“But?” she prompted, and he chuckled. He knew her too well.
“Well, I would never say this to Marie, but I’m back to square one with my parents. I refuse to marry someone under false pretenses, to shackle myself to a woman who will expect fidelity and devotion and all those qualities that are perfectly reasonable to expect from one’s husband.”
“You need another Marie—someone you like but who doesn’t expect you to behave like a husband. Someone who’s happy to live parallel lives.” She cackled. “You should marry me. Then I can quit my job and write books full time without it mattering if they’re scholarly enough and you can carry on in your usual fashion, blissfully free of the weight of spousal expectations.”
Something in his chest both lurched and settled at the same time. Wouldn’t that be lovely? He kept his response light, though. “But will you gossip with me in the evenings?”
“Of course. We already do that. The problem with this scenario, though, is I am thoroughly lacking in connections to the Austrian crown.”
He chuckled. “There’s also the part where you’re post-men—I assume that rules out even sham marriages.”
“Don’t forget the part where I’m still married.”
“Touché. Regardless of me and my problems, I truly am happy Marie found Leo.”
“I think it’s okay to be both.”
“What do you mean?”
“Of course you’re happy for Marie, but it’s also okay to have feelings about the fact that your life plan has been upended. Even if you haven’t had your heart broken in the conventional sense, you have lost something.”
“How’d you get so smart?” he said, partly to cover the fact that her analysis, which was so generous, was hitting him surprisingly hard, but partly because he didn’t want to talk about himself anymore. He vastly preferred talking about her. “And since you’re so smart, you should be able to find one man in all of New York with whom to have sex.”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” Apparently, he wasn’t the only one who wanted to change the subject. “The divorce, though, I am finally making progress on. The new papers are all done, and Vince has them—or at least Vince’s lawyer has them. Honestly, it’s such a relief that everything happens through lawyers now.”
“And do those papers include you giving him your dog?”
“They do not. My lawyer suggested I offer him my notes on the Gertrude Stein part of the book we never finished in exchange for Max Minimus.”
“Really?” Max did not like the sound of that. “All that work?”
“Well, it stings, but she said that’s the point. He wants to hurt me.”
But he did hurt you, Max wanted to say. Why does he have to keep doing it?
“He’s likely to view it as a bigger concession than the dog, which to my mind it’s not. I’m never going to do anything with those notes. The project is all tied up with him in my mind, and anyway—” She cut herself off.
“Anyway what?”
“I have an idea for a new project that is tangentially related. I won’t need the notes for it, but it will broadly arise from all that thinking.”
“Tell me more.”
“No.” He made a noise like she’d wounded him, and she laughed. “I don’t even have it straight in my head yet. That’s this fall’s project.”
“Ah.” She had that semester of teaching leave coming up. “Tell me,” he persisted. “I’ll help you get it straight in your head.”
“No,” she said again. “Eyes on the prize here, dude—the prize being a divorce. If we can make Vince view this as a win for him, it might finally do the trick.”
What an absolute jackass Vince was. Mean but also insecure and petty. Max wanted to hop the next plane to Spain and throttle him. He forced himself to sound calm. “That’s grand. Sounds like progress.”
“It is, but why does progress always have to be so painful? Get this: the lawyer wants me to be seen in public being civil and friendly in Vince’s presence in case he doesn’t accept the new terms. She says we need to do what we can to protect me later if he refuses to agree and forces a trial. That means acting in ways that counter the narrative he is likely to advance about me.”
“Which is?”
“That I’m a jealous, vengeful hag who refuses to move on with my life. That I’m the one holding things up. Which I guess is technically true, but only because of Max Minimus.”
“But isn’t Vince on sabbatical? How are you supposed to be seen being civil and friendly to him if he’s in Spain?” Vince and Berkeley were still doing Picasso cosplay and Instagram influencing in Barcelona. And yes, Max had stalked Berkeley’s Instagram. Her most recent post had been of her lower body poolside, her hand balancing a glass of wine on her taut, tanned belly, captioned “Syrah with my Sweetie” and followed by literally twenty-seven—he’d counted—hashtags. It made him irate.
“He’ll be back next week. We have our start-of-year departmental party in a couple weeks, so off I go to be fake friendly.” She made a strangled noise.
“Do you have to be fake friendly at the party? Can you just stop by his office and have a quick, civil chat?”
“The lawyer says that unless it’s going to cause me undue stress, I should go. She says it’s the perfect venue to show myself as a nonthreatening, reasonable person—in case it does go to trial and colleagues have to testify.” She was sounding uncharacteristically timid.
“Is that all that’s bothering you?” he asked gently. Normally, Dani would be the kind of person who would embrace this sort of assignment as a necessary evil. She’d be brusquely efficient in carrying out her duties.
She sighed. “The truth is, I’m scared.”
She did that sometimes. Came out with a truth deep into a conversation. It was as if she had to back herself into admitting something she didn’t think accorded with the image she should be projecting. He was stupidly pleased to be the recipient of such truths.
“I’m not scared of Vince,” she added in a rush. “He’s not going to hurt me or anything. I’m afraid of . . . getting into it with him. It’s hard to explain, but he’s such a good talker. I mean, why was I in mediation for so long? Because he has this way of making you believe what he says. He has this way of making it seem like he’s listening to you, when he’s not actually paying any attention to you at all.” She had said that before, that Vince didn’t listen to her. What a monumental ass. “You didn’t see it at the Christmas party because of our perfectly timed exit, but Vince has this way of talking you into a corner.”
“Nobody puts Dani in a corner.”
There was a long pause. Then, Dani’s voice, laden with amusement and incredulity: “Did you just quote Dirty Dancing?”
“Did you just recognize a quote from Dirty Dancing?” he countered.
“I love that movie!”
“You do?”
“I do. But I am not an Eldovian baron.”
“Marie is enamored of eighties and nineties pop culture. I’ve watched it with her.”