“Are you really doing this?” he asked.
I ignored the interruption. “—but I think that you should, um, consider that the women you’re watching are people, with their own inner lives, and by perpetuating the exchange of female sexuality for money, you’re undermining the—the ability of women to meaningfully transform the accepted gendered behavioral binary.” I was babbling now, parroting things that Sadie had said to me without really understanding them. I hoped it was coherent enough that Carter wouldn’t see through my desperate verbal fumbling.
Carter folded his arms across his chest. “The gendered behavioral binary,” he repeated.
I nodded, deciding it was probably best if I didn’t say anything else.
“I suppose it makes sense you would think that,” he said. “I’m at the club a lot, after all. And I did tell you—” He stopped, and sighed. “I shouldn’t tell you this,” he said. “Please understand that if you breathe a word about it to anyone, you’ll be undoing several years of hard work on the part of many people.”
I swallowed. I didn’t know what he was going to tell me, but it sounded serious. “I understand.”
“I’m helping federal prosecutors build a case against Richard Hackett. He won’t meet with me anywhere except the club; he’s paranoid, thinks he’s being bugged. Well, he is, but he doesn’t have any proof of it.” He sighed again, and drew one hand over his face. “So that’s why I’m at the club all the time. Not, as you seem to think, because I enjoy exploiting women.”
“That’s not what I think,” I said, even though that was, in fact, pretty much what I had said to him. I decided that misdirection was the best tactic. “Who’s Richard Hackett?”
“You’ve met him. He’s the one who likes fingering the dancers,” Carter said.
His words made me blush, but I knew, then, who he was talking about. “You’re building a case?”
“Securities fraud,” he said. “Mainly insider trading.” He shook his head. “Men who have so much money that they can’t think about anything but making more.”
“But not you,” I said, almost a question. “You think about other things.”
Our eyes met. His gaze, so clear and direct, sent an electric current running down my spine. “I think about other things,” he agreed.
He was a better man than I deserved. I had known it instinctively since the first night I met him; and now I had the evidence, more than I could have asked for, and it only served to strengthen my certainty that I had to cut him loose. I was nobody, a cocktail waitress with a high school diploma. He was going to be President.
I felt hollowed out, like I had been scooped empty, every organ and hope and memory lifted clean out of me.
I said, “I’m sorry. I just can’t.”
He must have sensed the finality in my voice, because he nodded, lips compressed into a thin line, and buttoned his coat.
He didn’t belong in my world, and I didn’t belong in his.
Chapter 10
Life after Carter was very quiet.
Without really meaning to, I began dividing my internal chronology into two eras: Before Carter and After Carter. It was a terrible idea, because it constantly reminded me of him and of what I’d lost. But by the time I realized what I was doing, it was too late.
Before Carter, I’d been a quiet, hard-working nobody, a silent mouse of a person, grinding through week after week and year after year of a dull, meaningless existence. But I hadn’t known it. It was just the way things were.
After Carter, I knew it.
It was hard to get up in the afternoon and go to work, with nothing to look forward to except years of loneliness and drudgery.
Maybe that was a little dramatic.
I felt dramatic, though. I felt like the heroine in a Romantic tragedy. I wanted to put on a long white dress and amble across the rain-drenched moors. I would catch a fever and waste elegantly away before I finally expired, in a heart-rending scene near the end of the novel.
Sadie was probably right: I read too many books.
I spent Thanksgiving with Sadie and her boyfriend, clustered around the table in Sadie’s tiny apartment. I wondered what Carter was doing. He was probably at his mother’s penthouse on the Upper East Side, eating a turducken and drinking expensive wine and laughing. He had only mentioned his mother to me once, but his affection for her had been obvious.
I hoped he was happy.
I wasn’t, and couldn’t imagine that I ever would be again.
I missed him all the time.
Work was no escape. I kept thinking I would turn around and see him there, looking at me from across the room, lifting his chin to let me know he wanted a drink. I thought I saw him, once, from behind, but then he turned and it wasn’t him at all, just some man wearing a suit.