That afternoon, when I went for a smoke break, Cassie followed me outside.
“Have you got a light?” she asked.
She had lost weight, her cheekbones had sharpened, and I wondered whether this had happened unnoticed over the whole course of Operation Vestal or—the thought gave me a prickle of unease—just over the past few days. I fished out my lighter and handed it to her.
It was a cold, cloudy afternoon, dead leaves starting to build up against the walls; Cassie turned her back to the wind to light her cigarette. She was wearing makeup—mascara, a smudge of something pink on each cheek—but her face, bent over her cupped hand, still looked too pale, almost gray. “What’s going on, Rob?” she asked, as she straightened up.
My stomach plummeted. We’ve all had this excruciating conversation, but I don’t know of a single man who thinks it serves any useful purpose, nor of a single occasion when it has had a positive result, and I had been hoping against hope that Cassie would turn out to be one of the rare women who can leave it alone. “Nothing’s going on,” I said.
“Why are you being weird at me?”
I shrugged. “I’m wrecked, the case is a mess, these last few weeks have done my head in. It’s not personal.”
“Come on, Rob. It is too. You’ve been acting like I have leprosy ever since…” I felt my whole body tighten. Cassie’s voice trailed off.
“No, I haven’t,” I said. “I just need some space right now. OK?”
“I don’t even know what that means. All I know is you’re freaking out on me, and I can’t do anything about it when I don’t understand why.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw the determined set to her chin, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to dodge this one. “I’m not freaking out,” I said, hideously uncomfortable. “I just don’t want to make things any more complicated than they already are. I am very definitely not capable of starting a relationship right now, and I don’t want to give the impression—”
“Relationship?” Cassie’s eyebrows shot up; she almost laughed. “Jesus, is that what all this is about? No, Ryan, I don’t expect you to marry me and have my little babies. What the hell made you think I wanted a relationship? I just want things to go back to normal, because this is ridiculous.”
I didn’t believe her. It was a convincing performance—the quizzical look, the easy slouch of her shoulder against the wall; anyone else in the world would have been able to breathe a sigh of relief, give her an awkward hug and start back towards some variation of normal, arm in arm. But I knew Cassie’s every tell and every quirk, as well as I knew my own hands. The quickening in her breath, that gymnast’s brace of the shoulders, the infinitesimal tentative note in her voice: she was terrified, and this terrified me in turn.
“Yeah,” I said. “Fair enough.”
“You know that. Right, Rob?” That tiny shake again.
“In this situation,” I said, “I’m not sure going back to normal is a possibility. Saturday night was a big mistake, and I wish it had never happened, but it did. And we’re stuck with it.”
Cassie flicked ash onto the cobbles, but I had seen the flash of hurt on her face, stark and shocked as if I had slapped her. After a moment she said, “Well. I’m not sure it needs to be a mistake.”
“It shouldn’t have happened,” I said. My back was pressed against the wall so hard that I could feel its protrusions digging into me, straight through my suit. “It would never have happened if I hadn’t been such a mess about other things. I’m sorry, but that’s the reality of it.”
“OK,” she said, very carefully, “OK. But it doesn’t have to be a huge big deal. We’re friends, we’re close, that’s why this happened, it should just bring us a little closer; end of story.”
What she said was eminently reasonable and sensible; I knew I was the one who sounded juvenile, melodramatic, and this just wound me even tighter. But her eyes: I had seen them look like that before, across a junkie’s needle in a flat where no human being should live, and she had sounded very plausibly calm then, too. “Yeah,” I said, looking away. “Maybe. I just need some time to sort out my head. What with everything else that’s been going on.”
Cassie spread her hands. “Rob,” she said: this small clear puzzled voice, I’ll never be able to forget it. “Rob, it’s just me.”
I couldn’t hear her. I could barely see her; her face looked like a stranger’s, unreadable and risky. I wanted to be almost anywhere else in the world. “I should get back inside,” I said, throwing my cigarette away. “Can I have my lighter?”
I can’t explain why I gave so little consideration to the possibility that Cassie might have told the simple, exact truth about what she wanted from me. After all, I had never known her to lie, to me or to anyone else, and I’m not sure why I assumed with such certainty that she had suddenly started doing it now. It never once occurred to me that her wretchedness might actually be the result not of unrequited passion but of losing her closest friend—which I think I can, without deceiving myself, say that I was.
It sounds like arrogance, fancying myself some irresistible Casanova, but I truly don’t think it was that simple. You have to remember that I’d never seen Cassie like this before. I’d never seen her cry, I could count on the fingers of one hand the times I’d seen her afraid; now her eyes were puffy and bruised-looking under the clumsy defiant makeup, and there was that flinch of fear and desperate appeal in them every time she looked at me. What was I supposed to think? Rosalind’s words—thirty, biological clock, can’t afford to wait—rubbed at me like a broken tooth, and everything I’d read on the subject (tattered magazines in waiting rooms, Heather’s Cosmo skimmed blearily over breakfast) backed them up: ten ways for “thirty-something” women to make the most of their last chance, Awful Warnings on leaving child-bearing too late, and, for good measure, the odd article on how you should never sleep with your friends because it inevitably led to “feelings” on the woman’s part, fear of commitment on the man’s, tedious and unnecessary hassle all round.
I had always thought of Cassie as a million miles from these chick-lit clichés, but then (Sometimes, when you’re close to someone, you miss things), I had also thought we were the exception to every rule, and look how that had turned out. And I didn’t intend to be a cliché myself; but remember that Cassie wasn’t the only one whose life had gone haywire, I was lost and confused and shaken to the core, and I held on to the only guidelines I could find.
And then, too, I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn’t find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.
Now it seems obvious, of course, that even a strong person has weak spots and that I had hit Cassie’s full force, with all the precision of a jeweler fragmenting a stone along a flaw. She must have thought, sometimes, of her namesake, the votary branded with her god’s most inventive and sadistic curse: to tell the truth, and never to be believed.
Sam showed up at my apartment on Monday evening, late, around ten. I had just got up and made myself toast for dinner and I was already half asleep again, and when the buzzer went I had an irrational, craven flash of fear that it might be Cassie, maybe a little drunk, demanding that we sort things out once and for all. I let Heather answer. When she banged irritably on my door and said, “It’s for you, some guy called Sam,” I was so relieved that it took a moment for the surprise to kick in. Sam had never been to my place before; I hadn’t even realized he knew where it was.
I went to the door, tucking my shirt in, and listened to him clumping up the stairs. “Hi,” I said, when he reached the landing.
“Hello,” he said. I hadn’t seen him since Friday morning. He was wearing his big tweed overcoat; he needed a shave and his hair was dirty, falling in long dank streaks across his forehead.
I waited, but he didn’t offer any explanation of his presence, so I brought him into the sitting room. Heather followed us in and started talking—Hi I’m Heather, and it’s lovely to meet you, and where has Rob been hiding you all this time, he never brings his friends home, isn’t that very bold of him, and I was just watching The Simple Life, do you ever follow it, God it’s mad this year, and on and on and on. Finally our monosyllabic replies got through to her: she said, in injured tones, “Well. I suppose you boys want some privacy,” and when neither of us denied it she flounced off, giving Sam a warm smile and me a slightly chillier one.
“Sorry for bursting in on you like this,” Sam said. He looked around the room (aggressive designer sofa cushions, shelves of long-lashed porcelain animals) as if it baffled him.
“That’s all right,” I said. “Would you like a drink?” I had no idea what he was doing there. I didn’t even want to think about the intolerable possibility that it had something to do with Cassie: she wouldn’t have, I thought, surely to God she wouldn’t have asked him to have a word with me?
“Whiskey would be great.”
I found half a bottle of Jameson’s in my kitchen cupboard. When I carried the glasses back into the sitting room Sam was in an armchair, still wearing his coat, his head down and his elbows on his knees. Heather had left the TV on, with the volume off, and two identical women in orange makeup were arguing with silent hysteria about something or other; the light skittered wildly across his face, giving him a ghostly, damned look.
I switched off the TV and handed him a glass. He looked at it with something like surprise, then threw half of it back with one clumsy jerk of his wrist. It occurred to me that he might be a little drunk already. He wasn’t unsteady or slurring or anything like that, but both his movements and his voice seemed different, rough-edged and heavy.
“So,” I said inanely, “what’s the story?”
Sam took another swallow of his drink. The pole lamp beside him trapped him half in, half out of a pool of light. “You know that thing on Friday?” he said. “That tape?”
I relaxed a little. “Yes?”
“I didn’t talk to my uncle,” he said.
“No?”