‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Phone slipped. Sorry.’ The phone hadn’t slipped as much as an inch, but it came out sounding natural enough, I thought. And if it hadn’t, so what? When it came to Mattie, I would be — in John’s mind, at least — below suspicion. Like the country-house staff in an Agatha Christie. He was twenty-eight, maybe thirty. The idea that a man twelve years older might be sexually attracted to Mattie had probably never crossed his mind . . . or maybe just for a second or two there on the common, before he dismissed it as ludicrous. The way Mattie herself had dismissed the idea of Jo and the man in the brown sportcoat.
‘I can’t do my courtship dance while I’m representing her,’ he said, ‘wouldn’t be ethical. Wouldn’t be safe, either. Later, though . . . you can never tell.’
‘No,’ I said, hearing my voice as you sometimes do in moments when you are caught completely fiat-footed, hearing it as though it were coming from someone else. Someone on the radio or the record-player, maybe. Are these the voices of our dead friends, or just the gramophone? I thought of his hands, the fingers long and slender and without a ring on any of them. Like Sara’s hands in that old photo. ‘No, you can never tell.’
We said goodbye, and I sat watching the muted baseball game. I thought about getting up to get a beer, but it seemed too far to the refrigerator — a safari, in fact. What I felt was a kind of dull hurt, followed by a better emotion: rueful relief, I guess you’d call it. Was he too old for her? No, I didn’t think so. Just about right. Prince Charming No. 2, this time in a three-piece suit. Mattie’s luck with men might finally be changing, and if so I should be glad. I would be glad. And relieved. Because I had a book to write, and never mind the look of white sneakers flashing below a red sundress in the deepening gloom, or the ember of her cigarette dancing in the dark.
Still, I felt really lonely for the first time since I saw Kyra marching up the white line of Route 68 in her bathing suit and flip-flops.
‘You funny little man, said Strickland,’ I told the empty room. It came out before I knew I was going to say anything, and when it did, the channel on the TV changed. It went from baseball to a rerun of All in the Family and then to Ren & Stimpy. I glanced down at the remote control. It was still on the coffee-table where I’d left it. The TV channel changed again, and this time I was looking at Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. There was an airplane in the background, and I didn’t need to pick up the remote and turn on the sound to know that Humphrey was telling Ingrid that she was getting on that plane. My wife’s all-time favorite movie. She bawled at the end without fail.
‘Jo?’ I asked. ‘Are you here?’
Bunter’s bell rang once. Very faintly. There had been several presences in the house, I was sure of it . . . but tonight, for the first time, I was positive it was Jo who was with me.
‘Who was he, hon?’ I asked. ‘The guy at the softball field, who was he?’
Bunter’s bell hung still and quiet. She was in the room, though. I sensed her, something like a held breath.
I remembered the ugly, gibing little message on the refrigerator after my dinner with Mattie and Ki: blue rose liar ha ha.
‘Who was he?’ My voice was unsteady, sounding on the verge of tears. ‘What were you doing down here with some guy? Were you . . . ‘ But I couldn’t bring myself to ask if she had been lying to me, cheating on me. I couldn’t ask even though the presence I felt might be, let’s face it, only in my own head.
The TV switched away from Casablanca and here was everybody’s favorite lawyer, Perry Mason, on Nick at Nite. Perry’s nemesis, Hamilton Burger, was questioning a distraught-looking woman, and all at once the sound blared on, making me jump.
‘I am not a liar!’ some long-ago TV actress cried. For a moment she looked right out at me, and I was stunned breathless to see Jo’s eyes in that black-and-white fifties face. ‘I never lied, Mr. Burger, never!’
‘I submit that you did!’ Burger responded. He moved in on her, leering like a vampire. ‘I submit that you — ‘
The TV suddenly went off. Bunter’s bell gave a single brisk shake, and then whatever had been here was gone. But I felt better. I am not a liar . . . I never lied, never.
I could believe that if I chose to.
If I chose.
I went to bed, and there were no dreams.
I had taken to starting work early, before the heat could really get a hold on the study. I’d drink some juice, gobble some toast, then sit behind the IBM until almost noon, watching the Courier ball dance and twirl as the pages floated through the machine and came out with writing on them. That old magic, so strange and wonderful. It never really felt like work to me, although I called it that; it felt like some weird kind of mental trampoline I bounced on. Those were springs that took away all the weight of the world for awhile.
At noon I’d break, drive down to Buddy Jellison’s greaseatorium for something nasty, then return and work for another hour or so. After that I would swim and take a long dreamless nap in the north bedroom. I had barely poked my head into the master bedroom at the south end of the house, and if Mrs. M. thought this was odd, she kept it to herself.
On Friday the seventeenth, I stopped at the Lakeview General on my way back to the house to gas up my Chevrolet. There are pumps at the All-Purpose Garage, and the go-juice was a penny or two cheaper, but I didn’t like the vibe. Today, as I stood in front of the store with the pump on automatic feed, looking off toward the mountains, Bill Dean’s Dodge Ram pulled in on the other side of the island. He climbed down and gave me a smile. ‘How’s it going, Mike?’
‘Pretty fair.’
‘Brenda says you’re writin up a storm.’
‘I am,’ I said, and it was on the tip of my tongue to ask for an update on the broken second-floor air conditioner. The tip of my tongue was where it stayed. I was still too nervous about my rediscovered ability to want to change anything about the environment in which I was doing it.
Stupid, maybe, but sometimes things work just because you think they work. It’s as good a definition of faith as any.
‘Well, I’m glad to hear it. Very glad.’ I thought he was sincere enough, but he somehow didn’t sound like Bill. Not the one who had greeted me back, anyway.
‘I’ve been looking up some old stuff about my side of the lake,’ I said. ‘Sara and the Red-Tops?
You always were sort ofint’rested in them, I remember.’
‘Them, yes, but not just them. Lots of history. I was talking to Mrs. M., and she told me about Normal Auster. Kenny’s father.’
Bill’s smile stayed on, and he only paused a moment in the act of unscrewing the cap on his gas tank, but I still had a sense, quite clear, that he had frozen inside. ‘You wouldn’t write about a thing like that, would you, Mike? Because there’s a lot of people around here that’d feel it bad and take it wrong. I told Jo the same thing.’
‘Jo?’ I felt an urge to step between the two pumps and over the island so I could grab him by the arm. ‘What’s Jo got to do with this?’
He looked at me cautiously and long. ‘She didn’t tell you?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘She thought she might write something about Sara and the Red-Tops for one of the local papers.’
Bill was picking his words very slowly. I have a clear memory of that, and of how hot the sun was, beating down on my neck, and the sharpness of our shadows on the asphalt. He began to pump his gas, and the sound of the pump’s motor was also very sharp. ‘I think she even mentioned Yankee magazine. I c’d be wrong about that, but I don’t think I am.’
I was speechless. Why would she have kept quiet about the idea to try her hand at a little local history? Because she might have thought she was poaching on my territory? That was ridiculous.
She had known me better than that . . . hadn’t she?