Social furniture. I moved on.
What I was also doing, underneath the surface performance, was watching the room. Not conspicuously, I'd learned the art of the peripheral registration, the way you could take in the full geometry of a social space without appearing to track it. Who stood where, who spoke to whom, who watched without appearing to, where the actual lines of connection ran underneath the performed ones.
Dominic stayed near me.
Not in an obvious way. Not the possessive adjacency of a man marking territory, nothing so legible as that. He moved through the room as he moved through every room, with the ease of someone who couldn't help owning the space, and he moved through it in a pattern that, if you were watching carefully, consistently kept him within a certain radius of where I was.
I watched carefully.
I started noticing it by the cocktail hour. Confirmed it during the first course. By the second I had enough data to be certain: this was not social habit, not the natural tendency of two people in a shared arrangement to gravitate together. It was deliberate.He was blocking something. An angle, a position, a line of sight that he didn't want someone to have on me.
I couldn't see what he was blocking from where I was.
That was, in its own way, more informative than seeing it would have been.
* * *
He was there during the third course, at the far end of the table, where he'd been moved in the gentle reshuffle that happened between the fish and the meat when Céleste Vauclain decided the conversation needed rebalancing. He was not one of the eight guests whose names had been offered to me.
He was wearing gray. The particular gray of a suit that was neither celebrating itself nor apologizing for being there, the gray of something chosen to be unremarkable, which was its own form of remark. He was perhaps fifty, lean, with a stillness that reminded me of someone, though I couldn't immediately identify who.
The first time he looked at me I thought it was incidental, the casual drift of attention that happened across long tables when you ran out of conversation on your immediate left.
The second time I noted it.
The third time I understood that it wasn't incidental and had never been.
He looked at me the way you looked at something you needed to understand, not admiringly, not hostilely, but with the specific quality of an assessment being conducted. He was reading something in me. I didn't know what.
I didn't look away when I caught his eye the third time.
He held my gaze for a moment, two seconds, three, and then returned to his neighbor's conversation without hurry, as though nothing particular had happened.
I picked up my wine. Took a small sip I didn't taste.
Across the table, without looking at me, Dominic shifted his position almost imperceptibly, shoulders turned slightly away from the gray-suited man, a movement so minor it registered as nothing unless you were already watching for it.
He'd noticed the third look too.
* * *
The car was quiet on the way back. New Orleans moved past the windows in the dark, the lit porches, the drape of Spanish moss backlit by streetlamps, the distant thread of music from somewhere down a side street, that constant auditory presence in this city, music appearing around corners the way weather appeared in other places.
I looked out the window and waited until we'd cleared the immediate vicinity of the Vauclain house before I asked.
"The man in gray," I said. "He looked at me three times."
Dominic was looking at his phone, or had been. He set it down on his knee.
"I noticed."
"Who is he."
A pause. Not the thinking pause, the deciding pause. The distinction was in the quality of the silence; I was learning them.
"Nobody you need to worry about," he said.
I turned from the window. He was looking forward, at the back of the driver's seat or the dark street beyond the windshield, not at me.