Scandalous

Chapter 10

He did not look at her again.

This was the decision he made, standing at the bar with his Scotch and a very studied interest in the middle distance, and he held to it with the discipline of a man who understood that some decisions needed to be made firmly and without negotiation or they ceased to function as decisions at all. She was his student. She was seventeen years old. She was twenty feet away in a room full of people and she was not his concern.

He took a measured sip.

She was his student.

The problem — and he acknowledged this with the same clipped, unsentimental precision he applied to problems in general — was that the reminder, however accurate, had a limited radius of effect. It covered the part of his mind that dealt in facts and professional obligations and the clear, navigable territory of what was appropriate. It did not extend fully to the part that had registered, involuntarily and in considerable detail, the way the black fabric had followed the lines of her figure, the pale flawless strip of skin at her waist, the exact quality of her legs below the hem of the skirt. That part was operating on a different set of inputs and was proving resistant to instruction.

She is seventeen, he told himself, with emphasis.

He knew she was seventeen. He had her enrollment form. He had, in some administrative sense, her date of birth.

He looked at his glass. He looked at Daniel, who was talking to a man in a navy blazer about something Nathan wasn't tracking. He looked at the painting on the far wall again and decided it was probably not genuine — the brushwork in the lower left quadrant was too uniform, too careful, the work of someone copying rather than deciding.

He did not look across the room.

She is your student, he told himself, for what he recognized was not the first or second time. That is the entirety of what she is.

He finished the thought. He believed it. He returned to it at intervals over the next several minutes like a man checking that a door is locked — each time with the same result, each time with the nagging awareness that the checking was itself a kind of evidence.

He was, he thought, being an i***t.

He heard Gwendolyn's voice before he saw her — that precise, carrying quality of a British woman who has never once adjusted her volume for a room and doesn't intend to start. Then he heard the lighter set of footsteps beside her, and then he made the mistake of turning because Daniel had turned and it would have been conspicuous not to.

Gwendolyn Delaney was crossing the room toward them with her arm linked through Shae's, moving with the unhurried authority of a woman delivering something she knows to be impressive and is allowing the room to appreciate accordingly.

Nathan looked — briefly, professionally, the way you look at a student who has just walked into your classroom — and then arranged his gaze somewhere in the general vicinity of Gwendolyn.

"I thought I would make introductions," Gwendolyn said, arriving between them, "before the evening gets entirely away from us." She looked at Daniel. "You remember my girl."

"Of course," Daniel said, with the warm, slightly surprised ease of a man who had not expected this particular connection. "Good to see you."

"And this," Gwendolyn said, turning to Nathan with the particular satisfaction of someone who suspects the introduction will be interesting, "is—"

"Mr. Kingston," Shae said.

Nathan looked at her directly for the first time since she'd walked in through the far archway. Up close, in the warm light of the drawing room, she was — he filed the observation and moved past it — she was exactly as she had been from twenty feet away. Dark hair with a few loose strands lying against the pale curve of her neck. Green eyes, steady and faintly amused, holding his with the same characteristic directness she applied to everything. A slight curve at the corner of her mouth.

She raised an eyebrow. "Fancy seeing you here, Mr. Kingston."

He felt the corner of his own mouth move despite himself. "Likewise, Miss Madison."

Gwendolyn looked between them with sharp, undisguised interest. "You know each other."

"Shae is one of ours," Daniel said. "Second period."

"And a very bright one, as it happens," Nathan added, with the measured, professional tone of a teacher describing a student, which was exactly what he was.

Gwendolyn took a long, satisfied sip of her champagne. "Of course she is." She said it without a trace of modesty on Shae's behalf — a simple statement of established fact. "I only raised her for half her life."

Nathan glanced between them. "Are you—" He looked at Gwendolyn. "Are you related?"

"Oh, heavens no." Gwendolyn dismissed the idea with the slight wave of someone swatting at something small. "I fostered her. She came to me when she was seven." A pause, during which she took another sip. "She was with me until she was fifteen, when her uncle was finally in a position to take her properly. Best eight years I ever spent." She said this last part without looking at Shae, the way you say a thing that doesn't require the other person's confirmation because you have simply decided it is true.

Shae was looking at the floor.

"I introduced her to English literature at nine," Gwendolyn continued, addressing Nathan with the energy of a woman who has found a sympathetic audience and intends to use it. "Most children at nine are reading whatever comes in front of them — she was reading it. There's a difference. I gave her Jane Eyre at ten and she came back to me three days later having finished it and wanting to know whether Rochester was a villain." She raised her eyebrows. "At ten. I told her that was exactly the right question."

"It is the right question," Nathan said.

"I know it is." Gwendolyn set her glass down on the passing tray of a staff member and took a fresh one without breaking stride. "She had a 4.3 GPA before she'd ever set foot in Crestwood. Languages, literature, mathematics — the literature she came by honestly, the mathematics I take no credit for, that is simply what she is." She turned to Shae with the warm, unstoppable pride of someone who has decided bragging isn't bragging when it's simply accurate. "Tell them what you scored on the AP English exam."

"Gwen—"

"She scored a five," Gwendolyn said, to Nathan, as though the question had been rhetorical from the start. "Top percentile nationally. At sixteen."

Shae had closed her eyes briefly, with the expression of someone who has accepted that this is happening and is waiting for it to conclude. She was standing with her arms folded loosely across herself — not defensively, just the posture of a person who has gone slightly inward, the particular discomfort of a teenager whose parent has begun performing them in front of strangers, even strangers who are not, technically, unwelcome.

Nathan caught the expression and looked away before she could catch him catching it. He did allow himself, once, a small sound that was nearly a laugh.

Gwendolyn, with the impeccable timing of a woman who operated on her own schedule, set her glass down, smoothed the front of her gown, and said, "Now, I must go and stop Geoffrey from saying something irretrievable to the woman from the Times. If I leave him alone with a journalist for more than four minutes, things deteriorate." She pressed Shae's shoulder briefly — warmly, the touch of genuine affection rather than performance — and then she was moving, green silk and silver-streaked hair, back into the room.

A beat later, Daniel glanced at his watch and then at the far end of the terrace. "Excuse me one moment," he said, and was gone.

Which left two of them.

Nathan held his glass. Shae stood beside him with her own — something pale and fizzing, champagne or something passing for it — and they occupied the same approximate two feet of drawing room floor in the particular silence of people who have things they could say and are briefly deciding whether to say any of them.

The party moved around them. Someone near the fireplace had begun a conversation about the school board that was escalating in the way that school board conversations tend to. The Billecart-Salmon continued its circuit.

Shae lifted her glass and took a sip. Her nose wrinkled — a small, involuntary thing, quickly suppressed, the expression of someone who has not entirely made peace with what they're drinking.

Nathan looked at the glass. Looked at her. Looked back at the glass.

"Aren't you a bit young to be drinking?" he said.

She turned her head toward him. The green eyes were level, and the corner of her mouth had done the thing again — that particular curve, the one that lived somewhere between composed and amused. "Age is just a number, Mr. Kingston."

He held her gaze for one moment. Then he looked away.

"Mm," he said, which was not agreement.

A beat of silence. Then, from her, without preamble:

"Have you read Giovanni's Room?"

He turned back. "Baldwin. Yes." A pause. "Why?"

She lifted a shoulder — not a shrug exactly, more the gesture of someone setting something down on a table between them. "I've been reading it. Independently." She said independently without emphasis, without any apparent desire for credit, simply as a contextual note. "I've been thinking about the ending."

"The ending is the point," Nathan said.

"That's what I keep coming back to." She turned slightly toward him, and he had the distinct sense of a gear engaging — some shift in her register, the same shift he'd heard in second period, the one that meant she was no longer performing engagement but actually in it. "David knows from the beginning. That's what Baldwin is doing — he's not building toward a revelation, the reader understands the revelation before David admits it to himself. So the tragedy isn't the ending. The tragedy is all the pages before it."

"The tragedy is the denial," Nathan said.

"Yes. Except Baldwin doesn't frame it as denial. He frames it as— David genuinely believes his own story. That's what makes it devastating, he's not lying to the reader, he's lying to himself so convincingly that he's almost succeeded." She tilted her head slightly. "Which means the person he destroys most completely isn't Giovanni."

Nathan looked at her. "It's himself."

"And Hella, but—"

"Hella is a consequence. David is the argument."

"Exactly." She said it quietly, not triumphantly — the tone of someone who has been sitting with a thought alone for a while and has just found someone to say yes, that's it back to them. She took another sip of the champagne, winced slightly less this time. "The thing I can't stop thinking about is whether Baldwin thought David was redeemable. Because the prose doesn't seem to think so. The prose has already made the verdict."

"The prose made the verdict in the first paragraph," Nathan said. "That's what the mirror is doing. He's looking at himself in the opening scene and he can't do it — he can't look cleanly. Baldwin tells you everything you need to know about David in the first two pages."

"And then spends the rest of the book making you watch him prove it." She looked up at him. "It's merciless."

"The best ones are," he said.

They moved, without deciding to, from Baldwin to the conversation around Baldwin — to the small, precise category of books that do the same thing, that locate their tragedy in self-deception rather than circumstance, in the slow, interior work of a person dismantling themselves while believing they are doing something else entirely.

He mentioned Death in Venice. She had read it — of course she had — and she had a specific argument about Aschenbach that he had not encountered before, about whether the obsession was in fact a delayed recognition of everything he had suppressed in building his career rather than a deviation from his character. He pushed back. She held her ground with the quiet confidence of someone who has thought it through and is not going to be moved by pushback alone, only by a better argument.

He gave her a better argument. She considered it — actually considered it, the brief, genuine silence of someone updating their position rather than the pause of someone pretending to — and then offered a modification of her original point that incorporated what he'd said without surrendering its essential claim.

He said: "Forster does something adjacent in Maurice."

She said: "Adjacent but more optimistic. Forster believed escape was possible. Mann didn't."

He said: "Do you think escape is possible?"

She looked at him. "From what?"

He meant from the architecture of the self — from the thing you've built around yourself and called character, from the story you've told yourself so long it's become indistinguishable from fact. He meant the Aschenbach question. The David question.

"The thing you're describing," he said. "The self-construction. The version of yourself you've decided to be."

She was quiet for a moment. The party moved around them, unreachable, unimportant, operating in some other register entirely.

"I think some people get out," she said. "And I think some people can't tell the difference between getting out and just relocating."

Nathan looked at her.

Something happened in his chest that he categorized immediately as recognition — the specific, rare pleasure of a mind encountering another mind that is genuinely, structurally compatible with its own. Not the performed intelligence of a student trying to impress, not the approximation of depth, but the actual thing — precise, unaffected, honest in the way that only people who have spent a lot of time alone with books tend to be honest.

And then, without particularly meaning to, without it being a decision so much as a thing that simply occurred, he smiled.

A real smile. Not the controlled quarter-smile he deployed in professional contexts or the polite version that had become his default in social ones, but a full, unguarded, genuine smile — the kind that reaches the eyes and stays there, the kind that belongs to a person who is actually, unexpectedly, glad to be exactly where they are.

He couldn't remember the last time he'd smiled like that.

He thought, briefly, that he probably couldn't remember because it had been a very long time.

She was looking at him when he did it. She didn't smile back — just looked at him with those steady green eyes, and something in her expression that was not quite readable, something that had arrived there and hadn't decided yet what to do with itself.

He looked away first.