When Ev had told her that, Carlie had asked, "Could Daddy die?"
"Everyone dies, honey. But I don't think Daddy will die for a very long time."
"When I'm grown up?"
"Probably not till then." She knew she should have told the truth, but she couldn't. The truth would come without her having to speak it. At least Carlie would have the memory of touching him. The reluctance that Mac seemed to feel with Ev was not as much in evidence regarding his daughter. There were times when he would embrace her with an intensity of feeling Ev had not believed him capable of. Mac had never done this in front of Ev, but one night she had walked into Carlie's bedroom, where Mac was hearing her prayers, and found the two of them, Mac dry-eyed but immeasurably sad, Carlie puzzled but accepting, her arms around her father's neck, her gaze directed toward the walls of her room, where rainbows led into one another in an infinity of arced colors.
When he started working again she thought that he might change, get his mind off the grim visions she knew were plaguing him. But if he was any less obsessed by his illness, he showed no sign of it. He was unsmiling, unresponsive. He did his job, dealt with the clients who came to their door, and put as much, if not more, money into their bank account as before. He worked tirelessly, and was gone from the house at least twelve hours a day, including weekends. Many days he was out until after midnight and up again at six, out the door while Ev was still waking up. Most of the time when he was in their bed she was not aware of it. At night she slept hard, due to the fact that she was working harder than ever before. It was sublimation, she knew, but it worked to a degree. She no longer cried as she had when she was left alone. Instead she determined that she would not be alone. So she filled her days with her teaching and her nights with meetings, taking Carlie to various lessons and activities in the hours between, and getting sitters for the frequent evenings when both she and Mac were out.
Of course she thought about divorce, and if the cause of her problems had been anything but what it was, she might have sought an attorney. But to leave Mac under such circumstances, even if life with him had become unbearable, would have been impossible for her. She pitied him too much, and too, she loved him too much. Still, she was human, and needed the things she had had before.
She never intended to have an affair with Jeff Saunderson, but it happened. It was impossible to avoid him, since Ev was curriculum chairperson at the senior high, and Jeff the chairman of the junior. Their meetings had always been after school, with the rest of the curriculum committee in attendance, but at one meeting at the beginning of December, one of the committee members, a Miss Tynan—blue-haired, crusty, and too near retirement to care what she said—told the others that half the topics on the agenda were a waste of time for anyone except the two chairpeople to discuss, and why the hell didn't Ev and Jeff get together and hash this stuff out, for God's sake, and then the committee will just rubber-stamp it?
It was what everyone else on the committee had been thinking for years, and it was quickly agreed upon, with the provision not to let the administration know what was happening, unless they asked, of course, which they seldom did.
So Jeff and Ev found themselves alone together several times a month. It started with conversation, mostly questions from Jeff about Mac's health, and Ev's evasive answers. She was cautious with him, extremely so, for she knew only too well how vulnerable she was at this time to any display of affection.
This caution, however, was not enough, and she soon found herself drawn to him, needing his ear, his understanding. He had been through it himself, after all. There was no harm in talking so personally to him. She had to talk to someone, and Jeff knew better than any of her friends precisely what she was talking about.
Not the day it happened, but the day they first knew it would happen, Ev's car, a seven-year-old Toyota, had surrendered its muffler to time, and was being fitted for a new one. Ev and Jeff had remained after school to discuss textbooks, and after the meeting he offered to give her a ride home. It was just after five, and dark, when they got into his car. In the past three days the only glimpse she had had of Mac was a shadow drifting into her bedroom way past midnight and out again before dawn, and she very badly needed a man to touch her—not necessarily to make love to her, but to touch her, hold her, tell her he cared about what she did and what she thought.
Jeff opened the door for her, then got in the driver's side. But instead of starting the car, he turned and looked at her in the darkness. "What is it, Ev?"
She didn't know what he meant, and said so.
"There's something. Can I help? I mean, I listen, but sometimes that's not enough."
She tried to smile, even though he couldn't see it.
"Sometimes that has to be enough," she told him.
"Not always." He made no move toward her.
"You'd better take me home, Jeff."
"Ev . . ."
"Please. Carlie will be waiting for me."
"What about Mac?" he asked quietly.
"What about Mac?" she returned, her throat thick.
"If you want to let it out, then do it."
"There's nothing to . . ."
"Don't tell me that, I don't believe it. You've been like a rock every time you talk about it, but you're always the one who brings it up."
She said nothing, and she was glad he couldn't see her face.
"I was the same way. Even with people I felt I could be free in front of. I tightened up. It was all I thought about, her dying, it was on my mind every second I was awake. But nobody wanted to talk about it. I'd try, and I'd see them clam up, and get uncomfortable, and try to change the subject. It was like I was Cyrano de Bergerac, with this huge nose in front of me that you could hang out wash on, but nobody ever mentioned it. And that feeling stayed inside me, and couldn't breathe, and I felt like it was rotting me away just like . . . just like . . ."
Ev could hear the tears in his voice, and started to feel her own tears, hot and acid, pool in the cups of her eyes. She put out a hand to him. "Jeff . . ."
He took it, and for the first time they touched, and the thrill that passed through her was like awakening from a very long and terrible dream. They held one another and wept, for the other, for themselves, for the one they had lost and were losing. And they wept in relief at finding someone else who knew. When they were finished, they sat back, shaken by the depth of emotion they'd shown, the vulnerability they'd both displayed.
"I'll take you home," Jeff said.
"No. Not yet." She put her arms around him and kissed him, and felt her cheeks, still moist with tears, against his. They embraced and kissed like teenaged lovers, hungry for more, yet knowing that this was not the time or the place.
"I want to see you," she whispered. "I want to be with you."
"I know. . . I want you too."
"Oh God, though . . . Oh Jeff, it seems . . . it just seems so wrong. With Mac . . ."
"It isn't wrong," he said softly but firmly. "It's something you need. It's something we all need. We all need love, Ev, and oh God I love you, I do . . ." He buried his face in the softness where her neck met her shoulder.
"I . . . love you too," she said, and it was true. She loved him, and still she loved Mac too. It was so strange, she thought in a surprisingly clear way, to love two men at the same time.
But it was possible. Oh yes, it certainly seemed to be possible.
McKain II
Physicians of the utmost fame
Were called at once; but when they came
They answered, as they took their fees,
"There is no cure for this disease."
—Hillaire Belloc,
Cautionary Tales
Chapter 10
In February I discovered that Ev was having an affair. It wasn't anything as obvious as finding a letter or a motel room key, or smelling sex on her clothes that led me to that conclusion. It was rather a slow accumulation of events and words and actions that, once collected and examined
, could have no other meaning. She stayed out at meetings later and later, and the few times I was home when she wasn't, she often got calls from Jeff Saunderson, with a message like, "Oh, I just wanted to remind her of the committee meeting next week. Tell her to call me if she needs a ride."
Yessir, boy. I bet you can't wait to give her a ride.
Why couldn't he have gotten in touch with her at school? They were on the same damned switchboard, and it wasn't like he wouldn't see her there, in the cafeteria or someplace. It made me suspicious.
Then, too, Ev's behavior toward me changed. She'd been very solicitous, annoyingly so, but over a period of weeks that stopped. She asked fewer questions about my work, about how I felt, about how the weekly therapy had gone. She was still interested, and at times she still tried to approach me more closely than I wanted. I thought at first that the change in her was just a natural reaction, under the circumstances—the distancing that I hoped we would both feel, and that would dull the suffering and sense of loss when the time came.
But once I felt confident that I knew the true cause of Ev's decreased concern, I felt cheated. While I realized that my own attitudes had driven her to it, I still felt as if I wanted to slap the hell out of her and beat the living shit out of Saunderson. I could have done it too. My weight had come back, and I had been exercising more than ever, so that my muscle tone was far superior to what it had been before the leukemia hit. If I went fast, I would make a beautiful corpse.
But after some thought, I came to terms with it. I was hurt, of course, but I had seen too many movies in which the wife of a dying man is damn well forced into an affair to preserve her own sanity. Too, Saunderson had been through it. A widower could help her more than a bachelor with his claws out for a pity fuck. And I thanked God that she wasn't having an affair with my life-insurance agent. That would have been too much.
But the main reason I decided to let it go was that Ev would need another husband. I knew her well. She was not the kind of person who could live without love, and she was not the kind of mother who would let Carlie grow up without a father. Surprisingly, I didn't feel too jealous. I was still sane enough to know that my daughter would need someone to take my place, and the thought of a stranger, whom Ev had chosen for kindness and love, tucking my daughter in at night was a more comforting picture for me than Ev doing it alone. Carlie was young enough to adapt, and Ev was woman enough to.
My main fear was that Ev would feel guilty about the affair—perhaps not now, but after I died. If I said anything, if she knew that I knew, I thought she might end it, and I didn't want that. Romantically, I pictured myself on my death bed, looking as ruddy as Ali McGraw in Love Story, taking Ev's hand and placing it in Saunderson's, telling them that I knew all along, and approved, and not to blame themselves in any way, but to love each other and drink a toast to me from time to time. What an asshole.
In short, I decided to keep my mouth shut.
Once I knew, everything became embarrassingly obvious, and at times I must have seemed remarkably obtuse in my efforts to avoid revealing my knowledge. I buried myself in my work. It kept coming, and I kept taking the jobs. In the months between October and April, I worked more domestic cases than I had in my whole career. Every time I staked out a motel, I was afraid that I'd see Ev and Saunderson pull into the parking lot, but of course I never did.
The middle of March I got another call from Phyllis Brubaker, the woman whose wandering hubby had given me my first post-chemotherapy job. He was wandering again, this time with a different woman. Phyllis—I may as well call her that, in light of what was to happen—came over in the early afternoon, when Ev and Carlie were at their respective schools. She smiled when she saw me, I supposed because she recognized me as a man who had done the job right for her the first time. But where in the earlier case she had been more cautious, less anxious to make her husband aware of her knowledge of his indiscretions, I had the feeling this time that she was out for blood.
"I thought it was all over, his running around. But now he's doing it again. And with a friend of mine, a single woman who's come to parties at our house." She shook her head and gave me a thin smile. "I can't overlook it this time. I want out. I've had it. You did such a good job for me last time that I thought I'd see if you would again."
"Not just a fling this time?"
"I don't care if it is or not. I'm tired of his flings. And I'm sick of him. I want out."
I told her I would see what I could do, took down the name and address of the future correspondent, and asked her some questions about her husband's movements and schedule. At one point she crossed her left arm over her breasts, pressed her knuckles against her mouth, and looked down. There were no tears in her eyes, but she was shaking.
"Would you like a drink?" I asked her. I don't usually offer drinks to clients, but this felt different. Maybe I knew what was coming.
She nodded. I went upstairs and came back with two rocks glasses with ice and a bottle of Glenlivet, my sole luxury. She accepted the drink gratefully, and I poured one for myself.
"I'm sorry," I finally said. "I try to look at these things as a professional, to keep a distance, you know?"
"Yes. It would be . . . impossible to get involved emotionally with every case, wouldn't it?"
"It would. Yes."
We sat there and drank in silence, two lonely people, me because I wanted to be, she because she didn't have a choice. It didn't take long for her to finish her drink, and when she asked for another, I gave it to her, then had another of my own. We didn't talk at all, just sat there and drank and looked at each other, and finally she put down her empty glass and asked me, very quietly and politely, to make love to her.
I'd been asked that before by women clients on domestic cases, and I'd always pretended I misunderstood, or changed the subject, and they'd caught on fast. It's a hazard, if you want to call it that, of the trade, born of the same emotions that make some women love their doctors or psychologists or divorce lawyers. We're there, we're strong, and we'll take care of them.
But I'd always been asked in two ways—the first coyly and teasingly, the woman almost embarrassed to bring it up, the second bluntly and graphically, sparked by an angry desire for revenge on their husbands. Never before had the request been made so sweetly and sincerely, and I wondered if she was able to recognize in me the same desire for love that we both felt, but that I had kept repressed for so many months.
Her simple question, the stark fact of her needing me as much as I did her, left me powerless to refuse. I forgot the codes by which I lived and worked, set down my glass, and came around the desk to her. She was standing by the time I reached her, and I kissed her with a hunger that frightened us both. The warmth and firmness of her made me erect for the first time in months, and she moaned as she felt my hardness pressing against her stomach. We sank down to the carpeted floor, and tugged off each other's clothes swiftly, desperately. Within seconds I was in her, filling her up, making her cry aloud, and crying out myself, not at the sensation, but at the contact, the closeness of her.
It wasn't really sex for either of us. It was the closeness that mattered, that knowledge of someone being there, and I cried in her arms when it was over.
"What's wrong?" she asked me, not in alarm or discomfort, but in caring.
I didn't tell her. I couldn't. "Nothing," I said. "It was just . . . you're so beautiful."
She kissed me and we lay together quietly. "I shouldn't have asked you to do that, should I?"
I smiled. "Yes. You should. It was right."
"You're very unhappy. Aren't you?"
"No. Not now."
"Yes. Even now."
I couldn't argue with her. She was right. Although I felt better than I had in months, I was still sad. "Your wife."
"No. Not my wife."
"Your work then," she asked softly.
"Not really. It's nothing."
"It's all right," she said, touching my cheek with gentle
fingers. "It's all right to feel unhappy about things."
Outside there was snow on the ground, but we lay in a square of sunlight that fell through the window, and made the dark carpet warm beneath us. After a while she asked me how I became a detective.
"An investigator," I mildly corrected.
"What's the difference?"
"I investigate. That's what I do."
She smiled. "You don't detect?"
"Not very often." I smiled back. "I don't have to."
"How did you start?"
"Sent in a cereal box top."
"Really."
"No. Not really." She seemed interested, so I told her.
I told her about working the police log and the criminal cases for the six years I spent on the Lancaster Daily News, about the friendship I'd had with Al Canelli as a result of meeting him on a story about his investigative agency, and of helping him out on weekends when he needed a backup man on surveillance. When Al moved out west in 1979, he made a half-joking offer that I buy the agency from him, and I half-jokingly accepted on the condition that I could swing a license. Al, through his contacts and through my reputation and experience gotten from helping him out, had been able to cut through a mass of red tape, and suddenly I'd found myself an investigator. I let the lease expire on the place Al had rented, turned half of our basement rec room into an office to save expenses, and had been working ever since.
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