“Grady changed my life,” Miranda said. Her voice broke, but she composed herself and continued. “He gave me the gift of joy and spontaneity. He introduced me to my friends. He showed me how exciting and magical the world could be. I will . . . always . . . miss him.” She was sobbing now, and sat down.
This was Miranda the girlfriend? The “phase”? The cover-up? Whatever she had been, she certainly seemed to love him. They all seemed to have loved him. It had obviously not been enough.
Another friend of Grady’s was eulogizing now. Olivia looked across the aisle at the group of close-knit mourners. There was a young man sitting all alone, in the last row. He was rather slight and frail, dressed more formally than the others, and nobody seemed to know him. He was watching and listening with a sad intensity, but he also looked as if he were ready to break and run away if he had to. In a way he looked as if he had wandered into the wrong funeral. She wondered who he was.
The friend who had been speaking went back to his seat. The soft music began again. The funeral was over. They all left the chapel and stood for a while in the hall outside, murmuring to each other.
“We’re going to Taylor’s house,” Aunt Myra said. “Does everybody have the directions?”
“Oh,” Big Earl said to Olivia, to anyone, “it’s so terrible to lose a son. It’s unnatural. A mother shouldn’t have to outlive her child.”
You should have thought of that when you were trying to kill him, Olivia thought. She noticed that Taylor kept herself as far away from her mother as possible, and that no one could bring themselves to offer Earlene condolences. She stood there, the puffy-eyed pariah, waiting for someone to tell her how tragic she was, but no one did, and finally she left.
The young man whom no one knew went over to Taylor. She didn’t seem to know him either. “Taylor?” he said.
“Yes?”
“Can I speak to you?”
Tim, who had not left Taylor’s side, began to translate. The young man led them over to the side, where no one could hear him, and very quietly began to talk.
* * *
They all went to Taylor’s house, which was large and open, with a view of trees and brush. The dining table was covered with platters of food for the mourners, and there was a well-stocked bar. Earlene was drinking scotch. Again, Grady’s friends kept to themselves, and the family to themselves, since the two worlds had never met and now it was too late because their link was gone; but from time to time they glanced at each other with polite sympathy.
It was strange to see Taylor without Grady, and harder to imagine her living the rest of her life without him. She seemed terribly lost and vulnerable. She kept going up to Miranda and hugging her, and saying, “We have to stay in touch. We both loved him. I don’t want to lose you.” She was so drugged from the tranquilizers and grief that she was mumbling.
How could Grady have deserted Taylor? All their lives they had taken care of each other whenever they could. It was hard to imagine two siblings any closer. They had protected each other, and they had both needed special protecting. Perhaps, at the end, even Taylor couldn’t give him enough.
Olivia went to the buffet and picked at some coleslaw, and then she went to sit with Jenny and Melissa. On the way she passed Paul and Bill, who were, she was not surprised to notice, talking about business.
“Why do you think he did it?” Jenny asked her.
“I don’t know.”
“Sometimes I worry that depression runs in our family,” Jenny said. “We don’t know why Stan killed himself either.”
“Suicide is most common among fathers and sons,” Melissa said. “The first one breaks the taboo.”
“How do you know that?”
“I read it.”
“My mother told me that Earlene went to visit Grady the week before he died,” Jenny said. “You know he would never let her stay with him, but Taylor was sick and couldn’t deal with having Earlene over, and Earlene wouldn’t postpone her visit, so he agreed to have her. I wonder if she upset him.”
“Big Earl always upset him,” Olivia said.
“But more, I mean.”
“I don’t know.”
“Too many funerals,” Jenny said. “I hope the next time we meet it’s when everybody’s happy.”
“Sam’s bar mitzvah in the spring,” Melissa said. “You must be very busy.”
“Oh, yes. You’re all coming, I hope.”
“Of course.”
“Kenny told me he’s getting married again,” Olivia announced.
The two cousins turned in delight to look across the room at Kenny. “No! To who?”
“Someone named Pam. She’s his age.”
“Do you think he’ll invite us to the wedding?”
“I hope so.”
Jenny looked at her watch. “Paul!” she said. “We have to start moving along.”
“We do too,” Melissa said.
The family was leaving to catch their planes. They were kissing and hugging each other, saying how it was a shame they hadn’t had more time to talk, but next time it would be better. “How are you?” they asked, almost in the same breath as “Goodbye,” and they all answered “Fine,” because there wasn’t time to be anything but fine, and if they weren’t fine this wasn’t the time or place to start complaining about it. It was a funeral a continent away from home, in the middle of the week, and they all had families and jobs and lives to attend to.
“Thank you for coming,” Taylor said politely.
When they left, most of Grady’s friends were still there to console her, and of course there was Tim, to comfort her and run interference between her and Earlene. On the way to the airport Olivia remembered that the young man who had gone over to talk privately with Taylor after the funeral had not come afterwards to her house with the other friends, but then she forgot about him. He probably wasn’t anybody she needed to know about anyway.
11
R
OGER HAD FIGURED
out a way to keep Olivia from giving him a fiftieth birthday party. His birthday wasn’t until summer, but she kept saying it would be impossible to make plans if he left everything to the last minute, and finally he figured out what he really wanted. He wanted to go to Paris again, just the two of them, for five days, stay at the Plaza Athénée and fly back on the Concorde. He wanted to drink champagne and dine at expensive restaurants and tell himself that he wasn’t older, just richer.
When he told her, she loved the idea. She said it was glamorous and romantic, and insisted on paying for the whole thing. After all, she had been planning to pay for the party he wasn’t having.
“I’m richer, too,” she said. And she was. Their practice was going as well as they had hoped it would when they pooled everything they had to buy the house, set up the clinic and merge their medical destinies.
He told himself he had everything he needed for a happy life—success in a career he cared about, comfort, health, decent looks, a loving life companion, a sexy girlfriend, a wonderful dog and just the right amount of illicit excitement to keep him virile. Why, then, did he have disturbing dreams that made him awaken tired in the morning, unable to remember them but knowing they had been there to disturb his sleep?
He remembered only one of these dreams. He was at a Mardi Gras, or some costume party like that, and everyone was wearing masks. He had been enjoying himself, dancing to loud music among a swirling crowd. A woman he knew was Olivia came to claim him as her partner, and then just as they were smiling at one another she pulled off her mask, and it was not Olivia at all but Wendy. Somehow he felt . . . abandoned. Where was Olivia? How could Wendy have fooled him so completely with just a party mask?
But didn’t they always pretend she did? Wasn’t that the point? His throat felt icy-cold, and then he woke up and Olivia told him he had been moaning in his sleep again. He wondered what the dream meant. He hoped it wasn’t a prophecy of bad things to come. He didn’t want to have to lose either of them.
And then one afternoon he was walking past one of the examining rooms, where Olivia was talking to a new client who had brought her little brown Abyssinian cat, and he realized in horror that the woman was Wendy.
Olivia looked up and her face glowed with pleasure the way it always did when she saw him, and Wendy gazed at him as if he were a total stranger. Gregory, however, reacted with his usual hostility—when the little bastard saw him he arched his back and twitched his tail. Roger gave Olivia a little wave hello and backed away as fast as he could.
His heart was pounding. What was Wendy up to, anyway? She had her own vet, and had always purported to like him. If Wendy had wanted to act out an office sex fantasy she would have made the appointment with him, not Olivia. No, this was obviously a visit to check out her rival, and when Roger thought of Wendy intruding on his territory—his own home was upstairs!—he wanted to pull her bodily out the front door. He was not intrigued or aroused; he was nervous and angry.
When Wendy went up front to pay her bill he hid in the back so she wouldn’t get it into her head to approach him. He thought that when Olivia had been in California for Grady’s funeral it would have been exciting to have sex with Wendy in the operating room, for example, but he had been too busy doing double duty and hadn’t thought of it, and now with Olivia in the building it was unthinkable. There was a fine line between fantasy and true folly, and he hoped Wendy was still aware of what it was.
He waited until all the patients were gone, and then when Olivia went upstairs he pretended he had some paperwork to finish and called Wendy.
“What were you doing here?” he demanded.
“Don’t you even say hello?”
“Hello. Why were you here?”
To his surprise she burst into tears.
“What is it?” he asked, concerned.
“You’ve never yelled at me before,” Wendy said. “I hate it.”
“But you never did anything like this.”
“What did I do?”
“You went to see Olivia.”
“I wanted to see what she was like.”
“Why?”
“
Why?
” She sounded incredulous. “Don’t you think I was curious?”
“But she has nothing to do with you.”
“Try telling her that.”
“What did you two talk about?” he demanded, thinking that perhaps he had made a mistake, that Wendy wasn’t perfect after all, that she might even be dangerous.
“My cat. What did you think?”
“I didn’t know.”
“Don’t you think I have feelings?” Wendy asked.
“You can’t come to my office and check out my wife.”
“She’s not your wife.”
“She might as well be. You could have caused serious trouble.”
“And I suppose nothing you and I ever did before was risky.”
“It isn’t the same,” Roger said.
She had stopped crying. “This is exciting and you know it,” Wendy said.
Was it exciting? Why wasn’t it? “If Olivia finds out about us, I’ll have to stop seeing you,” Roger said.
“Well, that makes me feel like I’m nothing.”
“You know what I mean. She’ll insist on it. She can’t find out.”
“She won’t.”
“She’d better not.” Was this exciting? Was he exaggerating the danger of Olivia finding out? After all, Wendy hadn’t done anything.
“I’m not expendable, you know,” Wendy said.
“I just meant . . .”
“I’m a human being. I don’t think you want to know me at all.”
“I can’t stay on the phone to discuss this now,” Roger said. “She could pick it up at any moment.”
“Does she make a habit of listening to your calls?”
“Accidentally. She could.”
“What about me?” Wendy said. “You’re supposed to protect me. Not only her. You make me feel like shit. You’re just like all the rest of them.”
“I’m not.”
“You are,” she said, and burst into tears again and hung up on him.
He pounded the desk and hurt his hand. He sat there inspecting it, thinking how it was his instrument, and was relieved that it was unharmed. He shouldn’t have been so unkind to her. She had made up so many different lives and identities for him that he realized he had lost sight of who the real Wendy was—if he had ever known. Their understanding had always been that he would be kind to her, take care of her. She was like a needy child. He had never heard her cry before. Suddenly he felt like a villain. Maybe he should call her back and make up with her.
He stared at the phone. Had he actually made her feel worthless? What kind of person did that make him? She should never have come here to meet Olivia, not really because it was so risky, but because seeing the two of them together was more than he could handle. Although he had told Wendy he would have to stop seeing her if Olivia found out, he had no idea what he would do. He didn’t even want to have to think about it.
He dialed Wendy’s number. It rang four times and then her recording began to play. “You have almost reached Wendy Wilton. If you leave a message after the beep, maybe you will.”
Beep. “Wendy?” Roger said. “Are you screening? It’s me. Pick up the phone.”
Nothing.
“Wendy?” Maybe she had gone out, stormed out, rather, furious at him. Or maybe she had left the apartment because she knew he would call her back and she wanted to punish him. “Wendy, I’m sorry,” he said into the machine.
“Roger,” she said at last. Her voice sounded weak and slurred.
“Are you all right?”
“No.”
“What is it?” he asked, alarmed.
“I took . . . pills.”
“How many? What kind?”
“A lot.”
“Wendy, what did you take?”
“We had . . . fun, didn’t we,” she said. Her voice trailed off.
It hadn’t been that long. She must have swallowed a whole bottle to sound this bad. “Wendy,” he said urgently, “stay awake!”
He heard her labored breathing, and then she dropped the receiver into the cradle with such dazed difficulty that he heard it rattling and clicking before it finally fell home.
God! He dialed Olivia upstairs on their private line. “Honey, I’m going to go out for a little bit, to get some air.”
“What do you want to do about dinner?” she asked. “Should I just make something?”
“Sure. That’s fine.”
“Pasta?”
My mistress is dying and we’re talking about what to eat for dinner, he thought. “Great,” he said. He threw on his coat and rushed out into the street and found a cab, cursing the traffic, rubbing Wendy’s keys in his pocket like a talisman. He remembered when she had first offered them to him and he had refused them, and finally had agreed. Now he was so lucky that he had them.
“Dr. Hawkwood,” Wendy’s doorman greeted him pleasantly. Roger nodded as pleasantly, forced a smile, and went upstairs.
He let himself into the apartment. It was dimly lit. He waited for the hated Gregory to spring out at him, but the cat was nowhere to be seen. Wendy was in the bedroom, lying on the floor, on her thick, white carpet, dressed in a white satin bathrobe, her silken hair spread out around her pale face. There was an empty bottle beside her that had held sleeping pills. It looked like a tableau of tragic death.
He rushed to her and saw that she was breathing. He knelt to take her pulse. Her pulse was still strong and even. But how could he be sure how many pills had been in the bottle when she had taken them, and how she would be an hour from now? When he tried to pick her up her body was dead weight.
He was terrified, sweating. Maybe he should take her into the bathroom and make her throw up. But even if he did, he was still afraid to leave her. The intelligent thing would be to call the nearest hospital and admit her into Emergency, but if he did that he would have to explain why the hell he was here in the first place. What could he say, that she had called his office because it was the last place she had been before she went home and got suicidally depressed? That he had answered the phone? Bribe the doorman to pretend he had never seen him before? Pretend he didn’t have her keys and that the doorman had let him, despite the fact that he was a total stranger, into her apartment because she claimed she was not feeling well? He supposed it would work—it had to. He didn’t know what else to do.
If he could only rouse her enough to tell him what she had swallowed. “Wake up!” he said, and shook her. Nothing. He picked her up and started walking her around the room like a large rag doll, trying to bring her back, even though it was wasting precious time. She leaned on him heavily, unconscious, but her heartbeat was still strong and even. If only he knew that she could sleep it off, that he wasn’t going to let her die . . . He could hardly think rationally.
He put her down. He would have to call 911. They took forever to come; maybe he should just carry her to a cab and . . . No, that would be worse.
He picked up the receiver and dialed.
The number was busy, of course, just when he needed help. He dialed again, and it rang through. “Hello,” Roger said. “I want to report an overdose of sleeping pills.”
Behind him, Wendy moaned.
He turned around, and saw that she was moving. “Wait a minute,” he said into the phone, and went to look at her.
She was moving, just a little, but just enough so he knew none of this was what he had originally thought. “Never mind,” he said to the operator, and hung up.
He knew her so well, but she had caught him off guard and had actually fooled him. She might have taken one sleeping pill, at the most two, but probably none. He began to tremble with relief, and then with rage.
She had never gone this far.
He tried to figure out what she wanted. It was obvious that she wanted him to save her. But he was in no mood to enter this ill-timed fantasy, and it did not arouse him at all. He cradled her in his arms and kissed her face and her hair and wished like hell she would decide it was appropriate to come back to life again so he could rush home before Olivia got suspicious.
“Darling,” he murmured. “Live, please live. I’m sorry. I love you.” Crazy bitch, he thought.
Wendy’s eyelids fluttered open. She looked at him and sighed. “You saved me,” she said softly.
“Yes.”
She sat up and put her arms around his neck. “Thank you.”
He moved away from her embrace. “Suicide is out of bounds,” he said. “It’s serious. Olivia’s cousin just killed himself. This hits too close to home.”
“But still you were here for me.”
“It doesn’t do it, if that’s what you have in your head. The last thing on my mind right now is sex.”
“That’s all right.”
Suddenly the softness of her flesh was frightening, almost alien. “Then what was this all about?” he asked.
“You don’t get it, do you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“I just wanted something for myself,” Wendy said. “Today all you cared about was you. So this was just for me.”
“For you.”
“Yes. For me. For
me!
You can go home now if you like. I have to let poor Gregory out of the kitchen and then I’m going to have a nice bath and go to sleep.” She sounded so calm, the victor.
“I’ll call you,” he said lamely, backing out.
Did he want to call her? Did he even want to speak to her again?
“And when you do, I’ll be there,” she said, and smiled.
She’s crazy, he thought. She was too reckless, too selfish. She had endangered his entire happiness because of her need to be reassured. He had hurt her, and so she had used him. It was not in the rules of their game.
But on the way home in the cab he wanted her anyway.