Scandalous

Chapter 36

He heard the car in the driveway at half past four.

He was in the study, marking the last of the comprehension responses he'd brought home from school, and he heard the specific sound of Maryanne's engine and then the door, and then the quality of the house adjusting to her presence — the particular shift in the air of a space that has been one person and is now two. He put down the pen and went to the hallway.

She was in the bedroom.

He stood in the doorway.

She was moving with the focused, efficient quality of someone mid-task — not hurried, not scattered, just purposeful. On the bed was the large grey suitcase she used for trips of more than two nights, open, partially filled. She was at the wardrobe with her back to him, moving items from hangers to the case with the practiced economy of a woman who has packed enough times to do it without thinking.

He looked at the suitcase.

"You're going somewhere," he said.

"Book signing in Sacramento." She didn't turn around. "Jillian Hartley — she's with the same agency. David asked if I'd go, represent the list. I'll be back Monday night."

He looked at the suitcase. The folded clothes, the toiletry bag already placed. The specific, careful organization of someone who had packed this before deciding to tell him.

He said: "I didn't know about this."

"It came up quickly." She moved to the dresser. Opened the second drawer.

He nodded. He stood in the doorway and looked at the back of her and nodded the way you nodded when you had decided not to say the thing that was sitting in the front of your mouth waiting. He thought about Sacramento. He thought about David, the editor, who had been the reason she was out past midnight the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.

He did not say any of this.

"Right," he said. "Have a safe trip."

He crossed to where she was standing and leaned in.

She turned. Not all the way — just enough. Her cheek presented itself to his mouth with the practiced efficiency of a woman who has made a decision about this particular gesture and is implementing it without discussion.

His lips met her cheekbone.

She was already turning back to the dresser.

He stood behind her for a moment. The room was quiet and warm and full of the specific weight of things not being said. He felt his jaw tighten in the way it tightened when he was holding something in place that wanted to move.

He took a breath.

He turned to face her.

"I love you," he said.

The quality of the room changed.

She stopped. The motion of her hands — she had been folding something, a scarf or a cardigan — simply stopped. She was standing at the dresser with her back to him and she went still in the complete, specific way of a person who has been given something they were not prepared to receive in this moment and is now deciding what to do with it.

A beat.

She looked down at her hands.

Then she said, over her shoulder, without turning: "I love you too."

He heard it. He heard it exactly.

He heard the three words produced with the specific, mechanical quality of a phrase that has become reflexive — the response that arrives not from the place words come from when they're true but from the place they come from when they are required. A reflex. A courtesy. The automatic quality of someone completing a sentence because the sentence was started and sentences required completion.

She picked up the scarf. She kept packing.

Nathan stood in the middle of the bedroom and looked at the back of his wife and said nothing further. He went back to the study. He sat at the desk. He did not pick up the pen for a while.

He heard the case zip. Heard her in the bathroom — the medicine cabinet, the particular sounds of a woman extracting what she needed for three days. Then the wheels of the case on the hardwood floor of the hallway. Then the front door. Then the car.

He sat in the quiet of the study and listened to the engine recede down the street and become silence.

Saturday he worked.

This was a choice made before seven in the morning when he'd stood in the kitchen and looked at the particular, untethered quality of a day with no fixed structure and had made the deliberate decision to impose one. He changed clothes. He went to the garden.

He pruned what needed pruning and cut back the bougainvillea along the back wall that had been working at the fence line since October with the patient ambition of a plant that had somewhere to be. He raked. He bagged. He moved through the garden with the physical, focused labor of a man who is using his body in the specific way that is available to him when his mind needs something to do.

By early afternoon the garden was done. He went inside.

He organized the study. Not reorganized — the study was orderly, it had always been orderly — but he went through the shelves with the methodical attention of a man who is checking every book is where it belongs and finding that it is and continuing anyway. He dealt with the correspondence he'd been putting off. He filed the end-of-term assessment guidelines he'd received three weeks ago and left on the corner of the desk. He sharpened every pencil in the cup.

By four it was done.

He cleaned the rest of the house. The kitchen, the bathrooms, the floor of the hallway that didn't need mopping and which he mopped. He did all of this with the thorough, slightly grim efficiency of a man who understands what he is doing and is doing it anyway — filling the hours of Saturday with the material of Saturday so that there was nothing left for the thing he was not thinking about to fill it with instead.

He ate alone. He read. He went to bed at half past ten and lay in the dark that was the dark of an empty house, which had a different quality from the dark of a house with another person in it — neither better nor worse, just different, a specific temperature.

He was not going to text her.

He thought this clearly, in the honest, private dark of the bedroom, with the decision-making part of him that was separate from the part that had been renegotiating in the back of his chest for three days. He was not going to text her. He was going to respect what Daniel had said and what Caldwell had said and what the part of himself that could read time stamps understood clearly about the direction of this thing and where directions led. He was going to use the weekend to reinstall the distance properly.

He went to sleep.

Sunday came in grey and still, the particular December overcast that California produced without cold — the diffuse, white sky of a morning that hadn't decided what it was going to do yet.

He was up by seven. He made tea rather than coffee, which was the choice he made on slow mornings when he wasn't trying to get anywhere — the longer preparation of it, the different rhythm. He took it to the kitchen window and looked at the garden he'd worked through yesterday and thought about nothing in particular with the floating, slightly directionless quality of a man with a clean house and a clear calendar and nowhere to be.

He picked up his book. He moved through the kitchen and the sitting room and back to the kitchen in the slow, unstructured orbit of someone filling space without urgency. He read a paragraph and looked at the garden. He read another paragraph and drank his tea.

By nine he had done everything Saturday had left him.

There was nothing to do.

He thought about this — the specific, slightly absurd position of a man who has worked through his entire available backlog of tasks across two days in the deliberate service of not having exactly this: an empty Sunday morning in an empty house with nothing to put his attention on except the things he had decided not to put his attention on.

He put the book down.

He looked at the window.

His phone chimed.

He looked at it on the kitchen counter. Face-up this time — he had turned it face-up this morning, which was either progress or its opposite, and he had not examined which. The screen lit with the preview of a notification and he could see the name from where he was standing across the kitchen.

He stayed where he was for a moment.

He thought about Daniel's voice. You can watch the whole thing progress. Time stamps. Phone records. He thought about the Hargrove teacher and the sequence that had built — harmless to not harmless, charted in the cold legibility of a phone log.

He crossed the kitchen.

He picked up the phone.

He thought: what if it's something urgent. He thought this with full awareness of what he was doing — the justification offered to himself in the same breath as the reaching for the phone, the way you sometimes watched yourself do something and understood exactly what it was.

He opened it.

Hi

He stood in his kitchen in the grey Sunday morning light and looked at the single word on the screen and felt something move in his chest that he had given up trying to categorize.

He almost laughed.

Not loudly — just the quiet exhale of a man receiving something small that landed with a weight disproportionate to its size. Hi. One word. The kind of word that carried nothing and everything depending entirely on who sent it and why, and he knew both.

He typed: Good morning.

He should have stopped there. He knew he should have stopped there — the professional two-word response, door closed, the reinstated distance holding. His thumbs stayed on the screen.

He typed: What are you up to?

He sent it before the oversight mechanism had fully registered the question.

He set the phone on the counter. He picked up his tea. He looked at the garden.

The response came quickly — she typed the way she talked, without apparent deliberation, the thought arriving fully formed.

nothing, was supposed to hang out with Claire today but she bailed she's sick. You?

He thought about the end of Friday's class. The birthday brunch, the beach, the beefcakes. Claire's voice carrying in the empty room while he'd stood at the board with his back to them and his eraser moving. He thought about it's her birthday and Sunday and the specific information he had received without looking for it.

He should end this now. He knew it with the clear, unambiguous certainty of a man who has sat with Daniel's lunch conversation for three days. He should say he was busy. Say he was spending the day with his wife — and he would not say that, because it was a lie, and he did not have the particular lie available to him that Maryanne's name would require. He should simply not respond. Put the phone down, face-down this time, and let the silence do the work that silence was available to do.

He typed: Doing nothing.

He set the phone down.

He picked it back up ten seconds later when it chimed.

do you like hiking?

He looked at this for a moment.

Yes, he typed.

The response came immediately. An address — a trailhead in the hills above Altadena, twenty minutes from where he was standing. And then: meet me there in 15

Nathan stood in his kitchen.

He thought about Caldwell's podium and Ms. Pryce's clipboard and no being alone with a student without administrative approval. He thought about Room 214 with the door closed. He thought about the specific, categorical difference between a closed classroom and a hiking trail above Altadena on a Sunday morning — and then he thought about the specific, categorical sameness of it, which was the two people involved and the direction of the thing and the time stamps that did not care about geography.

He thought about all of this.

He thought about doing nothing and a grey Sunday in an empty house and a garden that was already done and a book he hadn't been reading and the full, quiet weight of a weekend that had no one in it.

He typed: See you then.

He put the phone in his pocket. He went upstairs. He changed into something he could hike in — the efficient, automatic movement of a man who has made a decision and is implementing it before the part of him that knows better has time to make a counter-argument.

He got in the car.

He drove.