The Palace Thief (18 page)

During dinner Margaret made it a point to ask Wilson a number of questions—she was graceful socially—but even as he answered he was aware of faint amusement on Brent’s part. Several times, he could not think of how to keep the conversation moving. At one point, after going on too long, he found himself launching into a presentation on Japanese microchips that he had memorized for a marketing meeting that week. Brent smiled, and after a pause he asked Margaret what she had thought of the Hill-Thomas hearings.

Wilson ordered another glass of wine. It was definitely ridiculous. What was Brent trying to do? His plane was leaving for the West Coast in two hours. If he was trying to show Wilson that he knew how to handle himself with a woman, he was going too far. And if he was actually trying to teach Wilson something—well, he had a thing or two coming. Brent wouldn’t last an evening in the downtown bars. Didn’t Margaret know this? He looked over at her. She was saying something about the secretary of labor, and Brent was nodding again. He seemed to be gazing at her.

Finally, between dinner and desert, Brent excused himself to use the bathroom, and when he was gone Wilson sipped his wine and looked over the glass at Margaret.

“Your son is charming,” she said.

He took another sip of wine and set down the glass. “He’s a youngster,” he said. He tore off a piece of bread. Then he added, “He’s a good kid.”

“He’s so concerned.”

This seemed to be a good sign, and Wilson laughed. “God knows where he gets that from.”

She looked thoughtful. “He gets it from you, I think. He reminds me of my own son. After my husband and I were divorced, Michael went to work on an Indian reservation.”

“Is that right? Brent used to work at a women’s shelter.”

“Which one?”

“A place called The Sanctuary.”

“In Porter Square,” she said.

Wilson sipped his wine. “I don’t know where it is, actually,” he said. “He wouldn’t ever tell me. He told me it was a secret he promised to keep.”

“Good for him for keeping it, then. I probably shouldn’t have told you either.”

“I can’t wait to tell the guys at Ned Clancy’s.”

She smirked.

“Just kidding,” said Wilson.

“Brent said you were one of the most serious people he knew.”

“He said that about
me
?”

“Sure did.”

“Poor kid,” said Wilson. “He doesn’t know many people.”

Margaret laughed, and Wilson paused, enjoying the audience. Then he said, “Excuse me, I forgot to ask about your children.”

“Two sons,” she said. Then she added softly, “Grown now.”

She sipped her wine, and Wilson was suddenly aware what it meant for her to say this. His glance fell to her hands. “Do you miss them?” he asked.

“Terribly,” she said.

“I do too,” said Wilson, and then, crazily, he wanted to take her hand. He took another sip of wine and waited without speaking for several moments, watching her fingers.

“You know what I like about you?” he said finally.

“Tell me.”

“That Brent likes you.”

“Funny,” she answered, “that’s what I like about
you
.”

After dinner they put Margaret in a cab, and Wilson made the drive with Brent out to Logan. Rain had begun to fall, and as he sluiced the Lincoln through the puddles, he felt an unfamiliar ease between the two of them. He didn’t know if it was coming from him or from Brent, but on the short section of highway Brent let him rest his hand on his shoulder, and at the terminal he waited in the car a few moments before he got out to retrieve his luggage from the trunk. Wilson walked him to the gate.

“Hey, slugger,” he said, when it was time to board, “how many mice does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

“Two,” Brent answered, “but they have to be small. That’s prehistoric.”

“I know,” Wilson said, “but I just got it a couple of days ago.”

“Don’t sweat it, Dad.”

“Hey, it was good to have you out here, kid.”

“It was good to be here, kid,” Brent said. Then he reached over and kissed Wilson on the cheek. “By the way,” he said as he turned, “I like Margaret.”

“So do I,” said Wilson, and then Brent went through the gate.

It was remarkable how easily he and Margaret grew together. That week he took her to dinner, where they talked about Brent and her own children, and afterward they walked down to the
esplanade and sat on the benches by the Charles. Even then, the first time they had ever been alone together, he had the feeling of having known her for a long time, and he hoped for some small crisis—a car accident or a lost dog—that would prove their ease with each other. Driving her home, he took a detour through the dark, forested neighborhoods of Brookline and drove by Brent’s junior high school, where they stopped to watch the moonlight playing over the great trees on the lawn. She said, “He must have been a very sweet child,” and Wilson answered, “He was.”

They had dinner again two nights later, and Wilson found himself talking about the smallest details of his life—how the cleaners that week had broken two buttons on one of his shirts, how much he liked his new showerhead—but rather than feeling desperate at this turn in the conversation, as he might have with one of the women from the bars, he felt elated.
These
were his secrets, and at last he was telling them. Later on, he thought to himself, they could talk about
goals
and
expectations
, in bed looking at the ceiling. He kissed her good night but that was all. He knew enough to go slow.

The next week, Margaret called him and told him what he pretended not to already know, that her father was sick, and then she broke into tears and said that he had taken a turn for the worse. She wept openly on the phone, and he knew they were at a crossroads. He was hesitant to ask about the cancer; Brent had asked about it in a hot dog line at Fenway, but this was the protocol of a different generation, and instead Wilson just let her talk. He hoped she would stop sobbing between sentences, and she did eventually, after which there was a silence. It went on for several moments, and then he offered to go with her to visit.

Two days later they were together on a plane to Rochester,
Minnesota, where the old man was in the hospital. Ordinarily, the way he did with business trips, Wilson would have telephoned Brent with his itinerary—even though Brent laughed at these precautions—but this time Wilson could not bring himself to do it. He left a message on his own answering machine instead, assuming Brent wouldn’t call. Then they left. To avoid any problems, Wilson booked them into separate rooms at the hotel, and that afternoon they went to see her father. Wilson was nervous. He didn’t know how to explain his own presence, either to himself or to the old man, and as he waited in line in the lobby florist shop he rehearsed various things he might say to him. But when they entered the hospital room the poor old man was vomiting in the side-sink, and Margaret took his hand. Wilson took Margaret’s, and at that moment he realized he might be falling in love.

It was not the way he had expected it. The room stunk of floor cleaner and medicines, and the half-comatose old man in the room’s other bed was opening and closing his mouth like a fish. Margaret did not look particularly beautiful—it was not
that
—but she looked determined and kind, and when she rubbed the mottled back of her father’s hand, Wilson understood what her presence would have meant to him if he himself had been dying. Was this the way a middle-aged man fell in love?

By the time her father had quieted down and Margaret had wiped him off, the feeling was gone, and Wilson was relieved. But that evening going down in the hospital elevator, Margaret distractedly pulled his jacket straight and he felt the same thing again for a moment—a great, familiar comfort that made him take her face in his hands and kiss her, right there in the elevator. It occurred to him how much time he had wasted in bars. Then they were in the bright, fluorescent lobby with its silk plants and antiseptic residue, and the feeling was gone
again. But this was the way it started, he knew, stuttering like this, and he had not felt it in a long time.

That night he moved his bags to her hotel room and they slept there together, but he did not want to make love to her under the circumstances. He held her as though he might have been holding his wife of thirty years, and they went to sleep without speaking. Comfort seemed to be something they had both learned in their marriages, although when he woke early the next morning and wondered momentarily where he was—the hotel shook with the sound of descending airplanes—his heart sank at how easily his own allegiance had been transferred. He fought for courage.

But this was how his future was going to unfold, he came to accept, by such a strange bit of chance. His son had introduced him to a woman at a baseball game, and now she was flying home with him, sleeping on his shoulder in the airplane. Less than a week later they were in Minnesota again at her father’s funeral, and in October they drove up to New Hampshire to visit her in-laws.

Wilson wrote a letter.

Dear Buckaroo—

Brent didn’t write back, but he phoned a week later, full of questions about Margaret. What had they done together? How often was he seeing her? Wilson was hesitant at first, because in the letter he hadn’t mentioned going to Minnesota, but there seemed to be enthusiasm in Brent’s voice, and he discovered he was happy to talk about her. He was surprised at the relief he felt when Brent did not seem hurt, and his mood became garrulous. He told Brent about walking down to the Charles on their first evening together and feeling the kind of comfort he had not felt since Abbie had left. But suddenly, after he said this, he was afraid he had transgressed. He asked Brent whether he needed money to fly home for Thanksgiving, but Brent came right back to the subject of Margaret. Was she upset about her father, he wanted to know. At this point Wilson slipped in that they had gone to Minnesota together, and for a moment there seemed to be a pause on Brent’s end of the line. Then he resumed saying “uh-huh” every few seconds, and Wilson could picture him nodding on the other end. Before they hung up, Brent asked for her address.

The next day Wilson found himself thinking about her at
work. He wondered what Brent would write in a letter to her, and whether she would answer in the confidential, serious way they had talked at dinner. It was a comforting thought, somehow, that his son had secrets with her, even though this was the very thing that had caused him to lose his temper with Mary-Jane Donnelly. He didn’t understand. His own heart sometimes seemed like something he could look at only from a distance, like some small animal in a cage.

In the early afternoon he called Panos the florist and told him he wanted to send roses to Margaret’s house. Panos whispered,
discreet
,
discreet
, into the phone, and Wilson laughed. Then he realized that he hadn’t bought flowers since Abbie had left and that Panos probably thought he was still married. He started to explain but was overtaken by a shuddering sadness. Panos laughed, a low chuckle, saying
no need
,
my friend
, and asked Wilson what he wanted on the card. There was a silence before the florist suggested,
From an admirer
, and Wilson, fighting to steady his voice, agreed.

He hadn’t been ready for such a collapse. There seemed to be a part of him that he no longer controlled, a ruinous version of himself that brought up memories of his old life as soon as he was ready to embark on a new one. It had been years since Abbie had cared what he did, but even now he couldn’t help thinking that he was crossing her. He called Panos again and doubled the order of roses, and before he met Margaret that night for dinner, he drank two scotches in a bar on Mass Avenue and went for a walk along the river. Whenever Abbie came to mind he went through the state capitals, and when that didn’t work he made an attempt to recall the organizational structure of the 486 microchip. He told himself that melancholy was natural under the circumstances, but suddenly, crossing under a footbridge, he had trouble remembering the
woman he was about to see. He couldn’t recall what her voice was like or how she looked, and when he entered the restaurant a few minutes later he went to the men’s room and examined himself in the mirror because he was afraid his feelings would show on his face. Then he was afraid that Margaret had made the same sort of reappraisal of him. But when he got to the table she was already there, and when she stood and kissed him he remembered the roses and realized his fears were unfounded. By the time dinner was over he couldn’t exactly remember what he had been afraid of.

Two nights later, crossing the Mass Avenue Bridge in a rainstorm, Wilson first thought about marrying Margaret. He pulled over past the bridge, got his breath, and continued toward home. Rain thrummed on the roof of the car. He passed MIT, then Central Square, then the edge of his own neighborhood where he saw Panos emerge into the rain to throw a bag in the garbage, and just as suddenly, as the old florist hobbled back into his shop, he realized it might not be love he was feeling with Margaret, but merely the reconstruction of his memory of love. Tears sprang to his eyes. How simple he seemed to himself, like a schoolgirl overcome by familiarity. It was the first time since Abbie had left that he had shared Brent with a woman; this was all that had happened. Houses flashed by.