Oscar Thornton was a bond man at Salomon Brothers, a man who drove everywhere with one wrist on the wheel and the radio loud, a man for whom traffic parted, and now he sounded like someone at the bottom of a well.
"Viv," he said. Nobody else called her that. She had never liked it. "Viv, it's gone. Half of it. More. You don't understand what happened today."
"I'm sorry, Oscar. I am."
"I need you to come home. I need—I don't know. I need somebody to talk to who isn't screaming. Where are you? The answering service said Montreal. What are you doing in Montreal?"
"Working."
"Take the train down. I'll pick you up at Penn Station. I'll drive you—"
"I drove here," Vivienne said.
There was a silence on the line.
"You what?"
"I drove. I learned how. In August. I have a car. It's red." She closed her eyes. She could see it, the Alfa, sitting in the hotel garage four floors below, ticking as it cooled. "I drove myself, Oscar. It broke down, in Vermont, and a man fixed it, and I kept going. I'm sorry about the market. I'm truly sorry. But I'm not going to take the train down. And you're going to be all right. You're the kind of person who is always all right. You'll see."
"Viv—"
"Drive carefully," she said, and hung up, and sat in the booth with her forehead against the cool glass and her heart going like a drum. Then she put in another roll of quarters and dialed Vermont, and when Georgie said "Beaulieu's Garage and Towing," Vivienne said, "Georgie. Is your father there? I need to ask him something about a noise," and there was no noise at all and they both knew it.
The conference ended on Thursday. On Friday morning, the twenty-third of October, Vivienne Wainwright checked out of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, put her suitcase in the Alfa's absurd little trunk and the Geneva letter in the glove box with Georgie's tape, and drove south, out of Quebec and back across the border at Highgate Springs, and when she reached the place on Route 100 where she ought to have kept going toward New York, she did not keep going.