Scandalous

Chapter 28

The drive home was eleven minutes.

Nathan knew this because he had driven it enough times to have stopped noticing it in the way you stop noticing the length of a routine, but today he was aware of every one of them. The route down Colorado, the turn onto Lake, the residential streets with their orderly procession of well-kept houses narrowing toward theirs. Eleven minutes in which Maryanne sat in the passenger seat with her bag in her lap and her eyes forward and said nothing.

He did not attempt to fill it.

He had learned, across eleven years, the taxonomy of Maryanne's silences — which ones were comfortable and which ones were processing and which ones were the specific, charged quiet of a woman who was deciding how to say the thing she had already decided to say. This one was the third category. He could feel it from the driver's seat with the particular physical sensitivity of a man who has spent a long time in close proximity to one person and has learned to read the room without looking at it.

He drove.

He parked in the driveway. They went inside. Maryanne set her bag down and went to the kitchen and he heard the familiar sound of the kettle being filled, which was her particular ritual when she needed to do something with her hands while thinking.

He hung his coat. He set Middlemarch on the table by the stairs. He went to the kitchen doorway and leaned against the frame.

She had her back to him, watching the kettle.

"Maryanne," he said.

"Don't," she said.

"I was going to say—"

"I know what you were going to say." She turned around. She had the composed expression — not the social one, not the one produced for other people, but the private version of it, the one that meant the composure was real and self-generated and not going to crack. "You were going to explain to me that she's a student, that it's a professional relationship, that I'm constructing something from nothing because I'm — what. Jealous. Irrational. Reading too much into a tone of voice."

Nathan said nothing.

"And then," Maryanne continued, with the even, precise delivery of a woman who has rehearsed none of this and is doing it from instinct, "I was going to tell you that I spent four hours in a bookshop with you today and the only time your face did anything real was when that girl was in front of you." She looked at him. "And you would say I'm imagining things."

"She's my student," Nathan said. He said it the way he had been saying it in his own head for two months — the level, factual, structurally sound statement that contained the argument in its entirety. "She's seventeen years old. I am her teacher. That is the complete and total nature of what this is."

Maryanne looked at him.

He held her gaze. He said it again, because it was true and because it needed to be said and because he needed to hear it in the room between them with the weight of a stated fact. "Nothing is happening. Nothing has happened. Nothing is going to happen." A pause. "She's an exceptional student and I take my professional responsibility toward her seriously and that is all this is."

He meant every word.

He was also aware, with the specific, quiet honesty of a man who has stopped arguing with himself at two in the morning and knows what he found when the arguing stopped, that meaning every word and those words constituting the complete truth were not identical.

Maryanne was quiet for a moment. She looked at him the way she had looked at him in the bookshop aisle — the narrowed, precise attention of a woman conducting an examination rather than a conversation. She had been doing this for eleven years. She had been doing it since a Harvard dinner party in 2012 when she had looked at him across a table and decided, within approximately forty-five minutes, what kind of person he was and whether she wanted to know him better.

She had been, in the estimation of most people who knew them, very rarely wrong about people.

"Nathan," she said. Quietly. Without heat.

"What."

"Who are you trying to convince?" She held his gaze. "Me—" the slight pause, the word delivered with the specific weight of a woman who has been watching and listening and has arrived at a certainty she takes no pleasure in "—or yourself?"

The silence that followed had the quality of a room after something has been dropped in it — not broken, just altered, the air different from what it had been ten seconds ago.

Nathan looked at her.

He had the sentence. He knew the sentence. It was the same sentence he'd been saying since the kitchen eleven days ago and the same sentence he'd said thirty seconds ago and it was still true, every word of it still true, and he opened his mouth to say it.

He said nothing.

Maryanne watched him not say it. She watched the sentence that didn't come with the expression of a woman who has just received the confirmation she was not hoping for — not triumphant, not destroyed, just confirmed. The particular, steady look of someone whose read of a situation has been verified and who is now going to have to decide what to do with the verification.

She turned back to the kettle. It had boiled. She poured.

"I'm going to work," she said.

She took her tea. She went down the hall. The study door closed — not with force this time, not the punctuation of the night eleven days ago. Just closed. The quiet, final click of a door pulled shut by someone who has somewhere to be and is going there.

Nathan stood in the kitchen doorway.

He stood there for a long time.

He thought about the sentence he hadn't said. He thought about the fact that he had opened his mouth and the sentence had not come — not because he didn't have it, not because he'd forgotten the words, but because some mechanism he'd been relying on for two months had quietly stopped working and he hadn't noticed until the moment he needed it and it wasn't there.

He thought about Shae in Vroman's in the cream knit with her basket over one arm, talking about his wife's novel with the precise, unhurried honesty she brought to everything she read. He thought about the anger that had flickered in his chest when Maryanne said mouthy little brat and the way he'd covered it with she's young but very bright and the way Maryanne had repeated bright back at him with those narrowed eyes.

He thought: she heard it. She always hears it.

He thought: I couldn't defend it because there was nothing to defend. There was only what it was.

He walked to the kitchen counter. He did not pour himself a drink — he stood at the counter with both hands flat on the surface and looked at the window above the sink and the garden in the evening dark beyond it.

Who are you trying to convince.

He had no answer.

He had been answering this question for two months with the same vocabulary — student, teacher, seventeen, professional, nothing is happening — and he had believed the vocabulary, or had believed that the vocabulary was adequate, or had believed that adequate was the same as true, and tonight in the kitchen doorway he had opened his mouth and found that the machinery had seized.

He stayed at the counter for a long time.

He thought about Middlemarch on the table by the stairs. He thought about Dorothea Brooke marrying the wrong person with complete conviction and discovering the error in increments, over years, in small moments that accumulated into a shape she could eventually not avoid seeing.

He thought: I am not going to stand in my own kitchen at thirty-five and compare myself to a George Eliot character.

He stood in his own kitchen at thirty-five.

He pushed off the counter. He turned off the light. He went upstairs.

He did not knock on the study door.

He lay in the dark of the bedroom with the particular quality of a man who has reached the end of the argument and found nothing on the other side of it except the thing that had been there all along, waiting with the patience of things that are true.

Who are you trying to convince.

He closed his eyes.

He didn't answer.