Fun With Problems (5 page)

She, he thought, was the one who wanted to be led. He considered wildly, decided nothing. Then he said, "I have a house near Calverton."

"Really?"

"Yes, I do."

"I see. Could that be where we're going?"

"If you want to."

He was encouraged by her silence. Twenty minutes after they had passed through the decorous empty streets of old Chesterfield he pulled over to the shoulder. The road was wooded on both sides and it was possible to make out the
POSTED
signs on the near tree trunks. Then the persistent storm closed over the moonlit sky and it began to rain hard again.

"I have to make a call. Do you mind?"

"Certainly not."

He called his wife in Roland Park while Margaret sat stiffly beside him, listening equably, it seemed. He had not gotten out to make the call because of the rain. He looked into the dark dripping pine woods—anywhere but at his passenger—and declared to his wife he would be late. Offering no reason. When she asked for one he was reckless, a little unhinged by possibility.

"I felt out of sorts. I went for a drive in the country."

His wife asked if he was certain he was all right. He told her that, as far as that went, he was fine. When he turned to Margaret on the car seat beside him, he saw her bent forward, hands across her eyes as if in remorse or simply seeing no evil. He experienced another moment's panic. The wrong woman!

"Do you," he asked, "do you need to call anyone? I mean, to make a call?"

She shook her head and said nothing for the remainder of the ride. Shortly, they turned off onto a dirt road and followed its turns and doglegs past a few mailboxes at the head of dark driveways. The houses that showed lights were deep in the woods, far from the roadway. Overhead, the horned moon had appeared again, visible through bare wind-driven branches.

They parked in the clearing around Bower's house. Once out of the car they faced the salt-sour-scented gale off the bay. In the darkness they could hear its waves crashing against the unprotected shore. The house was shingled and square, a dignified practical house, unadorned except for a weathervane on the roof. It was impossible to see what the weathervane represented.

She had folded her arms and turned away from the wind. From her posture, Bower thought she seemed a little hesitant and subdued.

"Very nice," she said.

Bower pulled his own collar up against the chill. Now he was thrilled by his own impulsiveness and the stormy night sky, clearing again. Finally it seemed he was leading. He conducted them inside, his steadying hand lightly touching the sheath of leather that encased her. Bower turned on a lamp and raised the thermostat. Then, as she watched, he laid a fire and started it. His guest kept her coat on.

"Aren't you afraid of the house watch?"

"House watch? Not out here. A little more wine?" he asked her. "Madder music?"

The look she gave him was steady and flat, unamused. A little puzzled, slightly ashamed of his fit of brio, he went into the kitchen and opened a bottle of St. Emilion. He carried it out on a tray and poured for them.

"The good stuff this time," he said. She took a glass, but her look made him feel fat-witted and overcheery. "Like it?" he asked.

She only nodded without drinking. Suddenly it seemed the burden of discourse was his. She was looking, a little sadly, around the room.

"All these beautiful things," she said.

There were beautiful things in the room for people who knew how to look for them. Bower's wife collected early-American paintings and furniture. He had grown to appreciate them too. To keep the play of the evening alive, he began to give Margaret the tour.

The house itself was old, not quite Colonial but early nineteenth century. The front door opened directly on the living room, as it sometimes does in old houses. In that room stood a Mennonite chest with a sunburst painted on its front. The wall above it displayed a Kentucky quilt. The fireplace was equipped with fittings of old wrought iron. A table and chairs in a recessed dining area had the imperfect symmetry of rough joinery. Three of the wall paintings were genuine American primitives, and one was an attributed Robert Feke. Outside his computer workspace hung a later painting, a gloomy nightscape his wife thought might be an Albert Pinkham Ryder, but it lacked a provenance.

Margaret followed Bower's exposition of the room. She seemed to display little interest. From time to time she sipped the wine he had poured for her. Though the house had warmed, she kept her coat on.

"It's all very nice," she said, distantly polite.

"My wife has the eye," he said, as though Margaret were a casual guest and not the object of a particular seduction.

"Your wife? Isn't she afraid to leave all this out in the country? Isn't she afraid of losing what she has? Her house? Your attentions?"

Bower was very uncomfortable at having to explain his wife's personal qualities, but Margaret seemed to think she had a right to ask questions.

"What's here isn't all that valuable."

He watched Margaret set her empty wine glass on a place mat, sparing the finish of a dark mahogany table. A moment after setting it down, she touched the table's surface with two fingers and brought them away quickly, as if she were repelled by the dust on it.

"Oh," said Margaret, "I see." She looked around the room again. "What's her name? Would I like her?"

"I think so. Yes. I suppose. Her name is Jane."

"Jane. I'll bet I would."

"Please," Bower said, "take your coat off."

"I suppose she comes here with you?"

"Most weekends." He was growing impatient with her. "Is that some sort of problem?"

The look she gave him was again level, dead-eyed and stone-cold. He had rankled her. The antic animation of the last hours had somehow drained away.

"This isn't right," she said after a moment. "It would be wrong." She appeared suddenly stricken. "Another woman's bed!"

"What?" Though Bower knew her not at all, he thought there was a serious chance she might be joking.

"We can't," she said with surprising firmness.

"Oh."

"No, Frank. Sorry."

Bower was extremely disappointed. But edging his interior horizon, on a different quarter, appeared the faraway contours of relief. He tried to swallow the humiliation.

"You're a mercurial character. Aren't you?"

"Yes, I am," she said.

"I see."

"And here we are," she said. Suddenly she laughed, and for a moment she was lively and humorous again. "Out in the sticks. Don't you believe it's a woman's privilege to change her mind?"

"Oh, come on, Margaret." He was unsettled by her laughter and the cliché. She showed the expression he had learned to dread. The smile.

Driving her home was an embarrassment. He thought of switching on the car radio but decided it might only make things worse. Music would be irony. A stranger's voice would sound like mocking witness.

When they were back in the city, heading downtown along St. Paul Street, she told him brusquely that she lived in the Belvedere. It was an old hotel near the Washington Monument that had faded and then turned condo.

Margaret offered no goodbyes when they pulled up before the tastefully renovated entrance. They parted in the welter of Bower's shamed silence. Setting out for his own house in Roland Park, he kept his eyes on the road. As a result, he failed to see her climb into one of the cabs that always waited in front of the gay bar and club catty-corner to the Belvedere.

In the cab, Margaret made a call to her daughter. She was fatigued from the drive and irritable.

"Clean up, my dear."

Arriving, she found that Cordelia had cleaned up, after a fashion. At least there were no dishes in the sink. Nor was there—aside from a couple of withered apples, a moldering box of take-out rice, and a baby's bottle containing milk of indeterminate freshness—any food in the refrigerator.

"Christ, don't you eat?" Margaret asked.

"Yeah, I eat," Cordelia said, pouting. "How about you?"

Margaret inspected her.

"You don't look well."

"Oh, thanks," Cordelia said.

In Cordelia's room, Margaret found her grandson, diaper unchanged, lying uncomfortably with twisted covers and looking as though he had cried himself to sleep. As she stood there, the child awakened and whimpered.

"Wash that child and change him. How can you be so irresponsible?"

"All right, all right," Cordelia whined. Except for the petulant inflection, Cordelia had a cultivated voice like her mother's. In the bedroom, the baby cried savagely.

"Happy now?" asked Cordelia. She went into her room and slammed the door. Margaret took her sleek coat off and hung it carefully. Then she eased herself onto the living room sofa, took off her sensible shoes and put her feet up. She lay with her eyes closed, listening to the sounds from the next room, where Cordelia was alternately muttering to herself and crooning to the baby. After the child had been quiet for a while Cordelia came out, wearing her bomber jacket with its tombstone patch, ready to hit the street.

"Don't you think his eyes look odd?" Margaret said without rising.

"But he has beautiful eyes," Cordelia told her mother. "Angel eyes."

"You're slamming meth, aren't you, dear?"

Cordelia marched toward the apartment door, then turned in rage. Her mother cut off any reply.

"I've tried to persuade you. Your teeth will fall out. You'll age."

"Thanks again, Slim."

"I don't want to sit by and watch you lose your looks." She sat up to address her daughter. "And your mind. Tweakers are the most boring people. Who taught you to fix?"

"I knew how."

"No, baby. I'm sure it was Donny."

Cordelia opened the apartment door and started out.

"Just a moment, dearest. Where to? Leaving mother to babysit? Mother had a tough day."

"Really? Ball some poor dude?"

Margaret raised a despairing hand and waved off the insult. Leaving, Cordelia slammed the door, her second slammed door of their brief evening. Margaret brooded for a while and then decided to call Cordelia's dearest friend. Some people actually called him Slash, but to Margaret he had always been just Donny.

"Hey, Donny." She tried to keep her voice low for the infant's sake. "How's tricks?"

"Yo, Slim," Donny said cautiously.

"Could it be that you've just instructed my baby in the art of slamming?"

"No way. She's a big girl. Either way, see what I'm saying, she gets more independent."

"Are you hearing me, Donno? Don't you dare treat Cordy like some skeeza. I'm cross."

"I hear you," Donny admitted.

"Good. Because if you ever turn my daughter out, I think I'll kill you."

"You are paranoid," Slash told her as firmly as possible. "You're, like, saying things."

Margaret paused to let him reflect on how thin the joke was.

"On a happier note," she said, "I have a joint for us. I've identified this awful man. House full of good things. So be here tomorrow midmorning and don't be hammered. Or is that a vain hope and it has to drop without you?"

"I'm there."

"Okay, and bring my daughter back here. I can't spend all day babysitting. I have a meet with the Smiling Lascar tomorrow."

The man Margaret called the Smiling Lascar was a South Asian pharmacist in Bethesda with whom she could trade in pseudoephedrine. Victor moved it out to some country cousins in West Virginia who cooked it into pseudo-crystal for distribution by bike clubs around the upper South. Victor's overextended family was basically a criminal enterprise, and through him Margaret could maintain a phantom presence from the D.C. suburbs to the remotest hollow and never consort with ruffians.

She did undertake a little discreet consorting, though. Exploiting the average psychopath's lack of social confidence, she was able to reach out past Donny to his own network and had already stolen a number of his supporters out from under him. Their shabby world was often exhilarating—the commerce in ginseng and bear livers, actual moonshine from traditional stills, marijuana, arms and ammunition, cars, speed, motorcycles. Donny's associates seemed to
think they rightfully owned all motorcycles, as the Masai thought they owned all cattle. These men, she thought, were irreplaceable, the sons of the pioneers. She even had a certain secret fondness for Slash and understood her daughter's attraction. Still, she considered him needy.

"So you'll take care of that, no? And you'll bring a rental truck and plates? And you want gray coveralls or some neutral color."

"You got it, Slim," said Donny Slash.

"And you'll bring Cordy over here? And you'll show up? Scout's honor? Because this thing needs to be tomorrow."

"I'll come over too, yeah. I haven't seen much of Little Jimmy."

It was annoying the way he constantly referred to the baby as Littlejimmy, as though it were all one snively word. He had got Cordelia doing it. He had not seen much of the child because Margaret had various means of keeping him away.

"No, you haven't," she said.

"I mean, hey. This is my child here."

"Certainly, Donny," Margaret told him. "If you say so."

And that was that, and so, she thought, to bed. But no, the phone began its song and dance, and she had Kimmie on the line. Kimmie was Margaret's schoolgirl chum and former patient.

"Oh, Kimmie," she said. "It's so late."

Kimmie was a professor of composition at a small women's college in New England and a published poet. Margaret had been visiting with her on a business and shopping trip to the Northeast.

"Margaret!" Kimmie said breathlessly. "Did you take my car? My car is utterly gone. Vanished from the driveway."

"We discussed this, Kimmie."

"We did?"

"We certainly did. I borrowed it to drive to the train. I left it at the station. How can you not remember?"

She and Kimmie had planned to shop for early-American art and antiques along New York Route 22. Arriving, Margaret had found her friend, who was seriously bipolar, in a state approaching raving mania. To punish her, Margaret had taken Kimmie's battered '65 Ford Mustang and driven it to D.C. in partial payment to the Smiling Lascar.