Random Hearts (14 page)

He appeared surprised at his own outburst. A flush appeared
on his cheeks, little round dabs of red that gave his face a doll's look. A
shock of hair fell over his eyes, and she resisted the urge to set it right.
Yet she could not deny that their common predicament drew them together, nor
deny that in his presence she felt attractive again.

"May I call you..." She hesitated, having
forgotten his first name.

"Edward. Sure, why not?"

She found herself being deliberately ingratiating. Of
course, she told herself, she needed his help. "And I'm Vivien."

"Viv."

"Okay with me. Any way will do. I'm still the same
person, not like them.... "If they were sharing these intimacies, she
reasoned, exchanging first names would make them less like strangers.

"All right, Viv, but I'm still sorry. I admit I might
see the point of knowing, but they're both gone and they haven't left us much
to investigate."

"We have these keys," she said, watching him
react. "All we need is an address."

"And then?"

"We use the keys..." She hadn't speculated that
far ahead. At that point the search seemed an end in itself.

"Pandora's box," he muttered. "God, I don't
even want to think about it."

She felt a flash of impatience with his reluctance.

"I don't want to force you to do anything," she
said testily.

"It's just that it's too much to think about at the
moment."

"You did call me first."

"That may have been stupid. Sometimes when you've been
hit in the gut like this, you do strange things." He stood up and came
toward her. "Look. I'm sorry. I hadn't intended for this to go beyond our
meeting. I just want to forget, to wipe it all out of my mind."

"I have that same hope."

"Then why..."

"Dammit," she cried. "It was you who put the
idea in my mind. Last night as I left. You said finding out might ... might put
things in perspective."

"It was just an idea that popped into my mind.... I
can't explain it."

She had, she remembered, felt the unmistakable magnetism of
his urgency and perhaps something else that she could not yet define. Whatever
it was, it had lingered and had found ready tinder within her.

"Then you didn't mean it?" she challenged.

"I did," he shot back vehemently. "I did
mean it at that time. Then I thought about it. Maybe we should let go
now." He paused, obviously confused and uncertain. "Why dwell on it?
I have my job. It's very demanding. I just want to clear my mind of it and get
back to work. I'm willing to accept the facts. Over and done with. Lily was
unfaithful. She lied and cheated. The hell with it."

She saw his anguish. His eyes smoldered with pain and
confusion.

"I just don't want to have to relive it."

"You think you can just be reborn again? Without
memory?"

"I'd like to try."

"Time won't cure it," she said. "It will
always be there."

"We'll see." Despite his outward resolve, he
seemed somehow tentative and unsure.

"So you're saying you won't help," she said
regretfully.

"I don't know how I can."

"By pooling resources. Finding out."

She resented his planting the idea and then abandoning it.
It seemed pointless to argue. She stood up and put on her coat. He had sat down
again and seemed lost in thought.

"Even if you won't help, I'm still going ahead. Sooner
or later I'll find what I'm looking for."

When he didn't answer, she shrugged and let herself out. In
the end you only have yourself, she thought bitterly, trying to force him out
of her mind. Unfortunately, like the legacy of Orson, it was taking on a power
of its own.

Edward sat on the jump seat of the lead limousine. Ahead
was the hearse, polished to a bright sheen, carrying Lily's body. A long line
of cars followed, all of which contained longtime friends and acquaintances of
the Corsini family.

It had not surprised him to see the church completely
filled. The Corsini family had deep roots in this part of Baltimore. From a
pushcart, Lily's great-grandfather had founded Corsini Produce, a wholesale
firm that supplied fruits and vegetables to supermarkets.

Lily's brother Vinnie, a burly, crude bull of a man, ran
the business that supported various brothers-in-law, cousins, nieces, nephews,
and the sons and daughters of old family friends. Only a handful of Corsini
offspring ever left the fold, geographically. Lily was one of them. They never
forgave Edward for that. It hardly mattered that he met her after she had left
home. They always felt that her sojourn in Washington was only temporary. So
they were right after all, he thought.

How he had once envied them their closeness! A fortress, he
had called them. Compared to his blood relations, they were a kind of miracle.
A long time ago he had had an older brother, Harold, who died in a car crash.
All he had left now was a maiden aunt who lived in Seattle, from whom he
received a Christmas card once a year.

Vinnie sat in the center of the back seat between his
mother and his sister Rose. Beside Edward on the other jump seat was Anna,
sniffling, in deep mourning. In the church he had sat beside Lily's mother,
barely coherent with grief; her face was hidden behind a black veil, and her
arthritic fingers were entwined with rosary beads. Deepening the grief was the
fact that Lily had been the baby of the family.

As much as he had prepared himself for the icy reception,
it was difficult to endure. He was the ultimate alien, and he felt it.

"You didn't know where she was?" Vinnie had
barked at him, refusing to accept his proffered hand. Jowly, chunky, with thick
curly hair tumbling over a low forehead, Vinnie's eyes glowed with menacing
hatred. "You fuck."

Vinnie's reaction set the tone for the rest of them,
imbuing the family with a Mafiosa mentality. Once he had chuckled at the
reference. Now his thoughts about it turned morbid. He wondered if they would
seek revenge on him for Lily's death.

During the service he perspired profusely. His ears felt
stuffed, and he could not understand the priest's eulogy. It was, he decided,
the biggest trial of his life. Worse than the death of his brother Harold,
worse than the death of each of his parents. In those instances there was no
secret to keep, nothing to hold back, nothing for him to test other than the
endurance of his own grief. Hell, he thought, he had seen so much of death, it
had become nothing more than a natural phenomenon. What he faced now was
unnatural. In this company, Lily had been raised to sainthood, and he had
become the devil incarnate.

They had let him sit in the lead car for appearance's sake;
they had also put him in the front row beside his mother-in-law, who had not
even nodded in his direction. Ignore this, he begged himself, and keep your
cool. Say nothing. Leave them with their illusions.

"The priest said a nice Mass," Rose whispered,
dabbing her eyes.

"Didn't have to be," Vinnie said.

"Leave it alone, Vinnie," Anna said with a
sidelong glance at Edward.

"How can I leave it alone? Look at what he did to
Mama."

"It wasn't his fault," Anna pleaded.

"Whose then?" Vinnie said. "A man who
doesn't know where his wife is is a scumbag. He has a wife, he takes care of
her."

"You couldn't expect anything better," Rose said.
Of all the clan she had always been the most vehement about him. Once he had
asked her, "Why don't you like me?" And she had answered, "You
smell funny." Lily had said Rose had a mean streak.

"If he didn't work for that prick congressman, she
would have come back to Baltimore. We could have fixed her up good."

I love them, but I can't stand them, Lily had told him. On
his part he wished that they had loved him. Now he suspected they could be
right about him. Maybe he had not loved Lily enough. If he had, wouldn't he be
forgiving in his heart? Instead, he felt only anger, humiliation, and hatred.

"What are you giving him a hard time for,
Vinnie?" Anna asked when Vinnie continued his diatribe in the car as if
Edward were invisible. "Not like us. Look at Mama," Rose said.

Edward said nothing. It was important to hold everything
in, to control himself. He might drop the kind of information that they would
take as vindictiveness and lies. The image of his mutilated body thrown into an
open grave floated through his mind, and he shivered with fear. He wished he
could cry, show them the kind of grief they needed to see. He couldn't.

"You marry outside," Vinnie hissed, "you get
this. My kids marry outside, I'll cut their hearts out. He didn't even become a
Catholic. From the beginning no priest blessed them. He completely turned her
around."

He was stoking his anger, and Edward expected a blow to
land at the back of his head at any moment. If Vinnie touched him, he vowed, he
would spit it out at them: Your sister was a cunt, a whore. He would tell them
the truth.

"Lucky they didn't have kids," Vinnie said as the
cortege drove through the gates of the cemetery.

He stood shivering beside the open grave as they lowered
Lily's coffin into the ground, accompanied by the loud wailing of the women.
That can't be Lily in there, he told himself, remembering the sight of her
broken face. He had been the only one of the crowd to see it. Where had the real
Lily gone? he wondered. For a fleeting moment he recalled the words of Mrs.
Simpson. Viv. Couldn't be the Orson I knew, she had said. She had had his body
burned into ashes, dismissed. Lily was being put underground. Memorialized.
Boxed for a slower disintegration. They would bring flowers on her birthday. As
he watched the graveside service, he slipped off his marriage ring. When it
came time to fling handfuls of dirt into the open grave, he mixed his with the
marriage ring and heaved, imagining he could hear the ping on her metal casket.

They got back into the car, and the cars broke ranks as the
procession headed home. Life, after all, went on. On a residential street not
far from the cemetery, Vinnie asked the driver to stop.

"You can get out now, scumbag," he shouted.

"Vinnie," Anna protested. Mrs. Corsini paid
little attention. She rested her head against the side of the car, lost in
grief for her dead baby.

"It's all right," Edward whispered. "I
understand."

"You understand shit," Vinnie said.

"Let him go," Rose said.

"Come on, Vinnie," Anna pleaded.

"I don't want to see any more of him. As far as I'm
concerned, he killed Lily."

"Now that is stupid, really stupid," Anna shouted
between convulsive sobs. She started to open the door on her side. "He
goes, I go."

Edward turned to her. "It's all right, Anna," he
said, opening the door. He put one leg out, then turned to Vinnie. He wanted to
say it, but instead he said, "I loved her, the girl I married, your
sister. I loved her once. I..." He felt the words jumble in his mind, then
lose their meaning.

"You are a bastard, Vinnie," Anna cried, but she
did not get out.

Panicked, fearful that he might blurt it out, Edward
slammed the door shut and ran from the car, darting into a drugstore. He heard
the car drive off.

"Can I help you?" the clerk asked from behind the
counter.

He shook his head. No one can help me, he thought. Except
... the image of Vivien surfaced.

He went into the phone booth and called Virginia
information, got Vivien's number, and dialed. Her voice sounded familiar,
warming after the frosty reception of the day.

"I've thought about what you said, what you wanted to
do," he stammered. "Maybe it does make sense."

"It was your idea."

"All I could think of," he said, grateful for her
warm response, for her being there at the other end of the connection.

"It's like"—he paused, wanting to express the way
he felt—"being alone on a mountain."

"Something like that," she agreed. He could sense
her caution.

"She's buried," he blurted. "I'm calling
from Baltimore."

"Was it what you expected?"

"Worse," he said. "You can't imagine."

He wanted to tell her more. Who else could possibly
understand.

"I'll be back in a few hours. We could meet at
Nathan's. Say seven o'clock?" It was a restaurant in Georgetown. The idea
sounded ludicrous. Was it to be a kind of celebration?

"I'll be there," Vivien said. She hung up.

"Thank you," he whispered into the dead
mouthpiece.

They sat at a table in the rear. It was a small restaurant,
and business was slow.

"Do you feel funny about this?" he asked. He had
ordered duck à l'orange, and she had ordered broiled rockfish. The waiter
poured out cold Chablis from a carafe.

"It's fine," he said, tasting it. He repeated the
question.

"Funny?"

"I mean inappropriate."

"No. I don't feel inappropriate."

He sipped the wine. It felt tart on his tongue but smooth
going down. In the soft light he noted the angles of her face—deepset eyes that
peered over high cheekbones. Her nostrils, flared, making her nose seem flatter
from a frontal view. Her lips were full with a wide angel's bow, which she had
darkened with lipstick, giving her a different appearance than before. More
confident, perhaps. He wasn't sure.

Her small, pale, tapered fingers played with the stem of
her wineglass. Although he had observed them yesterday, he was surprised that
her hands were so small. Lily's hands were long and thin, the fingers delicate
but bony, the wrists thin with a large nob rising on the outside.

"I'm glad that's over," he said, pulling his gaze
away from her, looking instead into the bowl of the wineglass. "Her
brother accused me of being Lily's killer."

"Nice people."

"Just sick at heart," he said gently, although it
belied what he really felt. They had been cruel. He told her other details
about the funeral.

"I wanted to look grief-stricken," he said.
"I guess I wasn't as good an actor as I thought."

"I know what you mean."

He felt no compulsion to press the point. Instead, he
fished in his pocket and brought out the key.

"I brought it," he said, holding it up. Her eyes
widened as she looked at it.

"Now we need to find the lock. I checked a locksmith.
If it's a Medeco, it's registered and numbered. Ours is a Yale. Very
common."

Ours. The possessive pronoun was disconcerting. But she did
not correct herself, and he let it pass.

"I tore the house apart looking for an address. I
didn't even know what to look for." She took a deep drink of the wine.
"I tossed out everything that belonged to Orson, the physical things. I
kept the pictures, though. They're for Ben. Mementoes of a father. Just for
him." Her eyes glazed, as if masking some inner anguish. After a moment
they cleared.

"I haven't yet been able to summon the courage to go
through her things."

"But you must," she said. "Somewhere there
is a clue. Somewhere..."

Her entreaty had not lost any of its urgency.

"Yes. I'll try tonight."

He had deliberately avoided opening her closets, looking
through her drawers, touching her makeup and toiletries. Too painful? Too
overwhelming? He was not sure.

"If you'd like, I'll help," she said haltingly,
lowering her eyes.

"It didn't bother you ... to go through his
things?"

She looked up at him.

"It bothered me not to find what I was looking
for."

"You didn't feel..." He groped for the word.
"Funny?"

"I felt like a searcher. Nothing more."

"His things..." Again he hesitated. Was the image
he sought sentimental or unclean?

Her eyes narrowed as she inspected him. No mistaking her
purpose, he thought. She knew what she wanted.

"I told you, Edward." Her tongue lingered over
his name. "You don't have to go along."

"But I want to," he said quickly. Her eyelids
flickered, and she turned away. "I'm really committed," he said.
"It was my idea, remember?"

"I remember."

He had used the word committed, and he was, he told
himself, but he was frankly frightened by what it suggested. Commitment carried
the implication of entanglement. He felt sticky-handed, caught in an
increasingly intricate web; he wondered who was spinning the strands. To mask
his bewilderment he poured more wine into their glasses. Lifting his, his hand
shook.

"Look at me," he said. "That damned funeral.
It unnerved me." He felt compelled suddenly to dredge up his reactions as
though she had been a lifelong friend.

"When Vinnie, Lily's brother, accused me of being her
killer, I half-believed it, as if something I did flung her into the arms of
another man." Looking up, their eyes met.

"That's what they want. For us to feel guilty."

Us! There it was again. This time it referred to him. Was
she confusing him with Orson?

"For a moment I actually did feel that way."

"That's why we've got to find the holy grail,"
she whispered.

The waiter came with their food. They ate little and
without relish. Silent for a long while, they occasionally gazed at each other
warily, their eyes locking momentarily.

"Why?" he asked boldly. "He didn't seem the
least bit short-changed." His gaze washed over her face briefly, then
lowered. Her body suggested a completeness Lily's had lacked.

"I could ask you the same question," she said
gently, showing some embarrassment.

He felt a hot blush rise on his cheeks.

"I'm no bargain," he muttered. He was not being
modest or self-effacing; after all, his self-esteem had taken a terrible blow.
"I've always been a realist about myself. Actually, I felt lucky to have
her. Some luck." He sighed.

"Margo"—she showed good teeth in a
half-smile—"a friend of mine—only the other day at lunch she said I was
dull."

"Some friend."

"Actually, I agreed with her. Maybe that was it. Maybe
Orson did find me dull."

"Well, it's not apparent to me."

"Now you're being kind."

"What's wrong with kindness?"

It worried him that she might think he was patronizing her,
a perception that he felt needed correcting.

"I've often thought I was too, well,
self-absorbed," he said. "Maybe it made me unexciting. Not to myself,
mind you. To her. We were so busy, so involved in work, in its demands. Often I
would get these twinges, a kind of guilt, as if I were being neglectful."
He grew thoughtful for a moment. "But she was busy, too. We both had careers.
She was doing very well."

"I was just a housewife and mother, the lowest form of
womanhood in today's world ... for my generation. The keeper of the nest."
She sighed. "Maybe
Cosmo
is right."

"Talk about broken egos."

"I'm sorry," she said, lost in her own thoughts.
"The fact is, I used to defend the concept. You know, a growing family
needs a woman in the home. Like my mom. The rock." She shrugged. "I
deluded myself. A rock is inanimate, stationary, immobile." She released a
low, joyless chuckle. "While he was a rolling stone."

"That's all beside the point." He hadn't meant it
to be a dismissal of her point, and before she could respond, he continued:
"What I mean is that however we define ourselves, or them, is irrelevant.
The fact is that they concocted a modus operandi for deliberately, maliciously,
and systematically betraying us ... as though they were moles in some crazy
intelligence setup, pretending to be other people. Right under our noses."
Feelings of anger and humiliation rose again, stirring rage. "How did they
get away with it?"

"And why didn't we see it? Are we so ... so
thickheaded and unperceptive? So blind? How could we not know?" She tapped
her forehead with her knuckles. "It pulls the rug out from under all our
perceptions about ourselves, about who we are, what we see, how we feel."
She leaned over the table, drawing herself closer until he actually felt her
proximity, as if she had taken possession of the space around him.

"Two sides of the same coin," he said.

"Unless we know about them, how can we know about
us?"

They exchanged glances of silent confirmation, and he felt
the stirrings of—was it alliance, camaraderie?

"At least we've got a purpose, a point of view
and"—he felt a sudden wave of embarrassment—"a team effort," he
said stupidly. She nodded.

"Although finding the place where they met will be
like looking for a needle in a haystack," he said.

"At least we have a starting point. That's
something."

"It has to tell us something. Provide some sort of
clue."

"More than I learned from investigating my own home.
It told me nothing, as if that other life didn't exist."

"They were crafty bastards."

"That's the way we'll have to be ourselves. Think like
them. Get into their heads."

"But we didn't know them," he said. "As we
have discovered." His mind was beginning to lock into the problem.
"We'll have to make assumptions about them. Re-create them. Come up with
theories."

"All right. Toss one out."

He watched her as she stroked her chin and sucked briefly
on her lower lip. The waiter came and took away their plates. They hadn't eaten
much.

"Not good?" the waiter asked.

"Us. Not the food," Edward said. The waiter
shrugged. "Not that we're not good," he said foolishly, looking at
her. "We're not hungry."

"We're good." She nodded, and he saw her nostrils
flare.

"Let's hold on to that."

"Damned straight," he agreed, feeling the
strength of her support. He could tell she was feeling the strength of his.

"Let's start with this theory: simple boredom. They
were bored with us, for whatever reasons," Vivien began.

"But that implies we were a party to it."

"Maybe we were."

"Can anyone be responsible for another person's
boredom? Were we supposed to be entertainers?"

"Perhaps Orson wasn't even conscious of his
boredom." She looked at him. "I can only re-create him from previous
observations. His life had a certain sameness—the way he dressed, the way he
spoke and acted. He was a very controlled man. Almost rigid. Our lives together
were on a track. Tranquil. I thought he wanted it that way."

"A fair assumption," Edward said.

"Before Ben came, things were different."

"How so?"

"We had only each other to think about." She
thought for a moment. "No. I had only him to think about. He had his
work."

"What kind of a man was he?" Edward asked,
knowing the question was impossible to answer, especially now.

She stared into space, looking at the ceiling, a gesture of
her concentration. He, too, had a special gesture. He looked at his
fingernails, palms up, joints of four fingers bent. When Lily mentioned it, he
realized that it was a good excuse not to confront a person's eyes. Finding the
memory in the ceiling, her eyes drifted downward.

"He was interested in moral issues. The right and
wrong of things. It bothered him sometimes to take cases just for money. I liked
that in him. It reminded me of my father."

"So there you were, living with a moral man." He
had not intended the heavy sarcasm, but when it emerged, he felt good about it.
Damned hypocrite, he thought, remembering Lily who detested the mask of politics.
"Holmes is full of shit," she had told him more than once.

"He wallowed in integrity," Vivien continued.
"I liked that, too. It gave our relationship a cerebral quality. I was
always proud of Orson's intelligence. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard.
I was impressed by that. I also liked the way he spoke about things; he was
articulate, balanced, never emotional." She tapped the table, then took
another sip of her wine. "I was always afraid I would marry a man that
wasn't smart. Not that I'm an intellectual or anything like that, but I liked
it in him."

As she talked he tried to imagine their relationship,
forming his own picture. Orson was a clever bastard, shrewd, a bamboozling Ivy
League son of a bitch. He knew the type: superior, arrogant, self-confident. He
thought for a moment. Was he jumping to conclusions? Hell, he hated the bastard
for his own reasons and dreaded the moment when the focus would shift to
himself and Lily.

"We bought this beautiful house in McLean,"
Vivien continued. "I spent lots of time putting it together just right. He
wasn't overly interested in decorating, but I knew he liked the setting. He was
very conservative. The house had a New England feel. He was such a reticent
man. I assumed he loved it, loved our life, loved his work. A happy man. He
seemed like a happy man. Shows you how much insight I have."

"You say he was reticent. Do you mean shy?"

"Oh, he was very shy. I was always the one that had to
break the ice with people."

"That would be Lily," he murmured. A frown indicated
her confusion. "That could be how they met," he explained. "She
could have been the aggressor. I mean in the initial introduction. That's the
way she met me." He did not want to tell her the story of their meeting.
It seemed so prosaic. They had shared a cab going down Sixteenth Street on a
rainy day. He would never have started the conversation. "It was one of
the things I admired most about her. She wasn't afraid. She was easy with
people. It came from that big Italian family, I suppose. Everybody used their
mouths at once."

"So you think she made the first move?"

"From what you told me about him, I'd have to say
yes."

"But where? They were from different circles. Wasn't
she in fashion?"

"At Woodies. She was a buyer of better dresses."

"He wasn't remotely interested in fashion. I could
have worn a burlap sack for all he would notice. And he never went shopping,
except for his own clothes. Brooks Brothers."

"Random selection then—a train, a bus, a plane.
Something like that. Even a cocktail party."

"Orson hated cocktail parties, although he often went
for his business. He detested them. He never used trains or buses."

"Lily went mostly to fashion shows and retail cocktail
parties."

"Far afield for Orson."

His mind was racing now.

"All right, a plane. Lily was always shuttling up to
New York."