Identical (12 page)

She went downstairs and worked out for an hour, then, still in her sweats, turned on SportsCenter and ate a Lean Cuisine. As usual, work was on her mind. She remained impressed by the commercial featuring Georgia and continued to suspect that Hal, in that goofy intuitive way of his that often served him well in business, might be onto the truth.

But eventually, something bigger began to force its way on her. You couldn’t be a trained investigator and play dumb forever. And a fatal recognition had begun to form a few weeks ago, when they returned from Francine and Nella’s wedding. Heather had departed with Tom Craigmore too often on last-minute trips, had been gone on too many late nights with Tom, after which she seemed to return trailing the fresh scents of a shower. Evon knew she should have suspected long ago that Heather was sleeping with him.

When they had met, Heather had confessed that every once in a while, when she wasn’t in a relationship with a woman, she’d have sex with a man. Heather was insecure enough to think she had to do this to cement her place with the client. But Evon couldn’t pretend any longer that it wasn’t happening.

Love was the biggest thing on earth. But it seemed almost inevitably to end up twisted and bleak. Was that the truth? That this feeling everybody longed for and believed in and wrote songs about led nowhere good, down this sinkhole into the blackest part of yourself, into screaming battles and hearts that would have hurt less if they’d been split with an ax? Was that the truth of love? That it was the surest way to end up hating someone else?

By ten o’clock, Evon was in bed, and fell asleep with a book about Sandy Koufax on her chest. She woke again near midnight and snapped off the light, and roused once more two hours later when Heather arrived. Evon’s girlfriend was clearly drunk and blundered around in the bathroom, knocking things over, the steel cup by the sink and, from the sounds of it, some cosmetics. In the dark, Evon said, “Hi,” and reached for the light.

Heather stood still with a hand drawn over her chest, her eyes startled and large. She was otherwise naked, lovely with her long slender shape.

“You scared the shit out of me,” Heather said. “I thought you were asleep.”

“Not really. Sort of restless. How was tonight?”

“I can’t make up my mind about whether Tom is a total hoot or a complete asshole.”

And what kind of fuck is he? Evon nearly asked. There was a time, years ago, when she would have done that. But anger no longer accumulated in her until it became potent as a bomb. Instead, she was willing to experience the welling force of her own hurt.

“I can’t do this any more.” Evon thought she had said that to herself, until she observed the way Heather again stopped mid-motion, standing over an open drawer in the Eames wardrobe, a nightshirt in her hand.

“And what is it that you can’t do?”

“Watch you stumble in here after you let some guy paw you or screw you or God knows what else.”

“Oh please.”

“I think that’s my line.”

“I mean,” said Heather, who was crying instantly, “you don’t know what you’re talking about. I mean, accusing me.”

She didn’t bother to answer for a second.

“You’ve basically admitted it to me half a dozen times when you were blitzed. You’ve laid in that bed when I’ve asked where you were and said, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ How many times is that? I was just willing to pretend I didn’t know what you meant.”

“It
doesn’t
matter,” Heather cried. Evon knew how Heather would explain herself, because Evon remembered what Heather said she got out of her occasional dallying with guys in the past. She liked to laugh at them, Heather claimed, and she probably meant it. She wanted them to see that they couldn’t have her, didn’t reach her. But that didn’t mean it didn’t matter to her. It just mattered in a different way from when she lay in Evon’s arms. That was screwed-up stuff, but it was how Heather was. With sex, everyone was screwed up, or at least a little different in their secret treasure chest of wishes. But whatever her behavior meant to Heather, it mattered to Evon. That was the only issue. She told Heather that again.

“You want me to stop seeing the men I work with?” Heather asked. She was being dramatic now, crossing the room while she spoke and sweeping her arms about. “Is that what you want? I will. I mean, this is just batshit-crazy lesbian bullshit, but I won’t hang out with the people I’m not attracted to.”

“I don’t think you’ll stop. I think it’s important to you. I think you don’t know why, but you won’t stop. And you’re tearing my heart out, and so
we
have to stop.”

“I love you,” Heather said. “And you love me.”

Now that Evon was fully awake, she realized how close to the surface this had been, how thoroughly she’d considered the alternatives and made her plans.

“I’m going to sleep at Janet’s tonight. And tomorrow. A few nights. You’ll have to be out of here by the end of the weekend.”

Heather dissolved. She cried with total despair. Her nose ran. She left her beautiful self behind. She’d been too drunk to remember to take off her makeup and the muddy streaks ran from her eyes to her chin.

“I can’t leave here. This is where I live. This is my house. I love you. Please. I’ll change. Rebecca has a shrink. I’ll see a shrink. I will, I’ll change. I swear, I’ll change. Please.” She began shuffling toward Evon on her knees, with her arms outstretched. It was wrenching to see, in part because of the little secret piece in Evon that gloried in Heather’s debasement. Heather had been hurt back, she’d been destroyed almost. She reached the bed and clutched Evon by one calf. I love you, she said. Please, she said. Evon now was crying, too.

They had done this before, three or four times, albeit with different provocations. Each of them had played her part now, Evon angry, Heather abject. Evon had scared her, Heather had promised to repent. They could resume, with the hope that it would be better.

There was a richness to that, to hoping. Evon had always been desperate with hope when it came to the people she loved. But by now, she realized her optimism would shatter. The drama that engaged both of them-I love you, I hate you, I want you, I don’t-would start again, only to lead back here. Evon knew enough about herself by now, had been taught enough by good therapists, that she realized this was a piece of her, too, wanting someone, like her mother, who would never fully accept her, for whom she would never be good enough. That was the mythology the old Evon believed in, the resident programming. And to step away from it, she had to wrestle herself. It was like she had to hold the old Evon-the DeDe piece-right down on the bed and rise up out of her body like the filmy spirits that levitated from corpses in old-timey movies. It took a strength that seemed almost physical. But she knew what was right. She knew what was needed. She wanted to be happy and the first responsibility for that fell to her.

She was packed and dressed and out of the apartment, and away from Heather’s high-pitched clamor, in another ten minutes. She sat in her car in the garage under the building, waiting until she felt ready to drive. It had been such a long road for her, just to face what she wanted, which had seemed so frightening and shaming and, worst of all, alien. She had hated being different, feeling different, and having to take that on for life. But she had. And now, at the age of fifty, there was something else to face, something worse: that she might never be loved at all, never, not in the unburdened, lasting way she still hoped for. She sat in her car in the dark garage at 3 a.m., with her arms wrapped around herself.

It was 7:30 a.m. and he stood in the light-rail station in Center City, one glove on, his right hand bare as he extended it to commuters. He was positioned in the lower level, near the bank of doors, so he could catch both the inbound and outbound rush, but there was no heat here and the temperature could not have been more than ten degrees. The young interns who had accompanied him were stomping their feet and walking in circles, but the rush of engaging with so many people distracted him from the throbbing in his ears. Since John F. Kennedy abandoned the formal top hat for his inauguration, it had been the preferred political style in the US to greet voters bareheaded.

“Paul Gianis, hoping for your vote for mayor on April third.” He must have said that five times a minute, never varying more than a word or two.

He loved the meet-and-greets, but not for the reason most might suspect. They taught him humility, for one thing, a trait their mother always commended, even if she practiced it rarely. In today’s world only athletes and entertainers were real stars. Paul had been majority leader of the state senate for four years, but people still registered his as no more than a familiar face, figuring they’d met him someplace unrecalled, like their cousin’s wedding. When they heard his name, the commuters’ reactions varied. Most smiled tepidly and shook as they passed by. Some stopped to tell him they’d shopped in his father’s grocery, or that they’d voted for him in the past. There were always a few who wanted a picture, particularly if they were with their kids. Plenty of folks breezed by coldly, R’s or, more often, people who regarded politicians as a plague, especially ones making it harder to get to work. Of course, people he’d known for years-lawyers on the way to the office, most of them-would stop to say hi. And there was also one great Latino guy who, by sheer coincidence, he’d run into at four or five of these stops around the Tri-Cities, who opened his arms and hugged him this morning, shouting, “Pablo,
amigo
!”

Occasionally, commuters wanted longer conversations. Moms tended to ask pointed questions about schools and the Rec Department, both perilously underfunded, and younger people who were engaged in what used to be regarded as a reverse commute, going from their Center City apartments to jobs near the airport, would sometimes tarry to find out his plans to make the county more energy-efficient or to feed start-ups in the tech sector. Doing this day in and day out-and he was at a different bus stop or here every workday, and in grocery stores all over the county on the weekend-you could get a feel for the issues. There were still too many black folks moved to complain about the police force’s excesses, particularly in the North End. And inevitably he heard stories that broke his heart-today it was the dad of a gravely disabled son who couldn’t get adequate help from the schools or county agencies, but who refused to institutionalize a boy whose mother had abandoned him long ago. There was also comic relief-morning travelers who expected him to do something on the spot about their neighbor’s barking dog, or the zeta beams from Mars, or, very often, the judge hearing their divorce case, whose rulings against them were a sure sign of ingrained corruption. But he loved it all, the meeting, the wooing, the listening, telling his staffers to write down ideas and plans and names. This was the open heart of the city, full of need.

“So like what’s with this murder thing?” a young man in a stocking cap and overcoat asked now. It was the third time this morning someone had referred to Hal’s ads. He had practiced an agonized look and a toss of his head, as if it were beyond comprehension.

“This dude’s an asshole, right?” said the guy. His skin was spotty and he had probably experienced a miserable adolescence, but now he was clearly not lacking in confidence.

“Your words,” he answered.

“Yeah, but it sounds bad, man.” With that the fellow was gone.

At 8:45, he and the two aides left the station. He had a breakfast at the Metro Club, a fund-raiser with trial lawyers. He’d lost some support there because he’d been willing to discuss damage caps as part of a failed effort at health care reform last year, but most of the attorneys attending had been colleagues forever, and he was still their guy, especially since he’d be controlling the County Law Department from the mayor’s office.

When he opened the back door of the campaign car, a red Taurus a couple of years old, Crully was in the back seat. Mark leaned out and asked Kim and Marty, the interns, if they’d mind grabbing a cab. That could not mean anything good. Mark would only have come out in the cold because he had to brief the candidate in private on something he needed to know about before he ran into any reporters. Sure enough, Crully handed over a fistful of papers. Discovery motions from Hal’s lawyers.

“No motion to dismiss?”

“Huh?” Crully answered.

“You said they’d file a motion to dismiss our complaint on First Amendment grounds and we’d be briefing it until the election. But they’ve skipped that stage and gone straight to discovery. Right?”

Mark shrugged, indifferent to the fact that he’d been flat wrong. Hal and his lawyers had outflanked Paul and wanted Judge Lands to order production of all the evidence that the state and local police still had on hand, and to direct Paul to give saliva and fingerprints. They were going to try to do DNA tests. He read over the attached affidavit from Hassam Yavem, a couple of times. It was shocking, actually. He’d had an idle worry about DNA testing once or twice over the years, but one thing he’d been told repeatedly was that there was no way to tell his DNA from his twin brother’s. Yavem was a real scientist, though.

Crully could tell what was on his mind.

“Ray already talked to Yavem. It’s like one in two hundred the test will actually work.”

“And is all that stuff even around?” he asked.

“Apparently the blood is. They found it in the state police fridge. They actually have a ten-year retention policy and then they
adios
it, but not this.”

“And why was I so lucky?”

“AIDS,” Crully said.

“AIDS?”

“It’s from 1982. They didn’t do routine AIDS screening on blood in 1982. So when they got to 1992, nobody wanted to touch it. It sat there.”

“Great.”

Crully didn’t like what he was seeing in Paul, and he was seeing it every time this subject came up. Crully had been running winning campaigns long enough to be able to pick his races. And he chose them on two bases. First, he wanted to win. Occasionally, just for money, he’d work a stone loser in an off-year election for some Democratic gazillionaire who thought she or he was the new face of democracy. But Mark had tasted ashes often enough, and if he needed money, he could move back to D.C. and lobby. So he wanted winners, one. And two, he wanted a hardworking candidate. People would never believe how many of these men and, more rarely, women didn’t want to put in the time. They liked getting up in front of cameras or an adoring crowd, even if it was half relatives of the campaign staff. But they didn’t care for eighteen-hour days. And they wanted to pretend that the money grew on trees, that George Soros or someone was going to take a liking to them and pour down millions out of a pillowcase. They thought it was degrading or embarrassing to ask people to make their support tangible. Gianis was a pro. And tireless. Two days ago, he’d told Mark that Crully could begin adding campaign appearances in February, three more every day. And Paul still had a law office, not to mention that the state senate would go back in session next week. Gianis wasn’t going to get more than four hours’ sleep a night until May.