Impact (19 page)

“I'm serious, Alec.”

He shrugs, still wary of her motive. “I like what I do, Hygiene. I seem to be good at it, and despite what you read in the papers, I do some good for others.”

“There's more to it than that.”

“I suppose. The bullshit. The camaraderie. Litigation's kind of like football without helmets.”

She raises a brow. “Camaraderie with who? I heard Dan Griffin left you.”

As he scrambles for an answer, he curls into a defensive posture. “There are other people to talk to besides Dan.”

“Not in your firm, there aren't.”

“What the hell do
you
know?” he flashes. “You could never bring yourself to darken my office door.” He waits for her rebuttal. When it doesn't appear, he simmers. “There are plenty of other reasons to continue working. Not that I have any obligation to explain them to you.”

“The glory, for instance,” Hygiene observes quietly.

“I've never denied that I like the psychic income as much as the legal tender.”

“I know you haven't. I just thought maybe you didn't need it quite so much anymore. I always wished I knew more about your childhood,” she continues with what appears to be regret. “You crave attention more than anyone I've ever met. I think your mother must never have even
touched
you.”

It's a topic he avoids, his childhood. Not because he's certain it was deprived or traumatic, but because its particulars are so vague he's not certain it existed. If it did, the proof was circumstantial, its relics stuffed in backs of drawers and pasted to dusty albums, the only obvious outgrowth a rather broadly based repression. In his thirties he worried about the blank page of his formative years, but now he seldom dwells on it. His wives were far more interested in his youth than he was, presumably so they could blame the kind of husband he'd become on someone other than themselves.

Hygiene admires the view, then leaves the bed and sits in the chair that faces him. “This is a beautiful place, Alec. I've driven by a few times, hoping to see signs that your life had fallen apart, but they were never there. That was years ago, of course. Now so many lives are falling apart, one more or less doesn't matter.”

“Thanks.”

“I didn't mean just you, you idiot. I meant all of us.” She paused. “I hear you're about to tie the knot again. Martha? Is that her name? The horsy thing you gave up your partnership in Perkins and Maxwell for? She'd be number five, if my abacus is accurate.”

“Martha and I are
not
engaged, Hygiene. You may pass that along to the social arbiters, and tell them to kiss my ass.”

Martha. She is due in an hour. On three evenings a week she drops by to update his calendar, sift through the active cases and keep him current with the effluent of legal gossip, and provide any other services he may be in need of. But her official duties are not the reason Hawthorne has shuddered at the mention of her name.

A month ago his doctor cleared the way for sex. Though it has been four months since his last orgasm, and though Martha is willing to perform the most gentle of manipulations, to goad him toward that eruptive end while he remains stresslessly recumbent, he seems to have lost the urge. He doesn't know whether the incapacity originates in mind or body, in middle-age ennui or posttraumatic terror, but whatever the reason, he suppresses the slightest hint of concupiscence. Which means his relations with Martha have been uncommonly wholesome since his coronary. Which both of them seem to find refreshing. Which sounds uncomfortably like chronic illness or old age. Which vastly depresses him.

In what amounts to a welcome diversion, Hygiene bats her eyes. “You've been seen entering hotels with her,” she says.

“If I married every woman I've taken to a hotel, I'd be eating my meals at a mission.”

Abandoning his role as invalid, he goes to the bar and fixes her a drink. When he delivers it, she seizes his hand and kisses his palm. “I really did come just to tell you I wish you well, Alec,” she says. “And to tell you I think you should retire.”

He reacts with stony ire. “That's ridiculous. I'm not even fifty, for God's sake.”

“You
know
your law practice put you in that bed. And you know if you don't give it up, you'll be back there again.”

“Like hell I—”

“What do you
want
at this point, anyway?” she interrupts. “You make more money than Croesus. You're preeminent in your field—every time a plane goes down you pop up on TV, telling some idiot interviewer why it happened and how it could have been prevented. You've got fame and you've got fortune. So why don't you find a good woman and take her around the world a few times.” Hygiene fiddles with her necklace. “You always were good with women. I'm sure you could make a nice retirement program out of one.”

He reels from her tirade. “Jesus, Hygiene. What brought all that on?”

She hesitates, then shrugs, as if truth were a fallback position. “You're not my only ex-husband who's had a heart attack this year.”

“Who's the other?”

“Ben.”

He sighs. “I'm sorry. I didn't know. I like Ben.”

“I know.”

He is remembering the rumpled man who had succeeded him, a good guy who had been married to Hygiene for a dozen years and then abruptly divorced her. “Whatever happened between you and Ben? I thought that one was for real.”

She glances toward the floor, then looks at him until he fidgets. “I had a mastectomy. I learned to live with it; Ben didn't.”

He closes his eyes and envisions her on a table ringed with eager surgeons. “I didn't know, Hygiene. You should have told me.”

Her gaze falls to the protuberances at her chest. “Why? So you could keep it as a souvenir?”

“What kind of a …” He stops when he sees that no matter how badly he feels she has hurt him, she feels she has been hurt in equal measure.

“I'm sorry,” she says softly. “You don't deserve that. Not now, you don't.”

“I wish you'd told me, Genie,” he says, using the diminutive he has not uttered since six months prior to their divorce. “I would have liked to try to help. Be someone to talk to, if nothing else. Or help with Ben.”

She shakes her head. “It's okay, Alec. I wanted people around about as much as you do right now. The only reason I'm here is to tell you that Ben had his first attack a year before this last, and they told him to slow down and he didn't, and it happened again just like they warned him it would.” Her eyes are aglow with urgency. “I'm hoping you'll learn from it, Alec. I'm hoping my coming here will help save your life. There. I've been as melodramatic about it as I can.”

He has no idea what to say, so he says, “I guess I should thank you.”

“What you should do is decide whether you want to live or die. If you decide you want to live, just kiss your job goodbye. If you decide you want to die, just keep on the way you have been. I know you don't believe it, but sometimes life really
is
just as simple as that.”

He makes a face, trying to make light of her mission, but she keeps digging. “You haven't been dumb with your money, have you?”

He shrugs. “Just spent more of it than I have.”

“But you could walk away anytime you wanted to, right?”

Actually, he has thought about it more than once since his confinement, though not enough to reach a decision. But it is increasingly difficult to see his future as anything but a replay of his past, complete with the inevitable slow motion. “I'm not as flush as you think, Genie,” he dissembles finally. “In order to retire I'd have to sell this place, disown my kid, and move to Mississippi.”

She shakes her head. He watches her hair dance across her shoulders and remembers when she would crouch above him and conceal her breasts with her wavy mane, make him dig through a silken shade to suckle them. He is enjoying the moment until he remembers that now she has only one of them to hide.

“Balls,” she says. “You and I could have a lot of fun together, Alec. Travel. Go to plays and concerts. Read to each other. Sex would be a separate thing you could work out however you wanted. You and me, we'd just tug each other toward the cocktail hour.”

“You make it sound like I've only got five minutes left on earth.”

She rises off the chair and looms above him. “That's the way I
want
to make it sound.” She bangs her empty glass on the table and strides angrily toward the door.

“Say hi to Ben for me,” he calls after her.

“Ben is
dead
, you idiot” is what he realizes she has said, but only after she has left him.

Keith Tollison leaned back in his chair and tried to summon the energy to do what he had to do next, which was to see both Laura Donahue and Brenda Farnsworth within the space of the next two hours. Only months before, both prospects would have gladdened him. Now they were demoralizing reminders that the SurfAir crash had cast both women beyond his reach—the more he tried to help, the less of him they seemed to need.

Brenda had retreated to her school and son; Laura, to the task of coaxing her husband from his coma. Purposeful to them, to Tollison the weeks since the crash had been pointless and depressing. Certain that he should be doing everything that needed to be done, he spent long hours doing little but wonder why life continued to deprive him of its most coveted rewards. The only virtue of such thoughts being his increasingly virulent contempt for them, Tollison cursed himself and sighed, then grabbed his coat and left the office.

The Donahue house was high in the hills past the western edge of town, overlooking the lights of Altoona and the vineyards and apple orchards bordering the city to the north and south. Jack had built it as a showplace, stagy testimony to his talent for promotion and development. Borrowing to the hilt to finance it, he watched its worth appreciate dramatically as a series of San Francisco profiteers cast about for environments that would shield their families from the victims of the system that had yielded up their fortunes. The string of restaurants, boutiques, bodegas, and fitness centers that had accumulated along Main Street—bearing names that would have won prizes in a punsters' contest—was testimony that Altoona's transformation from sleepy village to suburban chic was practically complete. The result for the majority of Altoonans was that year by booming year, their homes earned more than they did.

Visible on the crest above, the Donahue house was long and low, shingle and stone, cantilevered from a brushy hillside, complete with swimming pool and putting green and view to the end of the valley. In the early years of his return to Altoona, Tollison had been there several times, at one or another of Jack's promotional extravaganzas. But since he never succumbed to one of the investment schemes, his presence had recently been infrequent. It was the way both he and Jack had wanted it and, since the first fumblings of their affair, the way Laura wanted it as well.

The road narrowed. At its end was only Laura's place and forty contiguous acres Jack had acquired in the hope of subdividing them. A faded sign still advertised the dream—
OAKWOOD ACRES, VIEW LOTS, A PROJECT OF DONAHUE DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION
. For reasons unknown to Tollison, the project had never gotten off the ground, and the road now led only to Laura and her forty-acre yard.

Another car rounded a turn, coming from the opposite direction. Driven far too fast for the width and contour of the road, it forced Tollison off the pavement. Bouncing along the rocky shoulder, he cursed the reckless driver, a bearded block of a man, no one he knew. When the man didn't acknowledge his protest, Tollison honked. With studied insolence, the driver turned the other way. Tollison resisted an impulse to turn around and chase him down.

From a distance the house seemed to have maintained its original flair, but after Tollison turned into the drive the signs of neglect were evident. The pool was dry; the putting green had grown to the length of rough. Weeds sprouted through the flagstone walkway; gutters brimmed with sodden leaves and sagged beneath wet weight. Moss patches soiled the roof like the droppings of large birds. One of the cars in the garage, a big Mercedes, had a
FOR SALE
sign in the window and its left rear tire was flat.

Tollison parked in the shade of a live oak, grabbed his briefcase, and hurried to the entrance and rang the bell. The ornamental plums that flanked the doorway seemed diseased and dying, of a virus that seemed to have spread to the house. He rang the bell again. Heat rose at him as though all of Altoona were on fire.

Moments later Laura Donahue, a smile on her face and a drink in her hand, tugged open the heavy door. When she saw who it was, she smiled crookedly and readied herself for a kiss. Her hair was twirled into a golden twist, her lips were heavily red, her silken blouse and slacks were black and white and billowy. The greeting was the first sign in weeks that he was other than a nuisance.

“Come in, Keith,” she said. “Let me fix you a drink. Still bourbon?”

“Still.”

The mention of the whiskey recalled the pint they'd shared in the airport motel. As he followed Laura through the narrow foyer, he forgot the waning of her attentions and his resultant pique, and felt the familiar swell of ardor. When they rounded a corner and descended to the living room, which was sunk three steps below the entrance level and was vast, he almost tripped and fell.

As always, the room demanded awe. One wall was entirely glass, revealing the forty empty acres and the city far below. The other three wore wainscoting of rough-hewn planks that formed the backs of three long benches, deeply padded, capable of seating a platoon. The floor was oak parquet, the ceiling roughened plaster, the furnishings beige linen and brown leather.

In the year it was built, the design and decor had been the talk of the town, but that was before refugees from San Francisco began building newer and finer mansions on the adjacent hillsides. Even had that competitive migration not occurred, the impact would have dwindled. The place had simply gotten old, had somehow become a relic, even though Tollison still thought of it as the Donahues' new house.