If I Should Die Before I Die (37 page)

Etc., etc.

Then one morning she stopped by my office again. It was, I remember, one of those incredible December days: cold, brisk and, for New York, a totally unreal blue sky, and the Counselor's Wife, who'd been out with the dog, looked positively blooming. Though you couldn't yet see that she was pregnant, you'd have to say it agreed with her 100 percent.

“Phil,” she said, “this time I won't take no for an answer. I don't care what else you have on, you're having lunch with me today. We'll eat upstairs, in the solarium. Okay?”

I started to invent some excuse, at least in my mind, but she shook her head firmly. Then I grinned at her, saying: “What time?”

“Any time you're ready,” she said. “Just call up fifteen minutes ahead.”

I did, and at one, after the Counselor had gone off to La Gonzesse, his favorite bistro over on Lexington, I rode the little elevator up to the top floor.

That top floor is the Counselor's Wife's pride and joy. If you said it's a little too perfect for living, I wouldn't argue, but that day, with the louvered shutters and the awnings at just the right angles, the sunlight diffused the room with warmth and gave a picture-postcard shine and sparkle to the facades and rooftops of the neighborhood. Unreal, like I said. The fare might not have been quite as elaborate as Margie Magister's, but it wasn't far off, and the Counselor's Wife served it herself. Furthermore, I ran into the first dog of my acquaintance who has an appetite for smoked salmon.

“As I've told you before, Phil,” the Counselor's Wife said, holding a platter of smoked fish while I helped myself, then the side dishes of capers, diced onions, lemon wedges, and a mountain of rye and pumpernickel bread, thinly sliced, in a wicker basket with a napkin bottom, “I owe you an explanation. I don't like the way things are between us now. We're too good friends to have unresolved conflicts between us.”

I said, more or less obligatorily, that I didn't think she owed me anything.

“Oh yes, I do,” she answered. “I used you. I used you in the most flagrant way.”

“Well,” I said, “at least I didn't feel like I was being used.”

“You didn't? Well, then, let me ask you this: What do you think that was all about, that night we went to Carter's apartment and I asked you to make love to me?”

She has, needless to say, that way of cornering you with direct, even blunt questions.

“I guess I haven't thought about it all that much,” I answered.

“The truth is that I was scared. Scared stiff.”

“You had every reason to be.”

“Why?”

“Why? Well, we thought McCloy was the Pillow Killer, remember? And we'd just seen the tapes of your shows in his living room. I remember the look on your face when you found them. You were like stunned, blown away.”

“Wrong,” she said.

“What do you mean, wrong?”

“I don't mean I wasn't thrown by the tapes,” she said. “You're right, they made me go numb. But there was something else going on. That's what I want to explain. Or try to explain, because I'm not sure anyone who's not a woman can really understand.”

She caught herself then, saying that, and started to laugh.

“I'm sorry,” she went on. “Most men can't stand to hear that, but it happens to be true. Anyway, let me tell you something about myself. I'm the kind of person who likes to run things, to manage things, to be in control. I think I've always been that way. I
manage
this house, I
manage
our parties, I chose a profession which requires you to
manage
therapeutic sessions, and I even think that's why I'm good on TV and why I still do it: because I get to
manage
my own program. The only thing I haven't entirely been able to manage is my own marriage. Your boss and my husband is probably the most difficult and least manageable human being I've ever met. In fact I think that's one reason our marriage is so successful: the challenge, for me, of Mr. Charles Camelot. And by the way, I
do
think it's a successful marriage.”

Up to here, I thought she'd described herself to a T. She could even have added me to her list.

“But I found out this past year that there was something else I couldn't manage. Do you know what that is? Or was?”

I shook my head.

“My own body,” she answered.

She went on about the “biological clock” inside every woman, about how she'd only really heard hers ticking that past year, and how it had brought on the realization that if she was ever going to have a baby, it was now or never. And how if she didn't, she'd come to realize she was going to miss out on one of the great events in a woman's life. Irrevocably. And that, she said, was a little like dying ahead of time.

“It drove me crazy, Phil,” she said. “It was like an obsession. Suddenly nothing else mattered. I'm afraid I more or less sprung it on Charles. If there was ever something I
mis
managed, that was it. He reacted badly, for which I don't blame him in the slightest. He said he was too old to have children, which isn't true, but he also said our marriage bargain, unwritten though it is, didn't include children. And that
was
true. We had some terrible arguments—I don't know if you knew about that or not—and in the end, I walked out. I left him, Phil. You know about that part. I actually thought I was leaving him for good.”

Here was where I came in. Here too came the unanswered question I probably didn't want answered, much less asked.

She seemed to spot it. She paused, expecting me to say something.

I didn't.

“Where do you think I went that night?” she asked then. “That night you turned me down? And thank God, by the way, that you did.”

“To Biegler?” I guessed.

“That's right. When did you know?”

“Know what?”

“That we were having an affair?”

“I didn't,” I said. “Not till the night in his … in your old office. The Halloran night. It was pretty obvious that something had been going on between the two of you.”

She laughed then, a downbeat kind of laugh.

“Actually, it was over by then. It had been for quite a while. One problem—not the only one—was that Bill was trying to manage me. Did you know he was the one who'd called the police? Remember? When you thought it was Charles?”

I shook my head.

“Anyway,” she said, “our sordid little affair dragged on longer than it should have. I tried to stop it—that was the main reason I changed offices—but he kept after me, and finally I agreed to see him. I thought I owed him that. To top it off, I did something very stupid. That was when I tried to reach you, remember? The message I left on your machine? I honestly think I agreed to the appointment with Vincent Halloran to rescue me from Bill, and I wanted Bill there, I think, in case I couldn't handle Vincent Halloran. I'm not proud of it, Phil. I almost got the two of us killed. But that's what happened.”

“And at the same time you'd realized somebody was following you?”

“Of course,” she answered. “But for the wrong reasons. I actually thought …” This was the one time she looked away from me. “I actually thought Charles was trying to find out if I was seeing someone else.”

I remember gazing out at the sparkling rooftops of the neighboring houses and, beyond them, the towers that abut onto Madison. I'd polished off as much as I could eat and was working on an expresso which she'd poured from a long-handled silver pot.

“I told you I'm not proud of it,” she repeated, reading my reaction. “But that's what happened.”

Okay.

“Come on, Phil,” she said. “Something's still bothering you. Tell me, please. I want everything out in the open between us.”

“Okay,” I heard myself say, still not looking at her, “but whose baby is it really?”

She didn't answer at first. She waited for me to look at her. When I finally did, she was smiling at me.

“You're so sweet, Phil,” she said. “It's all right, I promise you. I could even get you proof if you insisted. Bill had a vasectomy a long time ago. He already has four children, two by each marriage—he's single again now—and he decided four was enough.”

Which is why, I suddenly realized, she'd said Thank God it wasn't me.

“Then why him?” I asked.

“I don't know,” she said, shrugging. “Because he was there. Because I needed someone who wanted me. Because I was crazy.”

Clearly she'd finished. It bothered me still, though. I didn't know altogether why. I was thinking about the Counselor, about her. About me too, I guess. It was like she'd just put more slugs into the pool table, emptying the pockets, and you could hear the balls riding down the chutes, and it was my turn to rack again.

“How much of this does he know?” I asked.

“Who, Charles?”

I nodded.

“Some,” she said. “Enough. Not as much as you do now, though.”

“Then why are you telling me?” I asked.

She hesitated. Then she looked at me forthrightly, her blue eyes taking me in that confident way of hers.

“Do you really want to know?” she asked. “Even though you may not like it?”

“Yes, I would,” I said.

“Because I think you were in love with me. A little.”

She was right about one thing: I didn't like it.

“And because,” she went on, “I want us to stay friends. That's very valuable to me.”

She lifted her glass of Perrier, smiling at me.

“To our friendship,” she said.

I didn't say anything. But I lifted my glass too then, and clinked it against hers, and drank what was left.

Laura Hugger's refusal turned out to be like nothing more than a passing hiccup in our relationship. We went through the holidays together and on into the new year of our dwindling century. I have asked her, in passing, if she ever thinks about children. She says she's too busy living right to think about it. She still has time left, she says.

Nothing else has changed much.

Except for the Counselor.

As an expectant, then an actual, father, he has mellowed out to an extraordinary degree. To put it another way, he's become insufferable where his daughter is concerned.

She was born on schedule in the early summer. They named her Diana. Three weeks later, the Counselor's Wife threw a rooftop bash in her daughter's honor—the first party she'd given in over a year.

“Diana the Huntress,” the Counselor has taken to saying when, holding the baby gingerly in his arms, he introduces her around the office, and you can make his day by telling him how much she looks like him.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

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

Copyright © 1989 by Peter Israel

Cover design by Mimi Bark

ISBN: 978-1-4532-9377-5

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