Random Hearts (19 page)

Was she deliberately censoring the image for his sake?
Inexplicably, he felt pangs of jealousy. She appeared to be struggling to get
the words out.

"What I gave him then, at that moment, along with the
words of it, the obligatory I love you ... was my being. Everything that meant
my life I handed over to him. It was an act of trust. I gave my pledge
willingly, eagerly, without strings. And when he said it as well, I was sure he
meant it exactly the same way."

It was as if she were revealing some hidden sin, admitting
to a crime against nature itself. Suddenly she became inert. "Goes to
prove you should never, never give yourself away. You come into this world
alone, you go out alone."

"So you did love him?" For some reason he felt
vaguely disappointed by her confession.

"I committed myself to him. Isn't that what it
means?"

He started to reach for his snifter, hesitated midway, then
pulled his hand back. Entwining his fingers, he cracked the bones.

"Yes. That's what it must mean. It wasn't just saying
it. It was believing in it. In its binding power. In its..." He searched
his mind for a more precise meaning. "In its sense of sacrifice and
selflessness. I must have felt that way, too, when I said it for the first time
to Lily. Hardly as romantic as your experience. A restaurant in Georgetown,
although I remember a spray of pink flowers, and I was looking into her eyes,
drowning in them, I suppose. I haven't thought about it much the last few
years, but when I said it, I felt the same way as you described. Everybody who
says it must really feel it. It has got to come from the depths. Doesn't
it?"

She nodded and sucked in a deep breath.

"I'll never give myself away again. Never." She
said it firmly, lifting her glass.

"Never," Edward echoed. "Never."

Edward lifted his glass to hers. Both glasses reached out
and clinked in a silent toast. They sipped, and their eyes locked. Hers
appeared to him suddenly larger, deeper, darker, magnetizing. Perhaps it was
the light, he thought ... an illusion. The long moment became awkward as the
silence stretched. Their gazes faltered, and they both looked elsewhere. He
looked at his watch, but the numbers seemed blurred. He supposed he should be
going, but he wanted to stay. To continue.

"It does seem like a logical idea," she said,
breaking the silence.

"What?"

"McCarthy's. You know, checking locks against the
key."

"Yes," he said, "logical. But
time-consuming." His alertness became acute. Seize it, he urged himself.
His heart pounded with expectation, and he grew excited as he remembered
McCarthy's plan. The shrinking circles. It would take a battalion, McCarthy had
said.

"I'd invest it ... the time," she said haltingly.

"We could draw the circles, map out a route, and do it
methodically. Why not? I'll get a map. We can work it out."

"But your job..." she began. "Maybe I could
start working on it during the day while you're at the office."

"Yes," he said eagerly. "But what about you?
Your son..."

"I told you. He's with my parents." She frowned,
and he sensed that she did not want the issue raised.

"No," he said firmly. "We do it
together." He slapped the table. "A question of priorities. There's
nothing more important for us."

"Nothing," she said. He could observe her anger
beginning to flare, feeding his own.

"And there is no shortcut?"

"McCarthy would know."

"They mustn't get away with it, Edward," she
said, her voice rising. "Leave us like this, twisting in the wind."

The intensity of her fury brought McCarthy's words swarming
back at him, stinging. "I didn't put the poison in the cup."

"They won't," he assured her.

In the morning, awakening from a drugged sleep, Vivien
struggled to remember where she was. Orson's presence still lashed out at her.
Would it ever go away?

Despite the absence of his things in the bathroom, his aura
persisted. She performed her morning ablutions by rote, as she had done for
years, brushing her teeth, washing the moisturizer from her face, brushing her
hair, reaching into the medicine chest. Without thinking, she took a pill from
the white plastic dial and flung it into her mouth.

"My God, he's dead!" she cried at her confused
image in the mirror. Still, the old habit persisted, as if he had been standing
over her. It was absurd. Not realizing, she had been taking them every day. The
matter of Lily's pregnancy suddenly clarified itself, and she ran to the phone
and dialed Edward's number.

It took a few rings for him to answer. He seemed out of
breath and annoyed until he heard her voice.

"I've been gathering her things," he said, the
irritation gone. "They're coming to cart them away. Everything. I'm never
coming back here again."

"Where will you live?"

"A hotel. Anywhere. As long as it's not here."

She hesitated, then steadied herself as she formed the
words, but she did not speak them. Surely they had achieved a level of intimacy
that made it possible. She remembered last night. Once again it had validated
the importance of their alliance. She would be merely offering another
deduction to bring them still closer to the truth.

"Edward," she said tentatively.

"Yes."

"Have you still got her things? I mean, what she took
on the trip. What was recovered."

"Yes. They're here waiting to be trashed."

"It's pure instinct—nothing conclusive—all part of the
things we discussed last night, those intimate things. I'm glad I can't see
your face." Her own was hot with a sudden flush.

"I don't understand."

"Perhaps you won't even when I say it. You said ...
well, you said that on Sundays..." She waited for his response.

"Yes, I remember."

"You felt certain that she used the device. You said
she was quite disciplined about it."

"The diaphragm?"

"Yes."

There was a short silence as she waited for him to
comprehend. Definitely a gender gap here, she decided.

"Now remember carefully. You said Sundays. Even
recently."

"She was always fastidious about that." He paused.
"Yes, even recently," he muttered.

"Would she have known she was pregnant?"

"She had a cycle like a clock. Once, two years ago,
she was a week late. She had herself checked out." She sensed the dawning
in him of this new revelation.

"Now look among the things that were brought up from
the crash—her personal things."

As he searched, something nagged at her memory. A story by
Philip Roth in which the diaphragm had become a symbol of commitment. Odd how
her perceptions had multiplied, vibrating instincts and picking up distant
symbols, as if she had lived in a thick soupy fog for years, all those years
with Orson. In the distance she heard his footsteps. They grew louder. Then his
voice came back.

"It wasn't there," he said. "It was in its
usual place under the sink."

"You see?"

She felt strangely satisfied, knowing that she had achieved
a level of intimacy with Edward that she had never shared with anyone, not even
with Orson. On that subject she had always been reticent, even with Margo.

"But if she knew she was pregnant..." His voice
trailed away.

Could she invoke the old cliché about the intuition of
women? She decided against it. He might misunderstand. Where was her intuition
when it came to Orson?

"Because..." She hesitated, not wanting to appear
pedagogic about her gender. The problem was to frame the explanation in a way
he would understand: Lily didn't want the essence of you to touch her anymore.
Instead she said: "It was her way of being faithful." Waiting, she
listened for his reaction.

"Sounds almost mystical," he drawled. "But I
think I do catch your drift."

He seemed tentative.

"Call it a sisterly deduction," she said lightly.
"It's the only explanation that makes sense." She paused. "And
Edward, I believe it's important for you to know that it wasn't your
child."

"Well, then, that's one mystery that we can dispense
with," he said. "Now we can get on to the others." He seemed to
be fighting away irritation.

"It was important to know, Edward."

"Yes, I suppose it was," he agreed. "The
lying bitch."

"Don't you see? It wasn't your child that was killed.
You can rest easy on that score." She had wanted to dispel his
uncertainty. Wasn't that the point of the exercise?

"Thanks, Viv," he said gently. "You're
right. I wouldn't have wanted to live with that."

Lifting his burden hadn't done much for her own. It galled
her to know that Orson had fathered a child with a strange woman while she had
yearned for another one, a companion for Ben.

"We'll meet later, won't we?" she asked. For a
moment it had worried her that he might have forgotten or been turned off by
this new bit of deduction.

"Of course," he said. "We have work to
do."

For a long time she sat by the phone, trying to spark her
resolve. She got up and walked through the house. Despite all the material
renunciations, Orson's presence continued to make itself felt. She sniffed the
air, catching the old scents of him. Listening, she heard the floor creak with
the rhythm of his movement. His whisper, like a cold alien wind, tickled her
ear, mocking and accusatory. "You bastard," she cried aloud, turning,
arms thrashing as she ran through the rooms. In the kitchen, she shattered
glasses, threw dishes to the floor, defying his sense of neatness and order.
Opening a cabinet, she gripped a stack of plates, a wedding gift from his
sister, and slid them over the rim. Panting, she leaned against the wall and
stared at the broken shards.

"You fouled my home," she sobbed as she fought
down hysteria. In the bathroom she splashed her face with tap water, diluting
the burning salt tears. When her vision cleared, she watched her reflection in
the full-length wall mirror. In the cruel, white light, her skin looked harsh,
reddened by her rage. Is it really you?

She traced the line of cheek and chin, assessing what had
once seemed attractive. Her long black lashes fluttered over hazel eyes,
greenish now, newly washed. Like her father's eyes, always gentle, calmly
observant, yet transparent in anguish.

Opening her robe, she saw her breasts, still high and firm.
A "well-made woman" was the way Orson had put it. She stood in
profile, her bare skin alabaster in this light, her silhouette curved and
womanly, the patch at the bottom of her belly, jet black and curly. Compared to
others, she had always perceived herself as reasonably attractive, yet
something short of beautiful.

Sexy? For her there was only one reliable barometer,
Orson's interest. One could not exactly call it lust. Sensuality between them
had never been profound, and on the rare occasions when she was orgasmic, it seemed
pallid compared with the descriptions of others she had heard or read. Yet she
had never refused him. His demands were never urgent. But then, she had no real
standard to judge his desire or enthusiasm. Sex between them had never been an
issue, never a priority, never a point of contention. Was it something lacking
in her, some secret well of desire that she failed to plumb? What had that
other woman possessed?

Almost without her realizing, her fingers were trailing
lightly over her nipples, which had hardened. Her other hand caressed her
thighs, moved through the warm moist thatch of hair, touching skillfully,
finding the outer edge of pleasure. She felt the beginning of a rhythmic
pulsation vibrating inside of her, a strange, mysterious sensation. A vague
image surfaced in her mind: male flesh, musky, urgent. Edward!

She turned away from the mirror in embarrassment. Quickly,
she stepped into the shower, washed her hair, and blew it dry, satisfied that
it shined and cascaded with healthy attractiveness. Then she made herself up
with more care than she had taken in years.

Dressing, she felt somewhat restored but offended by her
earlier outburst and feelings of inadequacy. Fault yourself for ignorance,
naivete, and gullibility, but not for some intangible female inadequacy, she
rebuked herself. Never mind. They would get to the bottom of it somehow. She
and Edward. By then she had totally dismissed her earlier fantasy.

She drove to the bank and withdrew the $9,700 she had saved
from household monies over the last few years. She had never considered it a
private nest egg, certainly not mad money. Orson had known about it, of course,
and she had used it occasionally to buy gifts for him for birthdays and
anniversaries, and for little surprises. It would not do at all to have asked
for money to buy his own gifts or to use a charge account that, in the end, he
would pay for with his own check.

"Cash?" the teller asked with an air of perplexed
intimidation. Up to then she had not been certain. In her mind was the idea to
transfer the money to a checking account in another bank. This was Orson's
bank. She wanted no part of it.

"Yes," she replied. "Nothing larger than a
fifty."

The cashier shrugged and counted out the money.

"That's a lot of cash to be carrying around."

She stuffed the bills into her pocketbook, ignoring the
remark. Orson might have said it with the same inflection of condescension, and
she enjoyed the sense of disobedience.

Before going home she stopped at the supermarket to buy
steaks and red wine. She coped with moments of disorientation as she passed the
cereal stacks and freezer compartments and resisted loading her cart with
products which she had bought routinely for Orson and Ben. She wondered what
Edward's favorites might be.

Although the routine of shopping was a familiar one for
her, the experience today seemed uncommon; the familiar store seemed foreign.
Even her usual clerk at the checkout counter looked at her as if she were a
stranger, viewing her meager selection with disbelief.

"That all?"

"Afraid so."

Home again, she found the mess of broken dishes and began
to remove the debris. Before she could finish, the phone rang. Edward? It was
Margo Teeters.

"I took a chance, Viv. I thought you might be with
your folks."

"No," she said calmly. "But they have Ben.
There are some loose ends about the estate."

"Are you all right, Viv?" It must have seemed
redundant, for she quickly added: "Well, then, let's do lunch. I can cheer
you up."

"Not today, Margo," Vivien replied.

"What about cocktails and dinner? How about
that?"

"I'm sorry, Margo."

"Just want to give you a lift, dear." Her good
humor seemed contrived.

"Not up to it, Margo, really. Some other time."

"Well, let's set it up. I'm sitting here with my
calendar. How's Tuesday?"

"I can't make plans."

She had not wanted to excite curiosity, but it was too
late.

"What is it, Viv? You can't just brood. What are you
doing with your time?"

"Just ... waiting."

"Waiting? I don't understand."

Waiting? Now why did I say that? Vivien wondered.

"I'm fine, Margo. I just need time away.... "Away
from what?

"I know I'm being pushy, Viv. I'm just worried, is
all. You've had an awful shock. Awful."

"Maybe next week, then?"

"Maybe?"

Vivien hung up, searching her mind. Then she knew. She was
waiting—waiting for Edward.