Possessions (36 page)

“Sis! I swear on the great goddess Mary Jane I didn't—”

“Well, who else could do it?”

“Only a few people in Data—” He cocked his head, thinking, then hitched up his pants. “Time for a little detective work.”

“No. Bruce, I'm sorry, but I'm going to put you on temporary leave of absence. And it has to be without pay.”

“What the hell—!”

“Listen to me. You are in trouble around here. Your boss took these notes to my boss and by now everyone thinks you're part of some theft ring. So for a while you're out.”

“Hey, now—”

“No arguments!
I'm doing the best I can, but I've got my own problems and I can't take much more from you. You disguise your fantastic brain under a lot of bullshit, you drive me crazy, and I want you out of here while I do what I can to protect both of us. Why don't you go to San Francisco State, take some computer courses, maybe get a degree?”

“I know more than they do.”

“Probably true. Then take other courses. Or find another job. Just keep out of trouble.”

“If I'm in so much trouble, how come the police aren't hauling me off in handcuffs?”

“Because we're keeping it quiet while we try to solve it. And I'm counting on you not to talk. That's part of the deal. You don't come back if I find out you've been talking.”

“Why would I talk, I'd be arrested, Christ, my first decent job and this has to happen, shows what you get for being a good boy.”

“What you get for being a good boy is a sister who will help you and keep your job waiting for you. Go on now, I have work to do. Take care of yourself. Come to dinner on Sunday.”

He pushed out his lower lip and squinted at her. His shoulders drooped. “You're the boss, sis, see you Sunday.”

Leslie watched him drag himself through the door. The first time, she thought, that I've violated a direct order from the president of the store. And an executive committee already trying to break my contract and kick me out. I think I need a lawyer. I think Bruce and I both need a lawyer. She debated. Katherine, she thought. Katherine knows one of the top lawyers in the city. He's practically a member of the Hayward family. She turned and picked up the telephone.

*  *  *

Crumpled papers filled the wastebasket; the worktable was piled with notes, crossed-out drawings, string, and bent and broken wire. Nothing was finished. Nothing, Katherine thought in frustration, was even begun. In the three weeks since Tobias challenged her to work full-time, she had not created one design good enough to turn into a piece of jewelry. She was blocked. Trying to think of curves and whorls and angles, of gold and silver and precious stones, she relived instead the cumulative shocks of Mettler's cool response, Lister's fury, and the sense of defeat that descended on her the first time she used Craig's money and knew she hadn't come so far after all: she still wasn't making it on her own.

When Derek called, she was grateful for a reason to get up from her worktable. “Friday night,” he said. “I have to make an appearance at a benefit at Ghirardelli Square. We don't have to stay long; there's a new jazz trio at—”

“Derek, I'm sorry, but I'm busy Friday night.”

“Busy?”

Annoyed, she said, “I do have a life when I'm not with you.”

“I apologize,” he said smoothly. “But there are times when I expect you to be available. Friday night is one of them.”

“I'm sorry; I can't change my plans.”

I expect you to be available.
Meaning, she owed him something in return for his tolerating her abstinence. But abstinence was a problem for both of them; he wasn't the only one who wanted to go to bed. Katherine had thought it would get easier once she made up her mind, but it didn't: the more courteous and distant he was, the more her hungers gnawed her.

But whenever she wavered, something would happen to remind her of the other side of Derek: his cutting comments and contempt for others; his cold assumption that in some way she was his possession and owed him her availability in exchange for his tolerance and letting her into his glamorous life where she could meet the women who might someday buy her jewelry. And there was Tobias' story about Jennifer. Katherine had been trying to bring it up since she heard it, but lately Derek had refused to talk about the accident at all, abruptly changing the subject whenever she mentioned it.

She was pulled too many ways by Derek, and it was a relief to refuse him for Friday night, even if it meant missing a benefit where she probably would see many of the women she was beginning to know by name. But, as it happened, she spent that evening at Ghirardelli Square, after all. “I didn't plan this,” Leslie said as they arrived and saw the mass of people in front of them. “But with things as they are, when my president tells me to represent the store, I can't refuse.”

As they struggled through the crowd to an elevator and then to the doorway of the Mandarin, Katherine thought she had never seen the place so crowded. Once a chocolate and spice factory and a woolen mill, the red brick buildings had been renovated years before to a delightfully quirky ten-story maze of boutiques, theaters, and restaurants built around open squares, with small stairways and sudden corridors that made it seem endless and endlessly inventive. Always a tourist attraction, when it became the site of the May benefit for the Family Welfare League, its normal population was instantly quadrupled.

But the crowds and the noise receded as Katherine and Leslie were led through the Mandarin, past softly lit rose brick walls and silk tapestries to a table overlooking the bay. “Almost
as private as a Chinese tomb,” Leslie said with satisfaction.

Katherine, happy to be with Leslie, was happy even with the crowd; its electric vitality helped her forget that she had been feeling sorry for herself for much of the past month. “It's wonderful to be here. In fact, it's funny, but I would have been here anyway; Derek asked me to come with him. I don't suppose I'll see him in this crowd.”

A waiter poured their wine and in the lull Leslie asked, a little too casually, “Did you talk to your friend?”

“He said he'd meet us here. I didn't tell him very much.”

“Thank you. Isn't it odd: Heath's has a dozen lawyers, but when I need one for myself I come to you for help.”

“I think Claude is supposed to be very good.”

“Good? He's one of the best. Very posh firm, very solid.”

“But if you knew that, why didn't you call him?”

“I'm small potatoes compared to his other clients.”

Katherine shook her head, watching the waiter arrange skewers of marinated meat on a small tabletop stove. “If you're fighting Heath's executive board to keep your job, that's not small potatoes.”

“The point is, he'd rather have Heath's as his client than Leslie McAlister.”

“He didn't refuse when I asked him to meet you.”

Leslie lifted her glass. “To better times. I've seen him at parties, you know. Tall, handsome, silver hair, blue eyes. He collects nubile maidens.”

“He what?”

“He's one of those fiftyish bachelors who won't look at anyone but young lovelies in their twenties. To the collective despair of those of us who are single and approaching forty.”

“I didn't know that about him.”

“Not important. It's my neck I care about, not his sex life.”

There was a quaver in her voice that Katherine had never heard before. Ever since she drove to San Francisco in her rented truck, Leslie's positive, forceful presence had encouraged and cheered her; she had been the friend Katherine could cling to and the successful woman she could look up to because she had everything Katherine did not have: beauty, confidence, independence, a future she was sure of. But now a tremor ran through Leslie's voice and Katherine recognized the same uncertainly
that had trailed through her own voice for months. “Tell me about it,” she urged, and realized they had traded places: she was the one offering support.

“The pack is closing in,” Leslie said, trying to keep her voice light. “And I've probably given them the last excuse they need to kick me out—though they haven't discovered it yet.”

“What did you do?”

“It's what I didn't do. In the last few days so many arrows started pointing at Bruce for manipulating our inventory programs that his big sister was ordered to fire him on the spot. Hello.”

She was looking at Claude, who had materialized in the dim light beside their table.

Katherine stood and kissed his cheek, feeling like a magician who conjures people from thin air. She barely knew Claude; she had not seen him in months; but because Leslie asked, it had been easy to make a telephone call. For the first time since Craig disappeared, Katherine was helping someone else instead of worrying about herself. She smiled quietly. She hadn't realized what a burden she'd been to herself until she forgot herself for a few minutes.

Claude was looking from her to Leslie and she saw the two of them through his eyes: red-haired Leslie, green-eyed, sophisticated, her beauty as polished as a fine gem despite faint curved lines, like parentheses, on either side of her mouth and a jaw that jutted slightly, especially when she talked about Heath's; and Katherine, dark-haired, hazel-eyed, her head high, wearing a soft wine-colored dress from a designer resale shop—in almost no way resembling the woman Claude had seen in June at Victoria's and in October when he bought her a drink and tried to find out what she was up to. She smiled again and said, “I'm so glad you're here. This is Leslie McAlister. Claude Fleming. Have you eaten? We haven't ordered yet.”

“I haven't eaten.” Claude shook hands with Leslie as he sat down. “I heard the last few words. You were ordered to fire your brother from his job. I gather you didn't.”

Leslie's eyebrows shot up—exactly like Bruce's, Katherine thought. “Why do you gather that?”

“Katherine told me you need a lawyer because you think an effort is being made to oust you from a job for which you
have a three-year contract. Those trying to oust you must think you've given them a reason. Such as disobeying an order. Did you fire your brother?”

“No. I couldn't do it. He's never had such a good job and he was doing so well—I've never seen him so happy with himself. He'd tried everything else—drugs and as much booze as he could drown himself in and bumming around Europe and Asia, but nothing made him content with himself. Until he discovered computers.”

“Predictability,” said Claude. “Logical, reliable, programable. Correctible. Much better than drugs and booze.”

Leslie looked at him with interest. “That's impressive, to understand that about a kid in his twenties.”

He chuckled. “I know something about people in their twenties.”

“Oh, yes,” Leslie said coldly. She tilted the wine bottle. “We need another. Or would you rather we just talked about my problem so you can leave? I'm sure you have other plans for the evening.”

“I have no other plans.” He stopped a passing waiter and ordered another bottle. “You care for your brother very much.”

“True. He's related to me.”

“Simple family obligation? It sounded to me like love.”

She turned the stem of her wine glass in her fingers. “Well, it is. Bruce is very special to me. We had a family once, but as soon as we got to voting age our parents and cousins and uncles scattered around the planet, doing this and that. Bruce, like a fool, went looking for them. The ones he found were very busy, so finally he came back, looking like he'd met up with a gang and lost. Not that our busy family beat him up; they just ignored him to a pulp. So he came to me and it happened to be a . . . difficult time in my personal life and I wasn't at all busy. I gave him a bed to sleep in and an ear to listen to him and a kiss when he started crying. We took to each other.”

“You're older than he.”

“Oh, yes.” Leslie gave a short laugh. “Ten years older than his twenty-six.”

Claude nodded. “And you gave him a home.”

“No. He has his place; I have mine. What I give him is a
door that's always open, and someone to hang on to when he needs it. We give those to each other.”

Quietly, Claude repeated, “A door that's always open. Not easy to find. What did you do,” he asked, “if you didn't fire him?”

“Put him on temporary leave of absence without pay. I didn't tell him I was supposed to fire him; I just told him to get out until he heard from me again.”

“That's all you told him?”

“I told him to come to dinner on Sunday.”

They laughed together. Katherine wondered if she had become invisible. “I'm very hungry,” she said mildly. Without hesitation, Claude centered himself between the two women and made himself their host, conferring with them on the menu, beckoning a waiter, and, all through the meal, punctiliously including both Katherine and Leslie in his conversation. It was so pleasant that Katherine was sorry when they were finished and Leslie said she had to leave. “I've been assigned to accept an award for Heath's, for being the top donor of the past year. I think a most boring ceremony awaits me. If you two would like to wait here . . .”

“No,” Katherine said.

Claude pushed back his chair. “We haven't finished the business part of the evening. Unless you've changed your mind about retaining me as your attorney.”

“I would be delighted to retain you as my attorney.”

“Then we still have a great deal to discuss. Perhaps after your ceremony? There's a club not far from here . . .”

Walking from the restaurant and down the stairway, Katherine decided not to go with them. She shouldn't, anyway; she wasn't involved in their discussion. Suddenly she felt depressed, and it deepened as they merged with the crowd. Everyone was part of a couple. The whole world was a huge Noah's ark. She'd been part of a couple, too, but the other half had run off—evidently because she wasn't good enough for him to ask her help in solving his problems and keeping their marriage together. Keeping their family together.