“The hell you don’t. It could have happened to anyone? Do me a favor, Min, try not to make your analytical debut when we’re with the single biggest gossip in Princeton history. All good? Can we agree at least on that? You show an ounce of fucking judgment? Maybe some consideration for the man who’s been working around the clock to keep you sitting in that house without anything to worry about?”
“Tom,” she said, placing her hands out in front of her as though there was a table, or anything solid, to balance against. She kept them there, in the air between them. “I’m sorry. All right? I’m tired, too. I misspoke.”
“Misspoke!” he yelped, and for a terrifying instant she thought he might erupt into laughter. “Well, I do know one thing. I bet you’re damn happy not to be Isabel D’Amico. I bet your little-girl hero-worship bullshit, whatever it is that keeps you following her around like you’re her kid sister, has taken some hits the past few weeks.”
“Please stop. Please.”
“You know how long it’s going to take to clean up after him? Months, Mina. Maybe years. He put us in danger. I mean us, our family.” He poked his own chest with his thick index finger, again and again. “Us. You, me, Jaime.”
They both pretended not to flinch at their daughter’s name.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Tom said, “I can’t breathe.” He started loosening his tie and then, absurdly, ripped it off over his head, started undoing the buttons of his dress shirt. He discarded the shirt like a damp towel on the hood of the Jag and stood there in his white undershirt, which he quickly untucked from the waist of his pants. He breathed through his nostrils for a moment, then continued.
“You know what nerve that takes? To put everyone in danger like this? It’s not just us—I’m all for the people who hate him now, but they don’t get it. Everyone will suffer. It’s unconscionable, what he’s done. It is. And now I’ve got my wife running her mouth off about how it could have happened to anyone? Jack all happened to him. He did it. And you think that could’ve been me?”
“All I meant,” she said, “all I was saying, was that maybe he’s just the first domino to fall. I mean isn’t that what everyone’s saying? Everyone was a little extended and now things will have to change? I mean maybe that’s, you know . . .”
“Oh, thank you for pointing out the silver lining,” Tom said, holding his thumbs and index fingers like guns and pointing them at each temple. “First domino to fall. That’s a sharp turn of phrase there, sweetheart. You sound like quite the expert. Tell me more, by all means. Lay it out for me.”
He had his hands on his hips and as he spoke sometimes he threw them into the air above his head in disgust. When he did this his undershirt rode up, showing his lower stomach, taut, and the tops of the pelvic muscles that cut across his lower torso at diagonals. It was her favorite part of his body.
She felt the stinging behind her nose, so similar to the way it felt when she was about to sneeze, and she swallowed several times, quickly. He hated it when she cried.
“I don’t know why you’re talking to me like this. I’ve done everything I can to be helpful and—”
“Damn it, Mina, do you think we’re morons? Do you think I’m a complete fucking incompetent? I may not be the CEO of Weiss and Partners, and Lord knows I can imagine how hard it’s been for you to keep your head high around your little friend, but I guess it just turned out pretty lucky for you that you didn’t hold out for the CEO, right? I may not be the top dog, but things are pretty sweet for you, aren’t they?”
She was crying now. She couldn’t help it. He continued to rail at her—her ignorance, the pressures she put on him, the fact that he, Goldman, that they’d done nothing wrong. That Bob D’Amico had been the only idiot on the Street who thought he could keep taking the risks everyone else had forsaken months earlier, for fuck’s sake, Mina, years earlier. Bob thought he was so much fucking smarter than us, he kept repeating. Look where it got him. We were careful. You have no idea what you’re talking about.
“Get in the car,” he said, finally, when another car went by, its white headlights washing over them like judgment. She thought the car slowed a bit as it passed, but she couldn’t say for sure.
“Get in the car,” he repeated.
“No,” she replied. He looked at her in disbelief. For the first time in so long, she did not question her own resentment. Her husband was being unfair. The fact that he wasn’t a violent man, that she wasn’t a battered wife, didn’t excuse this. She was a grown woman, and she could call his bluff. It was a risk, to do so, but she could take it.
She put one hand to her chest and it fluttered there, as though it couldn’t quite endorse her sudden boldness.
“Cut it out, Tom. Just, enough. I’ve apologized for, quite frankly, not really doing anything wrong in the first place. So just stop. If you’re going to talk to me like this, I will get myself a second room when we get there. I swear to God I will. And you can sleep alone.”
Tom’s face set and he was still for so long that she really did believe, for a second, that he might hit her for the first time in their marriage. Wasn’t this a crisis, wasn’t everyone saying that their lives would never be the same? That this was the kind of meltdown that might come once in a generation? And that was them. They were this generation; she’d married into it. If their lives were never to be the same, what better way to usher in their impending doom than a short, sharp shock of violence to punish them both? What better way to say good-bye to the life they’d made than to realize that they barely knew themselves, in the end. That they could apply pressure to their own fragile bonds and learn that, rather than cracking them, it might turn them instead into completely different people?
“Get in the fucking car,” he said. “I don’t have to speak to you at all, Mina. Have it your way.”
She knew it wasn’t victory, not really. But she got in the car. The click of her seat belt across her chest, discomfort from an outside source, came as sweet relief.
LATER, SHE LAY IN BED waiting for him. When he emerged from his shower in a fresh white undershirt and a clean pair of silk boxers, the sleep outfit she’d packed for him, he did not look at her. She turned out the light, then waited before reaching over to him where he sat up against the headboard and lunging awkwardly to put her arm around him. He let his head fall to her shoulder.
He didn’t open his eyes, didn’t lift his head. He was stiff at first, his shoulders beneath her arms. He had corners, like a box, like a briefcase. But slowly, as she had so many times, she felt him ease into her body, lose his edges. His body was warm from the shower, though he’d dried his hair before coming to bed. He hated a wet pillow.
“I’m sorry I yelled,” he said.
“I know.” She ran her fingers along his skin, tracing the hairs on his forearms in little whorls.