High Stakes

She met Reed Savoie at a table in the back room of a club on St. Charles in January, at a game she had gone to because Camille's husband Marc had mentioned it and because it was a thing people did in January.

He was thirty-eight, and he played cards for a living, which is a sentence that sounds like a boast and was, in his case, closer to a job description: he played the big cash games in the back, he had a stake in two bars, he dressed better than the men who had real jobs, and he had the particular stillness of someone whose income depends on not needing anything. He was introduced as Reed, don't play against him, and he said, "Don't play against me," and smiled in a way that made it a joke and not a joke.

He was not handsome. He had a face that had been lived in and he knew it and he used it, and what he had — what Marin recognized in him within a quarter of an hour — was the ability to pay attention to a woman without wanting anything from her, which was, it turned out, the single most seductive thing in the world.

He began to appear. At the studio, with coffee. At the little table at the coffee place on Prytania with a newspaper he was not reading. In the aisle at the grocery on a Tuesday. He never called first and he never asked her to account for herself, and he never once, in six weeks, said anything about her marriage.

In February, after the ball she did not attend, she went to his apartment on Camp Street.

She did not write that sentence down anywhere, which was the only discipline she applied to it. There was no decision and there was no illusion: she knew exactly what it was and what it was not. It was not love. It was not even mostly desire. What it was, was the discovery that her body — which had for years been a thing that got sunburned and slept and produced children and sat through dinners — was capable of a private, entirely selfish joy that had nothing to do with anyone's approval, and that the discovery had happened in a room with a man who would never love her because he had no talent for it, and that she did not care, and that this not-caring was the most frightening part of the whole business.

He said once, afterward, "You're somewhere else."

"Yes."

"With him?"

"No," she said, and it was true, and it was the cruellest thing she said that winter.

Wyatt came to tell her about Mexico on a Wednesday.

He had been back on the island since September, and had come to the city three times, and had called her eleven, and none of those eleven calls had been a good idea. He stood in the front hall of the house on Esplanade with his cap in his hands like a man delivering bad news to a widow and said he had been offered a job — a consulting thing, a hotel group, six months, maybe longer — in Mérida.

"Six months."

"Maybe longer."

She looked at him. She was aware of standing in her own front hall with a man who had spent a summer teaching her to swim and who had, in the course of that summer, said approximately nothing that could be quoted, and who was now leaving the country because of it, and who would never, in his life, be able to admit that that was why.

"When?"

"March."

"Say it," she said.

He looked at the floor. He said, "I can't stay here and——" and stopped, and then said, "Marin, please," and she understood that this was the closest he would ever come, and that asking him for more would be like asking a dog to sing.

He went in March.

And here is the thing about the modern world, which nobody in the old novels had to solve: he did not vanish. There is no vanishing. There was a phone in his pocket in Mérida and a phone in her hand on Esplanade and the distance between them was an app that worked perfectly. He texted the first week. She answered. He texted the second week and she answered in two words because she was proud, and he answered in one, and after that the thread became a thing that sat at the bottom of her screen like a tooth she could not stop touching with her tongue. Neither of them stopped. Neither of them began.

"Call him," Camille said once, gently.

"I called him eleven times last summer."

"That was last summer."

"I know what it was," Marin said.