Watkins Glen

Grant Callahan — Senator Callahan on the stationery, "the Machine" in the press, Grant to no one — was a man who had converted his entire personality into a career with the thoroughness of a company converting to solar. He was not stupid. He was not cruel, exactly. He was a machine for the production of respectability, and like all machines he was innocent of his own exhaust.

He met his wife at Union Station with a kiss on the cheek and his mind already in the markup. "The education bill," he said in the car. "Harker is flipping on title funding. I need you at the Hopkins dinner Thursday. You were luminous at the last one." Luminous. Mara had a sudden, blinding picture of the gala, of Mercer saying her name, and felt herself blush like a girl, and hated Mercer for it, and hated herself more.

She did not fall in love that week. She did something more dangerous: she stopped pretending the possibility was closed.

Mercer came to Washington "for meetings" twice in the next month, a sentence that fooled no one, least of all Bianca Tate, whose downtown penthouse had replaced the salon as the city's premier venue for watching married women come apart in real time. Bianca collected other people's affairs the way other people collect first editions: lovingly, and with an eye to condition.

"Have you seen her?" she asked Mercer, glancing at Mara across the room. "Everyone's noticed, you know. Everyone. The only person in this town who doesn't know is Grant, and that's because he's the only person in America who reads no news about himself that isn't polling."

"Nothing has happened," Mercer said.

"Nothing," Bianca agreed warmly. "It's always nothing, right up until it's the only thing anyone talks about. Look at her, darling. Look at her looking at the door."

Mara was looking at the door. In a moment Mercer would come through it, and the room would do what rooms do — politely, collectively, without a word — look away.

Lily fell ill in February, which is what heartbreak is called when it happens to girls whose mothers can afford clinics. The doctors in New York used the word adjustment. Lily's mother, who had diagnosed Mercer as the disease, took her daughter to a famous clinic in the Alps, where the cure consisted of snow, silence, and an impossible Swedish regimen of rest, and where Lily met Vera — Clara — a quiet American girl with a congenital heart condition who was kind to everyone and in love with no one's future.

"Why did he choose her?" Lily asked Clara once, on the balcony, in the white cold, hating herself for asking and unable not to. "She's not — we're the same person, almost. I'm younger."

"Maybe he didn't choose," Clara said, winding her scarf. "Maybe he just found out which one of you he couldn't stop looking at. That's not a choice, Lily. It's more like an allergy." It was the kindest thing anyone said to her that year, and it did not help at all.

The race was at Watkins Glen, in May.

Mercer Racing ran an experimental prototype in the endurance class — a low electric howl of a car the team called Fury, because Mercer liked the superstition of it, the old horsemen's habit of naming the thing you'll one day be destroyed by. Mara had promised not to come. She came. She told herself it was because Senator Callahan's campaign needed photographs of the family being normal at a public event, and in the paddock she stood beside her husband in pearl gray, correct as a verdict, while a hundred cameras made the image that would run above the fold the day everything ended: the Senator's wife, smiling, beautiful, watching another man's car come down the straight at two hundred kilometers an hour.

She had begged Mercer, the night before, not to drive the double stint. "Promise me," she'd said, and heard, with a kind of horror, how far past friendship her voice had already traveled. "It's dangerous and it's unnecessary and I have a terrible feeling."

"You sound like a fortune-teller," he said, delighted. "I'm good, Mara. I've never felt better."

On lap 119, in the rain that everyone had said would hold off, Fury twitched at the apex of the esses — a gust, a cold tire, a millimeter — and went into the barrier backwards with a noise like the world's largest door closing.

Mara was on her feet before the wreckage stopped moving. She was running along the fence, past the marshals, past her husband's aide calling her name, and when the extraction crew pulled Mercer — alive, bloody, cursing, a fractured vertebra and his season over — out of the car, it was Mara's face, not his mechanic's, not his mother's, that the long lens found first.

She stood in front of the whole grandstand with her composure in pieces on the asphalt, and Senator Callahan, arriving late and correct, watched his wife weep for another man in front of forty thousand witnesses and a television audience, and understood, with the cold click of a machine registering a fault, that his life had developed a problem the polling could not fix.

That night, in the hotel, she told him.

She had planned dignity: the minimum of facts, delivered without heat. What came out instead — sitting on the edge of a hotel bed with her shoes still on, forty miles from the man's hospital — was the plain, naked, unforgivable truth. "I love him. I'm his mistress, if you want the word. I know what I am. I can't — Grant, I can't go on pretending. You can hate me. I'll take everything, I'll sign anything. I just can't live inside the lie anymore, because I've tried, and the lie has your face on it, and I'm suffocating."

The Senator was quiet for a long time. Then he stood, straightened his jacket, and answered with the sentence that would run through the rest of her life like a nail through a photograph.

"I asked," he said, "for one thing. Appearances. Keep the appearances, and everything else — your feelings, your love — is your own business, conducted discreetly, and I will not inquire. You will not be leaving this marriage, Mara. You will be leaving the impression of it, and I will not permit that, because the destruction of a public marriage at this moment is the destruction of my work, and my work," he said, with the first honest passion of his life, "is the only immortality available to people like us. Sleep well."

He left for the airport at six. She lay awake listening to the highway, understanding that she had been married for fourteen years to a man who would rather be lied to beautifully than told the truth once.