Mercy (64 page)

“About getting used to anything.”

“Oh, listen,” she said. “That was kind of a flippant remark. Besides, divorce is different…”

“Different from what?”

Palma looked at him, caught off guard. “Well, I…thought…”

“No, I know what you’re talking about,” he said quickly, as if he wished he hadn’t questioned her.

Palma looked down at her sandwich, put her plate aside, and picked up her wineglass.

“But, about being alone,” she said, looking at him. “Women do handle it better.”

“Yeah, that’s what I read, too.” Grant put his plate aside also and reached to refill his glass. He offered her some, but she waved him off. He had already polished off three while she was still on her second. Pulling up one leg, he rested his forearm on his knee.

“I’m not that big on machismo,” he said. “But I used to think I could handle a few things most people couldn’t. But those things didn’t have anything to do with loneliness. When I confronted that…well, it cut me down to size. Never experienced anything like it. Never.”

He stopped, gave a little self-conscious laugh, and took a drink. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve already worked through ‘maudlin.’”

Palma looked into her wineglass. She was sorry he was suddenly self-conscious, protective of getting into something too personal, something that might bore or offend her. She didn’t want him to get away from the thing that had prompted him to talk in the first place, to make shoptalk out of it. More than anything else she wanted him to talk about himself, even wanted him to talk about Marne. It didn’t offend her. It wasn’t like he was talking about an old girlfriend. This was different. Grant was different, and she wanted to know what he wanted to say. She wanted to know what he would choose to tell her, and what he would choose to keep to himself.

“It’s been three years since she died?” Palma asked.

“And three months.”

“You ever think about remarrying?”

“Yeah, that’s a funny thing,” he said. “For a year or so, no. It would have been like adultery, worse. Then at one point…at one point, it got to where I didn’t think of anything else. I thought I had to remarry. Thought I’d go nuts if I didn’t remarry. Actually, I panicked, a sort of psychological hyperventilation. I sold the place where we’d lived for years, where the girls had grown up, and moved into Washington. Georgetown. It was a joke. After all those years being married, I didn’t even know how to go about meeting another woman. The thought of going out to bars or clubs was laughable to me. I couldn’t see myself doing it. I was still invited to all the same homes and all the same parties Marne and I used to go to. But of course, I was odd man out. Then they started inviting a single woman, a widow, or divorcee. They had to be one of the two, to be my age. She’d just be there. Hell.” He grinned, remembering. “It was ridiculous.”

“So you never dated anyone?”

Grant drank his wine. “No one they intended for me to date. No one they knew.”

“Then you did? Or do?”

“Yes, I did,” he said, sobering.

She waited, but he didn’t continue, and he didn’t act as if he was going to.

“A bit of a scandal,” she said.

His eyes shot up at her.

“I’ll tell you what I know,” she said, realizing it was a bold thing to do, knowing she was risking offending him rather than breaking down more barriers and getting closer. But she remembered that Garrett had said Grant had gotten through it all right. Chinese lady and all. And she wanted him to know she really didn’t know anything.

“She was a Chinese diplomat’s wife. Beautiful. You fell in love with her, very seriously. You married. It ended suddenly. That’s it.”

“Jesus Christ,” Grant said, looking at her. He didn’t seem surprised, didn’t even seem shocked, or offended. “The rumor mill. I don’t know whether to be amazed by the fact that it got down this far, or by the fact that that was all of the story that survived.” He drank some more wine, almost finished the glass.

She had made up her mind in the split second after she told him what she knew that she wouldn’t go a step further with it. If he didn’t want to speak another syllable about it, then she would let it go, reluctantly. But she didn’t want to crowd him. She still didn’t know enough about him to do that, and she was quickly gaining a kind of admiration for his honesty that she hadn’t anticipated. She didn’t want him to feel anything he didn’t want to feel, maybe develop a feeling of obligation to go on with his story, or to quickly change the subject and get him off the hook. Then again, who was she kidding? Did she think that any conversation they might have was going to make Sander Grant talk about anything he didn’t want to talk about? He had been in his line of work a lot longer than she had, and reading human nature was the brick and mortar of his profession. If he didn’t want to talk about it, he wouldn’t, and he wasn’t going to feel guilty about it.

“I’m surprised you didn’t get a lot more detail,” Grant said. “There was certainly plenty of it.” He finished off his wine and set the glass down. Stretching his legs out in front of him again, he crossed them at the ankles and interlaced the fingers of his hands.

“I met her at a Bureau function, the sort of Washington social thing I never went to before Marne died,” he said. “But I’d moved into Georgetown by then, the girls were up in New York, I was sick of television, and I couldn’t concentrate enough to read a book. So I went to this thing. Black tie. I hadn’t worn one in fifteen years. Went to the tailor, had everything put in shape. If nothing else, I thought I would get in some good people-watching, better than airports.

“The party was in Georgetown, too, so I didn’t have far to go. I hadn’t been there ten minutes, obligatory drink in hand, other hand in pocket, feeling one hundred and ten percent out of place, when I ran into a guy I used to know before I went to Quantico. He was now in counterintelligence, and I hadn’t seen him in years. We talked a long time, and then I guess he thought it was time to circulate so he steered me around and introduced me to a number of people. One of them was a Chinese woman.”

Grant fiddled with his watch, adjusted the leather band, wound it. He reached for his glass and poured it about half full, then held it in his lap without drinking.

“I was caught off guard,” he continued. “And to be honest, it didn’t take much to do that at that time. She was married…to a diplomatic liaison attached to the Chinese Embassy. Educated in Beijing, then Oxford, she had several degrees and was taking courses at Georgetown University. Her husband wasn’t at the party that night, and I hate to think how I must have acted. In appearance she was Maine’s polar opposite.”

He looked at his glass, as if his allusion to the physical comparison of the two women had been a painful slip of the tongue.

“I think it’s fair to say that if someone had tried to keep us apart I would have risked my career to continue seeing her. But no one did, no one knew what was happening, at least that’s what I thought. The affair was nothing less than a shared frenzy to be together. It was something we didn’t even have to articulate, and never did.

“It was late winter in Washington, the time of year when the snow seems interminable and you get restless for spring. We met most of the time at my place because I lived alone and no one in the neighborhood knew me that well yet. She was an artist of discretion. We squandered time.”

Grant had to swallow with emotion, but he raised his wineglass to his mouth to have a reason.

“Long afternoons in bed, watching the winter light change in the room, the shadows on the ceiling growing longer as the hours passed. I was…absolutely…spellbound. In that relationship, reality had no place whatsoever. For either of us. When we met alone, whether at my place or a country inn in Virginia for the weekend, even a hotel, we stepped through a doorway to another time, another place.”

Grant cleared his throat. “I never even asked her how she managed to steal so many hours away from whatever life she had apart from me.

“By spring our affair was a nonsecret. It caused problems, for her, for me. She was already in the throes of a divorce. But we didn’t stop. Never in my life had I been so…reckless. Then one rainy afternoon—it was in the middle of April—her divorce was finalized. We were married within twenty-four hours.”

Grant put the wineglass to his lips once again and drank, holding the Soave in his mouth a moment before swallowing it slowly.

“Everything was wonderful for a while, maybe several months. She was back in school. But the affair should have remained an affair. She was brilliant, an intellectual, really, but the impetuosity that had excited and…ignited me during those stolen, sex-driven afternoons turned out to be something quite different when I saw it up close twenty-four hours a day. She was so beautiful, and she was impossible to live with. She was manic. She went to school all day, studied all night, went to plays, films, museums. She never slept, never stopped. She was always cheerful, often euphoric, which was infectious if you were an acquaintance or friend…or lover. But when you got to know her well you realized there was something pathological about her incessant zeal, as if she were hungry to find something, something ill-defined except that she expected it to be just over the horizon, in the next lecture, or book. Or affair.

“As to that,” Grant said, pausing, “I honestly believe she loved me.” He paused again. “If she could have stopped long enough to think about it. But I couldn’t satisfy her, not any more than any one book or play or friendship could satisfy her. It wasn’t long before I knew she was having affairs. It almost killed me when I realized what was happening. But the maddening thing was that by then I was beginning to understand her, and I couldn’t bring myself to condemn her for something I knew she couldn’t help. With something like that…you just endure it. It’s a one-way hurt. You know it’ll never be anything but pain.”

Grant seemed to be at the end of his story. It was the sketchiest sort of introduction, but Palma was spellbound, even shocked, that he had been so brutally honest about his own feelings, about her unfaithfulness. If Grant had thought this brief story of his affair would satisfy her, he was sorely mistaken. All it did was set fire to a thousand questions. But she asked only one.

“Did you love her?”

He didn’t move, and for a moment he didn’t reply. His expression did not seem to convey that he was considering how to answer the question, only that he was remembering. Finally he said, “Inordinately.”

He looked at her. “Five months ago, I guess it’s nearly six now, because it was ten days before Christmas, I got home from Quantico around eight o’clock in the evening, a little late. It had been dark several hours. She was gone. She’d left a letter that was meant to explain everything, but of course it was no help. She had plans and dreams, things she wanted to do and other people she wanted to do them with.

“There was an extraordinary thing about her leaving,” Grant said, almost as if he expected Palma to understand it. “She left nothing behind. There was not any little thing of hers for me to…have. You would have thought there would have been something, if only left by accident, a comb that might have slipped down behind a sofa cushion, a belt in a closet or drawer, a sock in the clothes hamper…a nail file.” He shook his head. “There was nothing. And I looked, too. There were some photographs, snapshots we’d taken of each other. They were gone. I couldn’t even find a strand of hair. It was as if she had never existed.”

He shook his head again, remembering. “The girls had gone home with school friends for the holidays. It was a hell of a Christmas.”

He looked at Palma without any kind of macho act of shrugging it off or self-conscious smile of mild embarrassment at having talked too much about himself and shown his vulnerabilities. He told it straight out of a weary bewilderment, seemingly unafraid to show the kind of blunted emotion that comes in the aftermath of a tragedy when you are worn out with grieving and tired of long suffering and the first glimmerings of objectivity have begun to color memory and experience. He seemed, if nothing else, relieved to have had the opportunity to say the things he said, and Palma suspected that this was as much as he had ever told anyone about it.

“What did your daughters think of the marriage?” she asked.

This time Grant did smile, if only a little sadly.

“They saw it for what it was,” he said. “They met her several times. It wasn’t that they didn’t like her, it was just that they knew instinctively that it was going to end in disaster. It was the first Christmas I hadn’t spent with the girls since they’d been born. I didn’t tell them she had left. As a matter of fact, I didn’t tell them for a couple of months. It wasn’t until recently that I think I realized why they chose this Christmas to spend away. And I’m pretty sure of this now. She and I had gone up to New York to see them about six weeks before the holidays. I think they sensed that it was unraveling. I think they made themselves scarce, thinking it would be the merciful thing to do, not to be around when everything went to hell for me. They knew me that well. And they were right. You make a fool of yourself on a grand scale, you need a little time to lick your wounds. Talk to yourself, get a grip on the loose ends of your frayed psyche.”

“Is that what you did?”

“That’s what I’m doing,” Grant clarified. “I’m not as resilient as I used to be.” He gave a humorless snort. “Hell, I was never as resilient as I used to be. The thing is, I was dependent on Marne for twenty-three years, emotionally dependent. I suppose unconsciously I knew that, but I really never admitted it, brought the fact out in the open and looked at it for what it was. I took her for granted in that respect. This work, these people are so goddamned bizarre that you need emotional stability more than anything else in the world. You crave normalcy. You need it. Marne was my steady second self. When I immersed myself in this work, when I had crawled around in the brains of grotesque minds so long that my own hands started shaking and I couldn’t stop them, I could go home and put them in Maine’s and know that I’d be all right. As long as she was there I knew I’d never get so far out that I couldn’t get back, that she couldn’t bring me back. I never had to worry that she’d lose sight of true north. When she died I had to learn to navigate by the stars. So far I’ve made a lot of miscalculations…but I’m getting better at it.”