Deadly Beloved (3 page)

Molly’s feelings ran mostly to self-satisfaction. In the kitchen of the elegant Victorian, in the circle of light cast by the sunroom windows, she finished reading the women’s page of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
and put her head up to listen for sounds of Joey getting ready for work. It was ten minutes to nine, but that didn’t matter much. Joey worked in the customer service department of a bank on the edge of Philadelphia. He wasn’t usually expected in until nine-thirty. Molly smoothed the paper out under her fingers and then reached for the coffee pitcher on the trivet in the middle of the table. On the whole, it was shaping up to be a very good day. The weather was going to be bright and hot, Molly’s favorite kind. The newspaper had been full of the kind of news she loved best, what with Princess Di having a new lover and Cher rumored to be hidden away in a plastic surgery clinic somewhere. Even the book section had been a blessing, because the book reviewed there was a novel by Judith Krantz, whom Molly not only read and liked, but understood. Sometimes the book review section caused her trouble because, unlike most of the other women at Fox Run Hill, Molly had never been to college. If the book of the day was something philosophical or historical, Molly would be forced to sit quietly all through lunch at the club, just so she wouldn’t say anything stupid that would make them laugh at her.

Molly heard the door of the master bedroom suite opening and closing. She nodded to herself with unconscious satisfaction and patted at her hair. Her hair was the same bright blond it had been when she was in high school. She used the same home dye product now that she had used then. What she was really proud of was her figure, which was still a size six. Part of that was diet. Part of that was exercise. Part of that was abortions. Molly had had her first abortion at fifteen, illegally, at a terrible place in New York that Joey had known about from the cousin of a friend of his. She’d had her latest at a polished steel and bright-tiled clinic in Philadelphia, just two and a half weeks ago. She had had eight abortions in all, and if she had to, she would have eight more. Children could ruin your life. Her mother had told her so. Besides, she could see it, all around her, the way children ate up their parents and never gave anything back. Fathers made out all right. They escaped to their offices and their poker games. Mothers were devoured whole and spit back dead. Molly didn’t think she had ever hated anyone as much as she hated her mother.

The French doors to the kitchen swung back and Joey came in, his face looking only half shaved, his neck looking too red where the barber had cut his hair too close to the skin. The face and the neck didn’t go with the suit. Razors and haircuts were things Joey was required to buy for himself. He always bought the cheapest kinds available. The suit was something Molly had bought for him. It was a good summer wool, custom-made at Brooks Brothers, and it looked much too good for someone who worked in the customer service department of a bank. When Molly was being critical, she had to admit that Joey
never
looked as if he worked in the customer service department of a bank, or any other department of a bank, and not because he looked too good for it. Joey had been the town hood when Molly first met him, and in some ways he still was. No matter how many times he got his hair cut short, it still wanted to form a ducktail at the nape of his neck. No matter how many times he put on good suits and wing tip shoes, he still walked with the hip-jutting swagger he had learned in tight jeans and shitkicker boots. Molly sometimes thought of that, of the way they were together when they first met, and always surprised herself. She could even remember being happy, in an abstract way that had nothing to do with her emotions. The only emotion she could feel, looking back, was an anger so hot and wild it threatened to drown her. It took in everything: the motorcycles and the cars and the sex and the taste of warm Pabst Blue Ribbon stolen out of somebody’s mother’s pantry; the abortion in New York with its mingled scents of sweet anesthetic and sour gin; her wedding with its six bridesmaids in shell-pink gowns; this house; this furniture; these dishes; this silverware; this latest abortion; this life. Anger, Molly always thought, was a traitor and a trick. It could ruin your life faster than children could.

Joey sat down at the table and folded his hands in front of him, like a child waiting for class to begin in a Catholic school. Joey had never gone to Catholic school, although Molly had. Her father had given the biggest contributions to the Parents’ Education Drive every year, and Molly had been chosen to play Mary in the Christmas pageant two years in a row. Joey was four years older than Molly was, and his face was lined and pitted, ragged and slack. Some wild boys grow up to be wilder men. They harden and plane down. Their faces take on an individuality wrongly supposed to belong only to the American West. Joey was the other kind. He would have run to fat already if Molly had let him. Even with all the working out she forced him to do, Joey had a pronounced pot on his belly and jowls hanging off the curve of his jaw. He was white and pasty too, as if he never got any sun—as if he never spent his Saturdays on the terrace at the club, dressed in golf shorts and a sun visor, talking to all the other men about sports.

Molly pulled the paper toward her again and folded it one more time. It was now too tightly squashed together.

“Well,” she said.

“Well.” Joey cleared his throat. Then he rubbed his hands together. His hands were fat and white, just like his belly. Molly had a sudden vision of him as a gigantic jellyfish, slick and slimy, curled up on her bed like a piece of animated ooze. She looked away.

“Well,” she said again. “There’s a dinner tonight. At the club. A planning committee dinner.”

“A planning committee for what?”

“A planning committee for a benefit thing. It’s Sarah Lockwood’s committee. I told you about it.”

“Sarah Lockwood,” Joey said.

Molly got out of her chair and went to the sunroom’s wall of windows, to look out on the pool in the backyard. Sarah and Kevin Lockwood lived in the French Provincial with the curlicue roof. They were the people in Fox Run Hill whom Joey liked least. He disliked them, in fact, for all the reasons Molly wanted to know them. Before her marriage, Sarah Lockwood had been an Allensbar, a real live member of real live Philadelphia Main Line Very Old Money family. Sarah had come out at the Philadelphia Assemblies and had her picture in the paper with a crowd of other girls, all wearing white dresses and carrying red roses. Kevin Lockwood was the president of his own brokerage firm in Philadelphia, one so small and exclusive, it didn’t even advertise. There were rumors all over Fox Run Hill that at least one of his clients was a former United States president, and that another was a member of the English royal house.

“I don’t want to go to dinner with Sarah Lockwood,” Joey said. “She makes me uncomfortable. She talks down to me.”

Molly didn’t turn around. “It’s only for a couple of hours. And all the other husbands will be there.”

“All the other husbands are shits. I don’t know why it matters so much to you to hang around with shits.”

“Everybody we’ve met since we’ve moved here is a shit as far as you’re concerned,” Molly said. “We couldn’t have gone on hanging out with bikers forever.”

“We should have had children,” Joey told her. “That’s what would have made a difference. We should have had some kids you could worry about so you could stop worrying about
them
.”

“It isn’t my fault we couldn’t have children, Joey.”

“It isn’t my
fault
either. Jesus Christ. I mean, I did the best I could at the time. I did what you asked me.”

“I asked you to find me someone safe.”

“I found you someone safe. As safe as it got. It was 1962.”

“Other people got pregnant in 1962.”

“Other people died in 1962, from what I hear,” Joey said.

Molly bit her lip. “That was God’s judgment,” she said primly, her teeth clamped together. “This is God’s judgment. We committed a murder and now we’re being punished.”

Molly heard rather than saw Joey stand up. The legs of the chair squeaked against the tile when he moved. Molly made a hot wet mist on the glass of the window in front of her and traced a curving line through it with her finger.

“I know we committed a murder,” Joey said. “You’ve convinced me we committed a murder. That doesn’t mean I have to go to dinner with Sarah Lockwood.”

“It’s at eight o’clock,” Molly told him. “In the Crystal Room at the club.”

“The Crystal Room.”

“It’s just a table, Joey. It’s not the whole room. It’s just us and the Lockwoods and three other couples.”

“And all the women are on this benefit committee.”

“That’s right.”

“Shit.”

The chair scraped again. Joey was putting it back under the table. Molly took a deep breath and turned around. The tears were so thick in her eyes, she could barely see. The muscles in her arms were so tense, they felt like wire.

Joey was standing near the French doors, on his way out.

“I’ll be back at six,” he said.

“You’re always back at six,” Molly told him.

“I’ll go to this damn dinner with you as long as you don’t expect me to talk to anybody.”

“Maybe if you talked to the people here, you’d learn something,” Molly said.

“Maybe if I learned something, I wouldn’t talk to the people here. Maybe if I learned something, I wouldn’t be married to you.”

“Maybe if you learned something, I wouldn’t make you stay married to me,” Molly said.

Joey hesitated one more second at the doors. Then he turned away from her and walked off. He lumbered like an animal past the domed niches and the long columns of plaster cherubs playing among bunches of plaster grapes. The front door opened and shut again. Molly heard the heavy metallic click of the safety lock snapping home. Joey always left and came in by the front door. It was as if coming in through the garage door would say something about him that he didn’t want to hear.

Molly went back to the table and picked up her coffee cup. She brought the cup to the sink and washed it out and put it in the white plastic-coated-wire dish rack. Then she dried her hands off on a dish towel and went through the French doors herself, through the foyer, into the living room.

Now that Joey was gone, she was back to normal. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t tense. She didn’t feel ready to laugh or cry or kick something. She was just thinking about dinner tonight and Sarah Lockwood and what it would be like to know a debutante. She twirled around a little in front of the fireplace, imagining what she would have looked like in a long white dress, holding a single perfect red rose.

On the coffee table in front of the love seat, there was a stack of antiabortion pamphlets. When Molly saw them, she stopped twirling and picked them up and smiled. Joey got worried sometimes when she talked about abortion. He knew only about the one in New York—he thought that abortion had messed up her insides, making her barren—and he thought she was turning into one of those fanatics, the kind who shot abortion doctors or torched clinics or sat out all night on the Mall in Washington, holding a sign with a black-and-white photograph of a bloody fetus tacked across it.

Molly knew that she was much more likely to torch this house than any abortion clinic. She thought about it often, burning small square pieces of paper in crystal ashtrays, watching the paper blacken and curl, watching the flame twist and rise.

“At least this way you’ll be settled,” her father had told her all those years ago when she was locked in the bathroom of the Fox Run Hill Country Club on the morning of her wedding, refusing to come out. “It doesn’t matter who you’re married to as long as you’re in control of the situation. It doesn’t matter what your husband is if you’re the one who has the money.”

I should have been smarter about it, she thought now. I should have stayed in that bathroom and reduced my wedding dress to rags. I should have refused to go through with it.

It was a strange thing though, Molly thought. Men—both strong men like her father and weak ones like her husband—always made her feel the same thing. They made her feel that she couldn’t ever, ever, ever say no.

B
Y NINE FORTY-FIVE THAT
morning, Sarah Lockwood had counted up the numbers seven times, and each time she had come to the same small set of conclusions. In the first place, the debt they owed on credit cards now totaled $115,646.28. In the second place, the monthly bills for those credit cards came to $3550. If she added that to the mortgage on the house ($4500 a month) and the payment on the car ($580 a month) and the utilities ($640 a month) and the association fee for Fox Run Hill ($900 a month), their monthly payments came to $10,170—and that didn’t include food or club dues or eating out or any of the other things Sarah considered essential. It didn’t include new clothes or gas for the car. It didn’t include printing for Kevin’s résumés or postage for sending them out. It was the kind of debt that made people disappear into the night and take assumed names in distant states. Sarah imagined them blowing into town in some two-bit burg just outside Cleveland, getting jobs at the local diner, renting a mobile home on the edge of a swamp. Sarah had absolutely no idea how people lived when they didn’t have money. Just the little things took her breath away. Cooking every night, no matter how tired you were or how much you wanted Chinese food or how sick you felt with the flu. Waiting three years to buy a new living room couch, even though the old one was fraying. Driving used cars. Sarah kept thinking of Matilda, who had maided for them until they could no longer pay her. Matilda had come every morning in sprigged-print dresses so thin they seemed to wear out as you looked at them. She had walked in thick-soled black leather shoes that always seemed to have holes in the toes. She had put her hair up in gold bobby pins that shone in the sun and came apart whenever she bent over to pick something up from the floor. There was something else Sarah’s calculations hadn’t accounted for: twice-weekly visits to the hair salon and the dues at the Fox Run Hill Health Club. If you didn’t take good care of yourself, things happened to you. Your hair got gray. Your face got creased with lines. Your body got thick and lumpy. You got old.