Truth and Consequences (11 page)

“No,” Delia agreed. “I expect he wanted you to say that the World Trade Center was a tragic loss to American architecture.”

“Maybe. Anyhow he kept after me and kept after me, and finally I told him that it was a significant structure, one that could only have appeared at this time in history and in this country.”

“Perfect.” Delia laughed lightly. “I wish I had your presence of mind.”

Across the hall, a ringing began. “That's your phone, I think,” Alan said.

“I'm not going to answer it. It will be the rhinoceros again, or some other awful animal.”

The ringing stopped; then it commenced again in Alan's office.

“If they're asking for me, don't say I'm here. Please.” She gave him a frightened smile.

“All right,” Alan agreed. “Hello. . . . What? . . . Just a moment, let me go and look. . . . No, she's not in her office.” Again, he realized, he had somehow become involved in a conspiracy with Delia Delaney.

“Thank you,” Delia said. “That was very convincing. And the absolute truth, too. Very neat.” She gave a silvery laugh.

“Shh, he's probably still downstairs.”

“But maybe he'll go away now.” Delia stood up and moved toward the window, swaying slightly toward Alan, so close that he felt the warmth of her bare arm against his. Together they looked down through the golden, windblown leaves of the big maple. “Yep, there he goes.”

“It's the same guy that came to see me,” Alan said as two heavy figures crossed the lawn. “Very persistent, he was.”

“Yes. Awful. I hate journalists, but you have to be polite to them, or they'll destroy you. Well.” Her voice changed as she moved away, and it was as if a cold wind were blowing on him.

She's used me, now she's going to leave, Alan thought. He felt an irrational disappointment and loss; and became aware again of the clawing pain in his back.

Delia crossed the room, paused by the door, and then turned. “You're speaking next week,” she said. “I'm going to come and hear you.”

“Why?” Alan asked coldly.

“Why not?”

“Are you interested in religious architecture?”

“I could be interested,” Delia said, smiling.

He shrugged. “I'm not sure I am anymore, since last Tuesday. Who can care about religious architecture, or any architecture, after what happened to those towers?”

“They always reminded me of the sign for Gemini,” Delia said. “Communication, speed, restlessness, short journeys. You're not a Gemini, are you?”

“No.” Alan, who despised astrology, volunteered no further information. The idea came to him that Delia was spacey as well as beautiful. “You don't really believe that stuff, do you?”

“Oh, but I do.” Delia laughed lightly. “I believe it every Friday from two to three p.m.”

“Really.”

“It's always fun trying on different faiths. Expands the mind. If you were a Gemini, for instance, you would have liked the World Trade Center better. You'd think of it as a kind of temple of commerce and communication.” She laughed again.

“A form of religious architecture.” Alan smiled, reassured as to her basic good sense. “You know, I have thought something like that. That you could see skyscrapers as the capitalist equivalent of church steeples. The visible connection of business to its god.”

“In that case, the World Trade Center must have been the temple to a twin god,” Delia said.

“Castor and Pollux, then, probably. They were violent gods, in charge of the city of Rome and thunder and storms.”

“I thought they were supposed to protect travelers. But I guess they didn't always.”

“Apparently not this time,” Alan said. “Too bad I can't say that in my lecture.”

“You can't say it right out.” Delia gave him a sideways look. “But you could suggest it.”

“Yes. Maybe I could.” He smiled, realizing the possibilities.

“So I'll look forward to your talk.” She turned the knob, but the door, being locked, did not open.

“Sorry, I'll get that.” He crossed the room. Again he stood so close to Delia that he could see all the separate sparkling gilt tendrils that escaped from her braid, and breathe her scent of orange peel.

“Thank you for taking me in,” she half whispered, putting her soft white hand on his arm. Then suddenly she stood on tiptoe and kissed him. The sensation was light but very hot, as if a burning butterfly had brushed his cheek. Before Alan could react, Delia was gone.

He did not try to go after her. Instead he turned back toward the drafting table he now used as a stand-up desk, and the draft of his lecture. This morning it had lain there dead, but now the sheets of paper seemed to glow gently, and new sentences had begun to appear in his mind.

SEVEN

The automatic door of the supermarket shut behind her with its rubbery swish, and Jane was surrounded by a blast of clammy air, at least twenty degrees colder than the golden autumn outside. In her sleeveless flowered cotton dress she felt chilled almost at once, and also angry. Not only at the store, but at her husband Alan, whose pathetic request, as usual disguised as a question, had separated her from what might be one of the last warm Saturdays in her garden.

“Are you going to the grocery this morning?” he had asked as she headed for the back door, carrying her garden basket and a trowel. “Because if you are, I need a bag of prunes and a couple bottles of prune juice. And if you have the time, I'd like a box of Fleet Enemas from the drugstore.” Yes, he had admitted, he was constipated again, in fact very constipated, and yes, he was very uncomfortable.

Naturally Jane had said that she was going to the grocery and would have time to stop at the drugstore. She had put down her basket and taken off her gardening hat and gloves, and hastened to make this statement true.

When Alan was in pain, which was still almost always, his needs took precedence over hers. That was natural and inevitable, but it was also annoying. But it was useless and also mean to give in to her annoyance, to let it ruin her day and also Alan's if she wasn't careful. I must try to be a good person, even if I'm really not, she reminded herself, as she often did now. He is in constant and awful pain, and I am not in pain.

Anyhow the current annoyance was nearly over. She'd already been to the drugstore and in twenty minutes she'd be back in her garden, picking ripe tomatoes and cutting some of her basil for pesto and covering the rest in case there was an early frost tonight. But making pesto was selfish, since Alan now wouldn't eat anything that obviously contained garlic. Since his illness began he had also declared a distaste for cucumbers, cabbage, spinach, artichokes, and zucchini (this last was a special nuisance since at this time of year Jane's garden, like that of everyone she knew, was oversupplied with that vegetable). Once Alan had been happy to eat all these things, and also the wild dandelion greens, sorrel, purslane, and chives that she loved to gather and add to salads and soup. Now he would not even touch the splendid watercress that grew in the stream near their house. He had also recently asked Jane not to bake or buy any cookies, cakes, or ice cream, because he wanted to lose some weight. She had complied, though she sometimes concealed a chocolate bar in the drawer of her desk. Meanwhile,Alan, as if reverting to childhood, had begun to crave high-calorie snacks. When he couldn't sleep at night he would go down to the pantry and graze; next morning a whole bag of potato chips or peanuts or dried coconut would be gone.

What made all this worse was that it was so out of character. In the past Alan had never done anything of the sort, no more than he had ever hung around the house most of the day or constantly called for her help or wanted to know where she was going to be at every moment. Often now when she looked at the man lying on her sofa or bed or in her bathtub she almost did not recognize him. That isn't Alan Mackenzie, she would involuntarily think: it's some pale, fat, weak, greedy, demanding person—someone like the shabby, threatening stranger she thought she'd seen coming down the drive on that bad morning in August.

The supermarket was more or less empty, but as Jane reached the end of one aisle and hastened up the next, she saw a man in a bright yellow shirt, jeans, and sandals frowning in front of a display of lettuce. Jane noticed first that he was very attractive, and then, less happily, that he was Henry Hull, Delia's husband.

“Well, hello,” he greeted her.

“Oh, hi, how are you?” she replied neutrally.

“Discouraged. Look at this lettuce, it's pathetic.” Henry held up a bunch of yellow-green leaves that drooped from his square brown hand in a sickly manner. “And the tomatoes. Hard as rocks and such a peculiar color, like dried tomato soup. Even the carrots are rubbery and withered. I don't get it. Here we are in the middle of farm country, you'd think they'd have something better.”

“Yes, but nobody buys vegetables at the grocery, not at this time of year,” Jane said. “If you don't have a garden yourself, you go to the Farmers' Market. They have wonderful tomatoes there now.”

“Oh? I must look into that. Where is this market?”

“It's downtown, near the lake.”

“Downtown?” Henry said in a vague manner.

“Yes, you take Route 13, that's just up the road, and then . . .” Jane paused. “I was planning to go there today anyhow, for apples and honey.”

“They have apples and honey?”

“Oh yes. They have lots of things. . . . If you can wait until I'm finished shopping, I'll show you,” Jane was surprised to hear herself say.

“That's very kind.” Henry also sounded surprised but pleased. “And I'll get rid of all this pathetic stuff.” He began to restore the vegetables to a bare space on the slanting counter; then to create a face from them. The lettuce became limp, disheveled green hair, the pale tomatoes two bulging eyes, one of the carrots a nose, and another a mouth.

“It doesn't look happy,” Jane said, laughing, though at the same time glancing around uneasily for the produce manager.

“No, why should it? Ashamed of itself, that's how it should look.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

“He's unhappy because you don't love him,” Henry suggested. He replaced the carrot with a limp zucchini, giving the face a mournful, longing expression.

“He can't expect me to love him,” Jane said, laughing again, almost giddily.

“But he does. We all do.” He gave her a quick stare.

“No, you mustn't,” she replied awkwardly, and turned away toward the front of the store.

“I have to drop some things off at my house, it won't take long,” she said as they left the grocery, with Henry pushing the cart. He would have seen the prunes and prune juice as she went through the checkout, and drawn conclusions, she thought, though she had attempted to muddle the message with a bag of brown sugar and some crackers.
It's my husband who is constipated, not me,
she had suddenly wanted to say, though this would have been disloyal and also vulgar.

As she drove home to deliver Alan's groceries and enema, and then down to the Farmers' Market, followed by Henry's SUV, Jane's mind was troubled. It was over eighteen months since she'd had the kind of conversation she'd just had in the grocery, and she was out of practice, she told herself. In the past, she'd enjoyed flirting lightly and easily with Alan's friends. But since his back trouble all that had stopped. You don't flirt when your husband is seriously ill—nor, if you are a man, do you flirt with the wife of a seriously ill friend.

Those old encounters weren't supposed to and didn't ever go anywhere; they were meant only to prove to both parties that they were amusing and attractive. But Henry wasn't Alan's friend, and there was something about the glance he had given her in the grocery—But maybe, no, probably, she was imagining it, because it had been so long.

An hour later Henry and Jane were sitting at a picnic table between the Farmers' Market and the lake, under a big willow tree that trailed its bright delicate yellow leaves (which, Jane noticed, exactly matched his shirt) in the water. They were drinking fresh cold apple cider, and beside Henry was a large new split-wood basket full of vegetables and fruit and homemade bread and honey and goat cheese and free-range brown eggs. Jane had prevented him from buying any zucchini or tomatoes, promising to donate some of the excess from her garden. It had turned out, as Lily claimed, that he did most of the shopping and cooking for himself and Delia.

“Hey,” he said. “I'm so lucky I ran into you.”

“Mm.” Maybe Henry was lucky, Jane thought, but what was she? Why had she volunteered to take him to the Farmers' Market instead of just giving him directions and going home? Why was she here by the lake at noon instead of making lunch for Alan and finding out if he was feeling better and if there was anything else he needed? Guilty was what she was, and selfish and careless.

“So how is everything going?” she asked politely, to break the silence and distract herself from these familiar self-accusations.

“All right. Delia's having one of her migraines, though.”

“Oh, that's too bad,” Jane said, struck by the use of the possessive, as if the migraines were Delia's personal property. “I'm very sorry,” she added, conscious that she was not especially sorry. The more she saw of Delia Delaney, the less she cared for her. When Delia wasn't demanding some special service or equipment, she was interfering with things at the Center in other ways. A few days ago, for instance, she had taken, or rather openly stolen, a whole ream of expensive pale-green paper (normally used only for posters and announcements) from the supply cupboard. Also, after Susie had received a polite written apology from Charlie Amir, which should have closed last month's unfortunate incident, Delia had completely spoiled its effect. She had done this by telling Susie that the bunch of roses that accompanied the note conveyed a message in the Victorian Language of Flowers: dark-red roses, appropriately, meant Bashful Shame, but the ferns that came with them signified Fascination. “He's ashamed of what he did, but he's also fascinated by you, Susie,” Delia had said, laughing. “When he kissed you, he couldn't help himself.”