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       10

      The big house behind the gated wall at the end of Guilderland Road had required significant repairs at the time of purchase, mainly to the roof and the wraparound porch, and Mitchell’s current business trip had seemed to all parties an advantageous period in which to get as much done as possible. Perhaps rashly, Willy had supported this schedule, thinking that she would be able to keep an eye on things while she got a feel for the house she was going to share with her new husband. Now, as she drove through the gate to what might almost have been a construction site, Willy wished she had never agreed to camp out in the house while Mitchell cruised around Europe.

      Two pickup trucks bristling with ladders and lengths of lumber stood on the patchy, soon-to-be-revitalized grass near the curving gravel drive. Short rows of roofing tiles lay near a tall ladder leaning against the left side of the house. A lot more lumber had been piled up on the far side of the house, and men with carpenter’s belts roamed across the roof and beneath the porch, hammering as they went. The branches of a Japanese maple half-obscured a third pickup. It belonged to the Santolini brothers, whom Mitchell had hired to doctor his property’s extensive trees, initially by hacking away the thick foliage that had grown up around them. Unlike Dellray Contractors—whose small army of worker ants had arrived in the other pickups—the Santolini brothers had only two employees, themselves. The day before, Willy had glanced out the kitchen window just in time to see Rocky Santolini smashing Vincent Santolini’s head into the trunk of the oak tree that dominated the great sweep of lawn to the right of the house. The Santolinis did that sort of thing all the time, it turned out; they got some kind of horrible pleasure from bloodying each other’s faces. Willy derived none from the sight of it. The idea that it might be her responsibility to terminate their brawls made her feel doomed and twitchy.

      Entering the scene through the open garage door at the moment Willy rolled up alongside one of the Dellray pickups came scowling Roman Richard Spilka, Mitchell’s number two right-hand man, right behind lizardlike Giles Coverley. Spilka served as a sometime bodyguard and general—what was the word?—factotum. In his dark suits and T-shirts, Roman Richard looked as massive and sour as a bouncer at a Russian nightclub. The permanent three-day whiskers on his pasty jowls, his louring eyes, communicated intense moral authority. (Roman Richard had pulled the Santolinis apart within seconds.)

      ‘Put your car in the garage,’ Spilka said. ‘It’s gonna rain again. What were you doing, anyhow?’

      I was going to liberate my dead daughter from a produce warehouse out on Union Street, she thought of saying. Then she considered telling him to mind his own business. Unfortunately, it had become clear that, in Roman Richard Spilka’s mind, monitoring Willy’s actions was one of his professional functions.

      ‘I went shopping,’ she said. ‘Would you care to inspect my bags?’

      ‘You should park in the garage,’ he said.

      Willy drove past him and into the garage. Roman Richard watched as she got out of her car and moved around to the trunk to remove the grocery bags. For an awkward and uncomfortable moment, she imagined that he was going to offer to help her, but no, he was just having a Testosterone Moment. Roman Richard often glanced at her chest when he thought she wouldn’t notice, usually with a puzzled air she understood all too well. Roman Richard was wondering how Mitchell could be attracted to a woman with such an unremarkable chest.

      To put him in his place, she asked, ‘Heard anything from the boss lately?’

      ‘He called while you were out. There’s probably a voice mail on your line.’

      Shortly after buying the house, Mitchell had installed a complicated new telephone system. Willy had her own private line; they shared a joint line; Mitchell’s assistant, Giles Coverley, had a line that rang in his office; and a fourth line that was dedicated to Mitchell’s business calls rang everywhere in the house but Willy’s office. She was forbidden to use this line, as she was forbidden to enter Mitchell’s office, which took up most of the third floor. In the glimpse she had once been granted through a half-open door, the office looked old-fashioned, opulent in a leather-and-rosewood manner. That made perfect sense to Willy. If Mitchell Faber, who had the taste of someone who fears that he has no taste at all, were to redesign the world, he would make it look like one vast Polo advertisement.

      Willy wasn’t sure how she felt about being forbidden entry to her future husband’s home office. Mitchell offered three excellent reasons for the prohibition, but the motive beneath two of the reasons sometimes troubled her. She did not want to be troubled by Mitchell. And all three reasons he had given her spoke to the protective role he had so willingly taken on. She might move papers around, thereby creating disorder; he did not want women in there at all, because women were distractions; having lived alone all his life, he needed some corner of the house that would be his alone. Without a private lair, he feared he might grow restless, irritable, on edge. So the first and third reasons had to do with shielding Willy from the consequences of neglecting Mitchell’s need for a single-occupancy foxhole, and the second was supposed to flatter her.

      He had lived alone for his entire adult life, without parents, siblings, ex-wives, or children. Mitchell had invited only a small number of working colleagues to their wedding, plus, of course, Roman Richard and Giles Coverley. To Willy, his life seemed bizarrely empty. Mitchell had no friends, in the conventional sense. Maybe you could not be as paranoid as Mitchell was and maintain actual friendships.

      Mitchell trusted no one absolutely, and the amount of provisional trust he was willing to extend did not go far. This, she suspected, was the real reason his re-creation of a men’s club lounge was closed to her. He did not trust her not to violate whatever confidentialities he kept in there, and his suspicion of her underlay the way in which he had concluded their single conversation about the matter.

      He had intended to answer her still-lingering surprise at the prohibition with an inarguable case.

      ‘Do you print out hard copies of your writing as you go along?’ he asked.

      ‘Every day,’ she said.

      ‘Suppose you’re working on a new book, and the manuscript is on your desk. Suppose I happen to walk in and discover that you’re not there. How would you feel if I picked up the manuscript and started to read it?’

      Knowing exactly what she would feel, she said nothing.

      ‘I can see it in your face. You’d hate it.’

      ‘I don’t know if “hate” is the word I’d use.’

      ‘We understand each other,’ Mitchell said. ‘This topic is now closed. Giles, would you please make some tea for my bride-to-be and myself ? We’ll take it on the porch.’

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