Andrew poured wine for the two intruders. Judy started to reach for her glass but Shiva picked it up and moved it out of her reach. “Thank you, God” she said, which made Shiva laugh. She continued to list slightly in the Indian’s direction.
“Judy was up all last night,” said Janis. “She’ll probably pass out even if she doesn’t have any wine.”
“Janis says I submerge myself in work,” said Judy, leaning further towards Shiva. “‘A bad habit,’ she says.”
“Her only bad habit,” said Janis.
“And now you plan to submerge yourself in Shiva?” said Rosemary.
“Oh, excuse me,” said Judy, sitting upright again. “It’s just, I finished these briefing papers for the Governor – about zoning changes…constitutional issues…land tax – and then I had an hour to go home and put some things in a suitcase – he only invited us this morning – and the plane ride was too short to go to sleep, and then we went to his famous house, and I thought a nap would be nice, but before we finished unpacking we had to leave, and now I don’t know whose house I’m in and I want to put my head down and your husband looks soft. Sorry.”
“I think that sums it up nicely,” said Rosemary. “Go into the living room, Shiva dear, and sit on the couch and put a pillow on your lap and let the poor child close her eyes for half an hour. She’s about to throw up from sleepiness, and that wouldn’t be fair to her or Cathy’s rugs.”
The two of them went into the living room as instructed. Andrew looked across the table into the next room and saw that Judy had already curled up on the sofa. Shiva was gently stroking her head, brushing the hair out of her face.
“Are you two friends,” said Sally, “or just co-workers?”
“Friends,” said Janis. “Have to be. We share an office that’s the size of a small bathroom. She’s hopeless and brilliant. The Justice she clerked for says God wants her to be a professor, but she has to get some real world experience first.”
“‘Real world’ as in Massachusetts politics?” said Andrew. “Isn’t that kind of the deep end of the pool?”
“I’m teaching her to tread water,” said Janis, looking back at Andrew. We both know all about treading water, don’t we? she seemed to be saying. How could she know that?
“I think school’s out,” said Rosemary, looking into the living room. “Has she passed the bar yet?”
“Oh, yes,” said Janis. “In D.C. and in several states. It took me two tries just in New York.” Janis looked around the room. “So God belongs to you,” she said to Rosemary. “Who do the other men belong to?”
“He’s mine,” said Cynthia, pointing at Joe without much enthusiasm.
“I’m Cathy,” said Sally. “Andrew and I are your hosts.”
“Thanks,” said Janis, briefly appraising her. “This is quite an imposition. Working for the Governor, we get used to radical changes of plan, but you didn’t sign up for this. Do you even have enough beds?”
“We do,” said Sally, appraising her back. Were they competitors or confederates? Andrew often couldn’t figure women out, to be honest.
“Just not enough men,” said Janis.
Rosemary laughed. “So why did you leave your job at a New York law firm to share an office the size of a loo?”
“Politics is more interesting than bond indentures. I think the Governor may wind up in the White House. I want to be one of those people on West Wing.”
“Have you slept with him yet?” said Cynthia.
It was a stupendously rude question, considering the circumstances – a younger, unfamous woman interrogated by a recognisable journalist in unfamiliar surroundings – but Janis batted it back easily. “He doesn’t do that anymore,” she said. And what was more impressive: the question went away.
If Rosemary was unembarrassed Venus, Janis was Athena disguised as an American. That wouldn’t work, though. Athena was a virgin. Andrew doubted Janis was. Did he hope she was or hope she wasn’t? He continued to like the idea that she would undress without embarrassment.
The conversation around the table continued for a while. Sally offered ice cream and strawberries. Joe got up to help her. Rosemary asked Shiva if he wanted some but he signalled from the sofa that he did not. Joe disappeared. Janis said she might go swimming if someone would come with her. No one offered. Part of Andrew wanted to but he couldn’t figure out how. The party was losing focus.
“Shiva and I will go get more lobsters,” said Rosemary, “or steak if it has to be that. Those who need naps will take naps.”
Rosemary looked at Andrew and said nothing, meaning that he should go upstairs and do just that.
He didn’t argue, but he didn’t move.
“What about me?” said Cynthia.
“You could go upstairs and fuck your husband,” said Rosemary blandly. She probably meant it as a joke.
“I’ve done my bit for today,” said Cynthia. It was a decent come-back, but she looked offended. The rest of the guests politely pretended not to have heard the interchange. There seemed to be a backstory Andrew didn’t know.
Rosemary asked Janis if she could get Judy upstairs so Shiva could come with her to the lobster monger. Janis said she could if Shiva would help her.
“Is ‘lobster monger’ a word?” said Cynthia. She was trying to rejoin the group, Andrew decided.
“It’s two words,” said Rosemary.
Before anyone could do anything, however, there was another phone call. The ringing was coming from the living room. Andrew got up quickly and felt briefly dizzy. Shouldn’t have had wine at lunch. For some reason it was important that he stop the ringing. Mustn’t let it alarm Judy. They had to get her upstairs without fully waking her. She was important to their plans in some as-yet-undisclosed way. He went towards the sound but there wasn’t a source. Judy was stirring like a sleeper having a bad dream. It wasn’t the sound the landline made. Shiva reached between the sofa cushions and extracted a mobile phone. He handed it to Andrew. Andrew recognised the phone as Cathy’s. She’d insisted on having a red one – so she wouldn’t lose it, she said. Like she was the commander of a nuclear missile site, Andrew had once told her, and the President had to be able to get her within five rings. It was a movie from the ’50s they’d seen on television once.
The ringing stopped. It wasn’t the President. The message on the screen said it was Eleanor. Andrew handed the phone to Rosemary.
Joe reappeared. “I’ll help you,” he said to Shiva, who still had Judy’s head in his lap. He picked Judy up in his arms and carried her upstairs without difficulty. “Can you bring her bag?”
“I’ll bring it,” said Rosemary.
Andrew realised that would give her a brief opportunity to get Joe’s views regarding his long walk with Shiva. What a clever woman she was. One had to acknowledge that Lady Rosemary was not a nice woman, but she was certainly skillful, both in and out of bed.
7
Andrew woke up with a start, lying on a bed that was supposed to have Cathy in it. Or some woman, at least. He was alone. It felt like late afternoon. He lay still to let reality crystallise. He got some of his best ideas that way.
He’d fallen asleep with his running shoes on. Rosemary had refused to let him dry dishes and insisted he go upstairs. It was as if his mind had been unable to cope and had simply shut down. His mind now seemed to be engaged again, which was reassuring.
Cathy hadn’t gone to Germany. The evidence for this was that Eleanor was calling her. And she hadn’t called the landline because she still wasn’t talking to her father.
Andrew hadn’t answered Cathy’s phone when Eleanor called because he didn’t know what to say to her. If Cathy hadn’t gone to Germany, where was she? And why had she run away? Perhaps he didn’t want to answer those questions.
Andrew hadn’t told Sally that Eleanor had called because he thought he maybe had a better chance of finding out what Sally was up to if she didn’t know he knew she’d lied to him about Cathy. Rosemary was certain Sa
lly was “up to” something.
If he did confront Sally, she would presumably say Cathy had told her to tell him she’d gone to Germany, quote, so as not to worry you any more than necessary with important guests coming unquote. But was he supposed to not care about his daughter? It was getting complicated.
The important guests were all over the place. As Andrew was going upstairs, Sally had announced she was taking Rosemary and Joe to the whaling museum. She had called and learned it was going to close at five, and Joe wanted to see it. They could go to the store afterwards and buy steak. Its business was so heavily weekend oriented that it stayed open late on Saturdays. Cynthia had said she didn’t approve of whaling and would Shiva please take her for a walk? Andrew assumed the Governor’s overworked staff members were taking their own naps. He would have checked on them, or at least on Janis since Judy was presumably sound asleep, but that was something only the hostess could do.
There was nothing to be done about his office being moved – or what that portended – except pray that Joe and Shiva decided they liked each other. So far the signs were good, though Andrew wished Cynthia would stop flirting with Shiva, despite Rosemary’s insistence that it would turn out to be helpful. If Joe decided to care, the deal could collapse in a heartbeat.
Andrew’s own heart rate jumped at that thought, and then he felt tired again. They say if you are only in the shallow first stages of sleep, when you wake up you don’t think you’ve been asleep. So maybe he’d gone back to sleep and what came next was a dream. It felt like a memory though.
He and Sally were in bed the first night, doing intimacy without sex, at which she was quite proficient. This was several hours before he’d gone downstairs and found Rosemary in the pantry. Rosemary naked sort of blotted out everything else, but being in bed with Sally was coming back. They’d been lying next to each other, not touching. She’d said she didn’t plan to touch him but it was impossible not to wonder if she’d meant it. Cathy hadn’t initiated in six weeks. He pretended he didn’t know how long it had been, but he did.
After a bit Sally spoke, very softly, which was like being touched unexpectedly. “Did she talk to you in the dark?”
“Cathy?”
“Yes.”
“No,” said Andrew.
“She talked to me,” said Sally.
“Yes.”
“I told you we’d shared a bottle of wine the night we finished getting the house ready.”
“Yes.”
“After dinner she said she wanted to see what I looked like in some of her clothes.”
“That was after she’d told you everything?”
“Everything about you.”
Andrew thought about that for a minute.
“We came up here,” said Sally. “I undressed.”
“As you did for me,” said Andrew.
“Cathy pulled various dresses and blouses out of the closet and I put them on. ‘You’re good in that,’ she’d say, or ‘wrong colour.’”
“Her clothes fit you well,” said Andrew.
“A bit tight in the bust,” said Sally.
“Cynthia admired your breasts,” said Andrew, remembering the conversation that morning on the porch.
“She was overexcited,” said Sally. “She wanted to touch them. I could tell. I would have let her put sun cream on me but I wasn’t sure she could handle it.”
“I suppose you don’t want me to touch them either?” said Andrew.
“Oh, I’d like it very much, but it wouldn’t be consistent with the master plan.”
“Which is?”
“That’s up to you,” said Sally. “I assume you have one, though in my experience most people don’t. But isn’t the idea here to keep the billionaires happy?”
“And their wives,” said Andrew. “You don’t much like Cynthia, do you?”
“Not an issue,” said Sally. “I’m the hostess. I have to be nice. I just get impatient with women who lack self-awareness. But let me finish. Cathy and I went through maybe half a dozen outfits, some necklaces, some rings. ‘Stay with me,’ she said finally. Nothing more. So we both put on tee shirts and got under the doona. We turned out the lights and lay side by side, a foot apart, the way you and I are now. Just when I thought she must have gone to sleep, she spoke.”
“Just as you did a few minutes ago,” Andrew had said.
“And it startled me the way my speaking startled you,” Sally had said. “She told me about kissing one of your house guests, last summer.”
“A kiss that started out as a hug,” said Andrew.
“Yes. She told you about it too?”
“Last May,” said Andrew. “The story was part of a discussion that felt like an argument that led to our hiring you. I thought it had to do with the strain of entertaining every weekend, and the prospect of being alone during the week.”
“She asked if she could kiss me,” said Sally.
Andrew said nothing.
“I do that sort of thing,” said Sally. Pause. “Not exclusively.” Pause. “I’m flexible.”
“How useful,” said Andrew.
“That was all,” said Sally. Clearly it wasn’t. “Well, almost all. I woke once in the night and discovered that she’d reached towards me in her sleep. Her hand was touching mine.”
“But earlier, had you kissed her?”
“Of course.”
There was a sound in the hall. The memory vanished. Andrew got off the bed and opened the door. It was the Governor of Massachusetts. No Janis. “Ah, Andrew,” he said. “For a minute I thought there was no one home.” He seemed to regard going upstairs in someone else’s house as normal behaviour.
“Aren’t you supposed to be attending to Lydia, talking to her about her mother or something?” George seemed to be taking over the weekend.
“Well, I would be,” said the Governor. “Come downstairs. I need a beer.”
“Just let me check on a few things,” said Andrew. He walked up and down the hall quietly opening bedroom doors. Judy was in Shiva and Rosemary’s room, still asleep. There was no sign of the others.
“I would be comforting Lydia even as we speak,” the Governor repeated as Andrew opened the refrigerator to find a beer. “I would be doing just that if one of those naughty girls I’ve dumped on you hadn’t left clothes in the washing machine.”
“Oh my,” said Andrew.
“Which Lydia found. Which means I need a bed for the night myself, because she’s kicked me out.”
“Sorry,” said Janis, coming in with a copy of Moby Dick in her hand. Andrew decided he liked her freckles. “You made us leave in such a rush, I forgot. Apologies for eavesdropping.” She said this to Andrew. “I was on the porch around the corner.”
“Why were you doing laundry at all?” said the Governor, more curious than annoyed, it seemed to Andrew. He doubted George even knew how to run a washing machine.
“You made us leave Boston in a rush too, if you recall, Governor. You called at eight in the morning. I normally do my laundry on the weekends. So I had to pack some dirty clothes.”
“Black lace underpants and bra?” said George.
“Do you want a beer, Janis?” said Andrew. He liked imagining her in black lace.
“No alcohol before six,” she said.
“And no sex after alcohol?” said Andrew, and immediately felt foolish. He wasn’t sure why he’d said that. George and Janis ignored him. “You need another one, George?”
“I’m good.”
Cathy’s phone rang again. Andrew pulled it out of his pocket and looked at the screen but didn’t answer it. “I suppose I should tell you what’s going on,” he said to both of them. “Come sit on the porch.”
“So that woman who introduced herself as Cathy isn’t your wife, but you’re pretending she is?” said Janis when he had finished outlining the situation. She spoke as if it were an interesting public policy question that would benefit from sound analysis. She seemed to enjoy analysis. Or maybe it was
“situations” she enjoyed – and being unfazed by anything. Working for the Governor would have given her plenty of situations to practise on.
“Of course, George will realise Sally isn’t Cathy as soon as she gets back from the whaling museum,” said Andrew.
“I’ve known Cathy since she was a little girl,” the Governor explained. “Our parents knew each other. I flattered myself that she had a crush on me when she was fourteen.”
“Every girl in Boston has had a crush on you at some point, George,” said Andrew.
“So you want us to pretend Sally’s Cathy too?” said Janis, ignoring the matter of crushes.
“That would be helpful,” said Andrew.
“Who is she?” said the Governor, standing up. He signalled that another beer would be acceptable after all, and the three of them went back into the kitchen.
“Well, I don’t really know,” said Andrew. “Cathy hired her as a general helper and companion. Florence and Eleanor are both away this summer. Cathy thought she’d be lonely.”
“Does she look like Cathy?” the Governor asked.
“Little bit. They can wear each other’s clothes. This Cathy is younger, with darker hair.” He paused. “Bit bustier.”
“And you’re sleeping with her?” said Janis.
“Sleeping in the same bed,” said Andrew, “but…”
“Too much information,” said the Governor.
“So will this Cathy know that the Governor knows the real Cathy,” said Janis, “and therefore know she’s a fraud?”
“She will if she thinks about it for more than a second,” said Andrew. “I’ve told them all that George and I are old friends.”
“And that at least is true,” said the Governor.
“So what will this Cathy do?” said Janis.
“We’re about to find out,” said Andrew.
Sally came in the door, followed by Rosemary and Joe. As soon as she saw the Governor, whose face every sentient American adult would recognise, she came straight over and gave him a hug and a kiss on the cheek. George seized the opportunity to pat her on the ass, which made Andrew smile. They’d never met, but they were going to pretend they didn’t know that.
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