“Oh, come on,” Steve said, sitting up from his slouch. “I wouldn’t mind, especially if it were Gayle.” He reached over and gave Gayle a hug. Gayle was sitting next to him. She giggled and pretended to squirm in his arms.
Trent poured a bit of beer over the top of Steve’s head. Steve tried to catch it with his tongue.
“It would have to be a desperate situation,” Nancy Yansen said. “Besides, there’s always the turkey baster.”
For the next several minutes everyone except David and Angela doubled up with laughter. Then followed a series of off-color jokes and sexual innuendoes. David and Angela maintained half smiles and nodded at punch lines, but they didn’t participate.
“Wait a minute, everybody,” Nancy Yansen said amid laughter after a particularly salacious doctor’s joke. She struggled to contain herself. “I think we should get the kids off to bed so we can have ourselves a skinny dip. What do you say?”
“I say let’s do it,” Trent said as he clicked beer bottles with Steve.
David and Angela eyed each other, wondering if the suggestion was another joke. Everyone else stood up and started calling for their children who were still down on the dock fishing in the darkness.
Later in their room as Angela washed her face at the wall sink she complained to David that she thought the group had suddenly regressed to some early, adolescent stage. As she spoke they both could hear the rest of the adults leaping from the dock amid giggles, shouts, and splashing.
“It does smack of college fraternity behavior,” David agreed. “But I don’t think there’s any harm. We shouldn’t be judgmental,”
“I’m not so sure,” Angela said. “What worries me is feeling that we’re in a John Updike novel about suburbia. All that loose sexual talk and now this acting out makes me uncomfortable. I think it could be a reflection of boredom. Maybe Bartlet isn’t the Eden we think it is.”
“Oh, please!” David said with amazement. “I think you’re being overly critical and cynical. I think they just have an exuberant, fun-loving, youthful attitude toward life. Maybe we’re the ones with hang-ups.”
Angela turned from the sink to face David. Her expression was one of surprise, as if David were a stranger. “You’re entirely welcome to go out there naked and join the Bacchanalia if you so desire,” she said. “Don’t let me stop you!”
“Don’t get all bent out of shape,” David said. “I don’t want to participate. But at the same time I don’t see it in such black and white terms as you apparently do. Maybe it’s some of your Catholic baggage.”
“I refuse to be provoked,” Angela said, turning back to the sink. “And I specifically refuse to be baited into one of our pointless religious discussions.”
“Fine by me,” David said agreeably.
Later when they had gotten into bed and turned out the light the sounds of merriment from the dock had been replaced by the frogs and insects. It was so quiet they could hear the water lapping against the shore.
“Do you think they’re still out there?” Angela whispered.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” David said. “Moreover I don’t care.”
“What did you think of Kevin’s comments about Dr. Portland?” Angela asked.
“I don’t know what to think,” David said. “To be truthful, Kevin has become somewhat of a mystery to me. He’s a weird duck. I’ve never seen anyone carry on so much about getting bumped in the nose in a pickup basketball game.”
“I found his comments unsettling to say the least,” Angela said. “Thinking about murder in Bartlet even for a second leaves me strangely cold. I’m beginning to have this uncomfortable nagging feeling that something bad is going to happen, maybe because we’re too happy.”
“It’s that hysterical personality of yours,” David said, half in jest. “You’re always looking for the dramatic. It makes you pessimistic. I think we’re happy because we made the right decision.”
“I hope you are right,” Angela said as she snuggled into the crook of David’s arm.
9
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 6
Traynor pulled his Mercedes off the road and bumped across the field toward the line of cars parked near a split-rail fence. During the summer months, the fairgrounds beyond the fence were used most often for crafts fairs, but today Traynor and his wife, Jacqueline, were headed there for the eighth annual Bartlet Community Hospital Labor Day picnic. Festivities had begun at nine starting with field day races for the children.