Lucia

The parking garage on West 62nd cost sixty-eight dollars, which Wes discovered at the machine and said out loud, and then said again, and which he did not mention again for the rest of the night, because he had decided at the door of the garage that he was going to enjoy himself, and he did.

The opera was Lucia di Lammermoor.

Wes read the program on the way up the escalator and said, "She goes mad," and Maren said, "Yes," and he said, "And then she dies," and she said, "Yes," and he said, "Well, that's a night out."

It was, in fact, a night out.

The house was full — there were people in evening dress and people in jeans, which Maren had not expected and which reassured her in a way she resented — and the curtain went up on a set of gray stone, and the chorus came on in dark coats, and there was a woman standing at the top of the stairs with a lamp. And it was, from the first bar, the thing she had been looking for since the dance at Sanger Hill, which was not beauty but scale: the sense that a feeling could be large enough to require sixty people and an orchestra and a building, and that the feeling would not have to be explained to anybody.

Wes leaned over in the first silence and said, "Which one is she," and Maren pointed, and he said, "The one in blue," and nodded, and watched, and at the end of the first scene leaned over again and said, "Is that her brother," and she said, "That's her brother."

He tried. He honestly tried. He watched the woman in blue with the attention of a man watching a person he is worried about, and he did not understand the plot, and he did not need to, because by the second act he had stopped asking and was simply watching her face.

At the second intermission she went out to the lobby for water.

The box across the house from them — the one at the left, the second tier, where the people are close enough to the stage that they are effectively in the scene — had been empty at the beginning. It was not empty now. There were four people in it, and one of them was dancing at Sanger Hill.

She knew him before she had looked properly. It was the shape of the shoulder, and then the whole thing: Julian Praeger, four years older, in a dark suit, holding a glass, saying something to a woman with her hair up. He had not changed, or he had changed exactly as much as a man like that is allowed to change, which is to say the change had been managed.

She stood in the lobby with a plastic cup of water and felt the floor move.

It was not desire. She had had four years to understand the difference. It was the sudden unbearable proximity of two facts: that the world in which a man like that exists is a real place with an address and a garage that costs sixty-eight dollars, and that she had been in a room with it in June, and that in the intervening four years she had been in a house on Main Street with a mortgage, and then in a farmhouse with a tarp on the porch, and then in a bed for seven weeks, and none of it had been the thing.

He did not look at her. Why would he. She was a woman in the lobby with a plastic cup.

Wes came out and said, "Are you all right," and she said, "It's the crowd," and he said, "Do you want to go," and she said, "No," and then, from behind them: "Dr. Aubrey."

Nate Farrow, in a coat, with a program folded into his pocket, and a look of pure surprise which Maren understood instantly to be a lie they had both agreed to before he opened his mouth.

He said, "I didn't know you were coming."

Wes said, "She's never been. I got seats. Upper level."

"Wes," Maren said.

Nate said, "Upper level is where the sound is." And then, to Wes: "I'm here for a deposition. My firm does the county's bond work. I came up Tuesday." And then, to both of them: "Can I buy you a drink. There's a place on the corner that stays open."

They went. Wes had a beer and asked Nate about the bond work and did not follow a word of it and enjoyed himself enormously. Nate sat at an angle to the table that put Maren in the conversation without putting her in the center of it, which is a thing people learn in rooms, and which he had learned in law school, and which she noticed. At one point he said, "What did you think of the mad scene," and she said, "I thought she was the only sane person in the building," and he put his glass down and looked at her for a moment and said, "Yes," and Wes said, "See, that's the kind of thing she says," and laughed, and Nate said, "She's right."

They walked back to the garage together at midnight. Wes went ahead with the ticket. Nate, walking behind her, said, "I'm in the city Thursday nights until the end of November," and she said, "I'm in the city Thursday nights until December," and he said, "Then we're both in the city Thursday nights," and she said, "Yes," and he said, "Okay," and that was the whole arrangement, stated in nine sentences on a sidewalk on Amsterdam Avenue, in the presence of a husband twelve feet ahead of them holding a parking ticket.

It began two weeks later in a hotel on West 45th with a lobby that had been renovated into a bar.

And then it became the taxi.

This is the part people in Harrow heard about and got wrong, because what they heard was a taxi, and what it was was the closest thing to a room that two people could have in a city at eight o'clock at night when every hotel has a desk clerk with a camera and a policy about IDs, and when one of them is a woman who has been told by a farm-supply man in a dead letter not to write.

It was raining. They stood under the awning of a closed shoe store on Sixth Avenue and Nate put his hand up and a cab came out of the traffic with its light on, and they got in, and the driver turned and said, "Where to," and Nate said, "Anywhere," and the driver said, "What," and Nate said — and his voice did not change, which was the extraordinary thing — "Just drive. We'll pay the meter. Drive wherever you want."

"Twenty minutes?"

"An hour."

The driver said, "Okay," in the way taxi drivers say it, which is a way of saying I have seen this, and put the meter down, and pulled into traffic, and did not speak again for fifty-one minutes.

They went down Sixth and across Canal and up the West Side Highway with the river black on the left, and over on the 59th Street Bridge with the cables lit, and down into Queens and back through the tunnel, and the whole time the city went past outside the windows like a film of a city, and they did not speak, and when they spoke it was not about anything, and at some point on the bridge she took the hotel receipt out of her coat — the one with the room number printed at the top, the one she had folded twice and put in her pocket because she did not want it in the house — and tore it into strips, and then into smaller pieces, and rolled down the window two inches in the rain, and put her hand out.

The driver said, in the mirror, "Hey."

She said, "I'm sorry."

He said, "Littering is a hundred-dollar fine, miss," and then he said, after a moment, "Do it at the light," and at the light on Vernon Boulevard she did, and the pieces went out into the wet air and were gone behind them, and the cab turned around and took them back over the bridge into Manhattan, and dropped them at the corner where he had picked them up.

He said, "That'll be one hundred and eighty dollars."

Nate paid with a card and added a tip, and the cab pulled away, and they stood under the awning of the closed shoe store again, in the rain, and Nate said, "I have to go," and she said, "Yes," and he said, "Thursday," and she said, "Thursday," and he went down into the subway at 49th Street, and she walked the eleven blocks to the garage where the car was, and sat in it for a long time with the engine running before she drove two hours north in the dark.

Grant Tully, she had heard, was in Montana.