Hunger's Brides (199 page)

Lovers are cruel sometimes. It's unavoidable, he tells himself. They find ways to apologize.

In the bluish light he glances across to the cold fireplace. He gets up and places a glo-log on the grate, turns on the gas, lights it and lowers the flame. Another candle's truth would be too much.

He brings over a glass of port. She is still on the couch, sitting now. She asks for her own glass. She has taken her boots off. Her jeans are stretched out on the floor. He is dressed, his belt unbuckled. A shiver, a deep swallow, she wraps her long tan coat tightly around her. She puts her white-stockinged feet side by side on the glass-brick coffee table, her chin on bare knees pressed tight together. With a quiet dignity she says they had better talk while they still know how.

“Okay.”

“The truth.”

“All right.”

“Why you?”

“She's obsessed.”

“There've been others. They never did this.”

He has his answer ready.“I'm not sure, but she may have convinced herself I've stolen her work—some of her ideas.”

“Did you?”

“She's confused.”

“Confused? She's
nuts
, Don, crazy as a fucking loon.”

“Is that a professional opinion?”

“As a loon. You heard her.”

“Maybe I did,” he says, “but that was a long time ago.”

Her voice is very soft. “I said, heard.”

He blinks.

“But she wasn't like the others, was she, Don.”

“It wasn't all craziness back then,” he begins. He is looking at her feet on the coffee table.

“Not like them at all.
Was
she.”

“She was …
gifted
. But I would not stay on as her advisor. It's never easy to watch a
career
blow up. In a case like that, it was criminal. A terrible, sickening waste.”

“Did you use her work?”

“
No
. I mean she got me started in a new direction, but no. Our approaches, our interests were completely different. You know how bored I was with what I'd been doing….”

“How many dozens of times have we sat together on this couch and talked about work? You've read to me snippets from a hundred papers. Lazy ones, dumb ones, plagiarized, bright … Have I ever once heard you talk about this great prodigy?”

“Her name—”

“Don't … don't say it.”

“Madeleine, you're acting like—”

“Don't say anything. Think how much easier that'll be for us both.”

“I swear to God, I have had no contact whatsoever with this girl for over a year.”

“I've never asked you to lie to me. I'm not asking now.”

“Will you
listen?”

“Christ knows, I've been no angel.”

“It's
over
. I swore on Catherine's eyes. You never asked me for that, either,” he says. Her eyes shimmer. “That much you know about me … Don't you?”

She nods, drawing her lips together, biting down.

“No more, I told you,” he says. “I
love
our life.”

He kisses away the tears that start down her cheeks when she smiles.

“I'm proud of us, Don. We found a way to give ourselves a second chance. How many people can say that?” she asks fiercely, her small chin lifting. “You know how rare that is?”

“First thing tomorrow I call the phone company—then her parents. Just ask them how she is, say we had a worrisome call. Leave it at that. If we spot her within a mile of this house, we call the cops.”

“We can't take any chances. Not with Catherine.”

“Never.”

“I need to know you support me in this.”

“Completely,” he says. “In the meantime we leave the machine switched off—business calls be damned for a couple of days, if that's okay.” She nods. “Unplug the bloody phone too.”

“No, what if mom calls? About Catherine.”

“Then let's bring her
home
. Tomorrow.”

“I want to hear what the police have to say first.” She sees his reluctance. “Why? Why do you keep avoiding this?”

“I just don't want to send the stormtroopers crashing in on her.”

“After what's she's done to us you still want to
protect
her?”

“She hasn't done anything yet.”

“How can you say that? Can you have the slightest fucking idea what she's got planned for us?”

“She said Easter—”

“That's weeks away. No, it
has
to be sooner. I can feel it,” she says, her voice low. “I can't keep doing this. I'm afraid to answer the phone—every noise in the house. I can't sleep … and you can't either.”

“I'll deal with it. Tomorrow.”

“Fine,” she says, voice flat. Getting up abruptly she takes one of the glasses off the coffee table and starts towards the kitchen.

He gets up to follow her, snatching up his glass from the table. Though she has rounded the corner, the kitchen light has not come on. “We can call them anonymously any time we need to,” he calls after her.

Later, two months later, when it is much too late, he will wonder how they could be caught so devastatingly off guard by a thing they had thought about constantly for days.

He nearly collides with her in the darkness as he comes around the corner. She is standing still. Her glass gleams dully in one hand. He sees the blue clock readout on the dishwashwer: 11:46. Another light blinks red, a call counter reads: 1.

“How?” She has half turned to him as his hand touches her shoulder.

“I don't know.”

“You said you'd switch it off!” Her eyes are wide in the darkness.

“I did. I'm telling you….” But he does know how, if not yet why. “There's a feature,” he says.“For emergencies. You can switch these things back on over the phone.”

“You knew that?”

“It has to ring something like thirty-eight times.” He hears a faint note of pleading.

The loose stone, the rotted rung, minute deflections of a life's chosen course.

He starts forward. She intercepts him, her small hands spread wide on his chest. Her eyes look searchingly into his face. “Erase it, Don. Let's just erase it.”

“No.”

“You
like
these messages—is that it?”

He feels something going tight within him. “It's probably not even her.” He closes his hands over her wrists and steps by.

“Don't do this.” She elbows past him and stands with her back to the counter. “What if I erase it?”

They face each other for an instant, chests rising and falling. He glances away. Through a window he sees snow falling, a dim gesticulation at the outer reaches of the backdoor light. Their eyes have adapted to the darkness. He is about to say he needs to figure things out—what she's up to. How to protect them. How to fix this.

“Not one fucking word. It's all over your face.”

“I'll just listen. You go on up.”

He will wonder, when he has lost the right to ask, whether it might have made the slightest difference—made it all less final, so much less inescapable—if they had not just made love, her hopes lying so near the skin. If she had not felt, just then, the stretched barrels of her vitals collapsing, the cold tracks down her thighs, her cries and his silences still in her ears.

“Just
call
, Don—get it straight from the whore's mouth. What are you afraid of? Call her!
Go
on.”

He feels a whiteness fluttering up behind his eyes. He is afraid of the violence it contains. He feels it all coming to pieces. “Go to bed.” It's all he can trust himself to say. How can he fix things, get it all back the way it was, if she won't let him listen?

She stands in the darkness in the kitchen of her house, her cheeks burning with fury, smarting at the indignity. In her house. “Don't forget where you're sleeping.” She brushes past him and stops at the bathroom door beside the stairwell. She turns on the light but turns back to face him, light spilling over her shoulders, darkening her face. “You
listen. Go ahead. But you get her out of our life, while we still have one. You get her out of your head….”

He cannot see her face, but will remember until memory fails, the gesture like a dancer's plié, right knee bent, left out-turned, propped on the ball of an arched foot … the way the right wrist is flexed, the scooping, scouring motion between her legs as she hunches slightly forward. He will remember the light glistening on her fingertips as she raises them to him. Her voice rasps, breathless.

“You get
her
out of
me.”

He has not moved, he does not speak.

She closes softly, a bar of light under the door. He hears the water running, presses
play
. As he listens he does not notice the light go out and the door silently open. Hating herself, she too listens. When she has heard the end, she calls out a question, from the bottom of the stairs. He turns, startled to find her there.

“Donald … Those guests of hers, this party. Were they …
gods?”

He sits in the living room until the fire burns out. He wraps himself in the yellow blanket and walks into the den. He puts on jeans and a T-shirt. The hardwood floor is icy under his bare feet. He lies on the leather couch but does not sleep. After an hour or two he gets up and listens again. The voice is coaxing, hushed. He will remember it more clearly than the precise order of the words.

He erases the message, unplugs the machine.

G
OD'S
W
AR
        

17th day of February, in the Year of Our Lord 1695

F
ILLED WITH HOPE
I come directly with the news, of Father Núñez's death early this morning. After an operation for cataracts the patient must lie absolutely still in a darkened room, avoiding the slightest strain or worry lest the eyes start oozing blood.

I hurry to bring her word, to be the first to tell her I stayed up all night crouched beneath his window,
whispering your name, Juanita
, so that he died, his ears filled with her, his eyes brimming blood.

After another night of heavy rain, the day dawns so calmly. In the morning chill, I pause at a street corner as a vast flight of swallows pulses overhead, like a liquid, seeping, blotting out the sky with their banking and wheeling—hysteria's emblem in the air.