Envy(87)

“Do. But make it a short one. I’ll be waiting.”


* * *


Maris didn’t go straight home. She had never intended to. Using her father as a pawn to delay Noah made her feel guilty, but only a little. She would never have deceived them if she weren’t desperate to rid herself of nagging doubts that had taken a tenacious hold on her.

She took a taxi downtown to the apartment in Chelsea. By the time she reached the door of the apartment, her heart was beating hard, and not because of the steep staircase. She was anxious about what she might find inside.

She unlocked the door with the key she’d had in her possession since the night of her surprise party and, remembering where the light switch was, flipped it on. The air-conditioning unit was humming softly, but otherwise the apartment was silent. She noted that the cushions on the sofa looked freshly plumped.

Moving into the kitchen, she looked into a spotless dry sink. There were no dishes in the dishwasher, not even a drinking glass. The wastebasket beneath the sink was empty, its plastic liner as pristine as when it had been placed there.

Maid service? Noah hadn’t mentioned retaining anyone to clean this apartment, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t.

Back in the living room she moved toward the room designated as Noah’s office. Hand on the doorknob, she paused and said a prayer, although she couldn’t specifically say what she was praying for. She pushed open the door.

In a single glance she took it all in, then slumped dejectedly against the doorjamb. The room looked exactly as they’d left it that night. Nothing had been disturbed or changed. There were no paper balls in the trash can, no reference books with pages marked, no notes stuck to the computer screen or scrawled on ruled legal tablets.

She knew what a writer’s work area was supposed to look like. Parker’s would have cost an obsessive-compulsive years of therapy. It was strewn with coffee-stained notes, and red pencils whose leads were worn down to nubs, and tablets filled with thoughts and diagrams and doodles, and file envelopes with curled, fraying edges, and unstable pyramids of reference material, and paper clips bent out of shape during periods of torturous concentration.

Yet if one thing were touched or moved on Parker’s desk, he would bark at the offender. He knew exactly where everything was, and he wanted it left the way he had it. Mike was forbidden to clean in the area, as though the disarray contributed to Parker’s creativity.

Noah’s writing space was immaculate. Although, upon closer inspection, Maris saw that his computer keyboard sported a fine layer of dust. The keys had never been touched.

Her heart wasn’t beating fast now. In fact it felt like a stone inside her chest as she turned off the lights and left the apartment. She conscientiously locked the door behind her, although she didn’t know why she bothered. There was absolutely nothing of value to her inside.

She exited the building and descended the front steps, lost in thought, her motions listless. She was weighted down with dread for the inevitable confrontation with Noah. When he returned from her father’s house, he would be expecting his docile wife to be waiting for him at home, eager and ready to make love to him.

That’s what she had deliberately led him to expect.

She had led him to believe that she was as moldable as warm clay, gullible, blindly accepting, and he had been easily deceived, because up until recently that’s exactly what she’d been.

He would arrive home thinking that their argument about WorldView was a forgotten episode, that she didn’t question the nature of his meeting with Howard Bancroft, that she had no reason to doubt him when he told her he had resumed writing.

Meek and mild and malleable Maris. Stupid Maris. That’s what he thought of her.

But he thought wrong.

As she reached street level, she noticed a passenger alighting from a taxi half a block away. She hadn’t expected the good fortune of finding a cab so soon and raised her hand to signal the driver.

As soon as he received his fare, he drove the short distance to where Maris stood at the curb. But she was no longer looking at the taxi. Instead she was watching the man who had alighted from it as he jogged up the steps of another brownstone, entering it with an air of familiarity, as though he belonged.

Gradually Maris lowered her arm, until then not realizing that it was still raised. She motioned the taxi driver to go on. Walking briskly, she quickly covered the distance to the other apartment building.

It was as quaint as the one she’d just left. There was no doorman or other form of security to prevent her from entering the vestibule. She checked the mailboxes. All except one were labeled with a name. Either the apartment was vacant… or the tenant in 2A received mail at another location.

Again, she climbed stairs. But it was with amazing calm that she approached the door of apartment 2A. She rapped smartly and looked directly into the peephole, knowing that it was probably being looked through from the other side.

Nadia Schuller opened the door, and the two of them stood face-to-face. She was dressed for romance, wearing only a silk wrapper, which appeared to have been hastily tied at her waist as she made her way to answer the door. She didn’t even have the decency to look alarmed or shamefaced. Her expression was one of smug amusement as she stepped back and opened the door wider.

Maris’s gaze slid past her to Noah, who was coming from a connecting room, presumably a kitchen, with a drink in each hand. He was in shirtsleeves, having wasted no time in removing his jacket and tie.