I'd Give Anything(4)

Then, Harris said—and I know that there can be degrees of empty because his was the emptiest voice I had ever heard—Harris said, “It wasn’t an affair.”



It was only later that night that I wondered what else they’d known, those canny hands of mine. About the girl, eighteen years old? About the months of emails and texts, thick and furious and all skirting the edge, the very, very thin edge of sordid? Did they know the exact shade of blond? The depth of my husband’s flattered foolishness? The precise angle and rate at which he fell from grace? I wondered if my hands held inside them, even then, as I sat inside the fogging windows of my car in the parking lot of Devonshire Market, the word that Harris and I would never use but that his boss had sicced on Harris just that morning and would again, his boss and probably everyone else we knew, a long, thin, hissing snake of a word: obsession.



Her name was Cressida Wall, a striking name for anyone, but particularly for a high school senior, although I didn’t know when I heard her name that Cressida Wall was still in high school, since it wasn’t until later in our conversation that Harris coughed up her age. Until that point, he had called her “a woman from work.” I didn’t even immediately absorb how striking a name Cressida Wall was because the noteworthiness of the name paled in comparison to the noteworthiness of Harris’s tone when he spoke it to me for the first time. As we sat in our yard, at one end of the long teak dining table that we’d bought last summer, each ensconced in our own beautiful black-and-white rattan French bistro chair, my forty-five-year-old pharmaceutical company vice president husband said, “I was having a business lunch at the Vedge Table with this woman from work when Dale Pinckney spotted us and misconstrued what he was seeing.” He paused. “Her name is Cressida Wall.”

Just like that. All by itself. Present tense. Not casually folded into the first sentence, “This woman from work, Cressida Wall,” but delivered in the form of an announcement. Except that announcements are meant for the people listening, and when Harris said the girl’s name, his gaze went shuttered and inward; his voice turned private and deliberate. He sat there in our yard, with our southern magnolia and almost-bare sugar maple (the few unraked leaves like red handprints on the grass) and the raised flower beds full of loam (once chocolaty, now chalky) and the rows of hydrangeas (faded to magenta and rust) along the fence, sat there with all those carefully tended pieces of our life—our life and Avery’s life—bearing witness, and he didn’t so much speak the syllables of the girl’s name as light each one like a candle: Cres, Sid, Ah, Wall.

“Dale Pinckney is an idiot,” I said.

Harris looked down at his big square hands, which were pressed together, prayer-fashion, on the tabletop. “He thought we were holding hands across the table.”

When Harris said this, he shifted his hands so that the fingers interlocked.

Oh, Harris, for the love of God.

“But he was wrong,” I prompted.

Harris looked at me, as if he’d forgotten I was there.

“Oh. Well, yes. I mean no. We were holding hands, I guess, but—”

“Momentarily?”

“Yes. Momentarily. At the moment that Dale saw us.”

“Like an encouraging squeeze,” I supplied.

Harris nodded, uncertainly.

“Because she works for you, right? And she’s been doing a good job.”

Harris’s eyes lit up. “Ah, yeah, a hell of a job! Cressida has been doing great work, really exceptional work. She’s gifted in a way that you just don’t see very often, with a real instinct for marketing. Normally, we don’t keep interns on after the summer ends, but she is so remarkable that I took a special interest.”

Really, Harris, did you? Because I never would’ve guessed.

“You mentored her,” I said, encouragingly. “That’s so like you.”

Harris smiled down at his interlocked hands.

It was only then that I realized what he’d said.

“Did you say ‘intern’?” I asked. My heart broke into a gallop. Silently, I told my hands that if they began shaking again, I would have them surgically removed at the first opportunity.

Harris’s smile switched off, and his eyes met mine.

“You’re saying that this Wall person is a college student? Because it seems to me that you just called her a woman.”

Always prone to dry-mouth, particularly in times of stress, Harris swallowed. “Our interns must be at least eighteen,” he said.

“So you called her a woman because, being over eighteen, she is technically an adult?”

“Cressida is an adult!” When he said this, Harris’s voice got louder; his cheeks reddened.

“An adult who is actually a college kid,” I said.

Harris’s face had always been the sort that changes color quickly, like a mood ring. It was one of the many reasons he was a terrible liar and poker player. Now, in an instant, he paled.

“A high school senior,” he said. “But old for her grade.”

I dropped my face into my hands. “Oh, Harris.”

“We usually hire college kids, but we made an exception.”

“Let me guess,” I said, from inside my hands. “Because she was so exceptional.”

“She was.”