TWO WEEKS, THREE WOMEN

The second one was a violinist, and the third a litigator, and he could not afterwards have said which of them was worse.

The violinist was called Delphine. She was thirty-one, Belgian by birth, a soloist with a regional orchestra who had a taste for being frightened that she described, with a candor he almost liked, as professionally necessary. "One plays so many dead people's music," she said, over the table at the Tower, with her long white hands folded. "One wishes to be alive, occasionally." He sat across from her for forty minutes. He read her file. He took her to the Glass Floor on a Tuesday night, because that was the order of things, because in November a woman with a collar turned up against the wind had stepped out over forty-one floors of nothing and said I find that I'm not afraid, and he wanted to see what would happen if somebody else did.

Delphine stepped out onto the glass and screamed. It was a genuine scream. She went white to the lips, and sank to her knees, and clung to his leg with both hands, sobbing and laughing, with her violin-callused fingertips digging into the cloth. He stood over her, looking down through the floor at the city lights spilled like sequins across the dark, and felt the cold tide stir.

It stirred. It did not rise.

He lifted her up. He put her in the car. He sat for an hour in his study afterwards, with his watch open in his hand, holding in his mind the memory of that clutching, grateful, gasping fear, and thinking: There. That was real. That was exactly what I wanted.

It had been like holding a glass of water when one is thirsty for wine.

The litigator was worse. Her name was Cassandra Roe, and she was thirty-four, and she was clever, cold, and unhurried. She had read the agreement with a red pen. She had struck out two clauses and rewritten a third, and when he'd said gravely that the text was not negotiable, she had said, "Then I won't sign it," and he had said, "Quite right," and had, to his own considerable surprise, laughed.

It was the first time in eleven days.

"What's funny?" said Cassandra Roe.

"Nothing. You reminded me of someone."

"Anyone I'd like?"

"You'd have been friends," said Callum, and the laughter went out of him like air from a punctured tire.

She looked at him for a moment, with her head tilted. She had very sharp, very intelligent eyes. "I've seen your file, Mr. Draycott," she said. "I read everything before I sign. And it's my professional opinion that you don't want a contract. You want a witness."

"To what?"

"I'd guess whatever happened."

He put down his pen.

"Send the car for Miss Roe," he said to the air, and rose, and left her in the room with her red pen and her extraordinary composure, and did not go back.

…

He began to drink.

It was not a decision. He had not touched Scotch in three years, not since a night at the old house in Greenwich when he'd stood in the kitchen with the bottle in his hand and discovered, with a kind of clinical alarm, that he was listening for a small boy's voice in the hall. He had put the bottle away that night, unopened, and never taken it out again. The decanter on the sideboard in his study had stood full for three years. It had become a kind of exhibit.

On the nineteenth of February, at eleven o'clock at night, he poured himself a glass.

He drank it standing at the window. It was the first, and it tasted of smoke and iron and a long-ago winter. It went down into his chest like a lit fuse. He poured a second, and a third. By one o'clock he was sitting on the floor with his back against the sideboard and his knees drawn up, and the decanter was a third empty, and the floor of the study was very cold and very far from the ceiling.

He did not get drunk. He wanted to. He was a man of six foot three and a hundred and ninety pounds, and he had trained his body into a state of such severe efficiency that it merely took the alcohol in, measured it, and stored it away, like a clerk entering a delivery. The only thing it did was make everything clear. It made the clarity worse.

He slept three hours a night.

He ate when Margaux put a plate in front of him. He stopped going to the gym. He missed a call with the Fed, and was an hour late to a board dinner, and on the twenty-first, in the middle of a negotiation over a shipping contract, he found that he had written, on the pad in front of him, in a small and upright hand, the number 10.

He looked at it for a long time. He tore the sheet off the pad and put it in his pocket.

And on the twenty-third, at four in the afternoon, he broke the first of his own rules.

It was a small one. It was nothing, really. He had always held that the Gilded Hour was to be conducted on a strict schedule: Fridays, nine to midnight, one guest, no exceptions, no variation. He had built it as a person builds a dam. He'd once had a man expelled for turning up an hour early.

At four on a Thursday afternoon, in his office at the Tower, he found himself standing at the window with his coat on, looking down at the park, and understood that he was going to call the car and drive to Halcyon, and that there was no one there.

He went anyway.

He sat in the long pale room for two hours. He sat in the chair, in the daylight, with the candle unlit and the oysters absent and the black silk lying folded on the table, as it had lain in October. He sat as one sits in a church.

Nobody came. Nobody had been asked to. It was just the room.

I am a man who waits in an empty room, he thought, for a woman who isn't coming.

Vivienne was right. It is a room where a man waits to be told what to do.

…

She was waiting on the step of the townhouse when he came home. It was seven o'clock, and snowing again, and she was standing under the lamp in her camel coat with her collar up and a bottle of wine in a brown paper bag.

"I'll go if you say," said Vivienne Locke.

He looked at her. She looked, he thought, much better. She had cut her hair. It fell to her jaw in a smooth pale bob, and there was color in her cheeks, and she carried the bottle with a kind of gruff, unfussy dignity, like a woman delivering a casserole to a funeral.

"I heard about Miss Roe," she said. "And the violinist. Odessa talks. She's very upset. She thinks you're having a nervous collapse."

"Is that her opinion?"

"It's the opinion of the whole of Park Avenue." She held up the bag. "I thought you might like to get properly drunk. With someone who'd get you to bed afterwards. In the spirit of friendship, I mean. Not the other thing."

He stood for a moment in the falling snow. Then he stepped aside.

"Come in."

…

They sat in the kitchen, because it was the only room she hadn't been in. She took the stool at the counter and he took the one across from her, and they drank the wine, which was a rough red, out of two of the cups from the drying rack. She did not remark on the pink arc at the rim of the one he handed her. He did not tell her to put it down.

For a long time they talked about nothing. The weather. A divorce in the city, a scandal at the Met. She told him she had taken a job: a small foundation on the Lower East Side, which gave grants to women starting businesses, and paid her eleven dollars an hour less than she had once spent on a taxi. "It's rather wonderful," she said. "Nobody there knows who I was. They think I'm just a woman who owns a lot of sensible shoes."

"You look well."

"I look sober. It's not the same." She turned the cup in her fingers. "Callum. May I say something unpleasant?"

"You usually do."

"You don't want them."

He said nothing.

"Any of them. I know the whole story, you see, the way one does in this city. The girl from Odessa's file. The Belgian. The solicitor with the red pen. You've tried three in two weeks, and you've sent all of them home." Her eyes were steady. "I'm not here to be cruel. I did that once, in your office, and it did no good. I'm here to tell you what I should have told you in November, when I sat at the back of that hall and watched you bid a million dollars on a stranger's secret."

"Which is?"

"You never wanted a woman who was afraid of you." She said it very gently. "It wasn't me. It wasn't any of us. You wanted a person who'd stand in front of you and not be. I thought it was a kink. I thought it was a species of cruelty. But it's the opposite. You want to be looked at, and not feared. And you found her. And you let her go."

"She left."

"You let her. You wrote her a door and held it open."

"Vivienne—"

"You don't want them," she said, "you want her."

The kitchen was very still. The snow ticked against the window. Somewhere in the walls the heating cycled and shut off.

"Yes," said Callum.

It was the first time he had said it aloud. It came out of him dry and quiet, like the last of the water from a well, and his whole body seemed to go with it; and he sat on the stool with his elbows on the counter and his face in his hands, a man of thirty-nine with three weeks of stubble under his fingers, and said it again, into the dark of his palms.

"Yes. I want her."

Vivienne did not touch him. She did not say poor Callum, or there, there. She only reached across the counter and quietly refilled his cup, and said, after a time, in her dry clear voice:

"Then find her."

"I can't."

"You can do anything."

"She wrote a clause." He lifted his head. "She asked for it. Neither party shall ask the other's reasons. She wanted to be free of the question, and I gave it to her. If I go after her, I've broken the only promise she made me keep."

"And if she's dying?"

He stared at her.

"I'm not a fool," said Vivienne softly. "You said it yourself. In your office. She's dying. You said it as if it were an arithmetic problem." Her own eyes were bright. "I've watched you not look at it for six weeks. You've been so careful. You've gone so far around it that you've got lost in the woods. But it isn't a clause, Callum. It's a person."

"If I find her," said Callum, very low, "I will have to know."

"Yes."

"I will have to know what it is. And how long. And I'll have to stand there."

"Yes."

"I stood on a dock once."

"I know," said Vivienne. "I know you did."

She got down from the stool. She came round the counter, a tall thin woman in a good camel coat, and for the first time in three years she put her hand against his face. It was a light cool hand, with no ring on it. It smelled of wine and soap and snow.

"You won't have to stand on it this time," she said. "Not if you go in."

…

He watched the tape that night.

He had not meant to. He had walked her to the door, and seen her into a car, and gone up the stairs to the white room, and sat down at the end of the bed with his head against the post. And then he had thought of the cameras.

There were only two in the house. They had been Margaux's insistence: one at the street door and one in the upstairs hall, trained on the stair, a small black lens behind a bronze rosette. He had never once looked at the footage. He'd regarded it as a thing like the foundations of a building.

He went down to the study. He opened the laptop, and typed a code that Margaux had given him in 2016, and found the date.

Sunday. 5:11 a.m.

The upstairs hall was gray and grainy and silent. A strip of carpet, a console, the pale oblong of the bedroom door. The time stamp in the corner changed at the rate of one second per second, and he watched it for a minute without anything moving, his heart oddly fast.

At 5:16 a woman came out of the dressing room, dressed for the street, in the gray coat and the scarf with a bag on her shoulder, and went into the bedroom, and the door-frame swallowed her. For six minutes the hall was empty. At 5:22 she came out again. She walked three steps down the hall and stopped, and turned, and stood at the bedroom door. The camera was behind her and above, so that he saw only the top of her head, her shoulders, the long still line of her back. She stood quite motionless, with one hand against the frame.

She stood there a long time.

He watched the time stamp. 5:17. 5:18. 5:19. Four-seventeen, he thought, absurdly. It's not. It's only one minute off. He watched the figure at the door, which did not move, and it came to him slowly that it was not still at all. Her free hand, the right one, hanging at her side, was moving. It was opening and closing against her thigh.

He leaned toward the screen.

The fingers curled. Straightened. Curled. It was not random. It was a pattern, small and steady, one finger at a time, beginning at the thumb and going out. He watched until he was sure. Ten fingers: one after another folding into the palm. It was a count.

She's counting down, thought Callum.

She stood in my door, and she counted down from ten, in her hand, so that she wouldn't wake me.

He had seen her do it a hundred times. He knew it as well as he knew his own pulse. Ten, in the cellar, with her sleeve in her teeth. Ten, on the glass. Ten, on the plane to Vegas, the night she thought he was asleep. He'd thought it was a habit, a kind of prayer. He had not known that it was also a way of keeping herself from walking back in.

On the screen, the hand closed. The last finger folded.

The woman at the door lifted her head. She turned, very slightly, so that the camera caught the edge of her cheek, white and thin against the gray scarf. Her lips moved. There was no sound on the tape, and no way to read it; the grain of the image was too coarse, the angle too steep. But he had spent months watching that mouth. He knew its shapes as one knows the stations of a line.

He ran it back. He watched it again. He ran it back and watched it six times, and then he stopped the frame and sat with his knuckles against his mouth.

Har-bor.

She had said it to the empty hall. She'd said it in the middle of the stair, on the way to leaving him. She, who had told him in the first hour that she would never use it. She had said it soundlessly to the closed door, as a woman might say a name to a grave.

The tape ran on. The figure turned and went down the stairs, out of the frame, and the hall stayed empty, gray, with its little red light, until the time stamp read 5:31 and the first thin light came into the skylight above.

He sat very still.

He did not know that he was crying until a drop fell on the keyboard.

…

At four in the morning Margaux found him in the study.

She had a key, and an alarm on her telephone that told her when the lights came on in any room of the house after midnight. She had come without a coat, in a gray cardigan, with her iron hair tied back, and she stood in the doorway with her eyes taking in the decanter and the open laptop and the man on the floor.

He did not look up.

"What are you doing?" said Margaux.

"Looking at flights."

It was true. He had been doing it for an hour. He had opened a second window, a public site, one that listed the departures from JFK on a given morning, and he had been going through them, line by line, with the dull systematic patience of a man defusing a bomb. Sunday, 6:05. Sunday, 6:40. Sunday, 7:15. Atlanta. Miami. Chicago. San Francisco. He had been writing the numbers on a pad in his small neat hand.

He had not asked himself why.

"Sir," said Margaux, very quietly.

"It would have been the morning. She walked to Fifth. She took a cab at Seventy-Ninth. She would have wanted the first one she could get with a seat, and a one-way ticket, and no reason to hurry." He pointed at the pad. "There are fourteen possibilities between nine and eleven. Eleven if one eliminates the international. I've been looking at the western routes."

"You gave an order."

"I did."

"You said no inquiry."

"I did say that." He looked up at last. His eyes were red, and very clear, and entirely sane. "I'm not making an inquiry, Margaux. I'm only reading a schedule. It's a public document. Anyone might read it."

She looked at him for a long moment.

Then, quite deliberately, she crossed the room and sat down on the floor beside him in her gray cardigan, with her back against the sideboard and her knees drawn up, an upright, narrow, sixteen-years-faithful woman in her stocking feet, and picked up the pad.

"Portland," she said, running a finger down the list. "Nine-fifteen. Delta. A connection. Or the direct at ten-twenty."

He did not answer.

"I only observe," said Margaux. "It's a public document."

Outside the snow had stopped. The first gray was coming up over the roofs, and the radiator ticked, and neither of them said a word; and on the pad, between them, in a hand that did not look like his, the number 10 had been written, and circled, three times.