Now though, the blinds were open and he knew it meant something had happened or was happening even as he looked. But he knew it was something only they could resolve and, though it was foolish, he told himself that maybe the blinds were open not to let darkness in but to let it out.
Never, since he first laid eyes on Rachel so many years ago, had he met a woman he wanted more.
Tonight was the first time he’d seen her in a dress. It was a simple cotton print, black dotted with tiny pink flowers, and there were pearl buttons all down the front. It reached well below her knees and it had little cap sleeves that showed the tops of her arms.
When he arrived and she’d told him to come into the kitchen to get a drink, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He’d followed her inside and breathed deep the waft of her perfume and while she poured the wine he’d watched her and noticed how she kept her tongue between her teeth to concentrate. He noticed too a glimpse of satin strap at her shoulder which he’d tried all evening not to look at and failed. And she’d handed him the glass and smiled at him, creasing the corners of that mouth in a way he wished was only for him.
Over supper he’d almost got to believe it was, because the smiles she gave Frank and Diane and the kids were nothing like it. And maybe he’d imagined it, but when she talked, no matter how generally, it always seemed somehow directed at him. He’d never seen her with her eyes made up before and he watched how they shone green and trapped the candle flame when she laughed.
When everything had exploded and Grace stormed out, it was only Diane being there that had stopped him from taking Annie in his arms and letting her cry as he could see she wanted to. He didn’t fool himself that the urge was merely to console her. It was to hold her and know closely the feel and the shape and the smell of her.
But nor did Tom think this made it shameful, though he knew others might. This woman’s pain and her child and the pain of that child were all part of her too, were they not? And what man was God enough to judge the fine divisions of feeling appropriate to each or all or any of these?
All things were one, and like a rider in harmony, the best a man could do was recognize the feel and go with it and be as true to it as his soul let him.
She switched all the downstairs lights off and as she went up the stairs, she saw Grace’s door was closed and beneath it that her room was dark. Annie went to her own room and switched on the light. She paused in the doorway, knowing that crossing the threshold somehow had significance. How could she let this pass? Allow another layer to settle unquestioned with the night between them, as if there were some inexorable geology at work? It didn’t have to be so.
Grace’s door creaked when Annie opened it, pivoting light into the room from the landing. She thought she saw the bedclothes shift but couldn’t be sure, for the bed was beyond the angle of light and Annie’s eyes took time to adjust.
“Grace?”
Grace was facing the wall and there was a studied stillness to the shape of her shoulders beneath the sheet.
“Grace?”
“What.” She didn’t move.
“Can we talk?”
“I want to go to sleep.”
“So do I, but I think it would be good if we talked.”
“What about?”
Annie walked over to the bed and sat down. The prosthetic leg was propped against the wall by the bedside table. Grace sighed and turned over on her back, staring at the ceiling. Annie took a deep breath. Get it right, she kept telling herself. Don’t sound hurt, go easy, be nice.
“So you’re riding again.”
“I tried.”
“How was it?”
Grace shrugged. “Okay.” She was still looking at the ceiling, trying to look bored.
“That’s terrific.”
“Is it?”
“Well isn’t it?”
“I don’t know, you tell me.”
Annie fought the beating of her heart and told herself, keep calm, keep going, just take it. But instead she heard herself say, “Couldn’t you have told me?”
Grace looked at her and the hate and hurt in her eyes almost took Annie’s breath away.
“Why should I tell you?”
“Grace—”
“No why? Huh? Because you care? Or just because you have to know everything and control everything and not let anybody do anything unless you say so! Is that it?”
“Oh Grace.” Annie suddenly felt she needed light and she reached across to turn on the lamp on the bedside table but Grace lashed out.
“Don’t! I don’t want it on!”
The blow hit Annie’s hand and sent the lamp crashing to the floor. The ceramic base broke into three clean pieces.
“You pretend you care but all you really care about is you and what people think of you. And your job and your big-shot friends.”
She propped herself up on her elbows as if to bolster a rage already made worse by the tears distorting her face.
“Anyway, you said you didn’t want me to ride again so why the hell should I tell you? Why should I tell you anything! I hate you!”
Annie tried to take hold of her but Grace pushed her away.
“Get out! Just leave me alone! Get out!”
Annie stood up and felt herself sway so that for a moment she thought she might fall. Almost blindly, she made her way across the pool of light that she knew would take her to the door. She had no clear idea of what she would do when she got there. She merely knew that she was obeying some final separating command. As she reached the door she heard Grace say something and she turned and looked back toward the bed. She could see Grace was facing the wall again and that her shoulders were shaking.
“What?” Annie said.
She waited and whether it was her own grief or Grace’s that shrouded the words a second time she didn’t know, but there was something about the way they were spoken that made her go back. She walked to the bed and stood close enough to touch but didn’t, for fear her hand might be struck away.
“Grace? I didn’t hear what you said.”
“I said . . . I’ve started.”
It came amid sobs and for a moment Annie didn’t understand.
“You’ve started?”
“My period.”
“What, tonight?”
Grace nodded.
“I felt it happen downstairs and when I came up there was blood in my panties. I washed them in the bathroom but it wouldn’t come out.”
“Oh Gracie.”
Annie reached down and put a hand on Grace’s shoulder and Grace turned. There was no anger in her face now, only pain and sorrow and Annie sat on the bed and took her daughter in her arms. Grace clung to her and Annie felt the child’s sobs convulse them as if they were but one body.
“Who’s going to want me?”
“What, honey?”
“Whoever’s going to want me? Nobody will.”
“Oh Gracie, that’s not true. . . .”
“Why should they?”
“Because you’re you. You’re incredible. You’re beautiful and you’re strong. And you’re the bravest person I ever met in my whole life.”
They held each other and wept. And when they could speak again, Grace told her she hadn’t meant the terrible things she’d said and Annie said she knew, but there was truth there too, and how as a mother, she had got so many, many things wrong. They sat with their heads on each other’s shoulder and let flow from their hearts words they’d barely dared utter to themselves.
“All those years you and Dad were trying for another baby? Every night I used to pray this time let it be okay. And it wasn’t for your sake or because I wanted a brother or a sister or anything like that. But just so I wouldn’t have to go on being so . . . oh I don’t know.”
“Tell me.”
“So special. Because I was the only one, I felt you both expected me to be so good at everything, so perfect and I wasn’t, I was just me. And now I’ve gone and spoiled it all anyway.”
Annie held her more tightly and stroked her hair and told her this wasn’t so. And she thought, but didn’t say, what a perilous commodity love was and that the proper calibration of its giving and taking was too precise by far for mere humans.
How long they sat there Annie couldn’t tell. But it was long after their crying had ceased and the wetness of their tears had grown cold on her dress. Grace fell asleep in her arms and didn’t wake even when Annie laid her down then laid herself beside her.
She listened to her daughter’s breathing, even and trusting, and for a while watched the breeze stirring the pale drapes at the window. Then Annie slept too, a deep and dreamless sleep, while outside the earth rolled vast and silent under the sky.
TWENTY-FOUR
ROBERT LOOKED OUT THROUGH THE RAIN-STREAKED window of the black cab at the woman on the billboard who’d been waving the same wave at him for the last ten minutes. It was one of those electronically animated jobs, where the arm actually moved. She was wearing Ray-Bans and a bright pink bathing suit and in her other hand had what was probably meant to be a piña colada. She was doing her best to persuade Robert and several hundred other traffic-snarled, rain-soaked travelers that they’d be better off buying an air ticket to Florida.
It was debatable. And a harder sell than it seemed, Robert knew, because the English newspapers had been going to town on stories about British tourists in Florida being mugged, raped and shot. As the cab crawled forward, Robert could see some wag had scrawled by the woman’s feet Don’t forget your Uzi.
He realized too late that he should have taken the Underground. Every time he’d been to London in the last ten years they’d been digging up some new section of the road out to the airport and he was pretty sure they didn’t just save it up for when he came. The flight to Geneva was due to leave in thirty-five minutes and at this rate he’d miss it by about two years. The cabdriver had already informed him, with something suspiciously approaching relish, that out at the airport there was a “right peasouper.”
There was. And he didn’t miss his flight; it was canceled. He sat in the business-class lounge and for a couple of hours enjoyed the camaraderie of a growing band of harassed executives, each pursuing his or her own self-important path to a coronary. He tried calling Annie but got the answering machine and he wondered where they were. He’d forgotten to ask their plans for this first Memorial Day in years they hadn’t spent together.
He left a message and sang a few bars of the “Halls of Montezuma” for Grace, something he did over breakfast on this day as a cue for groans and missiles. Then he took a final look at the notes of today’s meeting (which had gone well) and the paperwork for tomorrow’s (which might also if he ever got there) and then he put it all away and went for another walk around the departure area.
As he was looking idly and for no good reason at a rack of cashmere golf sweaters that he wouldn’t have wished upon his worst enemy, someone said hello and he looked up and saw a man who came as close to that category as anyone he knew.
Freddie Kane was something medium-to-small in publishing, one of those people you never questioned too closely about the exact nature of their business, for fear of embarrassing not them but yourself. He compensated for whatever deficiencies might lie in that murky area by making it clear that he had a personal fortune and furthermore knew every piece of gossip there was to know about anyone who was anyone in New York. By forgetting Robert’s name on each of the four or five occasions they’d been introduced, Freddie had made it equally clear that he didn’t count Annie Graves’s husband among this number. Annie, on the other hand, he very much did.
“Hi! I thought it was you! How’re you doing!”
He thumped one hand on Robert’s shoulder and Used the other to pump his hand in a way that somehow managed to be simultaneously both violent and flaccid. Robert smiled and noted that the man had on a pair of those glasses movie stars were all now wearing in the hope that it made them look more intellectual. He’d clearly forgotten Robert’s name again.
They chatted for a while over the golf sweaters, swapping information on destinations, estimated arrivals and the properties of fog. Robert was oblique and guarded about why he was in Europe, not because it was secret but because he could see how frustrated it made Freddie. And so it was perhaps revenge for this that motivated the man’s closing remarks.
“I hear Annie’s got herself a Gates problem,” he said.
“I’m sorry?”
Freddie put a hand to his mouth and made a face like a guilty schoolboy.
“Oops. Maybe we’re not supposed to know.”
“I’m sorry Freddie, you’re way ahead of me.”
“Oh, it’s just a little bird told me Crawford Gates is out headhunting again. Probably not a word of truth in it.”
“How do you mean, headhunting?”
“Oh, you know how it’s always been at that place, musical chairs and shoot the pianist. I just heard he was giving Annie a hard time, that’s all.”
“Well, it’s the first I’ve—”
“Just gossip. Shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
He gave a satisfied grin and, having fulfilled what may indeed have been the sole purpose of the encounter, said he’d better get back to the airline desk to do some more complaining.
Back in the business lounge Robert helped himself to another beer and flipped through a copy of The Economist, mulling over what Freddie had said. Although he’d played ingenuous, he’d known right away what the man was getting at. It was the second time in a week that he’d heard it.
The previous Tuesday he’d been at a reception given by one of his firm’s big clients. It was the kind of do he normally made excuses to avoid but which, with Annie and Grace away, he’d actually found himself looking forward to. It was held in several sumptuous acres of office near Rockefeller Center with mountains of caviar high enough to ski on.
Whatever the latest collective noun for a gathering of lawyers was (they came up with a new and more disparaging one each week), there was certainly one of them here. There were many faces from other law firms that Robert recognized and he guessed the hosts’ motive for inviting them all was to keep his own firm on their toes. Among the other lawyers was Don Farlow. They’d only met once before but Robert liked him and knew Annie did too and that she rated him highly.
Farlow greeted him warmly and Robert was pleased to find as they chatted that they shared not just an appetite bordering on greed for caviar, but a wholesomely cynical attitude about those who’d provided it. They staked a claim beside the nursery slopes and farlow listened sympathetically while Robert told him how the litigation over Grace’s accident was progressing—or rather not progressing, for it was getting so complicated it seemed destined to drag on for years. Then the talk moved on. Farlow asked after Annie and how things were going out west.
“Annie’s sensational,” said Farlow. “The very best. The crazy thing is, that asshole Gates knows that.”
Robert asked him what he meant and Farlow looked surprised and then embarrassed. He quickly changed the subject and the only other thing he said, as he went, was that Robert should tell Annie to come back soon. Robert had gone straight home and called Annie. She’d made light of it.
“That place is Paranoia Palace,” she said. Oh sure, Gates had been giving her a hard time, but no more than usual. “The old bastard knows he needs me more than I need him.”
Robert had let it drop, even though he felt that her bravado seemed intended more to convince herself than him. Now if Freddie Kane knew about it, it was a safe bet that most of New York knew too or soon would. And though this wasn’t Robert’s world, he’d seen enough of it to know which was more important: what was said or what was true.
TWENTY-FIVE
HANK AND DARLENE NORMALLY HELD THEIR BARN dance on the Fourth of July. But this year Hank was scheduled to have his varicose veins fixed at the end of June and didn’t fancy hobbling around so they’d hauled it back a month or so to Me
morial Day.
There was risk involved. A few years back, two feet of snow had fallen this very weekend. And some Hank had invited felt a day set aside to honor those who’d died for their country wasn’t a suitable day for a celebration at all. Hank said shit, come to that, celebrating independence was pretty dumb too when you’d been married as long as him and Darlene, and anyway, all those he knew who’d gone to Vietnam liked a damn good party, so what the hell?
Just to show him, it rained.
Rivers of it slid off billowing tarpaulins to hiss among the burgers, ribs and steaks on the barbecue and a fuse box exploded with a flash and snuffed all the colored lights strung around the yard. No one seemed to mind too much. They all just packed into the barn. Someone gave Hank a T-shirt which he immediately put on; it had I TOLD YOU printed on the front in big black letters.
Tom was late arriving because the vet couldn’t get out to the Double Divide till after six. He’d given the little filly another shot and thought that would do it. They were still busy with her when the others left for the party. Through the open doors of the barn he’d seen all the kids piling into the Lariat with Annie arid Grace. Annie had waved to him and asked if he was coming. He told her he’d be along later. He was pleased to see she was wearing the dress she’d worn two nights before.
Neither she nor Grace had spoken a word about what had happened that night. On Sunday he’d risen before dawn and dressed in the dark and seen Annie’s blinds still open and the lights still on. He’d wanted to go on up and see if everything was okay but thought he’d leave it awhile in case it seemed nosy. When he’d finished seeing to the horses and came in for breakfast, Diane said Annie had just called to ask if it would be alright if she and Grace came with them to church.
“Probably just wants to write it up in her magazine,” Diane said. Tom told her he thought that was unfair and that she should give Annie a break. Diane hadn’t spoken to him for the rest of the day.
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