She had never made love to him while she was in uniform, not even now, when she had enough brass and gold braid to impress the Pentagon. When she went to police memorial services, banquets, and showed up in dress blues, Seth turned fainthearted. He was overcome, helpless and frustrated. In the end, after all these years and disappointments, she was still splendid. If only she didn’t make him feel so worthless and ugly. If only she hadn’t driven him to this, forced him into it, caused it, and willed abject ruination upon his life. It was her fault that he was fat, and a failure.
The chief, his wife, honestly was not privy to any of her husband’s ambitions or lustful imaginings or the complete set of his resentments. She would not have been flattered, amused, or held responsible, for Chief Hammer was not aroused by dominance, or prey to control, or quick to assume that others might be smitten and excited by her position in life. It would never occur to her that Seth was eating ice cream with butterscotch, hot fudge sauce, and maraschino cherries at this unhealthy hour because he really wished to be shackled to the bedposts, or to be searched inappropriately and for a long time. He wanted her to arrest him for animal desire and throw away the key. He wanted her to languish and doubt herself and all she had done. What did not interest him in the least was to be sentenced to the solitary confinement their marriage had become.
Chief Hammer was not in uniform or even on the portable phone. She was in a long, thick terry-cloth robe, and suffering from insomnia, and this was not unusual. She rarely slept much because her mind kept its own hours, the hell with her body. She was sitting in the living room, “The Tonight Show’ droning on as she read the Wall Street Journal, various memos, another long letter from her ancient mother, and a few salient pages from Marianne Williamson’s A Return to Love. Hammer did her best to block out Seth making noise in the kitchen.
His failure in his passage through the world felt like hers. No matter what she told herself or the therapists she left in Atlanta and Chicago, profound personal failure was what she felt every hour of every day. She had done something very wrong, otherwise Seth would not be committing suicide with a fork, a spoon, or chocolate sauce. When she looked back, she realized that the woman who had married him was another entity. She, Chief Hammer, was a reincarnation of that earlier lost manifestation. She did not need a man. She did not need Seth.
Everyone knew it, including him.
It was a simple fact that the best cops, Marines, Airmen, National Guards, firefighters, and military people in general who were women did not need men, personally. Hammer had commanded many such independents. She would pick them without question, as long as they weren’t so much like the men they did not need that they had completely adopted bad male habits, such as getting into fights rather than not, or being clingy and demanding and domineering. What Hammer had concluded after all these years was that she had an overweight, neurotic, nonworking wife who did nothing but bitch. Judy Hammer was ready for change.
Thus it was that she made a tactical error this very early morning, in her long clean robe. She decided to go out on her wraparound porch, and sit on the swing, sipping chardonnay, alone with her thoughts, for a spell.
Vft Brazil was mesmerized when she emerged, a vision, a god glowing in lamplight, all in white and shimmering. His heart rolled forward at such a pitch, he could not catch up with it. He sat very still on the cold cement bench, terrified she would see him. He watched every small thing she did, the way she pushed forward and let go, the bend of her wrist as she lifted the tapered glass, her head leaning back against the swing. He saw the slope of her neck as she rocked with eyes shut.
What did she think? Was she a person just like him, with those darker shades, those lonely, cold corners of existence that no one knew? She swung slowly, and alone. His chest ached. He was drawn to this woman and had no clear idea why. It must be hero worship. If he had a chance to touch her, he really wouldn’t know what to do. But he did want to, as he stared, in the night, at her. She was pretty, even at her age.