He had believed her. At seventeen, he'd had no reason to question the older woman's experience when it came to the end of love. But looking at Maia now, Leigh lost faith in his stepmother's statement. While he knew his heart wasn't breaking, the mere sight of Maia Mor-land had cracked something inside of him.
~~~
At the wide, almost laughably long table, Leigh was seated directly across from Maia. It would be more accurate to say that Maia was seated, quite on purpose, next to the guest of honor, with Leigh carelessly placed between Kathleen's boss and the wife of a German banker. The banker himself was several seats away, near the head of the table, across from Kathleen and next to the party's host. Kathleen's boss, somewhat understandably, couldn't be bothered with Leigh, but the banker's wife was more than happy to talk about a recent shooting on a college campus.
She had been reading in the American papers that people thought each student on campus should have been armed. That it was the belief of the Americans in charge, that more guns would mean less shooting. Could this be right?
Leigh sighed, not really wanting to talk about gun laws, but he tried explaining about the NRA and how restrictions differed from state to state. If this party had taken place two weeks before, he would have been in a conversation about the behavior of (and outfits worn by) British sailors released from Iranian captivity.
The conversation at parties was always the same; only the details were different.
The banker's wife, Liesl Klein, spoke at some length about guns and violence, making a variety of obvious points, which allowed Leigh to listen without paying much attention. He was watching and listening to Maia, who was having an involved conversation with the guest of honor, a Ms. Anne Rudling. Anne Rudling was at the party in order to raise money for a foundation that collected the forensic evidence necessary to prosecute war crimes.
No, that was wrong. The foundation fundraised for organizations that did the forensic collecting needed by and for tribunals.
Leigh thought of Franklin and Kevin Staines's mother, who had worked for a fundraising firm. Once Oliver Lexham and his friends went off to college, had Mrs. Staines gone back to work? Franklin and Millie were still friends, Leigh knew, but the status of that friendship was in constant flux between romantic and platonic. Leigh dragged his mind back to the table. It was clear, based on what he overheard, that Josh Pierce's money was the target, and it explained Maia's proximity to Ms. Rudling. Josh had been scheduled to attend and had had to send an associate to accompany Maia at the last minute.
Leigh ate his salad, and the fish course, and then the braised veal, all served by a staff of five. He registered that Maia Morland, although surrounded by people, was eating her entire meal with ease. He watched her throat to check; no problems swallowing.
He was entirely unprepared to be so close to her—if he'd wanted, he could have easily put his foot on hers—and yet so unable to reach for her. He had thought the only visual memories left from that year were the bloody socks, paper tape on his room's crown molding, and a romance novel lying in a rain puddle. But it turned out that his body's silent space had absorbed much more: the times he'd breathed in against her skin, seen her smile, or traced his hands over her burn marks, secure in the knowledge that he would never let harm befall her again.
Leigh was careful to keep an eye on how often he let the staff fill his wineglass. Maia, he noticed, put her hand over her glass and shook her head no whenever anyone offered her wine. As Anne Rudling turned to a conversation with the man on her left, Maia caught Leigh looking as she, once again, refused some wine.
She leaned across the table and beckoned with her finger for Leigh to do the same.
"I always tell people I'm on antibiotics," she said, with an easy smile, "but you'll be glad to know that I have a no-drinking rule when I'm going to be around men I don't trust."
Leigh allowed himself a quick glance around the table. "Who here don't you trust?"
"In this town?" she asked him, her whisper full of mirth and disbelief. "Every man I meet."
"You look beautiful," he whispered back, because it was true, and because if he couldn't touch her he needed some way to reach her, and You look beautiful seemed safer than It's killing me to look at you.
"Don't be ridiculous," Maia said.
"Okay," he said. "But you do."
"Well, thanks," she said, and sat back down in her chair.
Leigh saw her turn to the man on her right, but before Maia had a chance to start talking, Leigh leaned in and asked him, "Do you think you can explain how over thirty students died in a shooting spree? I'm doing a terrible job."
The man took the bait and began talking to Liesl Klein.
With ease and quickness, the banker's wife was guided away from talking about the sad, blighted campus and into a conversation about the significance of six Shiite cabinet ministers resigning from the Iraqi government. Leigh was awed and impressed at the verbal dexterity it had taken. Although, maybe it had simply required some attention or effort. All of his attention was currently taken up in debating the wisdom of pointing out to Maia that when they first met, the war had barely started. The past was, perhaps, not a great conversation starter with a girl who had been his girlfriend during the year she was ... whatever it was she had decided happened to her.
Since she hadn't gone to court, Maia could call it whatever she wanted and no legal decision would contradict her. While Leigh was casting around for something to say to her that didn't include the words It's killing me, Maia leaned across the table again and said, "I hear you're going to Senegal."
"Yeah, right after I graduate."
"You'll be a great journalist," she said. "I've never met anyone as focused on details as you."
"Well, that remains to be seen," he said.
"Everything remains to be seen," Maia said, and when she smiled a dimple on the right side of her face flashed out at him.
Had that always been there? Had Leigh forgotten how her face looked when she was happy? Had he simply never noticed it? He felt himself growing warm under his shirt and hoped he wasn't visibly flushed.
"I just meant that it was almost impossible to find a job," he said.
Leigh, after sending his résumé and clippings to every paper with a mailing address, interviewed with seven of them; but with no offers on the horizon, he thought he was going to have to look outside of journalism for a paycheck. Then, on Pete's recommendation, Leigh applied to a few places abroad—wire services, mostly—stressing that he could speak French and, for the most part, get by in Spanish. CNBC was launching an African bureau and hired him as a stringer to file stories on West African economic and business issues.
"With that lined up," he told Maia, "I begged this French newspaper in Dakar to hire me. And they did."
"Millie said you were e-mailing her in French so as to practice."
"You talk to Millie?"
But of course she did. How did he think Maia had found out about his job in Senegal? Well, he hadn't thought, actually. And, in four years, he'd always been careful not to mention Maia to his sister. Millie had been to visit him the year he'd spent in Montana, working for the Missoulian, and to Chicago during the two years into which he'd crammed three and a half years of college. Millie had been to see him several times here in the city when he'd transferred to Columbia.
Leigh, if asked, would have said he knew his sister really well. And yet all this time while he was floundering around, Millie had remained friends with the one woman he most desired to talk to, hear from, or see.
"I felt like I owed her, you know, to stay in touch," Maia said. "She loved me like I walked on water."
"I loved you like that," Leigh said, glad they were both whispering. "I would have done anything to stay in touch with you."
To be heard at this table, you either had to lean in and whisper or make everything you said a kind of pronouncement, and she whispered back, "No, you loved me like you walked on water."
It was
like being hit, and Leigh looked down so that no one could see the mark on his face. His hands, which were braced on top of the tablecloth, were very close to Maia's. Her nails were polished, no sign that she had ever bit her cuticles until they bled. Their noses were almost touching as they talked, neither of them wanting to risk being overheard.
Instead, they were looked at and puzzled over.
"What are you two discussing so intently down there?" the host asked. "How to stop the war?"
The conversation about Iraqi ministers had turned into the inevitable one about the war and had spread across the table to everyone but Leigh and Maia.
"It's not a question of stopping," Maia said, sitting back into her chair, her eyes still on Leigh. "It's how to get out."
"That's what you were talking about?" Anne Rudling asked. "You weren't catching up on everything since high school?"
"Maia, you were in high school with him?" the host asked. "I remember your graduation as being all girls."
Leigh tried to remember his name. Andrew? Anthony? Josh Pierce's business partner, who had held down the fort when Josh was in prison. Anthony. Anthony Kearn.
"From the school before that," Maia said. "We were friends."
"I was her boyfriend," Leigh said, still furious over her comment about how he had loved her.
Let her deny it. Go ahead. She couldn't hurt him.
A murmur of how sweet and one God, I'm old, my high school boyfriend has five kids ran across the table. Leigh's statement of fact did have the one benefit of chasing exit strategy proposals out of the general conversation.
"Oh, he was more than my boyfriend," Maia said, smiling as if she had both a secret and a great prize to give away. "Leigh Hunter is one of the last, great gentlemen."
"Oh, my God," Leigh heard Kathleen Tahoe say. "You're that Maia."
"I am," Maia said, looking around to check.
Yes, she had a captive table. All eyes were on her.
"Some boys at our school were rather unkind to me," Maia said, in a bright, hard voice. "And Leigh put one of them in the hospital. My hero."
She almost pulled it off—the transformation of the mess unleashed by Preston, Kevin, and Oliver into a throwaway story—and in a few more years, Leigh had no doubt that she would be even better at presenting it as something that had never touched her. But not yet. Some softening in her voice or a dullness in her eyes gave her away, and the guests were silent, the way the cafeteria had been in the moments after Preston Gavenlock's body went still.
Something bad had happened to Maia Morland, and in the silence, the guests were trying to gauge it.
"My honor was restored to me," she said. "It was all very sweet."
That fixed any suspicion that she was not okay, and conversation rose up, with Liesl Klein asking Leigh about the American universities he had gone to and how safe he had felt. He told her that he had lived in a terrible neighborhood in Chicago but had always felt safe.
"I grew up in New York," he said. "Safety is all relative."
How to explain to her about how safe his parents had kept him? Ever since the war had started, Leigh had been young, strong, and in possession of perfect eyesight, yet the most danger he was ever in was the kind everyone faced when they got on the subway.
chapter twenty-seven
engraved
After a decent interval, as dessert, brandy, and espresso were served back in the living room, Leigh slipped into the bathroom across from the coat closet in the apartment's massive front hall. The apartment where he'd lived with Lillian would fit easily into the entrance area. But real estate was not on his mind, and Leigh dug his cell phone out from a pocket of his suit's confusing array of them.
Millie answered right away. She never left the house on Thursdays, recording and then watching her favorite TV show so she could fast-forward over the commercials. They exchanged hellos; she told him what was happening to all the characters and asked about his French. He managed to talk as much as was possible while in a bathroom full of embroidered hand towels and light fixtures with shades.
"Hey, Mill, you remember that romance?" he managed to get out over the sound of her blowing on her fingernails (she'd been painting them when he called).
"Which one?" she asked cheerfully. "I have like a thousand up in the attic. It's weird how I can never throw any of them out. I should donate or someth—"
"The one you were writing," he said. "The year I lived with you."
"Oh, yeah," she said. "The year Dad died."
His year marked by Maia was Millie's marked by Seth Davis. It was unbelievable that he had to be reminded of that. God, he could really be a thoughtless prick. Which he already knew, and hardly had to call his sister to discover.
"Did you ever finish it?" Leigh asked. "You know, writing it?"
"No, I don't think I did," Maia said. "It's hard to write a romance. Everyone thinks it should be easy because they're so obvious, but it's way hard to make them good."
"Well, do you remember what was going to happen?" he asked, ashamed to be asking, humiliated that he remembered the names Dexter Clayton and Meredith Franck. "How it ended?"
"Sure, of course I do," Millie said. "He saved her, he killed the evil earl, who was holding her captive for her money—not a good plot, but easy. And then, I guess they got married and lived happily ever after."
Someone knocked on the bathroom door, making Leigh turn a faucet on.
"You guess?" he asked.
"Well, that's how they all end," Millie said.
He turned on the other faucet, looking in the mirror as the tears, which he had held back on the day Maia left Calvert Park, fought their way out.
"Leigh, are you okay? You sound like an echo."
"I'm in the bathroom," he told her.
"I'm fine," he added.
There wasn't time to let them all cry out, so Leigh threw water on his face, pressed one of the linen towels against his eyes, and rejoined the party.
~~~
When it was time to leave, he went to get Kathleen's coat and found Maia waiting for him by the closet.
"I didn't mean that," she said, moving away from the door. "What I said about how you loved me."
The chandelier's dim light cast shadows from her earrings, giving him reason to stare at her neck.
"You might have meant it," he said. "And you're probably right. I did love you like that."
He pulled Kathleen's coat out from the hordes of black cashmeres. God, couldn't anyone own a regular coat? Like his fake tweedy one that had seen him through countless cold Chicago nights. Was he really standing less than a foot from Maia Morland, thinking about coats and the weather?
"You made me feel like I walked on water," Leigh said. "No girl—no woman—has done that since."
He should have stuck with the weather, a thought he had no time to finish, because he said, "But I also loved you. Just you, with all your crazy, amazing crap. I loved you more than I wanted to have sex."
Leigh paused, giving her time to answer or, more likely, walk away. But she was still, as if waiting.
"And I was seventeen, when sex is pretty much all that matters," he said, "so you think about that before you pass off what happened as a goddamn funny story about your high school boyfriend who failed to be a hero."
"Leigh," she said, her hand going up to his face and brushing something away.
"Or a gentleman," he said, his heart frozen at her touch, his body less so. "Or however you decide to tell it."
"I'm sorry ... it was an accident we met like this. I had no idea it would be so..."
"Difficult," he said, relieved that he felt no bitterness at how painful it was to see her.
Maia pointed to the coat. "Is she your girlfriend?"
"No, she's Pete's sister," Leigh said. "Kathleen Tahoe. She's my step-aunt."
"They got married?" Maia asked. "That's so great. Your mother still writes as Lillian Hunter, so I wasn't sure. And, you know, there's a limit to what Millie will tel
l me. She guards you, and so ... so I don't ask much."
Maia began to rummage through her purse. Small, covered in velvet and silver. From it she took a card case and a thin pen she had to twist open.
"I'm going to do something stupid," she said. "Which means it's up to you to be smart."
She wrote on the back of a card and then handed it to him.
"The number on the front is Josh's office, but the e-mail is mine," she said. "I traveled for a few years before starting college, and he had them made for me."
Leigh studied the engraved writing on the card in his hand.
"My cell's on the back," she said. "You do the smart thing, and don't call me."
"Don't you ever wonder?" he asked her. "Don't you wish you knew what it would have been like with us?"
He supposed he did mean sex. Being twenty-one hadn't really changed how much it mattered, but he also meant all the other parts as well. The ways she had loved him, the ways he'd tried to love her.
"Every day," she said. "I think about it every day."
Maia rose up onto her toes, one hand on his arm, and kissed him. Twice—one kiss on each side of his face.
A man who knew, among other things, what he wanted would know what to do with this card. Such a man would either throw it out or program the number into his speed dial.
Leigh put the card in his wallet. It wouldn't matter if he called her. They might run into each other or not. Millie might remain a conduit of information, but even Millie would grow out of the crush she'd formed in the months before her father died.
He wouldn't say goodbye to Maia now, just as he hadn't four years ago. It turned out that Janet was right. His heart couldn't break again over Maia Morland, but the crack she had created still ached. Leigh saw that he would spend his life saying farewell to Maia, the way one might to a childhood dream.
If he was lucky, he'd come to see it clearly. And that ache would no longer be for a first love or a lost one, but for a memory, full of pleasure and regret.
* * *
acknowledgments
After the Moment Page 18