“It’s a boy,” the technician noted, smiling. “Large. Very handsome, too. We’ve obviously caught him in the middle of a nap. Maybe he’ll move, in a second. In the meantime, I’ll try to show you a picture of his heart. To see it beating is a marvelous—hmmm. His position is making it difficult to locate. This little one is going to test my skill, I see.”
As the technician continued to move the scanner and make exasperated sounds, Sebastien straightened rigidly in his chair. His attention never left the murky screen.
“I’m gong to ask Dr. Reginau to have a try at this,” the technician said in a carefully nonchalant tone of voice. “He’s much more skilled than I.” She avoided looking at Sebastien and hurried from the room.
Marie raised up on her elbows. “Sebastien? Is something wrong?”
Because he didn’t want to believe it, he answered no. Sebastien stared at the screen, then at Marie’s stomach.
She lay back but grasped one of his hands. “You’re freezing cold. What is it? You know how to read a sonogram. What are you afraid of?”
Slowly he raised his eyes to hers. She shivered. He squeezed her hand tightly. The words hung in his throat like shards of ice. “She can’t find the heartbeat because there isn’t one. The baby is dead.”
Labor was induced, and a few hours later Marie expelled the fetus. She didn’t want Sebastien present for the pitiful event, and he didn’t protest. Dr. Reginau, the obstetrician, came to him afterward and said all the appropriate things: There was no obvious abnormality, no obvious problem with the pregnancy, no reason to think such a thing would happen again. This was just nature’s way of correcting a mistake.
Your father honors his mistakes.
My mother is not a mistake, you whore.
The words came back to Sebastien with startling vividness. That was when he hit Marie’s doctor. When Reginau was being helped to his feet by several shocked nurses, Sebastien told him that his child had not been a mistake, by nature’s standards or any others.
There would be repercussions because of such uncalled-for violence. He had struck a fellow physician, and a popular one, at that. He had struck a physician at the same hospital where he himself was on staff. Where he hoped to become head of the proposed transplant unit.
Marie lay in a private room, sedated, attended by her mother and Annette. She gave Sebastien a glazed look and told him to go home, that she didn’t need him. He was relieved to hear it. He spent the night walking the boulevards, his bruised hand throbbing.
Marie had the workmen come back and put a lock on the nursery door. Then she bolted it and kept the key in her jewelry box. She told Sebastien that she didn’t want the room opened again until she brought a baby into it. He had never seen her distraught and depressed before, and his efforts to soothe her were complicated by his own depression.
It was typical of their relationship that she didn’t really want to share her grief with him, and he didn’t know how to share his with anyone, including her. So they retreated into their work. She moved into another bedroom temporarily, preferring her privacy. He lay in their big, canopied bed each night, exhausted from another twenty-hour day, and stroked himself roughly. At those times he rarely thought of Marie but instead saw a piquant face with expressive green eyes and a scarred chin.
Three months passed in that way. Life began to feel normal again, although normal was not as it had been before. And then, one cold winter night just after one, the police came. Two detectives stood stiffly in the downstairs hall. The older of the two, a grim-looking veteran, spoke brusquely.
“Doctor de Savin?”
“Yes.”
“You have a brother named Jacques?”
“Yes.”
The younger man shifted and cleared his throat. “We’re sorry to tell you that he has … been found … dead.”
Sebastien took a step back and rested a hand on the banister. He stood very still, his shoulders stiff, his head up. “You must be mistaken. My brother isn’t even in Paris. He’s living in Amsterdam.”
The older detective, looking as if he’d been through this sort of scene a thousand times, rubbed his neck above a sweat-stained shirt collar and sighed. “No, Doctor. He had plenty of identification. It was with him in his hotel room. A guest reported hearing a gunshot. An officer went to investigate.”
They are simply mistaken, Sebastien thought firmly, “This person you found, he was murdered?”
“No. It appears to have been suicide.”
“That is not something my brother would do.”
The older detective grimaced. “Doctor, we have a note. It was written to you. We’re keeping it at the station. If you’d come with us, we can show it to you. And the body, as well.”
After a silent moment, Sebastien found his voice. “I see.” He turned smoothly and started up the stairs. “Let me tell my wife some delicate lie for the moment, and then I’ll go with you.”
“Very good.”
Sebastien heard the younger detective whisper to the other, “No brotherly love lost here, it seems.”
They took him to the police station and showed him a note written on hotel stationery in Jacques’s sweeping script.
I WAS NOTHING TO YOU BECAUSE I WAS NOT ANTOINE OR BRIDGETTE. I WAS NOTHING TO FATHER BECAUSE I WAS NOT HIM. ONLY ANNETTE LOVED ME FOR WHAT I WAS. I HAVE HONOR. I AM A MAN. I’M STRONGER THAN YOU, BECAUSE I HAVE THE COURAGE TO DO THIS.
Sebastien read the words a dozen times. What courage, you coward? he demanded silently. What honor? What code of honor tells you to die?
“Do you know what he might have meant?” one of the detectives asked.
“No.”
“Did you know that he was sick?”
Sebastien looked up, frowning. “I suspected that he had a drug habit. What do you mean?”
“There was no evidence of drugs in the room.”
“Then what was there?”
The younger detective fetched a pamphlet from Jacques’s belongings. “Perhaps it means nothing.” He handed it to Sebastien.
“Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome—Facts and Fallacies.”
Sebastien stared at the title. It absorbed him. It brought back his conversation with Jacques at Annette’s wedding. It ripped at his conscience.
“Are you all right, Doctor?” someone asked. Then, “Bring the doctor some water. Doctor? Would you like to call someone else in your family? Someone who can come to the station? Or a friend, perhaps? Here. The water.”
Sebastien tossed the pamphlet on a table and waved the glass of water away. “I’d like to see my brother’s body.”
They took him to the morgue. The chief medical examiner was very blunt. “The body has a nasty head wound,” he warned, as an assistant wheeled a sheet-draped gurney into a room with walls of stained concrete and floors dotted with drains.
Someone offered Sebastien a pair of yellow rubber gloves. Sebastien shook his head. The medical examiner coughed awkwardly and said that he couldn’t allow him to touch the body without them, under the circumstances.
Sebastien took the gloves and slid them onto his hands. These were not a surgeon’s gloves, meant for the artistry of life; these were the sort of gloves one wore to handle filth and death.
The drape was pulled back, and he stepped close, deliberate and silent, feeling as if he were in a dream. The gloves were appropriate. The thing on the table, with its misshapen head wrapped in bloody plastic, was only an obscene imitation of Jacques’s beauty.
Sebastien pushed the plastic away and looked at his brother’s face, then stroked his fingers down the silent artery in the throat, convincing himself. At the edge of his brother’s bloodstained T-shirt he found an ominous lesion.
“A typical sarcoma related to the syndrome,” the medical examiner interjected. “Probably, that is.”
“Yes. Yes.” Sebastien’s voice was low and hollow, for Jacques alone. “What you did took courage. It took honor. I wish I had known.” He laid his fingertips on Jac
ques’s lips.
“You and your brother were very close,” the medical examiner said with sympathy.
“No.” Not until now, when there’s only a secret to share, as there was with our mother. Forgive me, forgive me. “I want the nature of his illness kept from the rest of the family. Will that be possible?”
“I don’t see why not. We’re very good at misplacing information that would otherwise shame the serviving relatives.”
Sebastien turned Jacques’s face toward him and looked into the empty eyes. There is no shame, little brother.
He had spent so many years frowning at Jacques. He wanted to give him a smile now, but he was afraid it would ruin his control. His love for Jacques wasn’t lost at all. It was bottled inside his chest, cold and hard, where it hurt more than anyone could imagine.
Annette was openly devastated by Jacques’s death. She was six months pregnant, the same as Marie had been when she lost a baby, so Giancarlo whisked her away for a vacation in Tuscany after the funeral. He was a charismatic man, too much so, Sebastien thought. Annette was almost slavish in her devotion to him. But in this case, Sebastien was grateful that Giancarlo took her away from Paris and its memories.
Their father went through the funeral mass with an aloofness that contrasted with the subtle air of frailty about him. Sebastien felt only weary indifference for him.
A few nights after the burial Marie came into their bedroom. Sebastien was standing at a window, trying to lose his thoughts by looking for the faint stars that pierced the haze in the night sky.
She stopped behind him and kissed him on the back of the neck, running her hands down his bare torso to the waistband of his pajama bottoms. He felt her nipples pressing against him through the sheer lace of her nightgown.
“Let’s do something to help us forget the past week,” she whispered. “It’s been so long since we’ve had sex, my darling. I’m ready to start again. And I should be very fertile right now.”
“Have I become nothing but a means to an end? Could you make the request a little more romantic?”
“Oh, Sebastien, don’t be moody. I know I’ve been distant, but it’s because I’ve been depressed all these weeks, and so have you.”
“Ah, and having recently buried my brother, I’m cheerful?”
She ran her hands over the front of his pajamas, caressing him through the material. “Come to bed. You of all people should know that grief has its limits. We’ll do something positive—we’ll make another baby.”
“It seems that you’ve avoided me until your obstetrician said it was safe to conceive again. Did you think I was happy in here alone every night? Is our sex life now solely devoted to creating a baby?”
“Stop it!” She moved around in front of him, her eyes fierce but her hands still massaging between his legs. “We have a wonderful sex life. We’ve both enjoyed ourselves. It’s always been a purposeful sort of pleasure, so why should it be any different now?”
He stared at her for a moment, growing angry and yet also feeling his body react to her stimulation. “If you want sex from me tonight, you’ll have to work for it.”
Her eyes glittered with challenge. “All right, my darling.” She untied his pajamas and jerked them down, then knelt down in front of him and took his growing erection in her mouth.
Sebastien trembled at the wet heat and the hard sucking of her lips. She was right. It was easy, and why should he care if it were even more emotionless than in the past? He wanted a child, too.
He grasped Marie’s rich black hair and pulled her away from his rigid penis. “Enough. We wouldn’t want to waste good sperm, would we?”
She smiled, her mouth wet, and quickly helped remove the pajamas from his legs. He lifted her to her feet and dragged her to the bed. The instant she climbed atop it he pressed her down and tore her gown in two.
“Yes. That’s just fine. Whatever you like,” she murmured, putting her hands behind her head and drawing her knees up.
Sebastien thrust into her and wondered if her slick welcome came from a tube of lubricant. Then he closed his eyes and shut her out completely, only feeling the connection between their bodies. He burst inside her with a furious orgasm that left him shuddering. When he opened his eyes to look at her, she nodded approvingly.
“We are doomed,” Mary Beth said dully, “to live in dumps and work for the Parker Poodits of the world forever.”
Amy began to laugh. “But the people we meet are so darn interestin’. Come look out this window. I think the Ripple Man is trying to hit Frank up for another dollar.” Their neighbor Frank, a very dapper jazz musician who resembled Sammy Davis, had innocently stepped onto the old building’s tiny lawn to repot his houseplant. “Frank is shaking his head. Now the Ripple Man is peeing on Frank’s begonia.”
Mary Beth snorted. “I dislike living in a neighborhood full of derelicts, artsy-fartsy types, and men with very smooth cheeks and very short hair. I dislike being bohemian middle class.”
Amy leaned back in her chair and smiled at the irony of life beyond college. The bohemian Mary Beth had worked hard in the past year to change her image. Her wild blond hair was now straight and short. It curved around her face like parentheses, the blunt ends swinging inward just below her chin. She’d thrown out her bargain-military wardrobe and begun dressing in tailored suits. Around their colleagues at WAZF, UHF channel 16, Atlanta’s smallest independent television station, Mary Beth Vandergard was now Elizabeth Vandergard, newswriter, news producer, and sole anchorwoman for WAZF’s sole newscast, aired every weekday evening at six.
It wasn’t hard to get ahead at WAZF. And there wasn’t much about the place to intimidate someone fresh out of college. Which was why Amy had been content for the past year. She’d progressed herself, starting as a production assistant but zooming through the haphazardly staffed ranks to a producer’s job. She now commanded an impressive staff of two and enjoyed an annual income that was almost one-thousand dollars above minimum wage.
“It’ll get better,” she told Mary Beth. “This is great experience. Everybody our age is supposed to suffer while learning the ropes.”
“Bullshit. Deborah Norville is already working for a network affiliate. It’s not fair. For God’s sake, she was in the same production classes as me! We made the same grades! And I can enunciate better than she does!”
“She’s three years older than we are.”
“No excuse. I don’t intend to be known as the ‘other’ blonde who came out of the university! Norville will eat my dust one day. Wanna know why? Because she’s Miss Ice Cream and I’m a bitch, and the public is more fascinated by mean blondes than by nice ones.”
“Interestin’ theory.”
“No brag, just fact.” Mary Beth put a cashmere scarf around her neck and swept a long white alpaca coat over her slacks and blouse. “I’m off. Off to edit tape for my soon-to-be-acclaimed show on candy making.” She sighed. “I wish I could title it, Lick This, Sucker.”
The news was not a high priority at WAZF, and the whole city knew it. The station was best known for its wrestling shows. Mary Beth rolled her eyes. “Have a nice Friday off. I’ll see ya on Monday. Don’t be too wild with Mr. Comedy.”
“I won’t be wild. I might be semi-weird, though.”
After Mary Beth departed Amy tossed a jacket over her sweater and jeans. She left the apartment carrying a canvas tote and her purse, then drove to the airport through a murky winter morning. She picked up the ticket Elliot had left for her and took a flight to Chicago.
He was waiting for her, in body at least, at the gate. She found him slouched in a chair, snoring, his head thrown back and his denimed legs flung open. Large black sunglasses covered his eyes. Under a red ski jacket he wore a wrinkled flannel shirt with a crushed paper coffee cup tucked in the pocket.
Amy bent over him and sniffed. As she suspected, the scent of mint mouthwash puffed from him with each breath. He was as ridiculous as a kid trying to hide his drinking, and not nearly a
s successful. He smelled like a big mint julep. Frowning, she kissed his upper lip and woke him up.
“Huh? Baby, baby!” He engulfed her in his arms and pulled her onto his lap. “Salvation has come at last.” He kissed her repeatedly as she wound her arms around his neck.
Amy removed his sunglasses and peered at his bloodshot eyes. “Let me guess. You finished your last show then hung around the club until about four, then you and every guy who could still walk went to the owner’s place and partied until dawn. Right?”
“Wrong. Some girls went, too.” He grinned. “But I fought them off when they started rubbing their breasts against me.”
“Do you know that when you sleep sitting up you throw your legs apart and look like a dead frog?”
Looking toward heaven, he groaned. “I fought off the groupies to save myself for her?” But he was chuckling as he said it and ran his hands up and down her back. “I’ve got a great hotel room. No cheap digs for the hottest comedian on cable. You’re going to love this place. My God, I can’t believe we haven’t seen each other for three weeks. That’s a record. I knew I was getting too lonely yesterday when I was watching the Flintstones. I started fantasizing about Betty Rubble.”
She chucked him under the chin. “Well, Barney, I missed you too.” Amy loved the welcome in his eyes, and she knew that he wasn’t lying about his loneliness. Elliot was faithful. When they met she hadn’t expected him to be faithful, but after a year with him she was convinced that he meant it when he said he didn’t have other women.
Elliot had held onto most of his solid midwestern values, and he was so sensitive to the feelings of other people that he was like a piano string that vibrated from every sound near it. His observation-style comedy was built on the resonating tones of the world and the people around him.
But the dark side of such sensitivity made him restless, fearful, and moody. He needed Amy most when those demons plagued him. She took care of him, she made him stop partying long enough to rest, and she gave him a quiet, secure place to which he could retreat.
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