The Last Family (30 page)

Sherry opened the door and smiled out at him.

“Any trouble finding the place?” she said.

“No. I followed the opera music.”

“Come in. I’m cooking us a snack.”

Sherry lived in a cozy one-bedroom apartment near Vanderbilt University. In the space of thirty feet the living room became the dining room, which became the kitchen. From what Paul could see from the living room, the bedroom was large enough only for the double bed, covered by a thin Indian-print cotton throw, a dresser, a trunk painted sky-blue with white trim, and a bookshelf filled with books. The living room held two matching shelf units also loaded with books in all sizes and of all ages.

“We’re having lasagna. I hope you like Italian. I guess opera seems highbrow, but it helps me cook Italian to hear Italian.”

“I love Italian,” he said. “I’d have picked up a bottle of wine if I’d known we were eating.”

“You haven’t? Eaten, I mean?”

“No.”

“I’ve got the perfect bottle of red—Chianti with the little black rooster on the label. A friend who knows Italy says you should look for the rooster on a Chianti bottle because the rooster stands for the region where the best Chianti comes from.”

He was silent.

She turned and looked at him and cocked her head. “You brought the files?” She sounded—what? Indifferent?

“Yes.”

“Good, you look so much better outside the office.”

“I know what I look like, Sherry. So do you—remember?” He fumbled at his jacket pocket nervously. “Mind if I smoke?”

“Of course you know what you look like! Ashtray’s
on the coffee table. Listen, Paul. Let’s get one thing out in the open. Your face is screwed up a bit.” She looked down and then back up at him. “Okay, it’s screwed up a lot. But there is a difference between being ugly and having a face that looks like …” She paused. “Let me put it this way. Everybody has a good side. But usually they have to tell you which one it is. You’ve just done away with the guesswork.”

“I was going to say a Picasso.”

She laughed. “Okay, I might have chosen a different artist. But, look, it’s none of my business. You’ve evidently had a rough time, and your face really doesn’t matter to me. I didn’t ask you here to analyze you, pity you, mother you, or kiss your ass to get a better job.”

“You said you had some thoughts?”

“Oh, that. It was a ruse.” She busied herself rinsing glasses that she had pulled from the cabinet.

“Why did you ask me here?”

“I asked you here …” She stopped making the salad and looked at him. “Usually people skirt around a bit before they get into the heavy shit. But since you want to know. I asked you here because I’m attracted to you, and I thought I could talk to you here.”

Paul grimaced. Why did she want to talk to him? What did she really want? Didn’t she know his status was temporary?

She laughed as though she had read the thoughts.

He nodded. “Could I have a glass of the rooster red you spoke of?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said. She poured him a glass of wine and worked on the salad while he sipped.

“So what’s the game plan? What do we talk about? Montana game laws? That’s about all I know anymore.”

“Well, according to my overall plot I thought we’d eat and drink wine. Then we can talk and see if there is a mutual attraction.…”

Paul felt weak in the knees. “There is. I mean, I feel an attraction to most beautiful women.”

“But you’ve been in a cave in Montana. I’ll bet you’d be attracted to a …” She smiled. “Never mind. In that
case, saying it holds through the food and wine, then we can go into the next room and … you know.”

“I know?”

“Well, we can take our clothes off and … like in the romance books.”

“Just like that?”

“Normally I’d expect you to court me for the socially proper time. Flowers, candy, dinner out, and a few movies.”

“Normally?” His mind was screaming that something was wrong with all of this. He fought an urge to run for it, out to his car and back to the hotel. But she compelled him with her eyes … made him want to stay.

“Paul,” she said. “Relax. This operation may well end tomorrow or the next day, so I’m not sure we have the time or if I’m your type or any of that. I decided to reach out to you.”

“It’s been … I mean, I was expecting something altogether different.”

“You haven’t noticed me watching you? I thought you had. I’ve noticed you watching me.”

“People must watch you all the time. You’re a beautiful girl. This probably isn’t a good idea.”

“Normally I’m not this forward, and I’ve never jumped into bed with anyone on a first date, but I’m willing to make an exception because we’re adults, and I’ve glanced at the Kama Sutra, and where this goes is up to you. But rules, now. We don’t discuss the low points of your life, we don’t feel sorry for each other. If the food stinks, you can lie about that. I hope you like lasagna,” she said again as she picked up a pair of pot holders and reached into the oven for the dish. “If you want to leave after dinner, go. If you want to stay, stay. Okay?”

He managed a weak nod.

As she was passing him on the way to the table with the hot pan stuck between pot holders in her hands, she paused and kissed him on the lips, gently. She looked him in the eye and smiled, and he could see that she really didn’t care about his ruined appearance. It almost
eased his nervousness, but he hadn’t been in a romantic setting with a woman he was attracted to in something like six years. And then it had been Laura. He had known her intimately, and he had had an unscarred face and the natural confidence of a bulldog. That moment seemed a million years in the past.

She lit candles and turned the electric lights off.

They bumped their knees together, under the table, through dinner. It started as accidental, but each time they brushed against each other, the contact lasted longer. Paul was a bit self-conscious; he’d forgotten what a first date felt like, and he felt himself getting aroused. He was flattered by her attention. He liked Sherry, but he was haunted by second thoughts. What could she be setting him up for?

“It can’t be sexual harassment if it’s my idea,” she said, seeming to read his mind. “Maybe you can sue me.”

“Your idea?”

“You’d better believe it,” she said.

Dinner ended, and Sherry replaced the classical CD they’d listened to during the meal with a Nat King Cole disk. Then she poured them glasses of wine, led him to the couch, and sat beside him with her legs tucked up, her knees against his thigh, her hand behind his shoulder.

“Get enough to eat?”

“Yeah, but with Italian you’re hungry again in a week.”

“Comfortable?” she asked, laughing at his joke.

“I’m getting there,” he replied. He reached up and put his hand under her chin and brought her in close for a long, deep kiss.

“Can we talk a little, I mean, before we retire to the other room? I know I’ve seen you every day for the last few days, but we never just talked before.”

“You hardly know me,” he said.

“Everyone hardly knows you. I mean, they know what they see … observe about you. Like people follow you without even realizing they’ve made a choice in
the matter. It’s something about your eyes—I mean your eye”—she smiled—“it has real depth to it.”

“Like a dark pool in the moonlight,” he said.

“Stop crackin’ wise.” She touched his scar so gently, he hardly felt it at all. “Even this. No one notices for long. Not after they hear you talk. They assume you’ve been there and given your all. Battle worn.”

Paul sat up. “My all? I didn’t give anything, Sherry. I stumbled into a wasp’s nest and good people died. They died for sins they didn’t commit.”

“I’m sure you’re wrong.”

“See, Sherry, most leaders aren’t shit. Just because you call someone Chief doesn’t mean they are. Look at the pharaohs and the thousands of slaves they killed to build a tomb for their own remains. Little leaders, like me, are no different, really. People get promoted despite themselves. Look at T.C. Robertson, for Christ’s sake. I was just as bad. Names became small tags to move around a board. Someone’s getting too big for their own britches—move ’em to Alaska and let ’em wade through ship holds of tuna looking for a kilo of grass. Their families, too. Out of sight with the snap of a finger. Let’s not get into what sort of leader I was. I don’t want to remember those days.”

“From what I know of you, you were a good leader, Paul. Rainey said you were the best and the brightest.”

“ ‘Was’ is the key word.”

“Paul, none of that matters. I mean, people have died, but you had no way of knowing they would die. I don’t believe that it was your fault for one minute, and I don’t see how you can believe it either. You defeated Martin Fletcher fair and square, and he couldn’t see his own guilt because he’s narcissistic.”

“Martin doesn’t hate me because I defeated him. He hates me because he thinks that I violated the warrior’s code he imagines he lives by. That I cheated and I wasn’t man enough to come after him head on. That I was responsible for his collapse.”

“Cheated him?”

“He thinks I framed him.”

“Did you?”

“It would have been dishonest, against the code, and a coward’s way out. But—”

“But?” she asked.

“But maybe sometimes things have to be done around corners. I mean, we make choices that seem better than the other alternatives.” He looked at her to see if he was saying too much, or not enough. Why burden her with his personal cross? “Hindsight is twenty-twenty. But in his mind I’m a coward, and maybe he’s right. I shouldn’t have arrested him. I should have shot him between the eyes while he was sitting across a table from me. Eye to eye, man to man.
That
the man would have understood. But I just didn’t have what it took. That was the right thing to do. Then I would deserve …” He stopped and looked at her. There were tears in his eyes. “I would deserve …”

“Everything you’ve thrown away.”

Suddenly Paul began to tremble, and he looked distressed, as if he were going to vomit, but he just began to cry, silent tears streaming down his cheek. Sherry held him tightly while his arms hung limp, and he cried like a child. He cried for a long time as she held him.

When he stopped crying, she could feel the wall going back up.

“See what a leader I am? I’m sorry, I’d better go.” He shifted his weight away from her.

“Why?”

“This really isn’t a good idea … I mean the wine and everything. I guess I should apologize for …”

“I could quit the job. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“Do I look like someone who can’t find a job without making the boss? Plus you’re temporary here.”

“You’re serious?” Paul stared at her, studying her, suddenly seeing her differently from the way he had before.

“Dead serious.”

“Boy, are you setting yourself up for a disappointment.” He managed a nervous smile.

•   •   •

Paul stood beside the bed while Sherry undressed him slowly in the darkness. He was almost embarrassed. She peeled off the shirt, the pants, and the rest, and as she did, she covered the skin she was exposing with kisses. She ran her tongue over the bullet scars as she found them, nipped at the skin with her teeth, gently. Paul shivered; his wounded leg shook involuntarily, and he felt as if he were going to fall down, but he remained standing until she led him into the sheets. Then, with her back to him, she lit a candle and removed her clothes and draped them over the dresser slowly as he watched from the bed. It was like some wonderful adolescent dream. She turned, and as she did, her softly contoured buttocks became a triangle of dark pubic hair, and her shoulders gave way to her perfect breasts with small, dark nipples. She knelt into him and pressed her body against his torso. He kissed her breasts and her neck and pulled her down. They embraced and rolled toward the center of the bed, and Paul trembled like an awkward schoolboy about to get his first taste of love.

Later they were lying beside each other—he smoking a cigarette, she tracing words he couldn’t decipher on his chest with her finger. For the first time in five years he felt safe, if only for that moment. In a small apartment in Nashville, far from the stone walls outside his cabin, which he had assumed could shelter him. Even though she had said it didn’t bother her, he put the cigarette out after a couple of drags.

“You have a beautiful body,” she said. “For an old man, I mean.”

“So how old are you?”

“Small talk?” she giggled. “You know how old I am. You pulled my file and read it. I saw it open on your desk.”

“Sorry. I was just trying to …”

“Make conversation?”

“Something like that.”

She snuggled against him and twirled his chest hair with her finger. “My turn to open up? Okay, fair’s fair.
Let’s see what my file didn’t tell you. My father was a biology professor, and my mom was Amerasian and taught painting. Only child. Spoiled rotten. Good childhood. Believed in Santa Claus until I was in junior high. Boy, did I feel like an idiot. Betrayed by my own parents, by commercial interests, by the media. Now, tell me about your childhood.”

“Boring stuff.”

“After I finish, okay? Will you?”

Paul nodded.

“You’re the fourth man I’ve ever slept with. That’s due to a natural shyness, not lack of want. Bert, my high-school sweetheart and first husband, was the first.”

“You’ve been married.”

“Yes. It lasted through our freshman year, when he found his next true love. Then I had this year-long rebound with my western-civilization professor who looked like Mussolini. Then I had a long romance with an archaeologist in graduate school, and now there’s you.”

“It’s been a while for me, too.”

“I can imagine. Living on a mountain in Bear Butt, Wyoming.”

“Montana.”

“Same thing. What, they don’t have girls there?”

“My wife, Laura, was the last. Been about six years, I guess.”

The memory of the last time they had made love sank a shaft through his soul. It was something he had managed to repress. Was it sex? No, it had been something else. Anger, rage, and pain. God, had that been he? How could he have done that to Laura? He remembered her face, the tears, which had given way to a look of betrayal, hurt, and finally something close to blind hatred.