House of Secrets - v4 (8 page)

Andy’s mind wanted to drift back to Joy Resnick, but his heart resisted. Or possibly it was the other way around. Maybe it was his heart that felt the tug, but his mind was resisting. It was the kind of silly semantic distinction he and Christine enjoyed batting around with each other. They both were sticklers for precision in that way. Of course, Andy could not very well walk over to his wife and put the query to her. The details necessary to define the terms of the question would themselves… Well, it wasn’t going to happen.

Andy sipped at his drink and traced the sweet liquor as it infiltrated his system. On the train coming up from D.C., Andy had briefly imagined coming clean with Christine about his involvement with Joy Resnick. Briefly. He had tried imagining Christine displaying astonishing grace and understanding of the affair as having come completely out of the blue. But that was nonsense. “Out of the blue” would have suggested that Andy’s affair with Joy Resnick had represented a completely aberrant episode in his life with Christine, and this was simply not the case. Andy took grim solace in the thought that he could count on one hand the number of women he had slept with since being with Christine. The grim part being that with Joy Resnick, Andy had used up his last digit.

Two of the occasions had been completely anonymous, legs and mouths and shoulders with no names. The first had come prior to his and Christine’s marriage, during a junket to Venezuela: a brisk bounce in a Caracas Hilton followed by a dark funk and raging hangover the next morning. The second nameless encounter — bizarre by any standard — had transpired many years later, in the back office of a Georgetown jewelry store where Andy had gone to buy his wife a bauble. Andy’s heart could still get its beat screwed up at the memory of that one. The
SORRY WE’RE CLOSED
sign making an uncommon afternoon appearance on the store’s glass door. The audacity of the tall, heavy-hipped woman’s smirk as she insisted that Andy keep his eyes glued to her face the entire time. Her painted talons kneading his thighs while the wall calendar ripped free behind her head. Andy had gone directly to the nearest bar afterward and devoured a scotch, neat, almost fearful that the Amazon might march into the bar any minute and lead him by the tie to the nearest cramped space for round two. Andy’s stomach still berated him every time Christine lifted the necklace from her jewelry box.

Of particular bewilderment to Andy was an out-of-town encounter with a friend of Jenny Hoyt’s, no less. Extremely reckless, the incident had occurred during a never-fully-investigated rough patch with Christine. Happily for Andy, the woman’s husband had taken a job in San Francisco, a tidy continent away.

His only real affair prior to Joy Resnick had taken place during Andy’s first senatorial campaign, the same year that Christine’s brother died and that Whitney and Lillian had returned from London to see their floundering marriage carom into the final wall. A bad year for the family. The woman was a journalist with
The Washington Post
, and the genesis of the affair had been the sort of joshing and flattering attention that was common in many of Andy’s interactions with people. In the case of Rita Flores, Andy would have characterized his attentions as “flirting without intent” — that is, until the moment the candidate had found himself entangled with the fiery reporter in the back of a limousine on the way to her Arlington apartment. The fact that Andy had allowed his bantering friendship with the journalist to develop into a full-blown affair had surprised him, and he had sworn to himself — and asserted to Rita Flores — that his behavior with her represented no judgment whatsoever on the state of his feelings toward his wife and his marriage. In fact, Andy felt — but did
not
share with the journalist — that his tryst with her shined a bright beacon of affirmation on his and Christine’s relationship. Nifty trick, that one. But both during and especially after every sexual encounter with Rita Flores, Andy had found his mind (or was it his heart?) inundated with loving images of Christine, along with internal voices confirming that his sexual compatibility with his wife absolutely trumped the gymnastic session just concluded with the aggressive Ms. Flores. His and Christine’s pillow talk was certainly far superior. Plus there was an edge to Rita Flores that had never really agreed with Andy, a small hardness in the woman when it came to considering the circumstances and conditions of others. Christine had none of that. Her heart was always on the side of the other. Andy would drift off to sleep after every encounter with Rita Flores convinced yet again that Christine was his one and only. A semantic minefield that Andy would forever have to wander alone.

Andy snapped out of his reverie. Christine was calling out to him from over by one of the wickets.

“And you
stay
in that chair until you’re good and ready to apologize, do you hear me?”

She was standing next to the tedious ad exec who had been drooling all over her at lunch. A Greenwich action figure if ever there was one: the pale yellow slacks, sky blue Lacoste shirt, northbound hairline. In the instant of looking over at the two of them, the image of the ad exec climbing atop Christine in some hotel room flashed through Andy’s mind. Jesus God, he thought, give the poor woman more credit than
that
.

Andy called back. “Whatever it was, I swear I won’t do it again!”

Christine laughed. “If I can’t forgive you on Easter, then when can I forgive you?”

Andy’s glass was empty. He pushed himself out of the tiny chair and went inside for a freshener. Once there he decided against it. Instead, he went into the living room and dropped onto the green leather couch. He realized he was exhausted. The doctor had warned him about this, the possibility of sudden fatigue. Andy felt as if his bones and muscles had turned to water.

The Sunday
Times
was on the coffee table. The front page was dominated by the news — if that’s what it could really be called — of Vice President Wyeth’s growing difficulties. Andy had glanced at the paper that morning, primarily to see if his name had cropped up in any speculative sense concerning the crisis. It hadn’t. From outside, the sounds of raised voices and agitation drifted into the room, but Andy’s focus was elsewhere. His eyes ran across the newspaper like a pair of lasers. Over the three days since his stealth exit from Shelter Island, he had done his best to keep away from any coverage of the horrible bludgeoning death of the attractive thirty-four-year-old public relations executive at her family’s beach house on Shelter Island. Andy knew this behavior was the same as poking his head into the sand.
If I don’t see it or hear about it, it didn’t happen
. Thankfully, the growing press interest in the vice president’s situation had kept the story buried more deeply than it might have normally been.

But there it was, in the local section: Joy’s face, alongside the article about her murder and its investigation. Tears rushed to his eyes when he read that Joy was to be buried the following day. He dabbed away the moisture and continued to scan the article. Now that he had lifted his head momentarily from the sand, there was a specific piece of information he was anxious to find out. In his heart, he already knew it. Unless the Suffolk County police had been trained at Ringling’s Clown College, surely they would have figured this one out.

And yes, there it was.

…authorities are seeking at least two men in connection with the public relations executive’s murder. Aside from the evidence of forced entry by way of the bedroom’s rear door additional evidence suggests the presence in the bedroom with Ms. Resnick of a second individual. Police have collected blood and hair samples and are…

“Andy?”

Andy’s head jerked up from the paper. Christine and Michelle were standing in the doorway. They both looked miserable. All the lift in Christine’s face was gone; her eyes looked haunted. Michelle looked even worse. She was crying uncontrollably, her tears trailing down alongside her sniveling nose.

Andy’s stomach clenched.
They know
.

He released the paper and rose dreamily to his feet. His knees didn’t want to work properly. He felt as if the world outside the windows was spinning at blurring speed.

Michelle croaked, “Daddy.”

Christine took a deep breath, closing her eyes for an instant. She looked as if tears were on her way, too.
Here it comes
, Andy thought.
The future is a complete void
.

“Doc is dead. He just collapsed.”

Andy heard the words. But their meaning did not immediately register. Someone opened the sliding glass door in the kitchen and Andy became aware of the uptick in agitated noise from the backyard.

Michelle came running toward him. Andy released his breath, not even aware until that moment that he had been holding it. As he stepped forward and opened his arms to receive his bereft little girl, he felt a twinge in his stomach.

It was a most hateful twinge.

It was relief.

R
obert Smallwood knew a thing or two about angels.

As a child, he resembled an angel, or at least according to his mother he did. A large and doughy child, his wide, cornflower-blue eyes seemed to cover half his face. His slightly oversize head was perfectly round — like a pumpkin — and his hair remained fair and silky, soft ringlets that circled his scalp not unlike a halo.

By the time of his sixth birthday, Robbie Smallwood had amply accustomed himself to the winged creatures, having by then already visited New York City’s veritable warehouse of angels — the Metropolitan Museum of Art — many dozens of times with his mother. For nearly a year leading up to that birthday, Robbie and his mother had engaged in a weekly ritual of visiting the museum every Wednesday afternoon. Tartly done up and with a smart little hat on her head, Vivien Smallwood would usher her son and his sketchbook to the museum’s grand second-floor galleries and their scores of paintings that were crammed full with pink, dwarfish angels. Robbie was completely enthralled with the creatures. Their opaque, disconnected expressions. Their puckered limbs and pink-blushed skin. They hovered about on the canvases like little plump bumblebees.

Robbie’s “special place” was the lacquered bench directly in front of Lorenzo Lotto’s
Venus and Cupid
. Vivien Smallwood would park her son on the bench, give him a lingering kiss on the cheek, then disappear, flashing a smile at the ash-haired security guard who patrolled the galleries as she hurried off to the exit.

The painting was a complete wonder to the boy.
Venus and Cupid
. Each time he saw it, he was confounded anew. The angel in the painting was
peeing
on that naked lady. Actually peeing. A filament of liquid, clear as could be, arched from the cherub’s pudgy little penis on its way to the lady’s stomach. The lady herself — Venus — was also pink and quite fleshy, and thoroughly unashamed. More than that, she looked amused, reclining on the ground atop a gray blanket, one hand lightly brushing a swelling breast while this little winged urchin
urinated
on her belly! Robbie was enthralled by the look of coquettish mirth on the woman’s face. Could she actually be enjoying this? Was she encouraging the imp to debase her in this way? Over the hour and a half of his mother’s absence, Robbie sat on the wooden bench, scratching away feverishly in his sketchbook. Over the woman’s head dangled a conch shell. Its pink, shellacked lip curved back in a fashion that Robbie instinctively found disturbing. Even more than the rest of the inscrutable painting, it was the spiral shell that burned itself onto Robbie’s inner eye. His sketchbook was choked with his artless attempts to reproduce the incongruous mollusk. Each failed attempt — and there were hundreds of them — bore the concluding strokes of the boy’s final frustration, the mean, jagged scratchings-over of his fat black pencil.

His mother’s return was always punctual. Hearing the
click, click, click
of her heels on the parquet floor as she approached, Robbie would close his messy sketchbook and slide off the bench, bracing himself for the oversize hug.

“My angel!”

The security guard tended to regard Vivien Smallwood coolly as the two hurried from the gallery, though Robbie’s mother never seemed to notice. Robbie noticed. He could read the man’s expression. The guard was not impressed with his mother. Robbie could see that the old black man thought there was something distasteful about her.

And always the routine.

“I hope he was an angel.”

“Oh yes ma’am, he was. I’m expecting those wings of his to start pop-pin’ out any old day now.”

She couldn’t see it. The man was mocking her.

Robbie Smallwood had prayed like the devil for those wings to make their appearance. Straining as hard as he could, he used to imagine that he could actually feel them trying to break through the skin just below his shoulders. It was several weeks before his sixth birthday when his father caught him one morning standing stark naked on a chair in front of the bathroom mirror, twisting his body to get a better look at the reflection of his back. His father’s abrupt entrance into the room took the boy by surprise, and he let out a cry as he half-leaped, half-fell from the stool. His father beat him. To Robbie’s horror, his bladder released during the beating, some of the stream spraying onto his father’s trousers. The anointing further enraged his father, and in due course a trickle of blood began running from one of Robbie’s ears.