glanced over he might find them standing there again, restored. But he did not.
On his way to the office Carey had tried to settle on what he would tell Maggie. Too little would disrespect her, while too much would hurt her unnecessarily. He fiddled with what to do. Tell her the truth, of course, but only when she asked and only that part of the truth which pertained.
He remembered, when he’d met her here in Beijing three years ago, being aware right away that she did not know. She has no idea, he remembered thinking. Matt never told her.
Carey was not surprised. He would not have told either. So Matt had gone a little wild; so what? He’d pulled his reins in quickly enough, and by himself, too. Let it be, was Carey’s feeling. He was a nice man, Maggie seemed like a nice woman, no need for them to suffer. Let them be as happy as they could. That’s what he had thought. Now of course he half wished Matt had told her himself, so he wouldn’t have to.
Not that it was what Matt would have intended. Matt was a steady man, a man of rules; this Carey had seen about him from the first moment. He could still see Matt at the airport, with his hyper-organized luggage, his smooth, clean face smelling of the shave-soap provided on the plane. The man had force. His legal work was like that too, meticulous, powerful, unbending. He stayed with the rules. He was, Carey knew, exactly the type who sometimes had to break out.
It was a pattern he had seen before. He guessed one in twenty were like Matt, good, hardworking guys who bolted their traces when they came to this place where everything was on offer, where a wild, clubby economy turned cartwheels around the power center of government, where any desire could be satisfied.
“Let’s go out,” Matt had said at the end of his first day in the Beijing office, on his first visit, seven years before. That was the beginning. He had left even Carey in the dust, and Carey was known far and wide as a king of the night. They roamed from one pulsing spot to another on Sanlitun. After the crowded bars and the costume raves Matt would walk away and negotiate with the women who worked the clubs. Carey tried to tell him there were finer women to be had elsewhere, only marginally more expensive, women with something close to beauty, even class. A phone call away, come, let’s go — No. Matt would go for the bargirl. And he would walk up to the African drug dealers too, relaxed, companionable. He’d ask them what was up, like they were in New York. Not a blink. They’d always tell him what they had, hashish, ecstasy, LSD. He bought hashish and rolled it with tobacco. That was where he drew the line. His restraint when it came to drugs fit with the other Matt, the married man, the one Carey had met at the airport. And that was the Matt who showed up at the office after their nights on the town — always on time, frayed but ready — and put in a full day’s work. This impressed Carey. The man was a rock.
But Matt started to feel guilty. On his second visit, later that same year, he came into Carey’s office one afternoon and said he’d decided he should just go ahead and call Maggie now and tell her everything.
“Have you lost your mind?” Carey remembered saying. “Why would you tell her?”
“Because I tell her everything.”
“Things like this?”
“I never did things like this before.”
“You tell her this and you’ll change everything. Ask yourself — are you going to do it again? Is this going to be your new lifestyle?”
“No! I feel bad already.”
“Then don’t do it anymore. And don’t tell your wife. She doesn’t need to suffer.” His hand strayed to the file he had been working on. The clock had been running on the client and he didn’t like to stop. “It’s okay, man,” he added gently. “Everybody slips a few times.”
Matt had thanked him, and agreed that yes, this was the thing to do. “You’ll have to find a new late-night companion,” he joked, and Carey told him that would be no problem. At the same time, he was not surprised Matt had climbed back into himself, red-faced, so quickly. This too he had seen before.