Barnes opens a desk drawer, removes a couple of pieces of padded nylon. “Carpal tunnel,” he explains, wrapping his left wrist into one of these contraptions.
Her eye is drawn to the American newspaper that she failed to read this morning, blanket coverage of the events back home. The front page is dominated by a photo of a man who has been thrust into national prominence, first as a special adviser to his old pal the president, then an unexpected but largely unobjectionable appointment to the Cabinet. But now, after the VP’s cerebral hemorrhage, this political novice is suddenly poised to step onto the world stage. With the POTUS term limit looming, this man would become the presumptive nominee for president of the United States.
Barnes tightens his Velcro, then rips it open and refastens, makes sure the fit is optimal. He repeats the process for his right wrist, then turns back to Ariel and nods, fully protected against the twin ravages of tendinitis and gravity. Ariel can’t help but feel a little sorry for this guy. But just a little.
“Could you describe your husband, please? Height, weight.”
“He’s about five-ten. I don’t know what he weighs; I don’t watch him weigh himself.”
“But generally?”
“He’s thin, narrow.” She doesn’t know how to describe John’s body. It’s perfectly proportioned, beautiful. “Muscular, though not big muscles.”
“Okay.” Barnes clearly doesn’t want to hear about any other man’s pleasing physique. Insecurity and homophobia are so highly correlated that Ariel suspects they’re the same thing.
“What else? Let’s see, hair?”
“Dark brown, full and wavy. Green eyes.”
“Any identifying marks? Scars? Earrings? Tattoos? Facial hair?”
Ariel shakes her head. John is one of the few completely unadorned men she knows, with a wardrobe utterly devoid of logos or labels or identifiable branding, no sports-team or college merchandise, no jewelry or baseball cap. Even his car is generic, a statement of nothing so much as being a statement explicitly of nothing.
“Age?”
“Thirty-six.”
Barnes looks up quickly, then back down at his keyboard. She can see his calculation in that quick glance: Ariel is older by a decade, a difference that’s more than incidental when it goes in this male-female direction.
“Would people call him attractive?”
“Definitely.”
She knows what thread Barnes is tugging, what assumptions he’d made when she’d first arrived, what additional narrative he’s now constructing: It’s not that Ariel married a younger man, it’s that John married an older woman. Barnes is around John’s age. Maybe Barnes is wondering what might compel him to marry an older woman. This older woman.
Ariel examines him, while he examines her. His suit fabric is straining, wrinkles in all the wrong places; his shirt’s top button can’t close. This is a man who has put on some weight recently, more than just a pound or two, and his wardrobe hasn’t caught up. Maybe he’s in denial, telling himself that this extra weight will slide off easily once he stops eating dessert. Next week, maybe. Or the week after.
“Okay, so, this morning: no communication at all?”
“No. He hasn’t responded to my texts or emails. When I try calling, his phone goes straight to voicemail. I left a couple of messages.”
Barnes glances at Ariel’s hard-copy paperwork, which had been like filling out medical-insurance paperwork, something you do on a plastic clipboard with a click-trigger ballpoint emblazoned with the brand name of a new diabetes medication.
“So what have you two been doing in Lisbon?”
“Normal tourist stuff.”
“Such as?”
They’d taken an early-morning Segway tour, zipping along a waterfront dedicated to leisure pursuits—restaurants and discos separated from marinas by a ribbon of trail for runners and cyclists, like a twenty-first-century dream of urban revitalization. They’d ridden one of the old creaky trams, the famous number 28, lurching around sharp corners, up and down steep hills, like a vintage roller coaster, crowded and uncomfortable and more than a little scary.
Barnes is not a very good typist, using just a few of the fingers that are peeking out from his orthosis, toggling his eyes between keyboard and screen with occasional side glances at Ariel, at her breasts. She glances down herself, to make sure she’s sufficiently covered.
“Any contact with anyone?”
“Of course, plenty of people. At the hotel, restaurants, a couple of museums.”
They’d visited the Gulbenkian, a brutalist hulk with one of the world’s great private art collections, the spoils of a nation-state level of wealth. Also a convent that had been converted into a museum of tiles, which are everywhere in Lisbon—building fa?ades in mesmerizing geometric patterns, the interior walls of shops and cafés, lobby floors. You feel cooler just looking at the blue-and-white smoothness.
“Anyone you knew? Or anyone your husband knew?”
“No.” Ariel is not going to tell Barnes about the woman in the café. “We have a formal dinner scheduled for tomorrow night, with the partners from John’s client company and their wives. That’s why John asked me to come on this trip; these sorts of businessmen apparently like to meet the wives.”
“What sorts of businessmen?”
“European ones.”
Barnes grins knowingly, which he probably thinks is charming. It’s not. Every aspect of this man’s Southern smarm has grated on Ariel from the start.
“Does your husband travel for business a lot?”
“A few trips per month, usually for two or three nights, mostly in Europe.”
“Do you accompany him often?”
“This is the first time. We lead busy lives, and it’s not easy to find time when we can both travel. Our only other trip together was our honeymoon.”
“And when was that?”
“Three months ago.”
Ariel can see in Barnes’s raised eyebrow that his theory is taking on a more definite shape—you’re newlyweds, maybe bickering, you don’t really know this man, perhaps he simply left you. Who’d blame him? The poor guy has been gone for only a few hours and you’re already at the embassy? Take a chill pill, lady.
“So why this time?” he asks. “Other people’s business trips are not normally anyone’s idea of fun.”
“True,” Ariel says. “But I’ve never been to Portugal before. And all I needed to do for this trip was buy a new dress.”
“Not a terrible imposition, was it?”
Ariel had not in fact wanted to buy the dress. She was as a rule very careful with money, also averse to fashion in general. When she was young, she’d of course read all the magazines that tell you what to buy, and how to sexualize yourself—the makeup, the clothes, the shoes, the waxing—but she no longer even glances at these headlines, SUMMER’S HOTTEST F***-ME SHOES, TEN STEPS TO A TIGHTER TUSH, GIVE HIM THE BEST B***JOB OF HIS LIFE. Not anymore.
“Have you checked your bank balance today?”
Ariel is surprised by this pivot, but on the other hand she’s not. “No.”
“Don’t you think you should?”