“Then it must be staged. The dragons must be overgrown lizards or something. The magic must be sleight of hand.” Miles laughed. “Knights and damsels courtesy of Central Casting, dragons courtesy of the San Diego Zoo! Johnny Carson will have the whole menagerie on sometime next week!”
Ben waited for the big man’s laughter to die away. “Think so?”
“Of course, I think so! Don’t you?”
“I’m not sure.”
Miles frowned, then read the advertisement one time more. When he was done, he passed the catalogue back across the desk. “Is this what kept you home last night?”
“In part, yes.”
There was a long silence. Miles cleared his throat. “Ben, don’t tell me that you’re thinking of…”
The phone rang. Ben picked it up, listened for a moment and looked across the desk at his friend. “Mrs. Lang is here.”
Miles glanced at his watch and rose. “Needs a new will drafted, I think.” He hesitated, looked for a moment as if he might say something more, then jammed his hands in his pants pockets and turned for the door. “Well, enough of this. I’ve got to get some work done. Catch you later.”
He left the room frowning. Ben let him go.
Ben left work early that afternoon and went to the health club to work out. He spent an hour in the weight room, then spent another hour on the light and heavy fighter’s bags he had persuaded them to install several years back. He had been a boxer in his teens — fought out of Northside for the better part of five years. He had been a silver glover and could have been a gold, but other interests had taken him away and then he had gone east to school. But he still kept his hand in — even sparring a couple of rounds now and then back at Northside when he found the time. For the most part, he simply worked out, staying fit, keeping himself sharp. He had done so religiously since Annie died. It had helped him to release some of the frustration and anger. It had helped him to fill the time.
It was true that he had not been able to accept her death, he thought as his cab worked its way through the rush hour traffic from the health club to the high rise. He could admit it to himself if not to Miles. The truth was that he didn’t know how to accept it. He had loved her with an intensity that was frightening, and she him. They never spoke of it; they never had to. But it was always there. When she died, he had thought of killing himself. He had not done so only because he had known deep inside that he should not, that he should never give in to anything so obviously wrong, that Annie would not want him to. So he had gone on with his life in the best way that he could, but he had never found a way to accept that she was really gone. Perhaps he never would.
Frankly, he wasn’t sure that it mattered all that much whether he did.
He paid the cabdriver at the curb, walked into the lobby of the high rise, greeted George, and boarded the elevator for his penthouse suite.
Miles saw him as a grief-stricken recluse, hiding from the world while he mourned his dead wife. Maybe that was the way everyone saw him. But Annie’s death had not created the condition; it had merely emphasized it. He had been slipping back into himself more and more in recent years, dissatisfied with what he viewed as the continuing deterioration of his profession, frustrated with the way in which it seemed to sink down upon itself until it no longer served the purposes for which it had been created. Miles would think it odd that he should feel that way — Doc Holiday, the corporate trial lawyer who had slain more Goliaths than any David had ever dreamed effacing. What did he have to feel frustrated about when the system had worked so effectively for him? But of course one’s personal successes sometimes only served to point up the inequities worked on others. It was that way with him.