“The sun could explode.”
Her mouth was set in a receptive way. “Do you want to kiss me, Fred?”
“God, yes!”
She shot a look over her shoulder. “Then do it quick.”
• • •
Sunstruck, Paget’s Pond was a shimmer of prisms. Dudley, who had just washed his face and hands, stood where floating flowers rimmed the water. Chief Morgan, keeping his distance, said, “Don’t run.”
“Have you been looking for me?”
“Now and then.” Morgan took no solid steps, only tentative ones.
“Please, stop right there,” Dudley said, and Morgan did, tilting his head when the sun threw a beam straight into his eyes. “I heard the bells,” Dudley said. “Why aren’t you in church?”
“It must be over by now.”
“I’m an Episcopalian.”
“I’m something less,” Morgan said, relaxing. Dudley stood straight, soft, and peaceful, and Morgan read gentle madness in the friendly smile.
“I like your town, Chief, I really do.”
“Are you thinking of staying?”
“Not forever.”
“Right. You have to be born here to do that.” Morgan shaded his eyes. “You’re beginning to look seedy again.”
“You’re not so neat yourself.”
Morgan passed a hand over his stubble, stepping sideways for the firmer ground. “There’s someone who wants to meet you, Dudley. It won’t take long.”
“Who is it?”
“I don’t think you know her, though you may know her husband. That’s a guess.”
“I see.”
“I wonder. Will you come with me?”
“I’ll wait here.”
Morgan considered the weight of mistakes made during his career, some of which had left him feeling inadequate and besmirched. He remembered a dream in which he raced in full uniform onto a frozen pond and fell through weak ice. “You won’t run away?”
Dudley nodded.
“You swear?”
“I swear.”
• • •
Harley Bodine phoned first, arrived ten minutes later, and stared at her so intently she became singular, a being apart from all others. She looked beautiful in an austere white shirt tucked into a straight skirt, her black hair as glossy as the pelt of a panther. He was not all that certain she was glad to see him and felt his presence was provisional, dependent upon her mood. Her voice was casual, simply tossed at him.
“Do you want coffee?”
She served it in the sunroom, which overlooked small squares, cones, and spheres of evergreens. The house was abnormally quiet. Every little noise he made stood out. They sat in precisely facing chairs of white wicker.
“I’ve had only one other affair,” she said. “He was quite handsome, exciting, an assistant district attorney with political ambitions. For a while he was my pagan god.”
Bodine felt a rush of jealousy he would not have thought possible. “Was he married?”
“Yes.”
“Did Ira ever find out?”
“Not Ira. My first husband, a liar and a cheat. Yes, inevitably he found out. I wanted him to. It hurt him deeply.”
“You took revenge.”
“Call it what you like.”
He put his coffee cup aside because his hands were trembling, which was unlike him. Usually he had a strong hold on his emotions. “Where’s your assistant D.A. now?”
“In Washington. He’s a senator. Ira will doubtless run into him. They were at Harvard together.”
Yes, Harvard. Of course. He brooded for a moment, then reminded himself what he had had from her, more than he had ever expected. “I think Kate plans to leave me,” he said.
“I hope that has nothing to do with me.”
“No, nothing.”
“Will you try to stop her?”
The coffee cup was back in his hands, the ear almost too narrow for his finger. The saucer had a wavy edge. “I don’t know, too many variables. The only certainties are death, taxes, and ragweed in August.”
“Do you suffer from it?”
“Ragweed? I take medication.” An unwanted emotion pushed at him, took control. “Tell me more about the assistant D.A. The senator. Was he a good lover?”
“I thought so.”
A hot flush coloring his face lessened him, the way it did when he failed to catch a waiter’s eye. “How about me?”
The telephone rang in the next room. She rose with her coffee cup in hand and glanced down at him. “Let’s put it this way, Harley. You surprised me.”
• • •
Elbows on the table, Beverly Gunner sat silent and still, like a cup of tea gone cold. She watched the clock, she smoked, she waited and waited, and finally he came. He had not shaved. He was wearing, she noticed, the same clothes he’d had on at Rembrandt’s. He did not look like a policeman of any sort, but she trusted him.
“You found him?”
“Yes,” he said.
Leaving Minerva’s, she clung to his sleeve like a child. He opened a door of his car, and she climbed in with her heart racing and her confidence evaporating. She gave a start when the radio crackled, but nothing came on. She clutched her chest.
“What’s the matter?”
“Some things the heart can’t stand,” she said. He was alarmed. “I’m all right,” she assured him.
They drove up Summer Street and onto Fieldstone Road, which she knew well, too well, and soon her senses eddied. The poultry farm on the left was where an old woman in rubber boots had let Fay cuddle a newborn chick. On the right was an ice cream stand where Fay’s choice had invariably been black raspberry, a single scoop in a sugar cone, the drippings on her dress.
When they stopped, she looked out at a picnic bench and a No Swimming sign and said, “I don’t know where we are.”
Then she was out of the car, with the sun hot on her face. Walking into woods seemed a wrong thing to do, but she did it without question, along a path that ran rough and hurt her heels. She should have worn flats. Snagged in the pine tops was a blue tissue of sky she needed to know was there. The path wandered into a clearing, where she saw the flash of the pond and the figure of a man joyously naked. She turned her head.
Chief Morgan yelled, “Put your clothes on, Dudley.”
“Do we know what we’re doing?” she asked.
“Not entirely,” Morgan replied.
She shivered. “Can I call you something other than Chief?”
“James.”
The man, who had gotten into jeans and a roomy shirt, called back in a happy voice, “I’ve been swimming.”
The voice was in no way familiar, yet it gnawed at her ear. James, dear James, her strength, looked at her.
“Are you afraid?”
“I’m beyond that,” she said, though the man’s look, even from a distance, was unnerving. His eyes absorbed whatever they rested on, and they were resting on her.
“This is Mrs. Gunner, Dudley.”
“How do you do.”
Alone, aware of the endless threat of water, she went to him and felt the world retreating. Flat moments of silence spread between them as they stared at each other, as if they were relatives meeting for the first time, strangers sharing blood. Her voice came gradually.
“Do you know my husband?”
“Some people I’ve forgotten.”
“He’s a fat man.”
“But not a burden, I hope.”
A butterfly floated between them. As a girl she had fancied that delicate Japanese hands patterned the colors, that factories in Tokyo existed for that single purpose. She took a snapshot of Fay from her bag. “Did you know my daughter?”
He would not take the picture from her hand. He merely looked at it. “Was she sweet?”
“Very.”
“Some things I can’t talk about.”
“About this you have to.” Trembling, she had spoken loud enough for James, wise James, to hear.
“You mustn’t gang up on me.”
“I’m doing what a mother has to do,” she said.
His eyes were sympathetic, his smile collusive. “You’re not right in the head, are you?”
“I haven’t been for a long while.”
“You get used to it, you must believe me.”
She experienced a blast of visual sensations, none of them in sync, each carrying its own coloring noise. She recalled dreams in which sums on a blackboard never totaled correctly and written words failed to correspond.
“We may have been fed from the same spoon,” he said.
“No, I don’t believe that.” Her look communicated urgency. “Help me.”
“Yes, I should do something.” Words, kindly spoken, welled out of him. “I know a place you could go. You could rest, read, forget.”
This wasn’t what she wanted to hear. “What are you talking about?”
“A very exclusive place. Privileged. Your mother-in-law is there.”
She continued to stare at him, but her essential self floated away like the monarch that had passed between them.
She backed off, turned slowly, and on hurt heels returned to Chief Morgan, who stood with a thumb wedged in his belt and an unsettled expression on his waiting face.
“Did you hear?”
“Not all of it,” he said.
“He killed my daughter,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
The chief took a step forward and said to Dudley, “I have to take you in.”
Dudley edged toward blueberry bushes denuded of their fruit by jays. “Please don’t.”
“I have to.”
Dudley fled.
“It’s all right,” the chief said, slipping his hands into his pockets. “I’ll get him later.”
“It’s not necessary,” she said.
• • •
Myles Yarbrough returned with the Sunday papers, dumped them into a chintz chair, and said, “I met with him. Things are going to be all right for us.” Color long absent had returned to his face, along with a bit of life to his receding hair. “Did you hear me, Phoebe?”
She had heard him quite clearly. She sat on a creamy white sofa with her legs drawn under her. The bandage was gone from her face. The bruised and broken skin was violet circled in yellow, but the swelling had subsided.
“He was reasonable,” Myles said. “But of course he had to be.”
She was slow in looking at him, slower still in replying. Her voice had a smooth, thick texture. “He knows what I was, Myles. He was one of my clients.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
He pulled up an ornate footstool, sat on it, and caressed her ankles while viewing her in a manner she did not want to be viewed, as if she were a portrait other men had painted, her likeness idealized. Whenever he embraced her, it was as if he were lifting her off an easel.
“It might even have worked to our advantage.”
His advantage, not hers, though that was expected. Their marriage had been machined on quid pro quo. For her, a fur in her closet, diamonds in her jewelry box, an annuity in her name; for him, a prized courtesan.
Smiling, he gripped her foot and gently squeezed her toes together. “In any event, you’re my ace in the hole. We’ll never starve.”
It was an old joke she had never appreciated. “I’m forty years old, Myles.”
“I’m only kidding,” he said, his face altering in the instant. “I’m sorry.”
She could see that he was. And she knew that he loved her in some boyishly perverse fashion that suited him well. It was a side of his nature hidden from himself but not from her. Her passions, which he considered amusements, were in another room, a wall brightened by books. She had read them all.
“What did you get from him?” she asked, though she really did not want to know.
“A loan, interest-free, a year to pay back. By that time I’ll be on my feet.”
She casually kicked his hand off her foot. “You extorted him.”
“I negotiated a settlement like any lawyer would. He assaulted you, Phoebe. That’s a criminal offense, not to mention the civil suit we could’ve brought.”
Abruptly she rose from the sofa and stood on long, shaky legs visible inside an open white robe. “You did wrong, Myles.”
“What do you mean?”
“You pushed him. He’ll neither forgive nor forget. He’ll get back at us.”
“How?”
She sorted through the Sundays, brought up the Times, and extracted the book review section. “How, Myles?”
“Yes, how?”
She turned pages. “He’ll tell everyone in this town about me. It’s only a question of when.”
• • •
Chief Morgan hooked a left onto Wainright Road and drove Beverly Gunner to the cemetery. It was where she wanted to go. Inside the cemetery, where the geometry of erect stones looked like the low ruins of a lost time, she directed the way, this lane, then that one, and then she said, “Pull up.” Pausing, she collected strength, which now seemed easier to come by. She managed a smile. “Shall we?”
They stepped out into the swelling sunshine. A cardinal, scarlet on the run, vanished into the blue. A jay that sounded berserk squawked from the distance. Morgan offered his arm, but she didn’t need it.
“This one,” she said, stopping, and they stood before her daughter’s modest stone, an inscription that read SWEETNESS THAT NOW BELONGS TO GOD. “I’m not a believer, but I wanted those words.”
He was watching her closely, as if she were on the brink of nervous collapse, which she wasn’t. She was simply reliving moments in a field when Fay had been picking a nosegay of violets and other delicate wildflowers in bloom, a gift for her daddy. The chief murmured something that didn’t carry.
She said, “Paul never comes here, and he doesn’t like it when I do. He says it’s morbid.”
“We do what we have to do.”
“Yes, that’s exactly right.” She was crying, good tears, not bad ones. His hand was in motion on her back.
“Shall we leave?”
Back in the car, which the sun had heated, she sank deep into the seat. Her collapsing hair shaded her face, and she pushed part of it away with the astonishing sensation that she was breaking threads, severing connections. The chief was staring at her, his face almost an intrusion.
“Mrs. Gunner.”
“Yes, James.”
“Back at the pond you said you know, but how do you know?”
She smiled, for that was not something easily answered, nor was she sure it had an answer.
“I need something substantial, Mrs. Gunner.”
“I don’t know what that means anymore,” she said with a smile.
“Are you holding anything back, something I didn’t hear at the pond?”
“What would be the advantage?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “but all of a sudden you’ve changed.”
“Yes, I have, haven’t I? You’ve helped me, James.” Her smile was nervous. “I feel odd calling you James.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t.”
“You don’t want me to?”
“It’s up to you.” He wiped the sweat from his brow. “But you must tell me what’s in your mind.”
She touched his wrist, patted it. “I have to sort it out.”
He started up the car. As they drove out of the cemetery she found herself humming a tune that hadn’t popped into her head in twenty years or so.
• • •
A half hour later, alone, Chief Morgan motored up a straight drive and glided to a stop. Kate Bodine was bent over a flower bed near the last stall of the garage. He did not get out of the car. He waited for her to come to him. When she didn’t, he said, “I know, I have no right.”
Removing her garden gloves, she straightened. “You’re taking a chance.”
“Where is he?”
“Playing go
lf. Or seeing another woman. It’s not like him, but it’s possible.”
“Does it bother you?”
“Not so strangely, it doesn’t.”
He watched her slow approach, sunlight slipping in and out of her blond hair. Her mouth was set tight, as if she no longer wanted the burden of his confidences, his suspicions. “How’s the writing going?” he asked.
“I thought ideas would rush into my head like music. They don’t.” She placed a hand on the window ledge. “I have an interview coming up with WBZ. It’s radio, not TV, but I’ll do anything.”
“I’ll miss you.”
“I haven’t got it yet, but it looks good. I’ve told Harley. He didn’t seem interested.” She leaned forward, both hands on the window ledge. “You planted seeds in my head, James, but I must tell you, I don’t think Harley could ever have wanted his son hurt.”
Morgan nodded. “Please. Sit in the car with me.”
“It looks hot in there.”
“It is.”
She strode around the front of the car and slipped in, leaving the door open. She was wearing shorts. Her knees were grass-stained. “What’s the matter, James?”
“I don’t know what I’ve got myself into. One moment I feel I’m on the right track, the next I feel foolish. Worse than that, I feel responsible for the state of other people’s minds.”
“Maybe you should worry about your own. You look like hell. Don’t you shave anymore?”
“I feel I’m a player in something I don’t understand.”
“You’ve made me share the feeling.”
“I’m sorry.” He dropped a hand on her. “I should talk only to myself, but when I do that I never know when to shut up.”
“Your hand is sweaty. Are you making a pass?”
“I’ve been doing that since the first time I saw you.”
“All I want, James, is to get back into the business, or near enough.”
“At least you know what your business is. Mine’s becoming a mystery.”
“You tell me only bits and pieces. The rest I don’t know.”
“Nor do I.”
She crossed her thighs and locked his hand in place. “That’s far enough, James.”
“Yes,” he said sadly, “I knew it would be.”
• • •
Beverly Gunner yanked at curtains to block the sun, and in the shadowy room she stood before a mirror and saw only parts of herself, which deepened a feeling of estrangement. From herself. From the world, which operated, she had no doubts, at the lowest moral level. Then a light came on, and her parts connected. She viewed herself quickly to make sure she had not been rearranged.
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