much as to wake him.

She did not turn away.

She stood and looked at herself, and what she thought was not I am dying. She had been thinking that for four months. What she thought was something she had not known she was capable of.

I want to stay.

Oh God.

I want to stay with him.

It was not a decision. It was not a plan. It had arrived without argument, like a tide coming in over a flat sand, and it filled every inch of her, from the soles of her feet to the roots of her hair. She put her forehead against the cold glass. She breathed.

This was never in the budget.

She groped her way back through the dark to the bed. She took the ledger from her bag, and the Montblanc, and carried them into the bathroom, and sat down on the edge of the tub in the dim glow of the night-light, and opened to a clean page.

She wrote:

I'm running out of days.

And I just found something I want more than all of them.

She looked at the line for a long time. Then she tore the page from the book, quite slowly, along the binding, and folded it in four, and put it inside the back cover with the gold-edged card. She did not cross it out. She'd learned.

It didn't help. It was true, and it stayed true. And in the other room, in the dark, in his sleep, Callum Draycott turned over and said her name.