He smiled down at her again and she saw his fingers reaching out to toy with one of the empty shot glasses, saw that he was longing to order another.
“We don’t have to talk about any of that,” she said. She kept her voice low, matching his, and he bent his head down toward her.
“I just wanted to explain,” he said, now almost whispering in her ear. “Because it wouldn’t normally bother me, those guys dragging me along to talk to girls like you. I wouldn’t normally see that as a burden.” He’d turned his whole body now, away from the bar, closing her off from the other men around them.
He kept talking, about the summer, the interns who had been hired before the tide had turned and washed them up at the office, potential prey instead of the predators they’d been trained to be. He talked about the weeks in September when no one had slept. When the head of his division had asked him, one night, if he thought they should bring in a doctor to make sure everyone was still physically capable of being there.
“You don’t know,” he said. “You’re too young still to have known this feeling. But by the time you’re my age, you’re just living your life, putting it together piece by piece. You don’t stop to think about it, you just do it. And nobody really—I mean, you can’t be stopping all the time to think about how every small thing you do might affect someone else far away from you. You’d go crazy, thinking like that.”
As he spoke, his voice dipping as if he were continuously suppressing a series of belches, she tried to keep nodding. It was like no one had asked him in months how he felt, if he was worried, why he’d been so quiet and withdrawn. Like he’d been waiting to meet an underage girl in his regular bar, just to have someone to tell it to. Every few seconds, often at the ends of his sentences, he’d toss his hair aside with a jerk of his head, to clear it from his eyes, and she saw that he wore it this way—brushed softly in a wave that crested back from his forehead—to cover the fact that he was losing his hair. The newly exposed skin ran back in furrows along the top of his head, like wheel ruts on a muddy road.
All she’d have to do would be to say one thing too much, one thing any girl her age—a college junior, she reminded herself—wouldn’t normally know.
She had existed, thus far, somewhere safe. Whatever happened, however repugnant the pity she could see in other people’s eyes, no one could touch her. They had all known her for almost as long as she had known herself, and they couldn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know, force her suddenly to credit their opinions. They wanted to reach out, to prod her with their fingertips, to see if she was still all there. She was sure they wanted her to cry, some of them, but they didn’t dare try it. But here, she was no one. She was exposed, alone in the rifle sight, without any thick forest all around her to ward off the first shot.
“I must be boring you,” Hugh said. He moved closer to her, put one arm to her waist. He let his head droop toward her, let his razor-burned chin graze her neck. He wasn’t even trying to kiss her, really; he was just burying his face against her.
She thought of that trader on television, on the first morning. Of his mottled neck, of the way he’d spit her father’s name. And then, just as she’d always been led to expect, just like the shot-guzzling junior associates for whom her father had so much contempt, she felt it—a wave of nausea, beginning at her ankles and spreading steadily up through her entire body, the delayed revolt of every sip of beer and vodka and whiskey she’d chugged down against that body’s will.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and when his arm didn’t respond to her gentle pushes, she shoved him, harder, in the chest.
“What the hell?” he barked, his tender bewilderment vanishing. “What’s wrong, sweetheart?”
She didn’t say anything to him, just spun away from the bar, launched herself into the crush of bodies as if it were a rioting sea, and fumbled toward the street.
THIRTY
We’ve checked with the doorman at the apartment—both apartments,” the head of the security detail was telling Isabel. Mina liked him, his look. His name was Teddy. He had a military air to him, his head more square than ovate, cheekbones so broad and sharp they had corners. This was a man her sister Denise would go nuts for. Even if he brought bad news, it seemed safe to trust that he’d done his job.
Denise, Mina chided herself. That was what she’d intended to do tonight. She owed Denise a call. Jaime had decided not to come home for Christmas next week, and Denise was sleeping with some married guy. Gobbling up the Greenwich gossip together over the phone had been a reliable balm for them both, all month.
The married guy was in finance, but he was decidedly midcareer, and he was fearful for his job. Poor thing, Dee couldn’t even find herself a man with a glamorous other life for her to envy. What she was choosing to obsess over, then, wasn’t his wife but rather the many other women she was positive, positive, she told Mina, he was also sleeping with. She only knew about one of them, someone named Maggie. She’d seen them together once, at the bar behind the Oyster Bar, of all places. (This was a suspicious story in Mina’s mind, because why would Denise have been there in the first place?) But now she was following the woman around the city, devoting whole afternoons to this. Maggie had given Trevor some expensive bar of soap from Morocco and when Denise found it in the apartment in the city he’d told her, unapologetic, who it was from. And so Denise bought him a thick ceramic soap dish—totally the wrong style, she’d reassured Mina, for his anonymous steel-and-white-marble pad—and used the soap compulsively, whenever she spent the night. Mina thought of her sister now, expecting her call. Hunched over his sink, grinding the bar of soap between her hands, and then slapping at her cheeks, rubbing the creamy bubbles in circles into her skin.
The security officer was still debriefing Isabel. Mina took a sidelong glance at the kitchen door, where Lily had been lingering, suspiciously quiet and unhelpful, ever since Mina’s arrival. They hadn’t said hello. Mina had of course made to greet her, at first, but somehow Lily’s entire body had held itself apart from Mina’s arms. Not in disgust but almost with something like shyness. Which made no sense, but the truth was that for once it was nice to be able to stand at Isabel’s side, to rub her back every so often, without feeling like you were stepping on the toes of an employee half your age. Lily also kept looking at her phone, which wasn’t so unusual for some of these younger babysitters but for this one was, as far as Mina could remember, quite a bold display of insolence.
“I understand,” Isabel said to the security guy. “But I really don’t want to involve the police yet. We know she went into the city voluntarily, with her friends. I don’t want to have our name attached to anything publicly until we think we have reason to do so.”