He went to find a phone booth in the lobby and called home, and our mother was actually pleased to learn that he had run into an old friend from college at the art show. He had lost touch with so many of his Cornell friends, his fraternity brothers. Even the couple, Michael and Dorothy, at whose wedding they’d met. She didn’t ask for many details about his evening, but she told him she’d had a long talk with Harrison about his run-in with the head of school. Their son had agreed to stop tormenting Aaron if they’d allow him to go to the Brooklyn Public Library on Remsen Street after school, and come home on his own. Salo nodded. But he wasn’t paying attention.
He went back to the table, and Stella, and she told him more about her life and her world, the world of documentary film, which was slow-moving: grants and investment and red tape and eternally ongoing conversations. He nodded. The idea of an ongoing conversation with her was already blooming, uncomfortably, thrillingly. He hoped she couldn’t tell, and she couldn’t, or so she would say, afterward, and why would she lie to us about something so important?
Just after ten in the evening they shook hands and he leaned down to give her an awkward kiss on the cheek. Then he went home.
His own father, as Salo himself well knew, had for years carried on an arrangement with his executive assistant, a woman precisely as old and objectively as attractive as our grandmother, but single and childless and content to remain so. This person had lived in a tidy apartment on Madison Avenue and Sixty-Sixth, over a gourmet chocolate shop, and whenever Hermann was not at the office, or at home on Fifth Avenue, or at their weekend place in Rye, or somewhere else with his wife … well, that was where he was more likely than not to be, for years and years until the lady in question （known to our father as “Miss Martin, from the office”） suffered a stroke in her tidy apartment and died alone at Lenox Hill Hospital. It was less an affair than a parallel marriage with different terms, and Salo had no idea what, if anything, his mother knew about it.
This was not that. This was not that, at all.
Our father, for one thing, was not a person given to tracking beautiful women as they walked down the street or gathered in front of the school, and there were many, many beautiful women around Walden, aerobicized in the ’80s and increasingly yoga’ed or Pilate’d as the ’90s got underway. Some of these women worked, in the parlance of the day, “outside the home”; others took care of their kids and more highly calibrated care of themselves. A few Walden moms were even famous—actresses and media figures—yet they made a good-faith effort to leave their outside lives at the door and be informal and approachable within the school’s social enclosure. Salo hardly ever gave any attention to these women. Not even the beautiful ones. Not even the famously beautiful ones. “Tell me her name again,” he would ask Johanna as they made their way home after the fourth-grade play or all-school fundraising evening. “I know I’ve met her. She seems so familiar.”
“She starred in that movie you liked, about the bank heist,” our mother would say. “That’s why she seems familiar.”
Sometimes he told himself that their marriage worked because each of them ceded the authority of their respective spheres to the other. The fact that they didn’t crowd each other or push their way into each other’s daily affairs, that was a good thing. Wasn’t it? And of course he valued the work our mother did, running the family so smoothly that he could spend his hours in Red Hook or fly to Europe to see a picture or attend an auction, just because he wanted to. From the beginning our father had addressed family life as a party of one, setting a schedule around his personal needs and responsibilities and interests, while she was a many-tentacled creature, staying on top of the vaccinations and tutoring （for Lewyn, who needed help in math） and vet appointments （while the dog was alive） and upkeep on the house （both houses） and oversight of her parents （because her mother was beginning to have some difficulty with language, and her father refused to accept this, and Debbie was so busy and Bobby was incapable of doing a single thing in aid of anyone who wasn’t Bobby） and incidentally Salo’s parents as well. （Hermann had fallen the previous spring, on the corner of Seventy-Seventh and Park, and the resulting hospital stay had left him with an invasive staph infection leading to endocarditis. He was home now, but much diminished and not all that fun to be around, not that he ever had been. Johanna visited at least once a week.）