Not Forever

Eli Donovan saw Lily Marchetti for eleven seconds at the Meridian winter farm dinner — a charity thing Teddy Voss had organized, because Teddy considered all philanthropy a genre of party — and knew, with the horrible clarity of the healthy, that he had never once stopped loving her, and that his two years of manure, cover crops, and fence posts had been, at bottom, a two-year way of not dialing her number.

Lily had come back from the Alps certain of one thing only: that she did not want to be the kind of person Mercer had shown her she could be — abandoned, acceptable, brave in public. She had also come back with a feeling she couldn't file. So when Donovan, three weeks later, turned up at her family's house with a stick of chalk and the terror of a man about to propose for the second time to the same woman, she understood what he was doing even before he did it. He wrote, in the old childhood code she had taught him at Rockefeller Center years ago — the initial letters of the words he could not say aloud:

L — when you said no, did you mean forever?

Lily took the chalk. Her hand shook. She wrote, and wiped it out, and wrote again, and finally left standing, in her own round schoolgirl letters:

Not forever. I was a girl. Ask me again.

He asked. She said yes. And then, because no good thing in this story is allowed to arrive without a bill attached, Donovan spent his wedding eve in the same spiritual tetanus as every convert: the confession with Father Joseph, the monastery of his youth, the awful suspicion that a man who has been as arrogant as he had been had no right to happiness this clean. "What right do I have to this?" he asked the old priest.

"None," Father Joseph said placidly. "That's what grace is. It's never billing you. Stop auditing it."

They were married in a side chapel with too many Marchettis and not enough Donovans, and Lily wore her mother's veil, and Mara — uninvited, discussed, present in the room the way weather is present in a forecast — was mentioned by no one and thought of by everyone. Teddy, as best man, got magnificently drunk. Dana watched her sister marry the man she had once rejected for a faster car, and was, for one entire afternoon, happy for her, which Dana had begun to treat as a professional achievement.

Mara and Mercer had gone to Italy.

It was Mercer's idea and it was a good one: a hired palazzo outside Venice, six months where no one knew their names — the age of the internet had made anonymity almost a lost art, but money could still rent a reasonable facsimile. Mercer's back healed in the water and the walking. He fell in with a painter — Mauro, a Venetian who had painted commissioned portraits for thirty years and hated every one — and took up a brush himself, and for a season the racing driver became the kind of man who stands in front of a canal until the light changes, and he produced four paintings of the same subject, and all four were of Mara, asleep.

The Gritti picture — Mara at the window in a white chemise, the lagoon behind her neither dawn nor dusk but the held breath between — was the only true thing Mercer had ever made. Mauro told him so, and then told him the rest of it: "It's true because you're not painting her. You're painting the six months. You have maybe a year of this, my friend. There's no divorce in your country, is there? No, there isn't. So enjoy the canal."

They were happy. That has to be said plainly, because everything after depends on it: for seven months, in the most photographed age in human history, two people were genuinely, privately happy. Mara learned to cook, badly. Mercer read the entire shipping history of the Mediterranean out loud in bed. The baby, June, took her first steps on a Venetian floor with a view of the water, and Mercer cried, and Mara watched him cry and thought: I have everything. Why can I still hear the train?

Because she could. Underneath the happiness, fainter here than anywhere, there was the sound of her son's ninth birthday, of a schoolyard through a fence, of a statement about family privacy. It is the specific cruelty of her situation that the happier she was, the more it proved. A miserable wife could have told herself the marriage had simply failed. A happy exile could not.

In September, Mercer went home — the estate, the trustees, the investors who needed a driver's face at a shareholders' week — and Mara came with him, and within one dinner party at Stonebrook it was clear that Italy had been a solvent and the compound was now re-forming. The county families received Mara with a courtesy that had been refrigerated. The wives said how brave. Mercer's mother, whose social position was excavated out of old money and newer marriages, took her son aside within a week and delivered the verdict of her entire class:

"She's charming, of course. But a divorced woman is a vacancy, and a woman who cannot divorce is a storm front, Cal. Marry a girl with a clean history and keep the other one discreetly. That's what your grandfather did, and no one has ever once mentioned your grandfather."

Mercer, who had survived a crashed prototype at two hundred kilometers an hour, sat in his mother's drawing room and discovered there was a barrier he had no plan for. He did not leave Mara. He was not that story. But he understood, in that room, with the portraits of four cautious Mercers looking down, that the world had studied his rebellion and priced it.