Scandalous

Chapter 20

He had been working on Maryanne for eleven days.

Not aggressively — he had learned, over the years, the specific gradient of pressure that produced results versus the gradient that produced entrenchment, and he had applied the former with the patience of a man who understood that the goal was dinner at a friend's house and not, in the scheme of available conflicts, worth a significant expenditure of either of their energies. He had mentioned it casually. He had mentioned it again. He had mentioned it a third time in the context of Daniel specifically asked after you which was true and which he knew carried weight because Maryanne, for all her studied indifference to social obligation, had a functional vanity about being thought of.

She had said yes on a Thursday afternoon without looking up from her laptop, which was the version of yes he'd learned to take and be grateful for.

She was in the passenger seat now in a black silk blouse and tailored trousers, looking out the window at the Pasadena residential streets with the expression of someone who has agreed to a thing and is reserving the right to be unhappy about it.

"It'll be a nice evening," Nathan said. "Good food. Conversation."

"Mm," said Maryanne. A sound that was not agreement.

"Daniel's been genuinely looking forward to it. He mentioned Ellen has been planning the menu for a week."

"Lovely." The word carried the precise weight of a word being used to mean its opposite.

Nathan glanced at her. "I'm asking you to behave yourself tonight. Please."

She turned from the window. "I always behave."

"You behave by your own definition of the term," he said, which was accurate. "Daniel is one of my closest friends. He was kind enough to get me this position and he is, at the moment, genuinely my only friend within reasonable proximity, and I would like this evening to go well. His wife is— Ellen is warm and generous and she's gone to real effort for this."

Maryanne made a sound.

"What does that mean?" he asked.

"Warm and generous," she said, with the tone of someone trying on a phrase and finding it unflattering. "Sweet. You were going to say sweet next."

"I was going to say—"

"I don't like sweet people, Nathan. Sweet people make me feel like I'm being handled. I like interesting people. Crude, a bit vulgar, the kind of person who'd say something in polite company that makes everyone go silent for two seconds and then laugh too loud." She looked out the window again. "Sweet is exhausting."

"She's a person," Nathan said. "Extend her the courtesy of allowing her to be one before you've met her."

A pause. "Fine," Maryanne said, in the tone of a woman making a concession she finds mildly offensive. "I'll be good. As long as there's adequate wine."

Nathan's hand tightened on the steering wheel.

The night hadn't started yet and he was already regretting it.

The neighborhood was exactly the kind of neighborhood Nathan had expected based on what Daniel had told him — the pleasant, residential sameness of streets where the houses were well-kept and similarly sized and the lawns were uniformly green and the driveways held the appropriate number of appropriate vehicles. The kind of street where, if you looked down it at the right angle, you could see the same house repeating itself into the distance with minor variations in paint color and mailbox type.

He turned onto Daniel's street and it presented itself to him in its patient, identical procession and his mind went, with the efficiency of a mind that has spent thirty-five years making literary associations, directly to Ira Levin.

The Stepford Wives. 1972. The novel — not the 2004 film, though he had seen the film because Maryanne had wanted to, which was one of those concessions that had seemed reasonable at the time and in retrospect illustrated something he hadn't fully understood yet about the dynamic that had been developing between them. The film was broad and comedic. The novel was quieter and more frightening, as novels tended to be, because the novel could sit inside a character's growing unease rather than staging it for an audience.

The premise being: a Connecticut suburb. Husbands who love their wives enough to want them perfect. The specific horror of replacement without announcement.

He pulled into Daniel's driveway and cut the engine.

He looked at Maryanne. She had her nose very slightly scrunched — a subtle expression, the refined version of distaste, the one she deployed when she was categorizing a thing and finding it insufficiently interesting. She was looking at the house with the assessing expression of a woman deciding in advance how she felt about everything in it.

He thought, very briefly and without pride, that a robot replacement was an interesting premise in at least one direction. He pressed his lips together against the thing that was nearly a laugh and got out of the car.

Daniel answered the door in a navy sweater with the relaxed warmth of a man in his own home on a Saturday evening — bourbon already in hand, the particular ease of someone who had been looking forward to this and was not going to make anything complicated about it. He shook Nathan's hand with one arm and clapped him on the shoulder with the other and said something about finally, and turned to Maryanne with the slightly elevated warmth people deploy with the spouses of close friends.

They came inside. The house was warm and smelled of whatever Ellen had been cooking, something with garlic and rosemary that reached the front hall and made an argument for the evening in advance.

Ellen appeared from the kitchen doorway with her apron still on and her expression already arranged in the open, uncalculated welcome of someone who genuinely enjoys having people in their home. She was a compact, pretty woman with dark eyes and the kind of energy that occupied a room without requiring anyone else to contract to make space for it.

She hugged Nathan first — warm, brief, real — and then turned to Maryanne and hugged her too, and Maryanne received it with a grace that Nathan recognized as the outer surface of her social mode, the polished exterior she produced when the occasion required it and which bore no particular relationship to what was happening underneath.

"I've heard so much about you," Ellen said to Maryanne, with the full sincerity of someone who had heard things and was genuinely interested in the person they'd heard them about. "Come in the kitchen with me for a few minutes? I need to check on something and I feel terrible just abandoning you the moment you've walked in."

She looped her arm through Maryanne's with the easy, unself-conscious warmth of a woman who did not manage people so much as simply include them, and steered her toward the kitchen with a stream of friendly, genuine conversation about nothing in particular.

Maryanne looked back over her shoulder at Nathan.

Her eyebrow was raised approximately three millimeters — the precise, calibrated movement of a woman communicating volumes through a gesture too small for anyone else in the room to register. It said: what is happening and what am I supposed to do with this person.

Nathan looked at her. He shaped the word carefully, without sound: Behave.

Maryanne closed her eyes briefly in the manner of someone accepting a sentence. When she opened them she had located, somewhere in the available resources of her personality, the version of herself she produced for audiences — the Maryanne who was gracious and engaged and gave nothing away — and she turned it toward Ellen as they disappeared into the kitchen.

The door swung.

Nathan exhaled.

"You owe me," he said to Daniel.

Daniel laughed. "Bourbon?"

"Immediately."

Daniel's study was a room Nathan had identified the first time he'd visited as belonging to a person who had never quite accepted that they were no longer a graduate student. Books in piles, papers on the desk in the organized chaos of active use, a leather armchair that had been resoled twice, a small humidor on the side table beside a bottle of Blanton's that was already open. Nathan accepted the glass with the genuine gratitude of a man who had spent the drive here managing something and was glad to stop.

They sat. Daniel cut and lit two cigars with the unhurried ceremony of a man who enjoyed small rituals, and leaned back in his chair, and gave Nathan a look.

Nathan had known Daniel Holt for eleven years. He recognized every configuration of Daniel's expressions and this one was specific — the particular bright-eyed, barely-suppressed quality of a man who has something he has been waiting to say and is now arranging the delivery for maximum effect. He looked, Nathan thought, like a schoolgirl who had been told a secret at lunch and had held it through the entire rest of the day on the promise of telling someone better.

"What," Nathan said.

"Nothing." Daniel took a sip. The expression did not change.

"Daniel. What."

"I'm just sitting here. Enjoying the evening." A pause that lasted exactly as long as it needed to. "Word around the staff room is you've already got a teacher's pet."

Nathan looked at him. "I don't have favorites."

"Nobody has favorites," Daniel said agreeably. "And yet somehow every teacher in that building has one student who doesn't make them want to take up drinking on the job." He swirled his glass. "Henderson in Chemistry brings in an extra beaker for Tyler Morrison every Thursday. Pascali in Art lets Gabby Reyes stay after to use the studio. It's institutional. It's not a character flaw." He drew on the cigar. "Mrs. Chung leaves the difficult marking for Monday morning specifically so she can read Priya Nambiar's essays first as a palate cleanser."

Nathan said nothing. He was watching the door.

Daniel looked at the door also. Listened. Satisfied, he leaned forward slightly and lowered his voice.

"Mine," he said, with the weighted gravity of a man making a confession, "is Claire Monroe."

Nathan raised an eyebrow.

He thought about Claire Monroe — the girl who had been reading her book before she'd sat down, who leaned over to whisper things to Shae that Shae processed with mild exasperation, who had looked at Sloane Hartley with the compressed, uncomplicated fury of someone whose loyalties were complete and unconditional. Bright in the ways that didn't show up in grades. Not an academic standout by any measurable metric.

"She's not the most scholarly," Nathan said, carefully.

"No," Daniel agreed, with a slight smile. "But she's adorable. And she's genuinely funny — not performing funny, actually funny. She said something in my third period last Tuesday that I've been thinking about ever since." He drew on the cigar again. "She's got a quality."

Nathan understood, quite precisely, what was being communicated. He looked at Daniel for a moment with the look of a man registering information he doesn't particularly want to be in possession of.

"She's a child," he said. Not unkind. Not accusatory. Simply the fact, stated in the matter-of-fact way you state something that should not require elaboration.

Daniel tilted his head. "She's eighteen," he said, with the slight emphasis of someone marking a distinction. "I'm not saying I'd— I would never. I want to be very clear that I would never." A pause. "But there's nothing wrong with looking. That's all I'm saying."

Nathan held Daniel's gaze for a moment and was in the process of formulating a response that would convey what it needed to convey without starting an argument on a Saturday evening in a man's own study when the door opened and Ellen appeared in the frame, apron off now, the expression of a woman who has timed things correctly.

"Dinner," she said.

The table was set properly — the kind of proper that is warm rather than formal, cloth napkins and candles without the rigidity of performance. Ellen had made a roast with roasted vegetables and a reduction that justified the week of planning. The wine was open and breathing. Daniel poured.

They settled into the easy, surface conversation of people who are still establishing the shape of an evening — how the neighborhood had changed, a new place on Lake Avenue that Daniel and Ellen had tried the previous weekend, Maryanne's observation about the California climate delivered with enough dry precision to make Daniel laugh, which appeared to surprise her slightly.

"So," Ellen said, with the comfortable directness of someone who is interested in people and sees no reason not to be, "what is it that you do, Maryanne?"

"I write," Maryanne said. "Fiction. I'm in the middle of a novel at the moment. It's consuming, as they tend to be."

"How wonderful," Ellen said, with the warmth of someone who meant it. "What kind of fiction?"

Maryanne smiled the professional smile. "The kind that sells," she said, which was true and also deflective and Daniel caught Nathan's eye briefly from across the table.

Ellen turned to Nathan. "And how are you finding Crestwood? Daniel talks about it so much I feel like I know the place."

"It's good," Nathan said. "The staff are — collegial. The students are—" he considered the word "—varied."

"He already has a favorite," Daniel said, with the grin of a man who has been waiting to deploy this.

Ellen's face lit with the interest of someone who enjoys a story. "Already? It's only October."

Maryanne raised an eyebrow across the table. She was cutting her meat with the precise, unhurried attention of someone who is listening to more than the surface of a conversation. "A favorite student," she said. Not a question.

"It's not—" Nathan began.

"Is she pretty?" Maryanne asked. She said it lightly. She said it in the tone of a woman who has the social confidence to ask a question that would make other people uncomfortable and the self-possession to make it sound casual. She looked at Nathan with an expression that was pleasant and unreadable to everyone else at the table.

Nathan knew the expression. He knew what was behind it.

He reached for his wine and bought himself a half-second. He was not going to confirm that Shae Madison was beautiful in a way that had registered on him in any personal sense. He was also not going to lie, which would have required claiming she wasn't, which was not something he could produce with a straight face.

"She's—" He set the wine down. "She's an exceptional student. Genuinely, unusually intelligent. She can hold an intellectual conversation and sustain a real argument without— without needing it simplified. She's analytically rigorous in a way that I find—" he chose the word with care "— genuinely refreshing. She's mature beyond her years."

He stopped.

He had gone slightly further than he intended to. He was aware of this.

Maryanne's expression did not change. Not quite. But something behind it did — something very small and very specific that had nothing to do with the professional pleasantness she'd been maintaining across the dinner table and everything to do with the exact quantity of warmth that had found its way into Nathan's description despite everything.

She lifted her wine glass. She took a sip. The gesture was slow and deliberate and she looked at him over the rim with the eyes of a woman who has catalogued something and will return to it at a time of her own choosing.

"Well," she said. She set the glass down. "f**k. That's even worse than pretty."

The table went quiet.

Ellen's hands moved very slightly on the tablecloth. Daniel reached for the wine bottle with the brisk efficiency of a man who has identified a conversational fire and is going to redirect the water supply before it spreads.

"Has anyone been to the new place on Fair Oaks?" he said. "Ellen thinks the pasta is overrated but I think she's wrong and I'd like a second opinion."

Nathan looked at Maryanne.

Maryanne looked at Nathan. The mask was fully back in place — the pleasant, socially functional version of her, appropriate and composed. But under it, in the specific language of eleven years, her eyes communicated one clear, simple thing:

Later.

He picked up his fork.

He was dreading later with a specificity that sat in his chest for the rest of the dinner like a stone he had nowhere to put down.