Skeleton Key (7 page)

“It doesn't matter who it was,” he said finally. “If it was anybody important, he'll call back.”

“You're really a snot, do you know that?” Deirdre said. “You pick your friends out of the
Social Register.
You care more about your image than you do about your bank account.”

“If that were true, you wouldn't be here.”

“Oh,” Deirdre said, “I think I'd still be here. Even men who are listed in the
Social Register
go slumming.”

“I've never called seeing you ‘slumming.' And you know it.”

“You've never called it anything else, either. Are you going to marry Kayla Anson?'

“I doubt if she'd have me.”

“But you would marry her, if she'd have you? Because of all that money?”

“Kayla is a wonderful girl. But she's a girl. She's very young.”

“Jesus Christ,” Deirdre said.

Peter turned around with his drink in his hand. His penis was waving in the air. He felt so exposed, he wanted to duck, except that there was no place to duck into, and nothing to hide behind. Deirdre put her glass down on the tub collar and hauled herself up. She was exposed, too, but she didn't seem to mind it.

“You know,” she said finally, “you really shouldn't treat me like an asshole, because I'm not an asshole. Do you get my meaning?”

“I never treat you like an asshole.”

“You never treat me like anything else. But if you really think I'm going to let you get away with pushing me around the way you push around your debutantes, you're going to be very surprised. Have I made myself clear?”

“I never push you around.”

“Jesus Christ,” Deirdre said again.

She walked around the tub collar until she got to the towel rack. She got a towel and wrapped herself up in it, tucking the edge between her breasts to make it stay. Deirdre was the only person Peter had ever known who could do that and walk around without the towel coming lose and falling off. She was the only woman he had ever known whose breasts pointed at the ceiling like missiles at a launch pad. He supposed she'd had them done.

“I'm going to get dressed and get out of here,” she said. “You're beginning to piss me off. But try to remember a few things, will you please?”

“Like what?”

“Like the fact that you have caller ID.”

“I don't get it.”

“I'm going home,” Deirdre said again.

On any other night, Peter would have gone to her and tried to make her change her mind. He would at least have grabbed her arm and tried to do something physical. Now he just watched her walk away, her hips moving like waves under the pink terrycloth of the towel. She reminded him of Marilyn Monroe in some old movie.

When she was out of the room, Peter got a towel for himself and brought his scotch out into the main room. He could hear Deirdre in the loft, getting herself dressed, but he didn't go up to see her. He sat down on the love seat instead and closed his eyes.

He felt as if he were a single wagon, detached from a wagon train, and the Indians were attacking.

The call came in at 11:37, and Eve Wachinsky almost didn't hear it. She had an uneasy feeling that she might have failed to hear a number of calls tonight. With Darla upstairs, sick as a dog, and nothing going on down here but a movie on HBO with the sound turned down too low
to hear, the world could have come to an end without her noticing. Darla Barden was the woman whose house this was, and who owned the answering service that was run from this broad front room. The front room had once been a porch off the living room and had then been enclosed. Now it was an alcove off the living room, and the living room had no furniture in it. Eve rubbed at the side of her face and looked at the machine blinking in front of her. This room was full of machines: computers, telephones, fax machines, devices to contact beepers, radios turned to the police band. The movie on HBO was
Wag the Dog,
which was what everybody had been watching since August, when President Clinton had bombed the Sudan. Eve Wachinsky was not sure where the Sudan was—in Africa, she thought, but she wasn't sure which part—but it bothered her to no end that her last name was so much like the last name of That Woman.

Now she rubbed the side of her face and stared at the blinking light on the machine in front of her. The light told her which account the call was related to, so that she knew whether to say “Good evening, Southbury Diagnostics” or “Good evening, Holden Tool and Die” when she picked up. Right now, it felt to her as if everything on her body itched. She'd been sitting in the same place so long, it seemed as if every part of her body had gone to sleep. She wanted to cry, too, that was the thing, as if she had nothing to do with her life anymore except break down.

She put the headset on, punched into the machine, and said, “Waterville Physicians Services. Can I help you?”

“Oh,” Rita Venotti said. “Eve, I'm sorry. I couldn't remember the number I'm supposed to use, and I knew you'd be doing this one, so—”

“It's all right,” Eve said. It was, too. She hated taking calls for doctors more than she hated anything. The patients were all crazy, and too many of them got abusive. “Bitch,” the women called her, when she would not give them their doctor's home telephone numbers, or put them through to some doctor who was not on call. “Scum cunt” one of the
men had said to her once, and she didn't even remember why. The patients had terrible symptoms and waited for hours before calling in. They got addicted to their painkillers and then wanted more and more of them, from different doctors, called into different pharmacies. Eve rubbed the side of her face again, as if there was something there she needed to rub off.

“Eve?” Rita said.

“I'm sorry,” Eve said. “I'm a little tired tonight, I guess.”

“Could I talk to Darla?”

“She's upstairs asleep. She's got some kind of food poisoning, I think. Anyway, she was throwing up nonstop when I got here. And then she passed out.”

“Oh, dear. Well, I don't suppose it matters. In fact, I know it doesn't matter. I don't know what's wrong with me tonight. I need the road crew sent out to Four Corners. There's a telephone pole down on Capernaum Road. You know that road?”

“No.”

“One of those dirt things that's really a mess, but the thing is, it goes out to that little cemetery and a few other places, so people actually want to use it. And according to the guy who called me, the pole is leaning practically sideways.”

“I'd better call SNET, as well.”

“No, don't do that. Let the town people do it when they get out. It's so frustrating, really. I mean, Capernaum Road in the middle of the night. You'd think it could wait until morning. But I know what they'd say around here if I let it wait.”

“I don't think it's good to let it wait with the telephone wire being interfered with,” Eve said. “Aren't there other things up there on those poles, electrical stuff, that kind of thing?”

“I don't know. I don't understand any of it. I just know that when the poles come down everything stops and they close off the road for half a day. You'd think they could have thought of a better way after all this time.”

“Mmm,” Eve said.

“Well, it doesn't matter. Just get the road crew out to Capernaum Road and tell them to go from there. That will take care of it. I hope you're feeling good these days.”

“I'm fine,” Eve said.

“Everything's a mess over at my house. It always is. Did you know that my Michael got into Harvard University?”

“No,” Eve said.

“He got a scholarship, too. And he's going to have to take loans. But we worked it out We thought it was really important, if he could get into a good school like that he should go. And now Lisa is saying she wants to go someplace good herself. Wellesley, that's what she's thinking of. I don't know how we're going to afford it.”

“Mmm,” Eve said again.

“It's going to be a kick anyway,” Rita said. “Both my children in the Ivy League. Or whatever it is they call those girls' schools. I must say I never expected, when they were born, that they would both turn out to be so smart”

“If I don't call the town, you're never going to get a road crew out to Four Corners.”

“What? Oh, yes. You're right. Of course you're right I'll hang right up. It just gets so lonely around here at night, with nobody to talk to. I wouldn't work nights at all except that it pays so much more money.”

“The road crew—”

“Yes, yes,” Rita said. “I'll be quiet now. I've got to find out what Danny Hazelton is doing. I sent him out to Faye Dallmer's to find out what happened to her Jeep, and it's been simply forever. More than half an hour, at least. What do you think he could be doing out there for half an hour?”

“Maybe this time somebody really stole it”

“I don't think that's likely. Well, whatever. I'll talk to you later. Tell Darla I hope she's feeling better.”

“I will,” Eve said.

The headset sent up a buzzing dial tone in her ears. Eve took it off and put it down on her keyboard. It was too
dark outside. She had come to hate fall and winter in New England. Everything was always black. She turned sideways and began to punch the message—
Tree down, road crew to Four Corners Capernaum Road
—into the machine that sent messages to beepers.

The thing was, it had suddenly occurred to her that she was getting old. Not old old. She wasn't ready for Social Security, or a candidate for a nursing home. She was, in fact, exactly forty-nine years old. In two months, she would be fifty. The number kept stopping her dead, every time she thought of it.

Fifty was what her mother was, the year Eve had graduated from high school—graduated in the very same class with Rita Venotti and at least a dozen other people who were still in town. Rita had a husband and two children and a house out at Mount Fair Farm. John Candless, who had been president of their class senior year, had a wife and four children and a dermatology practice in Waterbury. Even Jenna Borman, the class slut, had surprised them all by entering a convent and becoming a teacher. Now she was Sister Jenna Marie Borman, and principal of Holy Name School in Waterbury.

I should have more to show for my life than this, Eve kept thinking—and by “more” she really meant anything at all. She kept trying to remember what she had been doing for the last thirty years or so, what she had been thinking, that she could get to the age she was now and almost literally not exist. She'd had boyfriends, but none of them had ever asked her to marry them. None of them had really been all that good in the way of catches, either, but that was something else. She had had jobs, but they had mostly been jobs like this one. She had worked for a long time as a cashier in a supermarket, and then for a little longer as a nurse's aide in a convalescent home. She had worked at Sears, too, selling perfume. It had probably been the best job she ever had—it had at least come with health insurance—but she had left it eventually, she wasn't sure why. She hadn't even had what she could call a lot of fun. Now
she rented a three-room apartment in a cut up old house in Watertown, and came to this job here, and played the lottery, but not too much. She couldn't play the lottery much. She didn't have enough money.

Her machine began to beep again. Eve clamped the headset on her head and picked up.

“Road Maintenance Department. Can I help you?”

“There's a telephone pole down on Capernaum Road? Are you kidding me?”

“Ask Rita. It's Rita who would be kidding you.”

“Jesus. In the middle of the night like this. What would bring a telephone pole down in the middle of the night like this?”

“Wind, maybe.”

“There isn't enough wind to blow over a matchstick. You'd need a major hurricane.”

“So maybe it's been down for a long time and somebody just noticed it now.”

“Not likely. Half the world uses that damned road as a shortcut You sure Rita didn't say anything about an accident, about some
car
knocking over a telephone pole on Capernaum Road?”

“Nope.”

“Jesus.”

“Craig?” Eve said. “Do you ever think that you've had enough of it? Your life, I mean. Do you ever think that you really have to change everything around right now?”

“I think that if I ever win the lottery I'm going to retire to Florida. Are you drunk or something?”

“No. No, just a little tired. I'm sorry.”

“You can tell Rita we'll be out there in about twenty minutes.”

“She says the report says that the pole may be leaning into a set of power lines. You may need SNET as well as CL and P.”

“Right Shit. Just what I need when it's right before Halloween.”

“Sorry.”

“Do you realize you apologize for everything?” Craig said. “You apologize for stuff you didn't even do.”

“Sorry,” Eve said again—but there was nobody to hear her. The dial tone was buzzing in her ears again. She took the headset off again and pushed her chair away from the computer.

It wasn't stupid, or drunk, to ask the kind of questions she was asking now. Eve was sure of it. Everybody had to ask those questions. The lucky ones asked while they were still in high school, when they had a world of time to do something about their dissatisfaction.

She got up and went into the living room. There was a fireplace there with a big mirror over the mantel, but nothing else except boxes of files and manuals, pushed up against the wall on the north side of the room. Eve went to the mirror and looked at herself. The image she got back was murky and inconclusive. She went out the front door that stood at one end of the living room and out onto the front stoop. With the door open, she would be able to hear the machine if it beeped.