Random Hearts (20 page)

The two black men who had come to haul away the contents of
Edward's apartment had looked at him through moist red-veined eyes, first with
skepticism, then with greed.

"Everything but that," he told them, pointing to
two large suitcases and a hanging bag in the corner. As far as he could
ascertain, nothing he had packed could be classified as shared. Inside were a
few favorite books:
The Collected Stories of Ernest Hemingway
and some
of Simenon's Maigrets. Lily had detested Hemingway and had thought Maigret
boring. He had mounted a spirited defense, he remembered.

As they carried the items out of the apartment, the younger
of the men, perhaps prompted by a fit of conscience, approached him. The other
man was struggling down the hallway with one of the heavy upholstered chairs on
his back.

"That stuff's not junk," he said. "You could
sell it."

"It's junk to me."

"He's gonna sell it anyway. And you're payin' for
haulin' on top of it."

"Once it's out of here, it doesn't exist for me,"
he said. The perplexed man scratched his head. Sometimes pragmatism had nothing
to do with economics. As the apartment emptied, Edward began to feel better, as
if pus had been drawn from a boil.

"Look at all them shoes," one of the men
whistled, seeing Lily's neatly stacked cache of shoes in plastic boxes.

"She had more than two feet," Edward quipped.

The man laughed.

"I didn't have my own shoes till I was ten."

"Life's unfair," Edward said and hated himself
for it.

When they had cleared away everything but the suitcases and
he had paid the haulers, Edward made one last call—to have the telephone
disconnected. Then he carted away his suitcases and hanging bag and loaded them
into the trunk of his car. As he drove away, a fleeting memory intruded.

"I love it," Lily had cried. It was more
expensive than he had wished, but it was Georgetown. It pleased him to see Lily
so happy. Newlyweds then, she was the fulcrum on which all life balanced.
"Between us, we can make it, Edward." As a place to live, it hadn't
mattered that much to him, except that she loved it and wanted it.

Now he felt an odd pleasure in chucking it all away,
especially all the decorating gewgaws on which she had lavished so much time
and thought. "Don't you think the couch is beautiful?" He had nodded,
only because it was her choice. Every stick, every hue and shade that
surrounded them was her choice. That was the way he wanted it. He did it
freely, eagerly, absorbing her tastes as his own. "Don't you just love the
carpeting?" she had asked. "Great," he had answered. The
criterion was her approval, her wishes. What he had done was surrender his will
to her. Now the idea revolted him. As Vivien had pointed out, to love meant
giving oneself away. He shuddered at the extent of his surrender. For what? he
asked himself. To be betrayed.

What Vivien had deduced about Lily's pregnancy offered
mixed comforts. He and Lily had discussed children as a practical matter. She
had never seemed to view motherhood with the same reverence that he felt,
perhaps because she had experienced "family," taken it for granted,
whereas he had been an only child and was orphaned now.

It would have disgusted him to know that she had been
carrying his child by default, the result of some stupid technical
"mistake." A child, in order to be loved, must be wanted. Also, the
idea of his own dead baby drowned at the bottom of the freezing river was
horrifying. Which left, as before, only the bitter pill of betrayal to feed his
anger. She had deliberately conceived a baby with Orson, consciously or unconsciously.
It was an inescapable conclusion. Perhaps she considered the genetic mix more
suitable—with Orson offering superior qualities. This odd twist of speculation
gnawed at him, gathering credibility as it fleshed out in his mind. Would she
have carried it to birth, giving it his, Edward's, name? A lifetime of his love
and pride lavished on a lie? To crown the cruel irony, she might have even
named it Orson, an idea which opened new floodgates of rage. How would he have
known? And, as always, he was sure to yield to her decision, probably intrigued
by the odd name.

When the anger became too acute to bear, his thoughts
shifted to Vivien and to how her deduction might affect her own struggle to
confront the truth of Orson's betrayal. Would the insult also carry with it the
connotation of her inadequacy? She had admitted a desire to have another child,
and yet Orson had refused, preferring to have it with another woman instead.
She might take some comfort in the possibility of accident. Such things were said
to happen, although, knowing Lily, he doubted that.

She might be thinking, too, of the lifetime of deception
that Orson might have held in store for her; he might have harbored this dark
secret, revealing it only on his death bed, like in soap operas or Gothic
novels, and leaving her to suffer in a lonely misery that mocked a lifetime of
love and devotion. Orson, as revealed, was certainly capable of acting out such
an evil scenario.

Before getting to the office, he stopped to buy some large
colored maps of the area. He had called earlier to tell them he would be late.
It was just after noon when he arrived.

"He's on the warpath," Jan Peters told him.
"He made us tear up the release. Harvey had to write another."

Despite his foreboding, he was still surprised not to find
the rewrite on his desk and rang for Harvey Mills to come into his office.

"The Congressman is on the House floor." He
averted his eyes and cleared his throat. "He ordered me to send it down
for him to approve." Lifting his gaze, as if he had suddenly gained
courage, Harvey watched him through his glasses. Another warning, Edward
thought, surprised at his own indifference. Dismissing him with a shrug, he
shuffled through papers on his desk. The words shimmered incoherently.
Swiveling in his chair, he looked out of the window. Mounds of blackened snow
had crusted at the edges of the asphalt, offering a faint reminder of that
fatal day. He felt disoriented, misplaced. The phone rang. He answered it, only
after it became unbearably persistent. It was Anna, Lily's sister. He caught a
tiny edge of contrition in her voice. Still, he regretted picking up the phone.

"Are you all right, Eddie?"

"Yes," he answered curtly.

"I want to apologize for Vinnie. He was upset. You
know how he felt about Lily."

"It doesn't matter," he muttered, hoping it would
hurry her.

"I had this idea, Eddie"—he could hear her draw
in a long breath—"seeing that Lily and I were close to the same
size." She cleared her throat. "I pooch a little in the belly."
The attempt at ingratiation failed miserably. He withheld the expected polite
chuckle. "Anyway, I'd like to have Lily's clothes." She waited. Again
he said nothing. "Well, it would be a memory thing, too. She had such
beautiful taste, and her wardrobe was fabulous, since she was in fashion and
all. If you're not too mad at us ... I was never your enemy, Eddie."

"No, you weren't." He felt compelled to say it.

"So you'll let me have them?"

Revenge, he thought maliciously. It came in mysterious
ways. He wondered suddenly if Lily had confided in her. Sisters in league. They
were always jawing together, he remembered.

"I'm sorry, Anna," he said.

"Sorry?" In the pause he heard her breathing grow
more labored. "Listen, Eddie, this is Anna. Not Vinnie. She would have
wanted me to have them. You know she would. It's the least you can do, seeing
that you're going to get all that insurance." So they had already
calculated that.

"I gave them away," he said calmly.

"So fast? You did that? You didn't even think that
maybe I wanted them?" He would not have given them to her in any event.

"To what charity? Maybe I can explain..."

"To none. To the trash."

He wasn't sure whether her response was a cough or a gasp.
He pictured the clothes on poor strangers, resisting a laugh from his gut.

"The shoes, too?"

"The shoes, too."

"You're a son of a bitch," Anna said.
"Vinnie was right."

He was poised to tell it. Again, he held back, knowing that
the telling would diminish himself further in his own eyes.

"You've got no heart, Eddie."

"Is that what she told you?"

Had she also confided the other?

"I'll never know why she loved you," Anna said.
She slammed down the phone.

"Did she?" he asked into the buzz.

The Congressman did not return to the office until late in
the afternoon. Edward, brooding and unproductive, had not noticed time passing.
He sensed in himself a growing isolation from the present. Yet he was fully
alert to the past, mesmerized by the images that floated by in his mind, like
film running through a Moviola: Lily and he running along a beach, the waves
lapping and foaming around bare ankles. Acapulco honeymooning. Lying in a
hammock on the Pie De La Questa, watching the awesome Pacific Ocean, getting
high on cocolocos. (Had he babbled something then about forever yours, swearing
it in his heart? Had she sworn it, too? Or was he imagining?) Lily and he
strolling aimlessly in Georgetown. Brunch at Clyde's with Bloody Marys, then a
walk along the old footpath beside the muck of the dead canal, holding hands.
Lily beside him at night, her breathing steady and soft, enveloped in his arms,
protected, secure. They had grown used to that style of sleeping, she on her
side, her body angled, her buttocks against his belly, his arm stretched out in
the space between her shoulder and neck, his hand cupped around a bare breast.
Then, suddenly, it had ceased. Not abruptly. Subtly. Then they hardly touched
at all. Lily fussed over his clothes and diet as if he were some big male doll.
Once she had nursed him through pneumonia, sponging him down, administering medication,
worrying over his body temperature.

Sometimes she had asked, lifting her head from a book or
fashion magazine she had been studying, propped on pillows, big glasses slid
halfway down her nose: Do you love me? And he had replied: Of course. Are you
sure? Sure, I'm sure. How do you know? I know. Was it the intimacy of siblings
or lovers? It crossed his mind that maybe she had one of those split
personalities, two different people living in one. He shook his head, trying to
rid himself of the old memories. In their place he saw Vivien, his alter ego
now. And more. But he let that thought pass. Never, he told himself. Never,
never.

It did not surprise him that the Congressman did not call
him into his office. He would be pouting now, in a funk. The office was not
humming with work, the staff was not churning with deadlines. The man was
undoubtedly frustrated, fuming with subdued rage. There was no more compelling
sense of anxiety than that generated by a politician running for office. Months
earlier, Edward had submitted a report to the Congressman on the necessity of
keeping his name before the public with a barrage of issue-oriented press
releases, filling the hopper with bills and stepping up case activity with
constituents tenfold.

"You sure we got the horses, Eddie?" the
Congressman had asked. Edward felt strong then, ambitious, confident.

"Sure, I'm sure."

"To do it, I've got to have the backup."

"You've got it."

When a man had a secret oasis, he could trek any desert.
His oasis was a mirage now. And he was tired and thirsty, and the sun was
melting his eyes.

Taking out the maps he had bought, he unfolded them. To do
what McCarthy had suggested, he had had to buy both a map of northern Virginia
and a map of the District. He cut them apart and pieced together the specific
areas he needed. He estimated the outer perimeters in terms of time and
distance, drawing a circle, as McCarthy had suggested, then dividing the
circle, into manageable slices.

As he worked with the maps, Jan Peters came in, looking troubled.

"What is it?" He was hunched over his desk,
studying the maps.

"There's a nasty-looking man outside. Wants to see
you."

"Has he got a name?" He did not look up, although
he could see the lower part of Jan's torso, fingers nervously tapping her thighs.

"He wouldn't give his name." She was obviously
annoyed by his lack of concern. When he did not respond further, he saw her
body come closer. She bent over the front of his desk. He could smell her sweet
breath.

"What are these?"

"Just maps."

"The Congressman is working around you, Edward. He's
madder than hell. You're going to lose your job. You know he doesn't care about
people."

Not as human beings, he thought. Ignoring her, he made
marks on the map with this magic marker. He felt her hand on his arm, staying
his movement.

"It's no joke," she pleaded.

At that moment, Vinnie burst through the door, a vast bulk,
snorting like an animal, sending off waves of sweaty body odor combined with
the stink of rotting wine grapes. Looking up, he saw Jan sidestep out of his
way. She stood now with her back to the wall, a hand clamped over her mouth,
her eyes popping with fear. Oddly, Edward felt no panic. Vinnie's meaty hand
grabbed a handful of shirt just below his neck and lifted him out of his chair.

"Fuggin' sombitch," Vinnie hissed as his free
fist shot out and landed on Edward's cheek. The blow glanced off the bone. A
large pinky ring opened a cut, and he felt the moist warmth of his own blood.
Jan gasped out a scream.

"This bastard trashed my sister," he said,
turning fierce eyes to Jan, who obviously had little choice but to endure the
role of witness. Edward struggled to get free of the man's grip, but without
success. Vinnie's free fist drew back and shot forward again. This time, Edward
shifted his head, and the blow passed harmlessly into the air. Vinnie's heavy
body lost its balance and fell over the desk, shredding Edward's shirt.