Sheik on the Level

He was an honest man in a city of dishonest men, and so the women trusted him completely, which was its own kind of disaster.

His name was Edgar Lyne, and he had come down from Boston in 1919 with a small inheritance and a larger sense of duty, and he had set up, on the second floor of a building on Lexington, a practice of the vague and useful kind that the 1920s had produced in great numbers — part lawyer, part broker, part man-who-knew-a-man. He had a wife, whom he loved, and an office, which he kept clean, and a habit, by half-past six on most evenings, of stopping at a small bar off Park Avenue where the bartender, a Greek named Stavros, made him the same drink for eleven years.

The drink was the gin one. Black tea steeped into the gin until the gin took on a brownness, like the inside of an old book. Cardamom crushed into it. A spoon of gula melaka, dark as a wet road. A piece of Turkish delight on the side of the glass, soft, dusted, faintly perfumed, the way a thing left in a drawer for years becomes faintly perfumed by the drawer. A white foam on top, which Stavros laid down with the back of a spoon, slowly, the way one closes the lid of a piano.

The women came to him because he listened. That was the whole of it. He did not advise, particularly; he did not, except in the most general way, intervene. He listened, and he remembered, and he did not repeat, and in a city where everyone repeated everything, this had the effect of making him, in the eyes of certain women, the only safe room in town.

They told him about their husbands. They told him about the men who were not their husbands. They told him about the money, which was, more often than people admitted, the real subject — the money that had been promised and not delivered, the money that had been left to a sister instead of a wife, the money that had gone, between Tuesday and Friday, into a horse, or a girl, or a small grey building in New Jersey nobody in the family had heard of. He listened. He poured them a drink, occasionally, from the bottle he kept in the lower left drawer. He told them nothing.

He broke no confidence. Not in eleven years. Not the one about the senator’s daughter, which would have made him, had he chosen to make it, a great deal of money in a single evening. Not the one about the boy from Yale and the older man on Madison. Not the one about the wife who, in 1925, on a Thursday afternoon, told him she was going to leave her husband and asked him, almost casually, whether he might consider, eventually, taking her place. He had said no. He had said it gently. She had cried, briefly, and then collected herself, and then told him a further confidence, which he had also not broken.

His own wife, whom he loved, was a different matter. Not because he loved her less than the others trusted him, but because he loved her more than he trusted himself. There were things he could not tell her. About the wife who had cried in his office. About the senator’s daughter. About a small grey building in New Jersey. About a girl who had come to him in 1927 in a coat that had cost more than his apartment, and who had sat across from him and wept, and who had been, when she stopped weeping, very beautiful, and had said his name in a way nobody had said it in some years.

He had not, on that afternoon, done anything. He had walked her to the door. He had gone home to his wife. He had eaten the supper she had kept warm for him, and he had told her about a case involving a deed in Yonkers, which was a true case but not the case of the afternoon, and his wife had laughed at something he said about the deed, and he had loved her, exactly, in that moment, with a completeness he had not felt since their wedding.

He had not told her about the girl. He had not, on principle, told her any of it. The marriage lasted thirty years on this principle.

When he died, in 1951, the priest said he had been a good man, which was true in a sense the priest did not entirely understand. There was a small turnout. His wife sat in the front pew, in a black hat she had bought for a different funeral and never worn. Behind her, scattered through the church the way salt scatters on a table, were twelve other women — some old now, some not so old, some with husbands beside them and some alone. They did not look at each other. They did not need to. Each one was sitting, that morning, in her own private vault, of which Edgar Lyne had been, for some considerable portion of her life, the only key.

The wife, going out into the rain afterwards, took the priest’s arm. She did not look back at the twelve. She had known about them, in the general way wives know things, for thirty years. She had loved her husband anyway. That had been her confidence, and she had kept it too.