Truth and Consequences (15 page)

“Yes,” Jane admitted. “I'm afraid of that sometimes.”

Henry stirred his tea slowly. “I figure there's no point in looking too far into the future. What we have to do is enjoy the world as much as we can right now. It doesn't do anyone any good for us to give up things and be miserable.”

“I don't know.” Jane laughed unhappily. “I mean, I've thought sometimes maybe it does. If Alan sees me enjoying myself he might feel worse because of the contrast.”

“Maybe,” Henry said. “But I don't think it works that way. At least not with Delia. She wants me to be strong and well and happy, otherwise I might not be able to take care of her, or I might not want to. She doesn't want me to get worn down or fed up. That's odd. Why isn't it ‘worn up' and ‘fed down'?”

“I have no idea.” Jane laughed. “You sound like Bill Laird. He's always looking sideways at words, turning them around in his mind.”

“I used to do a lot of that,” Henry said. He sat back and pushed his empty plate away. “You get in the habit.”

“Oh yes?” Jane looked at him, admiring his thick eyebrows, high color, and thoughtful meditative expression. “You mean when you were in advertising.”

“Yeah, and when I was a poet.”

“You were a poet? I never knew that.”

“I don't admit to it very often. But I was. It was a long time ago, but I even won an award for it, and I published two books. They were mostly white space, though, because I was a minimalist.”

“Really? So why did you stop?”

“I didn't exactly stop. My poems got shorter and shorter, and then they just sort of disappeared, and it was all white space.” He smiled and ran one hand around the collar of his denim shirt, as if it had suddenly become too tight.

“I'm sorry,” Jane told him. “But maybe you'll start again sometime.”

“That's what Delia always used to say. She got quite angry with me when I wouldn't even try.”

“But that's not fair,” Jane exclaimed in spite of her previous resolve. “It's not the sort of thing you can just decide to do.”

“Depends on how you look at it.” He shrugged. “Wouldn't you like me better if I were a poet?”

“No, why should I?” She laughed.

“Delia would.” His face darkened; he looked away from her, out of the window, which was beginning to blur with rain.

“Well, I like you just fine the way you are,” Jane said, feeling a rush of distaste for Henry's wife. At least Alan never wants me to be something else, something I can't be, she thought.

Henry turned back; he looked at her, then slowly smiled. “And I like you just fine the way you are,” he said, less casually.

Jane caught her breath; for a moment the whole room blurred like the rain-washed quadrangle outside. Something is happening, she thought. Alarmed, she tried to block it.

“I'm afraid Delia has the same sort of idea about Alan,” she said rapidly. “She's convinced him he's an artist; and now she's convinced some friend of hers who owns a gallery in New York to show his pictures of ruins.”

“Yeah, she told me about that.”

“Of course Alan was very excited when he heard the news. Over the moon, he said himself. He didn't say anything about his back for nearly a whole day. But I'm worried about the whole thing.”

“Worried?” Henry raised his eyebrows.

“You know, what people will think.”

“What's that?” He smiled, but Jane did not.

“They'll think Alan's making fun of death and destruction.”

“Really? Do you think he is?”

“No, of course not. Alan would never do that. Anyhow he made most of those drawings long before September 11. But most people won't know that. They'll think it's a joke about the World Trade Center, and they'll get angry.”

“Is anyone angry at him now?”

“No,” Jane admitted. “But not many people have seen his drawings.” I'm angry, she realized. Not at the drawings, but at Delia, for charming and bullying her way into Alan's life, making him jump over the moon like the stupid cow in the nursery rhyme, making him forget his pain, when I've been trying to do the same thing for a year and a half without success. It was so wrong, so unfair—It also was something she couldn't complain to Henry about.

“I'd better get back to work,” she said instead.

“Okay.” He stood up. “Hey, it's really raining,” he added as he pushed open the door. “Never mind, I have a big umbrella. Here, take my arm.”

Splashing though puddles, Jane and Henry made their way across campus toward the Center, where his car was parked. But though her feet were soon wet, the rest of Jane remained surprisingly dry. This struck her as odd; then she realized that because Henry was shorter than Alan by several inches, his big black umbrella shielded her better. Also he held his arm closer to his side, so that Jane's hand was pressed against his rough tan duffle coat. A shiver ran up her arm toward her shoulder, and farther, and she had to remind herself forcibly that she was suffering from prolonged sexual frustration, and that Henry was just a friend who was married to one of the most beautiful women in Hopkins County.

“I'd like to come in for a moment,” he said when they reached the Center.

“Yes, of course.” Jane held open the heavy door while he shook out his umbrella. “How's everything?” she asked Susie.

“Very quiet. Nobody's here but Charlie and Selma.”

“Yes, I know.” Neither Alan nor Delia had come in that day—Delia almost never did on Fridays—and the fifth Fellow, a dignified Yale sociologist in his fifties called Davi Gakar, was on his way to a wedding on Long Island with his family.

“Oh, look at that rain.” Susie opened a pink-flowered umbrella. “I'll be back in an hour. Oh, I forgot, Selma wanted me to remind you that she's screening all Delia's calls. Says she's Delia's watchdog.”

“Yes, I know,” Jane repeated without enthusiasm. Somehow, over the past few weeks, Delia had got everyone at the Center working for her. Selma took her phone messages, Susie typed her manuscripts and letters, Charlie brought her coffee at the weekly lunch, and Davi Gakar passed on his
New York Times
every day. “I expect she'll get tired of it after a while.”

“Actually I don't think she will,” Henry said as the front door closed behind Susie.

“No, maybe not.” Jane recalled the look of doglike devotion that Selma sometimes directed toward Delia. At least Alan isn't working for her, Jane thought.

“Delia understands the use of obligations,” Henry said, following Jane into the office and sitting on the edge of her desk. “She knows how to bind people to her with them. When you do something for Delia she's wonderfully grateful. She makes you feel that she couldn't survive without your help, and that you have a big part in her fame and success. But that's not what I wanted to say.” He leaned toward Jane and put one hand on her arm. “I w-wanted to say—to tell you—” He stumbled over the words.

Something is happening, Jane thought, I should stop it. But she could not move.

“I—Oh, hell.” The telephone had begun to ring.

“Unger Center for the H-Humanities,” Jane said, also stuttering a little.

“This is Sergeant Dan Warren at the Hopkins County Public Safety Office.”

“Uh, yes?” And now something else is happening, she thought, feeling frightened and confused. Someone has been arrested, someone is dead or injured.

“Who am I speaking to?”

“This is Jane Mackenzie. I'm the administrative director of the Unger Center for the Humanities at Corinth University.” Hearing her tense, formal tone, Henry sat back and took his hand off her arm.

“We have an individual here who has been detained by the Airport Security Officer at the county airport. He was trying to board a plane with weapons and contraband materials. Claims he is employed by your organization. Says his name is David Gakar.”

“Davi Gakar. Yes, I mean he's a Fellow here, at the Center,” Jane said, still shaken but also relieved. “You mean, you're saying they think he was going to hijack an airplane?”

Henry's thick dark eyebrows rose, and he opened his mouth in a mime of astonishment.

“Maybe. He didn't get that far.”

“But Professor Gakar is a famous professor from Yale University. He wouldn't—” Jane fell silent. After all, how did she know what Davi Gakar would or wouldn't do?

“He says you can verify his identity.”

“Well, yes. Of course I can.”

“In that case we'd appreciate it if you would come to the County Security Building as soon as possible.”

“Yes, of course. I'll be right there.” The phone clattered loudly as she fit it back into its base. “They've arrested Davi Gakar,” she told Henry, annoyed to hear the wobble in her voice. “They think he's a terrorist or something.”

“Yeah, I gathered.”

“I've got to call Bill Laird.”

“Yeah.” Henry smiled, to her mind inappropriately.

Bill, as usual, was calm and calming. Not to worry, he said: he would get in touch with the University counsel's office and meet her at the Security Building (he called it by its former name, the County Jail) as soon as he could. She should go there now, and bring Davi Gakar's file, along with his contract and letters of recommendation.

What is the matter with me? Jane thought as she went through the necessary actions: getting out the file, asking Charlie to cover the phone until Susie got back from lunch—carefully not telling him what the “minor emergency” was. I am a good administrator, she told herself. I am calm and capable in crises much worse than this one. When Wilkie Walker slipped on the icy front steps last February and was lying there with his leg twisted under him; when the fire started in the bathroom wastebasket the year before that, I knew what to do. But now she was confused; she felt as if she were running a fever, and her heart kept up a fluttering uneven rhythm. It's because of Henry, she realized, looking at him and quickly looking away.

“I have to go now,” she said.

“I'll drive you.” Henry stood up.

The confused thought crossed Jane's mind that this might not be a good idea. But why not? She did not try to answer her own question, only said, “Thank you.”

“I probably won't be of much use, but you never know.” He smiled. “Anyhow, I wouldn't want to miss this.”

It's not a TV show, Jane thought, but she said nothing.

They did not speak much on the way to the County Jail. Once she asked Henry to please not mention to anybody what had happened to Professor Gakar, and he replied, “All right.” But most of the time she was just silently watching the rain soak the windshield of Henry's SUV and the wipers slosh it away, and wondering alternately whether Davi Gakar was an international terrorist and when or if Henry would say whatever it was he had started to say at the Center. She was tensely, annoyingly aware of him beside her, his rough tan duffle coat, his broad tanned hands on the wheel.

In the outer room of the Security Building, Davi Gakar's wife and children were sitting on a long wooden bench. Whenever they came to the Center, they had always seemed happy and casual, and been dressed in casual New England preppie style. They smiled often, showing perfect teeth. Now they all wore formal dress-up clothes and varying unhappy expressions. Davi's wife, a small, sophisticated woman who was a dentist in real life, had on a gilt-embroidered silk sari, heavy gold earrings, and a weary, sour expression. His nine-year-old daughter, in a lace-collared dark-red velvet party dress, looked lost and frightened, while his five-year-old son, in a miniature suit and tie, was restless and bored.

“It's really important that we get to New York this afternoon,” Mrs. Gakar said in tones frayed by repetition. “My husband's niece is being married there.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Davi was extremely upset at the airport. He was in the right, of course, but what he said wasn't useful. Maybe you can talk a little sense into him.”

“We'll try,” Henry said. Jane, who found Davi Gakar rather formidable, did not have the confidence to echo this promise. Going to the desk, she presented his file, and Sheriff Hanshaw was summoned.

“If you'd come this way, please.” Jane and Henry were directed by a female clerk down a corridor to a small ugly room containing six plastic chairs, a table, a very young uniformed policeman, and Davi Gakar, in an elegantly cut three-piece suit and a state of indignation.

“This is totally unreasonable, unforgivable,” he declared after being told that he and his family could not yet leave the building. “You have the documents now.”

“Please be patient, Professor,” the policeman said in a manner that suggested he had said it several times before. “The sheriff is looking at your papers now.”

“The staff at the airport are incompetent bunglers,” Davi Gakar declared. “They cannot tell a wedding present from a weapon. Look.” He gestured at the table before him, on the white plastic top of which was laid out a heterogeneous collection of objects, as in the memory game Jane had played at children's parties. The center-piece was a rectangular black leather case lined in royal-blue plush and containing a large carving knife and fork with bone handles. Surrounding it was a debris of shiny silver wrapping paper and ribbon, a child's flute, a pair of nail scissors and a nail file, and a bright-yellow toy bulldozer with a shiny metal scoop. “The stupidity was amazing,” Davi continued. “They imagined that with this equipment my family and I planned to hijack their plane. Presumably, I would attack the pilot with this carving knife and fork. My wife would stab the copilot with her nail scissors, my daughter would poke them with her flute, and my son would hit them with his toy car. That is what they thought, apparently.”