Scandalous

Chapter 27

Terry had the car idling at the corner of Colorado and Fair Oaks when she came out of Vroman's, which was exactly where she'd asked him to wait and exactly the kind of thing Terry did — not pulling into the lot where the meter ran, not circling the block, just there, present, the black car at the corner with the engine running and Terry in the front with the radio on low.

She got in. Pulled the door closed.

"Good?" he asked, glancing at her in the mirror the way he glanced, the brief check-in of a man who had been doing this for three years and had learned to read her from the back seat.

"Good," she said.

She looked out the window as he pulled into traffic. The Saturday afternoon Pasadena moved past in its weekend configuration — the foot traffic on Colorado, the outdoor tables, the particular quality of a California November that was still warm enough to sit outside without discussion. She held her bag in her lap with both hands.

She was thinking about the auburn hair.

Not in the way she would have predicted thinking about it — not with the simple, clean discomfort of meeting someone whose existence had been abstract and was now concrete. It was more specific than that. She had looked at Maryanne Sherman Kingston standing in the fiction aisle of Vroman's with her hand on a shelf and her dark eyes conducting their assessment, and she had noticed things. She always noticed things. She had been doing it since she was small, the habit of a child who had learned early that the information available in a room exceeded the information being stated, and that the gap between the two was usually where the true thing lived.

What she had noticed:

The way Nathan had said this is my wife with the particular, careful quality of a man managing the introduction rather than simply making it — the almost imperceptible steadiness of it, the deliberate neutrality of someone who has thought, in the fraction of a second before speaking, about the register they're going to use.

The way Maryanne had looked at her. Not just the social assessment — she had been doing that, yes — but beneath it, the specific quality of a woman looking at something she has been thinking about and is now seeing for the first time, and finding the seeing more complicated than the thinking had prepared her for.

The way Nathan had stood slightly behind Maryanne throughout. Not hovering. Not performing anything. Just — present in the particular way of a man who is watching two things at once and is very carefully not letting either of them see that he's watching.

And then bright. The single word, returned to Nathan like a stone placed back in someone's hand. The narrowing of Maryanne's eyes by the fraction that she'd let show.

Shae had not been in that marriage for eleven years. She had been in that bookshop for approximately seven minutes. But she had stood in the space between those two people and felt the specific temperature of it — the quality of a long, complicated thing that had calcified in some places and was still moving in others — and she had understood enough of it to know that what she'd walked into was not simply a husband and wife on a Saturday afternoon errand.

She looked at the passing street.

The uncomfortable thing — the thing she was now sitting with in the back of Terry's car with her bag in her lap — was that meeting Maryanne had not made anything simpler. She had expected it might. The wife as a concrete reality rather than an abstraction, the specific, physical fact of her, should have clarified something — should have placed a weight on the scale that resolved the question of what Shae had been feeling and what she was going to do about it.

It had not done that.

What it had done was the opposite. Because Maryanne was real now, and Nathan standing behind her in that aisle was real, and the thing between them — the temperature of it, the specific quality of the silence in the car they'd presumably driven here in together — was real, and all of it was real in a way that made the thing Shae had been refusing to name more real too. Not simpler. Not resolved. Just — more weight on both sides of the scale, which was not the same as resolution.

The only time he looks happy is when he sees you.

Claire had said this sitting on the Texas King with her knees pulled up, in the open, direct way Claire said true things.

Shae looked at the window.

She thought about his face in the bookshop when Maryanne had walked away. The brief, unguarded second of it — the thing that crossed it before he'd composed himself and turned to her and said enjoy the rest of your afternoon, Miss Madison in the level, professional voice he produced for these encounters. She had caught it. She always caught things.

She pressed her lips together and looked at the road.

The house was quiet when Terry pulled through the gate and up the drive. She thanked him, took her bag, went inside.

She set the locks. Stood in the foyer for a moment.

The afternoon light was coming through the tall windows at the angle it came through in November, lower and more golden than it had been a month ago, the kind of light that made the house feel more like itself somehow — the wood of the floors and the shelves picking up the warmth of it, the garden visible through the glass at the back with the last of the afternoon in it.

She went upstairs. Sat at her desk.

The laptop was open from this morning. The document was there — the story about the girl in the library, the man who came on Tuesdays, the conversation over the book they'd both reached for. She read it back.

She had written it with enough distance from the truth to feel safe. Different names, different specifics, the fictional frame doing the work of permission — allowing her to put the thing on the page by calling it something else. It was a technique she understood, had always understood. Brontë had done it. Plath had done it. You wrote the true thing and you dressed it in fiction's clothing and you let it walk around in public and nobody could prove it was you.

She read the last paragraph she'd written. The girl noticing the man's hands. The way he moved through a library with the unhurried ease of someone comfortable in their own body. The conversation that had moved without effort.

She put her fingers on the keys.

She wrote: She had not expected to ever meet his wife. When she did, she understood for the first time that the situation had dimensions she had been examining from one angle only. The wife was real and complicated and had a history with him that was made of eleven years of ordinary days and things that had happened between people in rooms she would never see. This was not a revelation — she had known all of this in the abstract — but knowing something in the abstract and standing in front of it are different experiences, and she had now stood in front of it.

She stopped. Read it back.

She wrote: What she had not expected was that meeting her would make it worse instead of better. She had thought that a face, a reality, a concrete presence would function as a kind of answer. It had not. It had only made the question heavier.

She sat with that for a moment.

Then she kept writing, and did not look up for a long time, and the afternoon light moved across the floor of her room at its slow November pace while she wrote the truest thing she'd written yet, in someone else's name, in a library that was not a classroom, in a city she hadn't named.