Too Easy (27 page)

•
 Robert's lawyer goes out of the room to find some papers. Anne and Robert are in big leather chairs a few feet apart. Robert whispers loudly at her, “Anne, don't you see, it was all a mirage. It wasn't real. None of it. I love you. Please. We shouldn't be divorced. What if we just had a trial separation?”

“No. I can't live with you.”

He hates the cool way she's watching him. “It was like a disease. A fever.” Robert leans closer to her, his face animated and intense. “The fever's over now. I'm myself again.”

Anne ignores what he said. “You know, Robert, you shouldn't have started the affair. But you did. So you had to be able to finish it. Seems to me—and I'm putting this the way I think she would—you screwed up coming and going. Have I got this right?”

Robert stares at her in shock. She's so cold. “That's looking
back at it,” he insists. “I'm telling you the whole thing was like a hallucination.”

“So which are you most sorry about?” Anne says. “I think I can handle this now.”

“What?”

“That you started or that you couldn't finish? Which do you regret the most? Tell me!”

“Anne, stop this. That's all hindsight. It was madness, pure and simple.”

“Robert—tell me what you're most sorry about. You started the whole thing? Or you couldn't finish it off?” She smiles at him and whispers, “Finish me off, that is.”

I can't believe this, Robert thinks. We're married all these years and now she's looking at me with this supercilious expression. I've created a monster. Doesn't she understand? I've lost the most here . . . the two best women I've had in my life.

“Anne, what's happened to you?”

“I survived. What's happened to you, Robert?”

Look, he thinks, she's toying with me. This is horrible. “Anne, please . . . can't you forgive me?”

“No, Robert. I cannot. . . . Don't feel too bad, I'm not sure I can forgive me either.”

“Why, Anne? Why?! Why's it have to be . . . like this?”

He's very near her now. She stares quietly into his frantic eyes, studies the big face. Maybe for the last time, she thinks. Look, Robert, it's like this. I defended myself and my home—well, that's part of what happened.

She frowns for an instant, thinking through to the end of it. And I guess I defended myself from the thought, every day for the rest of my life, that you'd be making love to another woman. . . . One you loved more than me. . . .

He blinks before her calm gaze. “I couldn't help myself, Anne. Don't you understand that? I was powerless. I'm only human.”

Robert springs from the chair and paces the side of the
room. Looking back at her with imploring grimaces. She watches his big, restless figure.

“Make some allowance,” he tells her.

That was the oddest part, she thinks. All the time he was with that other woman, preparing to kill me, really, the marriage was very good. Sex was getting better all the time. It's so weird.

Robert points at her. “I don't accept this, Anne. One mistake? That's all I ever made.” He's shouting now. “Do I have to pay for it forever?”

“I guess we all do.”

“I want you to be my wife. We belong together.”

Anne wonders if she could want Robert back. Is she taking some sick pleasure in rejecting him? Maybe. Probably. How could anyone be sure? It's not just that she can't forgive him or can't understand him; maybe she could do both. But there's the feeling that she has grown in some other direction, where he can't follow her. And she wants to make this definite.

“Tell me this, Robert.”

“What? What! Anything!”

“How was the sex?”

“What?!”

“The sex, Robert—with Kathy?”

“Anne! Don't talk like that—”

Robert's lawyer comes back, almost running into the room. “Hey, hold it down. People are listening to—”

“Anne! . . . God, please stop that. What a terrible thing to say.”

The lawyer holds Robert's elbow. “Come on, take it easy. These things are always rough.”

“Anne, please . . . forgive me.” He's trying to push past the lawyer.

She stares across the room, hardly hearing him now.

• B
RUCE
D
EITRICK
P
RICE
grew up in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and decided at age seventeen to become a novelist. He graduated from Princeton, served two years in the army, and then settled in New York to pursue a career as a writer. He published a nonfiction book about explorers, and then his first novel,
Ralph.
He worked at a variety of part-time jobs before he started his own business, Word-Wise Advertising, which designs brochures and logos. His second novel,
American Dreams,
was published in 1984. In addition to fiction, he writes poetry and essays on language and eduction. He is also a painter who has had several shows.

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1994 by Bruce Deitrick Price

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form whatsoever.

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Designed by Karolina Harris

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Price, Bruce D., date.

Too easy : a novel / Bruce Deitrick Price.

p. cm.

1. Man-woman relationships—New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.

2. Newspaper editors—New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.

3. Marriage—New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.

4. Murder-New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3566.R44T66 1994

813'.54—dc20      94-5735

CIP

ISBN: 978-1-5011-4091-4

ISBN: 978-1-5011-3977-2 (eBook)