Just thinking about him made her feel weak and strange, and she wasn’t sure why. It was all mixed up. His crooked smile, so much the same, his body, so terribly changed, so light and undernourished, the lifeless way his hair lay against his scalp contrasting so blindingly with the rich memories she still held of him. She had wanted to kiss him.
‘Stop it,’ she murmured to herself. Her face in the bathroom mirror looked like a stranger’s face. Flushed and hot and let’s face it, gang, sexy.
Her hand dosed on the ring in the pocket of her slacks, and almost – but not quite – before she was aware of what she was going to do, she had thrown it into the clean, slightly blue water of the toilet bowl. All sparkly clean so that if Mr. Treaches of Baribault, Treaches, Moorehouse, and Gendron had to take a leak sometime during the dinner party, he wouldn’t be offended by any unsightly ring around the bowl, who knows what road-blocks may stand in the way of a young man on his march toward the counsels of the mighty, right? Who knows anything in this world?
It made a tiny splash and sank slowly to the bottom of the dear water, turning lazily over and over. She thought she heard a small clink when it struck the porcelain at the bottom, but that was probably just imagination. Her
head throbbed. The attic had been hot and stale and musty. But Johnny’s kiss – that had been sweet. So sweet.
Before she could think about what she was doing (and thus allow reason to reassert itself), she reached out and flushed the toilet. It went with a bang and a roar. It seemed louder, maybe, because her eyes were squeezed shut. When she opened them, the ring was gone. It had been lost, and now it was lost again.
Suddenly her legs felt weak and she sat down on the edge of the tub and put her hands over her face. Her hot, hot face. She wouldn’t go back and see Johnny again. It wasn’t a
good idea. It had upset her. Walt was bringing home a senior partner and she had a bottle of Mondavi and a budget-fracturing roast, those were the things she would think about.
She should be thinking about how much she loved Walt, and about Denny asleep in his crib. She should think about how, once you made your choices in this crazy world, you had to live with them. And she would not think about Johnny Smith and his crooked, charming smile anymore.
9.
The dinner that night was a great success.
CHAPTER TEN
1.
The doctor put Vera Smith on a blood-pressure drug called Hydrodiural. It didn’t lower her blood pressure much (‘not a dime’s worth,’ she was fond of writing in her letters), but it did make her feel sick and weak. She had to sit down and rest after vacuuming the floor. Climbing a flight of stairs made her stop at the top and pant like a doggy on a hot August afternoon. If Johnny hadn’t told her it was for the best, she would have thrown the pills out the window right then.
The doctor tried her on another drug, and that made her heart race so alarmingly that she did stop taking it.
‘This is a trial-and-error procedure,’ the doctor said. ‘We’ll get you fixed up eventually, Vera. Don’t worry.
‘I don’t worry,’ Vera said. ‘My faith is in the Lord God.’
‘Yes, of course it is. Just as it should be, too.’
By the end of June, the doctor had settled on a combination of Hydrodiural and another drug called Aldomet fat, yellow, expensive pills, nasty things. When she started taking the two drugs together, it seemed like she had to make water every fifteen minutes. She had headaches. She had heart palpitations. The doctor said her blood pressure was down into the normal range again, but she didn’t believe him. What good were doctors, anyway? Look what they were doing to her Johnny, cutting him up like butcher’s meat, three operations already, he looked like a monster with stitches all over his arms and legs and neck, and he still couldn’t get around without one of those walkers, like old Mrs.