Locust Lane(15)

Cruel questions, born of desperation. And futile, as well.

“Christopher—talk to me!”

But he simply sat there, sinking deeper into some inexpressible torment. Michel finally backed off. Confrontation clearly wasn’t working. The boy was out on his feet. He needed to sleep. So Michel sent him to his room after ordering him to stay in the house until he got back from Papillon. Michel would call school with an excuse. They’d talk the moment he returned, and silence and shrugs would no longer be acceptable.

It was a girl. It had to be. That would explain why Christopher had become so edgy and secretive of late. Michel had suspected that there was somebody for the past few weeks, even though Christopher said nothing about it. The math just didn’t add up. There were Jack and Hannah and Christopher. There needed to be one more. There needed to be a girl.

Time and again, he’d been tempted to challenge his son about his moody distraction. But that was difficult when Michel was hiding something of his own. How could he advise openness when he was secretly sleeping with another man’s wife? How could he speak to his son about right and wrong when he himself was sinning? Perhaps Christopher knew. There’d been a chance sighting, an overheard conversation. Although it was more likely that he felt his father’s hypocrisy in his bones. All those lessons about right and wrong were lies. You could be secretive and evasive, after all. You could let yourself be ruled by irrationality and lust.

Now, as he labored over blanquette de veau and fattoush and the sole, Michel understood that it all came back to Alice. The matter of Alice. Until that situation was resolved, it would be impossible for him to deal with his son. Or anything else. And that wasn’t going to happen by avoiding her. Her unexpected arrival at the restaurant today made that clear. A woman like Alice wouldn’t just disappear.

He still couldn’t understand how he’d let things go this far. He wasn’t looking for a lover. She was there, suddenly, and things began to happen that neither of them could control. For the first time since Maryam’s death, emotion ruled him. And it had been good. Better than good. It would be a lie to say otherwise. They laughed together. When was the last time he’d laughed? And the sex, the abandonment. It was sacrilege to say it, but it had never been like this with his wife.

But it couldn’t last. It would run its course; the flames would burn out. He knew it and he thought she’d known it as well. But then, four nights ago, she’d made her proposal. Divorce. And not just divorce, but one that would allow him to realize a dream he’d had since he was a young man. But it was wrong, to take another man’s wife and money. Wrong to destroy a marriage, even one as unhappy as hers.

He’d said nothing at the time, even though the answer was obviously no. He told himself he wasn’t saying it because he didn’t want to hurt her. But in truth, he was deeply tempted by the prospect of being with her, fully and without secrets. In his heart, he didn’t want to lose her. He didn’t want to go back to being the man he was before meeting her, his empty days following each other like ants, dutifully building a colony without knowing why. The loneliness would be even worse this time, with his son starting college. He wasn’t sure he could bear it.

But still, it was wrong. Not in the burn-in-hell sense he was taught as a little boy. He’d abandoned all of that after his wife took her last breath. And yet this was still wrong, cheating and sneaking around and now, possibly, taking another man’s money. No matter what he and Alice did after they stepped out of the shadows, the original sin, the stain and the stink of it, would still be there for his neighbors and his customers and his son to see and smell.

The rush ended. The restaurant emptied. Alice was long gone; Sofia had left for her break. He checked his phone to see if there were any messages from his son. Nothing. He was still asleep. There was nothing from Alice either, which he supposed was good as well. Amid the usual spam and work matters, he saw a lockdown notification for the high school that had arrived a couple of hours ago, followed by news that it had just been lifted. Michel wouldn’t have been particularly concerned even if his son had been there. Americans and their paranoia. If people had been this sensitive when he was a boy in Beirut, he’d have never been allowed out of his house. No one would have. Although maybe that would have been a good thing.

He spent an hour prepping dinner and dealing with deliveries, then headed home. This was not his normal practice—he usually stayed at the restaurant straight through dinner. Working or, recently, seeing her. As he drove across town, a familiar, nagging feeling settled over him. It was something he’d experience from time to time, ever since he moved here almost four years ago. A sense that there was something not quite right about his new hometown. He knew it was irrational. Emerson was a perfect place to live. There was little crime and no litter, and traffic would only snarl briefly when school was letting out. There was money—a lot of it—but you never really saw it, certainly not like you did in the cities. You felt it, like a cooling breeze, a reassuring hand. And besides, Michel had inhabited fine restaurants his whole life. He moved among the rich without friction. The town was white, yes, but not exclusively. There were Blacks and Chinese and Arabs and Latinos. And in the morning they, too, emerged from their million-dollar houses and piled into their Suburbans to take their beloved children to the beautiful shining schools; firing up their German sedans to head off to the hospitals and banks and law firms where they worked.