Acts of Love (22 page)

“I'm busy, Sandy,” he said, resting his fingers on the edge of his desk. “What do you want?”

“I'll tell you what I don't want. I don't want smart-ass guys like you poking around my family.”

“It's my job,” he replied. “You'd do the same.”

“How do you know what I'd do?”

“Because I know you're the best this paper has.”

She paused before remarking curtly, “Just stop digging around my family.” She slid off his desk and returned to her own, hammering at the keys with the tips of her fingers until there was just that, the steady rhythm of letters, words. It was only in the act of writing that she had ever lost the sense of time, of her own discomfort. Now that, too, had deserted her. When the phone rang, she picked it up distractedly.

“Yes?”

“I just called to see how you were doing,” John said. It always seemed to him that he needed an excuse to call her; he wondered if she would ever just be his.

“I'm fine.”

There was a recess of silence.

“What would you like for dinner tonight? I thought I could pick it up on my way over.”

She bit her lip. There had been no previous talk of dinner, of tonight. She could not remember reaching the point with him where these things are taken for granted. When did that come? Three months? Six? She had always managed to escape before it occurred. “I thought I'd just be alone tonight,” she answered.

“Oh.”

She could hear his disappointment, and she flinched with a spasm of irritation. “I need to spend some time with the girls,” she added guiltily.

“Of course.”

“I'll call you tomorrow.”

“Tonight,” he insisted, teasing, but still.

“Tonight,” she said, and smiled. “I'll call you tonight.”

She hung up the telephone and tried to re-enter her work. For months when she had first started seeing John she used to wonder what was missing. Something. There was an evenness where there should have been edges, sharp curves. Even his lovemaking seemed at times too polite, leery of sweat and smell and sound. Only gradually did she begin to realize that what was also missing was pain. She went to the top of the page and began systematically listing possible candidates for the police chief's job, their assets and their liabilities.

 

W
HEN
S
ANDY GOT HOME THAT NIGHT
, the house was so still, so silent, that she thought the girls had gone. There were no lights on downstairs, only the winter's early-evening dusk filled the entryway.

“Julia? Ali?” she called.

She discovered them upstairs in their bedroom, Ali on her bed, Julia at the desk. It puzzled her that even when she wasn't there they were reticent to spread out into the house, as if they did not want to leave fingerprints, smudge marks, on anything that was hers. They looked up politely when she entered. “Are you hungry?”

Ali nodded.

“How about pizza?”

“Whatever,” Julia replied.

Sandy went downstairs and called the local pizzeria. She thought that the girls might come down and help her decide what to order—extra cheese? peppers?—but they didn't, and she was left to guess what they might desire or despise. She turned on the television and watched the news until the pizza came. When it arrived, hot in its blue plastic padding, which the boy unzipped as if the contents were flammable, dangerous, she put it on the coffee table in front of the television with plates and a stack of paper napkins and switched the channel to a game show she had seen the girls watching before she called them down.

They ate steadily, picking off the mushrooms she had ordered and making a limp brown pile of them on the edge of their plates. They did not call out the answers to the quizzes the way she had seen them do before or groan at stupid responses. During commercials, Sandy put down her slice and smiled hopefully at them, but her attenuated forays into small talk—What happened at school today? Are there any cute boys in your class?—met only with one-word answers. She remembered when she had been simply their aunt and the free-spirited visits they'd had with her then, released from their parents. Surely they must remember it, too, in the same way they remembered other ancient myths that they could no longer quite believe in. They ate the rest of the meal in silence.

As soon as they were finished, Julia stood up. “I still have some homework to do,” she said. She started for the staircase, turning when she had one foot on the first step. “Ali, you didn't finish yours, either.”

Ali, snug on the couch, so near to Sandy that she could feel the heat from her thighs, her hips, didn't look up, didn't dare. “Yes, I did.”

Julia, frowning, continued up the stairs and slammed the door to their bedroom.

Sandy and Ali sat cocooned in a silence that softened, spread. Inch by inch, Ali wriggled closer to Sandy, until her head was resting in the crook of her arm, and then her lap, still watching the screen wordlessly, while Sandy stroked her hair.

They sat that way for two hours, while the remains of the pizza congealed and the shows changed, until Ali's breathing was a tender whir. Gently, Sandy picked her up and carried her to her room, where Julia, hearing their approach, quickly turned off the lights and pretended to be sleeping, while Sandy put Ali on her bed, took off her sneakers, and covered her with the quilt.

 

“T
ELL ME A STORY
,” Sandy said, her knees up under the blankets, the phone cradled close to her ear.

“What story?”

“Any story. A bedtime story.”

“An adult bedtime story or a children's bedtime story?” John asked.

“Tell me a story about us.”

“I'll tell you about our first date,” he suggested.

“Okay.”

“We went to the racetrack,” he began. “It was in early fall, cold. You had never been to the track before. You were depressed by the dinginess of it, the losing tickets on the floor, the men with bad skin and cigars. You kept asking, ‘Don't they have jobs?' It was the trotters. We chose horses with names we liked. Woman Under the Influence. My Last Dollar. We kept losing. Once, we covered half the field between the two of us, and we still lost. You went to stand by the railing on the field to watch the horses and jockeys up close. You were wearing a big red sweater. One of the jockeys tipped his hat to you as he went by. All I could think of was making love to you. I didn't know how to touch you, not even how to take your hand. You seemed so self-contained. We left before the last race.”

“Does the story have a happy ending?” she asked.

“Yes. We went back to your house and made love, and we've never been apart since.”

“I always did like fairy tales.”

He laughed. “Do you think you can sleep now?”

For a moment, there was only the faint crackling of the telephone line.

“I dream of her,” she said quietly. “Ann. She never says anything, but her face is always contorted, her eyes sliding down into her cheeks, her mouth flying off.”

“I know. I still dream of my sister,” he said, “and it's been thirty years. They took me to the hospital to see her two days before she died. She was so emaciated in that big white bed. I've had the same dream all these years of the flesh falling off of her body in big handfuls and landing at my feet. I always wake up just before she's a complete skeleton.”

Sandy pushed the receiver closer to her ear so that all she heard for a long instant was the sound of her own blood rushing through her head. “I wish you'd make more of an effort with them,” she said.

“Who?”

“Julia and Ali.”

“Okay.”

“Is that a real okay or a just-stop-bugging-me okay?”

“Look, it's late, Sandy, and I've got to get into the store early tomorrow.”

There was a long pause.

“Blue,” she said finally.

“What?”

“The sweater I was wearing at the racetrack, it was blue.”

He laughed. “Good night.”

“Good night. I love you,” she added, in such a covert whisper that he did not realize what she had said until he had hung up.

 

R
EARDON, IN A CRISPLY EFFICIENT VOICE
, called the name of the woman he had met for the first time four days ago when she walked into his office, unknown and unbidden, and told him she had information he might be interested in.

Lucy Abrams, her carefully made-up face framed by thick chestnut hair, had stood before his orderly desk, her lower lip twitching nervously, as he hurried to shut his office door.

“Sit down,” he said.

She settled lightly on the very edge of a vinyl-covered chair, unable to meet his gaze. “I've never been in a lawyer's office before,” she said. Her voice was hesitant but strong, intimating that outside of this cubicle, a lack of confidence was not generally one of her problems.

“It's not nearly as bad as the dentist's.” Reardon smiled encouragingly. “Now, suppose you tell me what this is about.”

Her eyes, a watery brown flecked with gold, focused on him for the first time. “It's about Ted Waring,” she answered.

Now, Lucy Abrams, wearing a curvy red wool dress, walked into the courtroom and down the aisle to the witness stand. Sandy watched her closely, noting her black suede pumps and her shapely, muscular calves, surely the result of some torturous workout regimen. Her hair, pulled back with a thin black velvet headband, glistened. Her steps slowed the slightest bit as she passed Ted, and her head inclined a fraction in his direction. Ted pursed his lips in a variation of disgust and folded his arms across his chest while he watched her being sworn in.

“Can you please tell the court when you first met the defendant, Ted Waring?”

“It was last year. December, I think.”

“And where did you meet?”

“In a bar. The Handley Inn.” Her lower lip, glossy and red, twitched as it had in Reardon's office.

“And what was the nature of your relationship with Mr. Waring?”

Lucy Abrams looked down at the floor, a speckled gray marble, and then briefly across to Ted, her face and her eyes luminous and hard. If Ted flinched, she did not see it. She yielded to the lawyer. “We had an affair.”

“How long did this affair last?”

“Just a couple of weeks.”

Sandy squirmed, leaning forward to study the witness more carefully. She was wearing too much makeup, a habit, no doubt, left over from a blemished adolescence.

“Was Mr. Waring married at the time?”

“He said he and his wife had just separated.”

“And did he seem upset about this?”

“Sometimes yes, sometimes no.”

Ted shifted his legs, his feet landing audibly on the ground, and Fisk made a patting motion on the table to steady him.

“He was a hard man to read,” she went on. “Real moody, you know? One minute he's mooning over her, the next minute he says he couldn't care less.”

“Ms. Abrams, why did you stop seeing Mr. Waring?”

She hesitated before answering. “Something happened.”

“What happened, Miss Abrams?”

“He came over one night. Well, he'd been drinking. I don't know what had happened that night, something with his wife, they'd had a fight over the phone, I think. He kept talking about her, Ann this, Ann that. Well, you know, there's only so much one woman wants to hear about another woman. I'm an understanding person, but there's a limit. I don't remember what I said, something like, ‘Hell, she's probably got a new boyfriend of her own.' Next thing I know, he shoves me down on the couch, and he's on top of me. I thought he was kidding at first, horsing around, you know? But he started getting really rough, almost strangling me. I screamed for him to stop, but he didn't seem to hear.”

“Did Ted Waring say anything at this time?”

“Yeah. He said I was wrong, his wife would never be with another man.”

“Were you frightened, Miss Abrams?”

“I was terrified.”

“Oh, please,” Ted muttered.

She clipped her attention to him for an instant before she continued. “He seemed crazy. He was very drunk.”

“What happened next?”

“I don't know, somehow he just sort of snapped to. He stopped, got off me. He looked down like he didn't even know where he was.”

“Did you ever see Ted Waring again after that evening?”

“No. I would have been terrified to be in the same room with him.”

“I have no further questions.”

Fisk took his time rising and made a point of staying by his desk, as if he didn't want to get too close to Lucy Abrams.