To Russ and Tammy Card,
dear friends and beloved family,
for the faithfulness that carries you
along roads rough and smooth
For the first time in many years, I actually wrote an entire novel at home. Thus every page was wrung from the patience of my family. Kristine and Emily read every chapter as the first draft emerged from the printer, and Geoff was not far behind; the fax lines hummed as Kathy Kidd in remotest Sterling, Virginia, received and read each night's work the morning after. To all four of you, thanks for your responses, which helped me know what I had written and how it needed to be improved.
Later, when the first draft was completed, I had great help from other advance readers, most notably my friend David Fox and my wise editor at Harper, Eamon Dolan; they also have my gratitude. Any flaws still remaining are probably due to my stubborn disregard of good advice.
My thanks to Kathleen Bellamy and Scott Alien for good work under all circumstances. Thanks also to Clark and Kathy Kidd, for giving me DC and northern Virginia.
And last of all my thanks to Charlie Ben and Zina, for reminding me always of the joyful striving of childhood.
CONTENTS
1. Harvest
2. Groceries
4. Prenuptial Agreement/p>
5. Bliss
8. Footprints
9. Missing
10. Memories
11. Reunion
12. Believer
13. Salad
14. Old Lady Tyler
15. Snow
16. The User
17. Hair
18. The Dragon
19. Into the Grave
Quentin Fears never told his parents the last thing his sister Lizzy said to him before they pulled the plug on her and let her die.
For three days after the traffic accident, Lizzy lay in a coma, her body hosed, piped, pumped, probed, measured, medicated and fed so the doctors could keep her organs in good condition for transplant, while Mom and Dad struggled with the question of whether she was really dead.
Not that they had any doubts. The doctors showed them the flat lines of Lizzy's brainwaves. The doctors reverently assured the Fearses that if there were the tiniest spark of a hope that Lizzy was actually alive inside that bandaged head, they would cling to that hope and do all in their power to revive her. But there was hope only for the people whose lives might be saved by Lizzy's organs, and then only if they could harvest them before they deteriorated. Mom and Dad nodded, tears streaming down their faces, and believed.
But eleven-year-old Quentin did not believe the doctors. He could see that Lizzy was alive. He could see how the huge bruise reached out from under the bandages, blackening Lizzy's eyes; he watched the bruise change over the three days of the coma, and he knew she was alive. Dead people's bruises didn't change like that. And Lizzy's hands were warm and flexible. Dead people had cold, stiff hands. The machines that measured brainwaves weren't infallible. And who was to say there wasn't something deeper than the electrical activity of the brain?
"Quen understands about brain death," said Dad to one of the doctors late on the first day of her coma. He spoke softly, perhaps thinking Quentin was asleep. "You don't have to talk down to him."
The doctor murmured something even softer. Maybe it began as an apology, but it ended more as a question, a doubt, a demand.
Whatever it was the doctor said, Dad answered, "He and Lizzy were very close."
Quentin murmured his correction: "We are close."
It was just a word. A slip of the tongue. Only it meant that Dad had given up. She was already dead in his mind.
The men moved out into the corridor to continue their conversation. That happened more and more in the hours and days that followed. Quentin knew they were out there plotting how to get him out of the way. He knew that everything any grown-up said to him was bent to that purpose. Grandpa and Grammy Fears came to see him, and then Nanny Say, Mom's mom, but all conversations seemed to come to the same end. "Come on home, dear, and let Lizzy rest."
"Let them murder her, you mean."
And then they'd burst into tears and leave the room and Dad and Mom would come in and there'd be another fight in which Quentin would look them in the eye and say—not screaming, because Lizzy had told him years ago that screaming just made adults think of you as a child and then you'd never get any respect—he would look them in the eye and say whatever would stop them, whatever would make them leave the room with Lizzy still alive on the bed and Quentin still standing guard beside her.
"If you drug me, if you drag me out of here, if you murder her in my sleep, I will hate you for it for the rest of my life. I will never, never, never, never, never..."
"We get the idea," said Dad, his voice like ice.
"Never, never, never, never, never..."
Mom pleaded with him. "Please don't say it, Quen."
"Never forgive you."
This last time the scene played out, on the third day of the coma, Mom rushed crying from the room, out to the corridor where her own mother was already in tears from what Quentin had said to her. Dad was left alone with him in Lizzy's room.
"This isn't about Lizzy anymore," said Dad. "This is about you getting your own way. Well, you're not going to get your own way on this, Quentin Fears, because there's no one on God's green earth who has the power to give it to you. She's dead. You're alive. Your mother and I are alive. We'd like to be able to grieve for our little girl. We'd like to be able to think of her the way she was, not tubed up like this. And while we're at it, we'd like our son back. Lizzy meant a lot to you. Maybe it feels like she meant everything to you and if you let go of her there'll be nothing left. But there is something left. There's your life. And Lizzy wouldn't have wanted you to—"
"Don't tell me what Lizzy would have wanted," said Quentin. "She wanted to be alive, that's what she wanted."
"Do you think your mother and I don't want that too?" Dad's voice barely made a sound and his eyes were wet.
"Everybody wants her dead except for me."
Quentin could see that it took all of Dad's self-control not to hit him, not to rage back at him. Instead Dad left the room, letting the door slam shut behind him. And Quentin was alone with Lizzy.
He wept into her hand, feeling the warmth of it despite the needle dripping some fluid into a vein, despite the tape that held the needle on, despite the coldness of the metal tube of the bedrail against his forehead. "Oh, God," said Quentin. "Oh, God."
He never said that, not the way the other kids did. Oh God when the other team gets a home run. Oh God when somebody says something really stupid. Jesus H. Christ when you bump your head. Quentin wasn't raised that way. His parents never swore, never said God or Jesus except when they were talking religion. And so when Quentin's own mouth formed the words, it couldn't be that he was swearing like his friends. It had to be a prayer. But what was he praying for? Oh God, let her live? Could he even believe in that possibility? Like the Sunday school story, Jesus saying to Jairus, "She isn't dead, the little girl is only sleeping"? Even in the story they laughed him to scorn.
Quentin wasn't Jesus and he knew he wasn't praying for her to rise from the dead. Well, maybe he was but that would be a stupid prayer because it wasn't going to happen. What then? What was he praying for? Understanding? Understanding of what? Quentin understood everything. Mom and Dad had given up, the doctors had given up, everybody but him. Because they all "understood." Well, Quentin didn't want to understand.
Quentin wanted to die. Not die too because he wasn't going to think of Lizzy dying or especially of her already being dead. No, he wanted to die instead. A swap, a trade. Oh God, let me die instead. Put me on this bed and let her go On home with Mom and Dad. Let it be me they give up on. Let it be my plug they pull. Not Lizzy's.
Then like a dream he saw her, remembered her alive. Not the way she looked only a few days ago, fifteen years old, the Saturday morning her friend Kate took her joyriding even though neither of them had a license and Kate spun the car sideways into a tree and a branch came through the open passenger window like the finger of God and poked twenty inches of bark and leaves right through Lizzy's head and Kate sat there completely unharmed except for Lizzy's blood and brains dripping from the leaves onto her shoulder. Quentin didn't see Lizzy with dresses and boys who wanted to take her out and a makeup kit on her side of the bathroom sink. What Quentin saw in his dream of her was the old Lizzy, his best friend Lizzy whose body was as lean as a boy's, Lizzy who was really his brother and his sister, his teacher and his confidante. Lizzy who always understood everything and guided him past the really dumb mistakes of life and made him feel like everything was safe, if you were just smart and careful enough. Lizzy on a skateboard, teaching him how to walk it up the steps onto the porch, "Only don't let Mom see you or she'll have a conniption because she thinks every little thing we do is going to get us killed."
Well it can get you killed, Lizzy. You didn't know everything. You didn't know every damn thing, did you! You didn't know you had to watch out for a twig reaching into the open window of your car and punching a hole in your brain. You stupid! You stupid stupid...
"Mellow out," Lizzy said to him.
He didn't open his eyes. He didn't want to know whether it was Lizzy speaking through those lips, out from under that heavy bandage, or merely Lizzy speaking in the dream.
"I wasn't stupid, it was just the way things happen sometimes. Sometimes there's a twig and there's a car and they're going to intersect and if there's a head in the way, well ain't that too bad."
"Kate shouldn't have been driving without her license."
"Well, aren't you the genius, you think I haven't figured that out by now? What do you imagine I'm doing, lying here in this bed, except going over and over all the moments when I could have said no to Kate? So let me tell you right now, don't you dare blame her, because I could have said no, and she wouldn't have done it. We went joyriding because I wanted to as much as she did and you can bet she feels lousy enough so don't you ever throw it up in her face, do you understand me, you tin-headed quintuplet?"
Quentin didn't want her to tell him off right now. He was in the middle of a war trying to save her life and the last thing he was worried about was Kate. "I'm never going to see her again anyway."
"Well, you should, because if you don't, she's going to think you blame her."
"I don't care what she thinks, Lizzy! All I want is you back, don't you get that?"
"Hey, Tin, there's no way. I'm brain dead. The lights are out. The body's empty. I'm gone. Toast. Wasted."
He didn't want to hear this. "You... are... alive."
"Yeah, well, right, and it's a lot of fun."
"They're trying to kill you, Lizzy. Mom and Dad, just like the doctors. Grammy and Grandpa and Nanny Say, too. They want to unhook you from everything and then cut out your kidneys and your eyes and your heart and your lungs."
"My chitlins, you mean."
"Shut up!"
"My giblets."
"Shut up!" Didn't she know that this wasn't a joke? This was life and death going on here and she was still joking like it didn't matter.
"It does matter," she said. "I'm just trying to cheer you up. Just trying to show you I'm not really gone."
"Well don't tell me, tell them. If I try to tell them you talked to me, they'll put me in the loony bin."
"They're coming to take me away, ha ha, hee hee, ho ho—"
"Stop it!"
"Tin, I'm here, not there, not in that body. Here."
But he wouldn't look up. Didn't want to see whatever she wanted him to see.
"All right, be that way. Stubbornest kid ever spawned of man and woman. You're driving Mom and Dad crazy, you dig, you dig, you dig?"
He did the next step in the ritual. "I dig, I dig, I dig."
"Well, well, well," she said, and giggled.
"They're trying to kill you."
"My body's no good to me anymore, Tin. You know that. And even when it's gone and buried or whatever, I'll still be here."
"Yeah, right, like you're going to come talk to me every day."
"Is that what this is about, then, Tin? What you want? I'm supposed to stay around so you can cuddle me like a stuffed animal or something?"
"Mom and Dad should have been the ones trying to save you!" That was the crux of it, wasn't it? Mom and Dad shouldn't have believed the doctors so easily. Too easily.
"Tin, listen to me. Sometimes your Mom and Dad are the only ones who know when it's time for you to die."
"That's the sickest lousiest most evil thing I ever heard anybody say! Parents don't ever want their children to die!"
"They didn't put the tree there. They didn't put the car there. They didn't put me in the car. They didn't put me in this bed. I did all that myself, Tin, or chance did, or fate or maybe God, he hasn't said. The only choice I left for them was whether my death was going to be completely meaningless or not. Give them a break."
"I'll never forgive them."
"Then I'll never forgive you."
"For what!"
"For keeping me tied down like this, Tin."
He couldn't help it then. He opened his eyes. And she wasn't there. Nobody was there except that still body lying on the bed, breathing into and out of a mask. Her voice was silent.
Quentin got up on rubbery legs and walked to the door. Was it still trembling from his father slamming it? He pulled it open and stepped outside. They were all there, looking at him in surprise: Dad, Mom, Grammy and Grandpa, Nanny Say, and the three main doctors. One of the doctors was holding a hypodermic syringe. Quentin knew what it was for—to tranquilize him so they could get him out of the room. Well, too late. Lizzy had sent him out of the room herself.
"Go ahead and kill her now," said Quentin. Then he turned his back on them and walked down the corridor toward the elevators.
Father came out to the car and talked to him before they harvested Lizzy's organs. In that conversation Quentin broke down and cried and said he was sorry and he knew Mom and Dad weren't killing Lizzy, that she was already dead, and they could go ahead with the organ-taking and he took back what he said about never forgiving them and could he please just wait in the car and not have to talk to grandparents or any of those doctors or nurses, who would be unable to keep the triumph out of their voices or their faces and he couldn't bear it.
"Nobody feels any triumph over this," said Dad.
"No," said Quentin, still trying to say whatever it was Dad needed to hear. "Just relief."
Dad took this in. "Yeah, I guess so, Quen. Relief." Then Dad leaned over and put his arm around him and kissed his head. "I love you, son. I love you for standing by your sister so long. And I love you for stepping away from her in time."
Quentin stayed alone in the car until after his sister's body died. And he never told them that Lizzy had come and talked to him. At first because he was too angry to tell them something so private. And then because he knew they'd put him in therapy to try to get him to understand that it was just a hallucination born of his grief and fear and stress and fatigue. And finally he never said anything because even without therapy he pretty much came to believe that it was, in fact, a hallucination born of grief, fear, stress, and fatigue.
But it was not a hallucination. And deep inside himself, in a place he didn't often go, where he kept the things he didn't like to think about but dared not forget, he knew that Lizzy was still alive somewhere, and somehow she was watching what he did, or at least looking in on him from time to time.
How did he grieve?
He read her library—she always called it that, four shelves on cinderblocks, packed with paperbacks she had bought or been given by friends. He picked up the most-thumbed, most-bent, most-brokenback books and read them first. Lord of the Rings, I Sing the Body Electric, Chronicles of Narnia, Fountainhead, The Crystal Cave, Pride and Prejudice, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Stranger in a Strange Land, Gone with the Wind, Childhood's End, Breakfast of Champions, Quentin read them all, and yet when he thought back he remembered it differently, remembered hearing them all read aloud to him in Lizzy's voice. Lizzy reading the incantatory cadences of Bradbury, the delicate politeness of Austen; Lizzy telling of the ring slipping accidentally onto Frodo's finger as he fell from a table in Bree; Lizzy reading out the measurements of every male character in Breakfast of Champions and howling with laughter when the narrator declared his own. Lizzy enchanted with Merlin's magic, Lizzy grokking, Lizzy sobbing as she read of a Nazi soldier dashing out a Jewish baby's brains against a wall, Lizzy caught up in the tragic awe of the human children being carried off by the pied piper devil aliens, Lizzy mercilessly ambitious as she built buildings no one else would dare to build or married Frank Kennedy for his money even though he was engaged to her sister. All the voices of all the books were hers. It was the only time Quentin could hear her speaking to him. He read them all and then started over, read each one again and, again, started over.
His parents gave him other books for Christmas, his birthday, as a reward for good grades (Lizzy always had good grades, so Quentin would too). Finally, after Quentin was well started on his fourth passage through those shelves, he came home from school one day and the books were gone.
The shelves were gone. Lizzy's room was gone. Just an empty shell—walls, ceiling, carpet. Only the thumbtack holes in the walls and the red spot in the carpet where she spilled fingernail polish during her one and only attempt at self-decoration remained to prove that she had lived there. Cleaned-out, swept, vacuumed, the room was like her death all over again. For Quentin, perhaps it was really her death for the first time. The silencing of her voice.
He walked into the kitchen where Mom and Dad were sitting at the table. Waiting. They knew what they had done, they knew what it would mean, they were waiting to deal with him together. Quentin walked into the kitchen and got a drink of water and drank it all down and then poured another and emptied it onto the floor.
"Quentin," said Dad, "There's no need to..."
Quentin opened the refrigerator and began pulling things out and heaving them back onto the floor behind him. Milk cartons, egg cartons, leftovers, half-empty bottles. His father's arms caught him from behind, gathered him into an embrace. Quentin writhed his way free and ran for the back door leading out into the yard. Dad started to follow.
"Let him express his anger," said Mom. "I can clean this up."
Quentin ran to the flower garden and kicked the tops off the tulips and then began to pull them up, pull up every plant. The hard root-thorns of the roses carved at his palms but he got three of them out before Dad and Mom both came out of the house and struggled to hold him. He kicked and flailed with his arms, not caring how they cried out in pain at the blows that landed, until finally he lay facedown in the grass, his arms held behind him, the weight of his father's body on him. Mom was weeping frantically, Dad was panting with the exertion.
"You've got no right to destroy things like this," Dad began.
You've got no right to kill Lizzy.
"It's time for us to move on and live. Including you, Quentin. We asked you not to swallow yourself up in Lizzy's life. We hinted, we begged, we ordered. You don't have any friends, you don't do anything but sit in that room and read the same books over and over again."
Her books. Her voice reading to me.
"And it's going to stop. We can't let you live in this... haze, it's not right, it's going to stop—"
At that moment, when he said the word stop, Dad's voice changed, just a little; an undercurrent of uncontrollable fury rose to the surface and, as had happened only a few times in Quentin's life, he was actually afraid of his father, of what this rage might do now that it was in control.
And, just like those other times, Mom immediately picked up on the change in Dad and suddenly her tears stopped and she began to talk calmly, rationally. Soothingly. "We've already lost one child, Quen. Don't make us lose the other."
Immediately the rage receded and Dad's voice also calmed. "I don't know what the garden has to do with this anyway. Or the fridge."
Now Mom became downright intellectual about it. "They're our things, dear. We took away his world, so he's going to take away ours. Metaphorically speaking."
"Well, whatever the official psychological terms might be, it's pretty damn childish."
"Yes, and he's a child."
The crisis was over. The well-worn script had been acted out. Mom weeps; Dad goes into protector mode; his rage frightens her and she begins to talk like a college graduate, which she was and Dad wasn't; and so Dad backs off and hands the authority back to her. Conciliation and analysis are the order of the day. Quentin couldn't have explained the pattern in words, but he knew the flow of it, knew that there would be no serious punishment. Instead Mom and Dad would be careful with him and with each other for several days, tiptoeing through all conversations, sidestepping all conflicts, both of them vaguely ashamed of themselves and afraid of each other and unsure why. In the electric space between them, Quentin would be left alone. He didn't remember learning this pattern. It had always existed, and both he and Lizzy had used it for years, the one scrap of power that children had; but used it rarely, because it was too frightening to realize that Mom and Dad could be controlled, or at least gotten around. Sometimes it was better not to get your own way than to face Mom's and Dad's frailty.
"If I let you up, Quen," said Dad, "will you stop this nonsense and go to your room?"
Quentin nodded. The song the junior high choir was learning ran through his mind. Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me. Dum, dum, ta-dum, ta-dum.
Dad let go of his arms and rolled off him. Quentin sprang to his feet and walked to the house, to his room. As he passed the open door to Lizzy's room he closed it. He closed the door to his own room, too, and lay down on his bed and faced the wall.
After a while Mom knocked on the door. "Quen, will you be wanting some supper?"
He didn't answer.
"Quen, you have to eat."
He didn't answer.
"Quen, do you really intend to never talk to me again?"
He didn't answer and she went away.
Apparently they decided not to force the issue. He ate nothing that night, but the next morning he got up and had breakfast with Mom before he went to school. He talked to her. Normal stuff. No mention of the events of the day before. It never came up again. The kitchen smelled for a couple of days from the one pickle jar that broke, and then it didn't anymore. Father replaced the dug-up plants and only one of the roses died from the trauma. They turned Lizzy's old room into a combination sewing room and household office. The only hint of the strain between them that remained was that Quentin simply would not go into the room, would not speak to anyone who was in the room, and whenever the door to Lizzy's room was open he would close it as he passed, no matter who was inside, no matter if they asked him not to. Eventually his parents simply gave in and kept it closed all the time, whether they were in there or not; and if they wanted to talk to him, they got up and left the room and closed the door behind them. It was a small accommodation, really, considering. His one tiny act of permanent revenge for their having stolen Lizzy's voice from him.
Slowly, over the months and years, one by one Quentin found copies of the exact paperback edition of each of those books Lizzy had owned. He bought them and kept them in boxes in his closet, until he had replaced them all. If his parents knew about it, they said nothing. After all, his grades were high, he wasn't getting into drugs or booze or smoking like the bad kids at junior high and high school. The psychologist that they talked to told them that, while it would be nice if he could speak with Quentin and make sure, nevertheless it seemed that the boy had dealt with the loss of his sister rather well. Considering.
Eventually all the people who had gotten parts of Lizzy's body died. Eventually everybody dies. Quentin became quite philosophical about it. Everybody dies. What matters is what you do between now and when it happens to you. It was especially important to Quentin, because he was living for two.
Junior high, high school. Quentin's days were full and then were forgotten, or at least not much thought about. There were friends. There was laughter. The wild kids held no attraction for him; the rich kids wouldn't have him because he wouldn't suck up; so he drifted in among the smart kids, the play-by-the-rules kids. Quentin soon became the witty one in his circle, the one who didn't say much but always had the deft put-down, the bon mot, the new catchphrase. Perhaps it was all the dialogue stored up inside him from Lizzy's books. He became both desirable and dangerous to have as a friend. No matter how close you thought you were to him, no matter how often you had laughed with him, he could still turn around and sting you, and you had to smile and take it. So he had friends, yes, but they were always held one barb away.
He finished high school with awards in Spanish and math in the final assembly of his senior year. Grades that brought him just under salutatorian. He was passed over in the official "most likely to" balloting, but in the unofficial ballot in homeroom class he was voted "most likely to be the guy your mom wishes you were dating" and "most likely to own the company you end up working for when your first-choice career falls through." Liked, even admired a little by his fellow students, though never fully trusted. They knew without knowing it that he didn't belong to them.
Funny, though, their voting him the guy that moms wanted their daughters to date. Because he didn't really date anybody. He didn't even do the tuxedo proms, except the preference dances, when he was asked each year by a sweet and only vaguely unattractive intellectual girl. He said yes each time and rented the tux and bought the corsage and then never asked her out afterward, which probably hurt her feelings but he just wasn't interested in pursuing anything. Four dates in four years. Not much of a record. If his parents worried they didn't say anything.
He certainly didn't worry. He wasn't blind—he knew which girls were attractive. He had his share of interesting dreams and pleasant fantasies. But when it came to thinking of maybe asking a girl out, he'd start watching her a little bit in class or between classes or at lunch or wherever, and pretty soon she'd say something or do something that was... wrong. She didn't measure up. To what, he couldn't really say.
Maybe it was like Lizzy had said when boys started asking her out. "Why waste time with a guy when I know there's no point?" Mom used to say, "But he's a perfectly nice boy, why not go and just see the movie? Eat the pizza." And Lizzy would roll her eyes and say, "Mom, please, are you really saying I should let them spend money on me when I know I'm just leading them on?" and then the two of them would burst out laughing and Quentin would sit there unnoticed at the kitchen table or in the living room or wherever he was and he'd think, What is this thing between women, like men are a joke that women all told each other long ago but men never get it.
Only maybe now he did get it. The joke wasn't men, the joke was people who didn't know what they wanted to give or to get and so kept disappointing and being disappointed. Quentin didn't know what he wanted, but he did know what he didn't want. What he didn't want was any of the girls at school. He had lots of friends who were girls. He liked them. Nice girls. Just not for him.
And not for him were the girls at Berkeley, either, as he majored in Spanish and then math and then history, grinding away and getting good grades so that even with all the changes in major he graduated right on time and hadn't had more than ten dates in all four years of college. The first couple of years Mom and Dad didn't say anything, but by his junior year Mom had begun asking in every phone call and every visit home to Santa Clara, "Have you been meeting any nice girls? Are there any nice girls in any of your classes?" And there was that one excruciating conversation with Dad in the garage helping him mix the paint for the wood trim around the doors and windows, when Dad's weird questions finally coalesced enough for Quentin to blush furiously and reassure him that yes, Quentin liked girls and not boys, he simply hadn't found the right girl yet but he was looking and don't worry, Dad, when I do bring somebody home she'll wear a dress and she'll have two X chromosomes, now can we please just paint the trim?
He graduated with a double major in Spanish and history and promptly got a job back home in Santa Clara with a company that was actually trying to sell computers for people to use at home or in small businesses. He came into the company because a friend from high school got a job there and thought maybe he could be an adviser on a home history program they were developing, but in no time Quentin fell in love with programming and discovered he had a real knack for it. By the end of the year he had sold out his stock in the hardware company and jumped to a software house that was developing a word processor for the new IBM PCs. A year later that company was bought by an even bigger company that made operating systems and programming languages and spreadsheets and word processors and pretty soon he had risen high enough in the hierarchy for them to move him to Washington State where he officially lived on a rented houseboat but actually slept most nights in his office because he was indispensable to several major projects. He had nothing to spend money on, and so he poured it all into buying stock in his own company as it increased a hundredfold in value, and then doubled and doubled and doubled until anybody who had started working for them in the seventies was a millionaire many times over, and Quentin richer than most.
One day in 1987 he realized that he wasn't interested in programming anymore. Yesterday it was still a challenge. Today it wasn't. Nor did he care about business or marketing or even the people he worked with. They had all changed, the job had changed, the company had changed. It wasn't any fun and if he just sold his stock he'd never have to work another day in his life. When you win the lottery, do you go back to sweeping the supermarket aisles? That's all his job had become to him.
He cashed out all but about ten percent of his stock and there he was at age twenty-six with twelve and a half million dollars. Fifty software and hardware companies offered him ludicrously high salaries that no one could ever really earn, and he turned them all down. So there he was with a rented houseboat, no career, and, to put it candidly, no life. It was as if he had been running a long, long race and finally realized that there was nobody else in it with him, he had crossed the finish line years ago and didn't notice it because not a soul was there to cheer for him and clap him on the back and say, "Good run, Quen! Good run!"
Or, come to think of it, maybe they were there, only Quentin himself didn't care what they thought of him and so he sloughed off their praise and their friendship because he was still waiting for the one voice he'd never hear again.
What do you do with 12.5 million bucks? Quentin put most of it into safe stocks and bonds, a nest egg which he never touched except to move from one safe investment to another. In his worst year, the recession of '91, he still made a million in interest, dividends, and capital gains. He paid off his parents' house and bought them a nice car and then couldn't think of anything else to do with his money. Even renting a very nice apartment, he still needed only about fifty thou a year to live on, which included a car of his own (nothing outrageous, just a Nissan Maxima). He traveled a little at first, until he found out that hotels in Cancún and Paris and Hong Kong were pretty much alike. So there he was with a lot of money coming in and it seemed completely pointless just to plow it back into more investments and make more money that he had no particular need for. Besides, after you've churned your own portfolio until even your broker is telling you enough already, what is there to do with the rest of the day, the rest of the week, the month, the year?
Home for Thanksgiving in '92, after Dad had finished railing about the election of Bill Clinton, the conversation took kind of a serious turn. Quentin just sat there staring into the fire and in the silence Mom said, "Quentin, did it all happen too easily for you?"
At once Dad leapt to the defense of capitalism and explained again why it was that Quentin had worked hard and guessed right and the free market had rewarded him, quite properly, with wealth which really wasn't extravagant, not by the standard of Ross Perot or Bill Gates, anyway.
But then Dad ran out of steam and there was a silence again, and some more wordless fire-staring, until again Mom spoke up. "If you don't have any dreams of your own, Quentin, why don't you borrow somebody else's?"
Dad snorted. "Dreams." But of course he had always been the dreamer of the family, and as Quentin thought about it he realized that when he got so extravagantly wealthy he had really been fulfilling his father's dream. A few years' work in a job he enjoyed, and he had snapped that tight wire inside Dad's heart and the old man was happy now, at ease. The system had worked for his son, and that was almost better, in Dad's eyes, than if he had earned all that money himself.
The next Monday, Quentin turned over a few hundred thousand dollars of his portfolio to his father to manage for him, of which his father would keep half as his commission. But that was only the beginning of his response to his mother's remark. There were other people with dreams who needed only a few thousand or a few hundred thousand dollars to have a shot at making them come true. It was something to do with his excess money.
He ran an ad for one week in the San Jose Mercury News: Small investor looking for hardworking partner with good ideas. He was flooded with letters. From among those not written in crayon he chose a few dozen that seemed worth looking into. Quentin ended up forming fourteen partnerships, in which he supplied all the capital and the salary of an accountant who reported to him; Quentin himself remained benignly silent until it was time to either fold a failing business or offer to let a successful partner buy him out. The picture was usually pretty clear within a year. More than half of the businesses did well, and some made serious money. Two of them went public and Quentin's gain on each of them more than repaid his entire investment in all fourteen partnerships.
It had been the best year of his life. He could share in the happiness of the successful partners, and as for the ones who failed, they might be disappointed but they knew that at least they had given it a good shot. And since Quentin covered all the partnerships' debts and losses, they all walked away clean. Nobody lost. Some good things were accomplished.
But why limit his new project to the south bay? Quentin began traveling again, renting an apartment in a metro area, putting an ad in the local paper, sorting through the responses, forming the partnerships. It took a few months to get things under way; then he'd move on, keeping the apartment for another year or two so he'd have a place to stay when he came back for follow-up visits. He didn't quite choose each new destination by closing his eyes and stabbing at a map with a pushpin, but his method wasn't much more scientific—he'd look through the travel section of some bookstore and go wherever a picture intrigued him. There was nothing predictable about it. His stay in Vermont wasn't in beautiful Montpelier, it was in bleak and dirty Burlington; but when he went to Texas he skipped the bustling cities and drove east from Dallas into the lush savannah country until he came to Nacogdoches and thought, for a while, he might have found his home for life.
But a few months later he was on his way again. Durango, Missoula, Kennewick, Seneca. Asheboro, Mandeville, Oakland, the Bronx. There was no shortage of dreamers, no shortage of interesting dreams. Dayton, Concord, Grand Junction, Grand Island. Flagstaff, Johnstown, Boise, Savannah.
Spring of 1995. Herndon, Virginia. The weather was finally warm and Quentin had just placed his ad, not in the Washington Post but in the local shopper. So it would be a few days before it came out and he had time to kill. He went to Worldgate and saw a Wednesday afternoon showing of some movie about the Ebola virus starring Dustin Hoffman as the hero who somehow finds a way to synthesize a serum that can be manufactured so quickly it can cure people with advanced cases of the disease. He came out of the movie wondering why he was so upset. There had always been stupid movies. Why should this one bother him so much?
He stopped at the frozen yogurt shop at Worldgate but the place had been taken over by extraordinarily smelly gourmet coffees, which meant that all the yogurt would be mocha no matter what flavor it was supposed to be. Why did such a minor annoyance make him want to yell at somebody about how you don't put something with a dominant smell into a shop that depends on having a variety of different flavors? It was absurd. It didn't matter. But when he got to his car he slapped the roof so hard his hand stung and for just a moment he felt a little better.
Maybe my life isn't so great after all, he thought as he drove up Elden Street to the Giant food store. It was just before five. The local rush hour wasn't too bad, and the DC commuter wave wouldn't hit for another half hour. Maybe I'm already getting tired of living on borrowed dreams. But if I stop doing this, what will I do next? And how long will the next career last?
Meat pies, apricot nectar, and Teddy Grahams pretty much accounted for his diet these days. He contemplated buying stock in Marie Callendar's, Libby's, or Nabisco, but decided that when it came to food he'd rather be a consumer than an investor. He wondered what the markup must be to allow Giant to accept American Express, or did the food store maybe have some sweetheart deal with Amex so the rakeoff wasn't as steep as it was for everybody else? And then he thought, Is my life so empty that this is the best thing I can think of to think about?
Think of a thing to think about. It became his mantra as he pulled meat pies out of the freezer compartment.
And then a whiny child's voice pierced the nonsense in his mind.
"If you were ever home you'd know that I eat healthy things all the time and all I'm asking for is some real ice cream instead of that fakey stuff."
It was a girl, maybe ten or twelve, blond hair done up in that smooth too-sophisticated way that always made Quentin vaguely sad, as if somebody was letting the kid throw away her childhood.
Only this one was obviously a real harpie. A pouty face, a voice too loud, and the parents all aflutter trying to placate her. "We just want you to be happy, dear," said the mother.
"You told us to help you watch your waistline," said the father.
Could these people hear themselves? They sounded like some movie star's toadies.
"Well I didn't mean ice cream, did I?" said the girl, as if her parents were the stupidest people who had ever lived.
"I don't think there's anything wrong with a little Ben and Jerry's, do you dear?" said the mother. "It doesn't have as much fat as the Häagen-Dazs, does it?"
"Whatever," said the father. He, at least, seemed to understand what a monster this child had become. How weak they seemed, to let her manipulate them like this.
All at once a memory flooded back—lying in the grass, Dad's body pressing down on his. Dad getting angry, and Mom suddenly being conciliatory, and Quentin getting away with something. Just as he had done a dozen times before.
So what? So all children are manipulators—at least he had always had the decency not to humiliate his parents in public like this little dipwhistle.
Of course that could also be taken to mean that he was a hypocrite while this little girl was simply open about what all children try to do and all but a few parents are too weak to stop them from doing.
Thank heaven I never married or had kids, thought Quentin. Who needs to get into a lifelong power struggle with your own kids?
He had all the pies he needed for a couple of weeks—all that the freezer in his rented townhouse would hold. He wheeled the cart down the aisle past the girl and her tame parents. He made a point of not looking at them—why not let them pretend that nobody noticed their humiliation? But he couldn't resist a long hard glare of contempt at the girl.
She met his gaze with a saucy look; but there was a twinkle in her eyes that surprised him. Could it be irony? Could it be that she knows exactly how bratty she seems?
Well what if she does? Knowing you're a jerk doesn't mean you're any less a jerk; probably the opposite. Lizzy never looked like that. She had too much pride to act like this girl, or look like her, or talk like her. This girl was alive and Lizzy was dead and all of a sudden it rolled over him how many years of life she had missed and how much better she would have lived those years than this snotty little girl. Better than Quentin, too. She wouldn't have found herself thirty-four years old and sick of the emptiness of her life. Because her life wouldn't have been empty. She would have loved somebody and married him and had children. And they wouldn't have been children like this, they would have been good kids, decent kids, kids you could be proud of. She would have made her life mean something. While Quentin had—what? Money? And this girl... she had that irony in her eyes. Knowledge without wisdom. Power without purpose. Like me.
He stood in the checkout line. The clerk bantered a little with the dressed-for-success woman in front of him. Quentin gazed around the store listlessly, seeing everything, noticing nothing.
Until he saw a woman in the express line, bent over her purse, digging for coins or a pen, and there was something about her, about the way her hair fell, about the slope of her shoulders, the clothes she wore. He knew her, absolutely knew her, only it couldn't be her, but she was so perfectly like his memory of Lizzy that he couldn't breathe. And when she stood straight and handed money to the cashier, she did it with that straight-armed, elbow-locked movement that was Lizzy's own.
"Sir?" said the clerk.
The woman ahead of him was picking up her bags and leaving. Quickly Quentin finished moving everything from his cart to the conveyor belt, glancing up as often as he could to see if he could catch a glimpse of her face. Not that there was any hope that it could be Lizzy, but if this woman really was somehow Lizzy's double, then maybe he could see her face, see what she would have looked like grown up, only that was crazy, all he would see was that it wasn't Lizzy, and it would hurt him all over again that she wasn't there. Already it hurt him. Already something deep and long denied was stirring inside him. The grief that he had never expressed except on one miserable afternoon of throwing jars on the floor and pulling up plants.
She turned around just as he was bending down to get the last of the pies out of the cart. When he looked up again she was almost at the door, but he caught a glimpse of her face and gasped aloud at the face, at the exact, the perfect copy of...
"Sir, where are you—"
"Just ring it up, I'll be back in one second—"
But she was gone. Standing there at the railing that kept carts from going out into the parking lot, he scanned for her, for that walk, that hair, that light spring sweater, walking to some car, walking to another store, but she wasn't there. No sign of her.
He pressed his hands to his face. The woman couldn't have looked that much like her, it was just his mind playing tricks on him. He returned to the store, to a clerk who was looking annoyed, to a line of shoppers—refugees from the DC rush hour now—who seemed about one step from a lynch mob. He swiped his card through the machine, signed the slip, gathered up his frozen food and headed for his car.
The one thing I can't have in all this world is Lizzy. But she's what I've wanted, all day, all month, all these years. Coming out of that bad movie today I wanted to jammer to her about how stupid the science in it was, how pathetic it was to see Dustin Hoffman in a role so dumb, a Stallone castoff. She would have laughed and quoted some line from The Graduate, which of course she had snuck off to see even though Mom and Dad declared it a dirty movie and off limits. "It wasn't dirty to me" she said. "I just came home and proved that it takes bigger boobs than these to do that tassel thing." And the yogurt place, it was Lizzy he wanted to tell his diatribe to. And in the store, he needed Lizzy beside him so they could laugh about that bratty little girl and then hatch some bizarre plot to kidnap her and then see how low the ransom would have to go before her parents would finally pay it and take her back.
But I can't have Lizzy.
And as he plunged his car out into the heavy traffic of Elden Street, it occurred to him for the first time that even if Lizzy hadn't died, he couldn't have had her with him at age thirty-four in Herndon, Virginia, in the spring of 1995, because she would have been thirty-nine years old and undoubtedly married and probably she would have had a couple of kids in high school by then and a husband who adored her because she wouldn't marry anybody stupid enough not to adore her and he would have been the one talking to her and listening to her and sharing jokes with her and inflicting his diatribes on her. Not me.
If she had lived, she would have gone away to college before he even got to high school. The closeness between them would have faded. He would have grieved a little, maybe, but he would have turned to his friends then, the way other people did. He wouldn't have kept comparing every girl he knew to his perfect image of Lizzy because Lizzy would still be home for holidays and he wouldn't be so needy for her; some other girl's fresh and un-Lizzyish style or look or attitude would have intrigued him instead of putting him off. He would have fallen in love the normal dozen or so times and right now if he had these millions of dollars he wouldn't be wandering North America borrowing other people's dreams, he'd be at home, and everything he did and made and built and won would have been for his wife, his children, their future. Together they would have invented dreams of their own, dreams to spare, enough dreams that they could freely share them with strangers instead of his having to go shopping for them.
Grownup men don't share their lives with their sisters, they share them with their wives.
He felt sick with the sense of loss. What have I been doing all these years? How stupid can a reasonably bright guy be?
The realization struck him so hard that he had to pull off the Herndon Parkway into a condo parking lot and rest his head against the steering wheel and what was he doing? Why was he crying like some ten-year-old kid? It wasn't Lizzy he was grieving for after all. It was himself. It was his own lost years.
It was Lizzy whose organs they harvested, not mine. So why have I made myself as solitary as the dead?
Finally he got control of himself, pulled a Kleenex from the box he kept on the perpetually empty passenger seat, dried his eyes, wiped his glasses, put them on again, and leaned back to look at the bright evening all around him. Cars pulling into the parking lot. People getting out and going into their condos, where some of them lived alone and some of them had roommates and some of them had a wife or husband and some of them had kids and every damned one of them had more sense than Quentin Fears had.
There she was, climbing up the stairs to the end townhouse of the building right next to him. He could see her face clearly as she dug in her purse for her keys. No, she didn't look like Lizzy after all, not really, not as much as he had thought in the store. But her movement was the same, or very similar; he hadn't imagined that. And her hair, it was almost like Lizzy's, wasn't it? When Lizzy had worn it that way, or almost that way? Long, anyway.
Not Lizzy at all, really. But—and here's the thing that surprised him—she was still attractive. Still interesting. The way she stopped searching, stood up straight, rolled her eyes heavenward in exasperation, and then made one final dive of the hand into the purse, to have it emerge a moment later, clutching the keys on a big brass ring. How could she have missed something that size in her purse? She slipped it into the lock, went inside, and closed the door behind her. Lights went on. She was home.
But I'm not home. Not here, not anywhere.
More than anything else Quentin wanted to get out of his car and walk up to that door, knock on it, smile sheepishly when she opened the door and...
And what? Lie? I'm sorry, I seem to have locked my keys in my car, can I use your phone to call triple-A? Beg your pardon, but I noticed you in the grocery store and you look so much like my dead sister that I really want to spend some time with you, thinking about her and crying—do you have a few evenings free?
She probably had a husband in there waiting for her, or coming home soon afterward. But as he sat in the parking lot, nobody else walked up the front steps. There was no husband. Somehow there was no husband. And the certainty grew: I should be the one to walk those stairs, to open that door, to laughingly call out, "Hi, honey, I'm home." To tease her about a purse so cluttered she couldn't even find a two-pound eight-inch brass ring of keys.
Hello, I'm a multimillionaire who is pathologically lonely and so filled with pent-up longings that you have only to think of a desire and I'll satisfy it. Mind if I come in?
He restarted his engine and drove away. It was dark. He had sat there for nearly three hours. When he got back to his apartment the meat pies weren't even cold, let alone frozen. He spent a half hour slopping them out of their pieplates and grinding them down the disposal. Then he went to the Rio Grande and over a plate of pork tamales and a bottle of sangria-flavor Peñafiel at the bar he plotted how to find out who she was and, more to the point, how to arrange to meet her before the end of the week.
The first thing Quentin's lawyer found out about her was that she didn't own the townhouse—a property-management firm was renting it out for an investment group in Atlanta that owned twenty condos in the complex. So she was renting.
Only she wasn't. The condo was empty.
Then did she work for the property management company? Nobody from the firm had visited the property except the yard guys, and they had no employee who fit her description particularly well anyway.
A previous renter? A relative of a previous renter? An ex-spouse or former lover of a previous renter? A roommate or subletter of a previous renter?
The condos were fairly new. There had been only one renter before, a Pakistani family of four who had been waiting for their house to be built out in Oak Park. No roommates, no sublets, no ex-spouses or former lovers, and even if one of their relatives had looked like her, they'd never given anyone a key because the wife was home all day so who locked the doors?
The research had cost him about a thousand dollars in lawyer and private investigator fees and the result was zilch. She didn't exist. No woman could possibly have walked up to that door and turned a key in the lock and gone inside. He didn't see it, it didn't happen.
He sat in the parking lot for half an hour on Saturday, trying to figure out how he could have been wrong. And came at last to the obvious conclusion—he was one seriously lonely man. Conjuring hallucinatory images of a woman very much like his dead sister, just so he could imagine meeting her and talking to her and having somebody to build a life with. It was definitely time to start dating.
The trouble was he had no idea how to go about it. He'd been a witness of the singles scene at restaurant-bars like Rio Grande and Lone Star and T.G.I.Friday's, and it always looked so pathetic to him. Come here often? You look good, and I haven't even had a drink yet. Buy you a drink? Want to help me celebrate my promotion? I hope you just broke up with your boyfriend so I don't have to kill him. Did any of these lines actually work? And even if they did, what came of it? One-night stands? Quick torrid affairs? Did any of these deliberate encounters lead to something that cured loneliness instead of simply easing the symptoms for an hour or two? Quentin wasn't interested in meeting the kind of woman who would come to one of those places looking for the kind of man who hoped to meet women there.
But this was the DC area, wasn't it? There were serious parties going on every night; Quentin knew it because some of his new business partners moved in those circles—the guy who was trying to start up a serious fund-raising business, for instance. The lobbyist who was trying to get out of the lobbying business and into publishing. They had both invited Quentin to the kind of party where congressmen and generals and admirals and undersecretaries showed up. He had turned them down as he always did.
He drove home and called them both. Two parties on the same night, one in Georgetown at a second-tier embassy and one in Chevy Chase at the home of a once-famous hostess. "These are people on the make, Quentin," said the lobbyist. "They're going to figure out fast that you aren't power, so you must be money. I hope you won't mind that."
"Are you saying they're all cynically looking for people to exploit?"
"All the eager-looking ones are. If they're really vivacious or fervent or, you know, on—they're trying to get something out of the night. So if you want pleasant company, just look for somebody who's bored but not drunk and you'll probably do OK. Of course, that's usually a description of somebody's spouse who isn't, you know, inside the belt-way. So they're probably not just bored but boring. And devotedly married."
"I just want to see what these parties are like. Tell me what to wear."
The first party was cocktails before dinner; the would-be fundraiser didn't have the clout to get him a seat at the table, but that was fine with Quentin, he had the other party to go to. The first one was a bust—everybody was on the make or, worse, on the way down and desperately clinging to prestige. Quentin kept count of the snubs he got until he ran out of fingers and then he concentrated on eating the really fine hors d'oeuvres and avoiding the cocktail pushers.
The second party was much nicer. The hostess hadn't really faded, Quentin quickly concluded. It was Washington that had faded; she had an elegance that felt pre-war. Not World War II, either. More like World War I. Could that graceful era possibly have survived in this house? The age when undersecretaries were all men of good families with old money, serving their country as a civic duty and not as a rung on the ladder? That's how it felt, for the first hour at least. But then he began to see that his lobbyist partner had been right. Even in this old-fashioned gathering, there were those who tried just a little too hard and those who remained just a little bit too aloof. It was as much about status as the other party had been, except, of course, that the other one was more nakedly obvious about it.
I might have been like these people, Quentin thought. If I hadn't just stumbled into money by being a pretty good programmer at exactly the right time for that to bring millions of dollars down on the heads of unsuspecting geeks. I might have been on the outside looking in; at the bottom looking up. Now I'm on the outside, all right, but above, looking down. I don't need anything these people have to offer. What I need, they don't even care about. Some of them probably even have it, and are wasting it, losing it—an adoring wife or a husband who gets taken for granted, ignored, hurt, left behind on the upward climb. He spotted a couple of these—women who were clearly uncomfortable in their designerish or designeresque dresses, women who belonged at a PTA social like Quentin's mom, bringing cookies to the bake sale. There was nothing for them here. Not even their husbands. Their husbands were here, yes, but not for them.
There was a high-ceilinged library with a ladder that rolled around the walls hanging from a rail. Quentin had seen such places in movies and the urge to climb the ladder was irresistible. He pulled out a book at random from the topmost shelf.
"All right, you can borrow that one, but don't lose my place."
Quentin turned to see who had produced that strong but aging woman's voice and nearly lost his footing.
"Oh, don't fall, please, the family fortune couldn't stand another lawsuit. That's why I gave up gossip."
It was the hostess. Quentin put the book back and climbed down. "I didn't mean to meddle," he said. "I've just never climbed a library ladder before."
"And I'm too old to do it anymore," she said. "That's why I have my assistant put all the mystery novels up there, so I won't forget and read them a second time by accident and then get disappointed when I realize that it's only that one again. Except that it happens anyway, even with the brand new ones. I've read them all. Seen them all. Met them all. Served expensive alcohol to everybody, and they all look the same."
"How many times have you met me?" asked Quentin. As always, he found himself sliding into the style of conversation that seemed appropriate. Polite, self-deprecating wit, that's what was called for, thrust and riposte but no one ever bloodied. He didn't analyze it, he just slipped into the role.
"Let's see," she said. "Lonely, bored, hoping to connect with somebody but unwilling to believe that you're actually good enough for anybody."
"Oh, I'm good enough," said Quentin. "Male, mid-thirties, no pot belly, all my hair, good teeth, and money."
"But you don't want the kind of woman who keeps that list, am I right?"
"So I guess you're the one I'm looking for."
"Me? Don't be silly. I married my husband for money and I've done rather well at hanging on to it in spite of taxes, recessions, inflation, and those people who make you look at pictures of starving children before they let you say no to their charity."
"Did he know? That you married him for money?"
"My dear, in those days it didn't occur to decent people to marry for any other reason. My family was old money and his was newer. Mine had more prestige and his had more zeroes after the two and the four. His mother traded on the connection to get a better grade of guest at her parties, and I was able to help my sisters live in the style to which they were accustomed until they married even richer men than my Jay. Everybody won."
He hadn't realized that there were still people who lived in such a Jane Austen world. "Did you love him?"
"Jay? I thought not until he had an affair with a secretary during the war, and then I was insanely jealous for a while and I thought that meant I loved him. Later his libido calmed down and we gardened together for a few years before he got Alzheimer's at sixty and faded away and died. Those few years in the garden, I think I did love him then. That's really above average, in my experience. Not everybody gets those years in the garden."
"I don't even have the garden."
"Neither did we, till we planted it together." She smiled, but he could sense that the intimate moment was over. She was ready to move on. So he made it easy for her.
"I'm feeling guilty. I'm monopolizing the hostess."
She studied him for a moment, as if passing a verdict on him. "There's a clever young woman out on the back porch, admiring a gnarled cherry tree that hasn't borne fruit in years but I keep it because my Jay and I planted it together and he kissed me there. It's a magical spot, and I've been prowling the party looking for someone to send there to join her."
"I've kept you talking so long, I doubt she's still there."
"Oh, I told her if she stirred from that spot before you got there, I'd never let her back in my house."
"You told her you were sending me? But you don't even know me."
"I told her I was sending a young man I wanted her to be nice to for my sake because he was so lonely at this party."
"Was I that obvious?"
"No. There's always a lonely young man at my parties. It's in the nature of young men to be lonely. Did you think you were unique?"
"So you're a matchmaker."
She turned and headed for the door, slow of step but making rapid progress all the same. "I have a garden that doesn't get used enough, that's all. Think of yourself as plant food." And then she was gone, back to the party.
The young woman was in the garden, just as the hostess had promised. For a moment, seeing her from behind, he thought he knew her. He even thought, madly enough, that it was her, the one he had seen in the grocery store and then at the door of the townhouse. But then she turned and her hair was reddish and her face was really nothing like Lizzy's or even the other woman's, but she seemed nice enough. Bored, but nice.
"So you're the lonely young man?" asked the woman.
"And you're one who's supposed to cheer me up?" asked Quentin.
"She's such a matchmaker. She forgets things though. Such as, this is the third time she's sent me to wait under the cherry tree."
"I take it the previous times didn't work out?"
"One of them did. I didn't find true love, but I did find a candidate for Congress from a Philadelphia suburb."
"Is that where you're from?"
"No, it's where he was from. I'm a headhunter, Mr...."
"Fears."
"Oh, you sound dangerous. Or at least hostile."
"Yes, it sounds like 'fierce,' but it's spelled F-E-A-R-S."
"What an interesting contradiction," she said. "Written down, you're timid; spoken, you're dangerous."
"Unfortunately, I'm not a candidate for anything."
"Neither am I," she said. "I'm not working tonight. I'm really here for old time's sake. I love the grande dame, and her garden, and her matchmaking. I had to come to one more of her parties before I leave."
"The beltway has lost its charms?"
"I suppose," she said. "Both parties are simply too ideological for me anymore. They insist on nominating horrible people because they have the correct opinions on the key issues. They don't want the kind of candidate I like to find."
"And that is?"
"Well-balanced. Open-minded. Ambitious but principled. Reasonable. Telegenic and electable but also hardworking and bright and honest enough that I'm proud to have helped them get started."
"This really was a career? Finding candidates?"
"I always think the best people for public office are the ones who really never thought of themselves in public office. Somebody has to put the bee in their bonnet."
"So what will you do now?"
"To be honest? I haven't a clue."
"But with all the candidates you found, surely there's one who can help you land in a career—"
"To be honest, Mr. Fears, the only candidate I ever found was the one I met here under this cherry tree, and he quit after one term. It wasn't really my career because nobody paid me for it. It was my... vocation."
"What's your career?"
"Middle level bureaucrat. But I have this face and I look good in evening attire and I got invited to parties by bosses who needed a partner for an out-of-town visitor—all legitimate, I assure you. I kept my eyes open, hoping to find the candidate for office that I could vote for with a clean conscience. My dream was to find a president."
"And now you've given up?"
"The parties are controlled by screamers from the left and the right. There's no room for my dreams in this town." She shivered, though the night was merely cool, not chilly. "I can't believe I'm telling you all this. I don't tell this to people. I guess you're hearing my swan song."
"I'm kind of curious why you have these dreams of politics in the first place."
She looked at him with a kind of fierceness in her eyes and took hold of his arm tightly. "Because I love power, Mr. Fears. Power used wisely and well, power used to make people safer and freer and happier. But it's power that I love, even though one is supposed to pretend that it isn't. As if anyone would ever come to this benighted town for any other reason."
"So why don't you run for office?" asked Quentin.
She smiled. "Voters don't take pretty women seriously."
Quentin almost said, You're not that pretty.
She laughed as if she had heard him. "I'm telegenic. The camera loves me. You should see my driver's license. My yearbook picture. I swear I can't take a bad picture. It's a curse. I'm much less attractive in person."
Quentin laughed and felt something inside him relax for the first rime in twenty years. Something that he hadn't even known was clenched. "Well darn," he said. "I wish I'd seen your picture before I met you."
"No, it's better this way. You would have felt too intimidated."
"Now I've got to see your license, you know."
She shrugged, opened her little evening purse, and took out the plastic card. He looked at it, angling it to get moonlight on the picture. "Am I correct in thinking that you actually crossed your eyes for your driver's license picture?"
"I stuck out my tongue the first time but they made me take it over again. They were very angry."
"This may be the ugliest driver's license photo I've ever seen."
"Do you think so?" she said. "Have you seen a lot of them, or are you just saying that?"
"What did you do in your high school yearbook, put your finger in your nose?"
"I had friends on the yearbook staff. They managed to sneak in a picture of the back of my head. Just my hair in curlers and the back of my neck. They got in so much trouble till my parents finally believed me that it was all my idea."
Her name, according to the license, was Madeleine Cryer.
"Ms. Cryer," he said, meaning to ask if he could see her again.
"Call me Madeleine, please."
"Then you have to call me Quentin."
"Is that your name?"
"Yes."
"But how unbearable. That's a terrible name for someone when you're already going to be stuck with a weird last name. Didn't your parents love you? Didn't you get beaten up in school a lot?"
"Everybody called me Quen."
"Quentin. Isn't that a prison?"
"Somebody actually asked me recently if I was named after the guy who did Pulp Fiction. Even though I must be fifteen years older than he is."
"I have to call you something else. Tin. I have to call you Tin."
Lizzy's old nickname for him. It hit him so hard that he caught his breath.
"Don't be mad at me," she said. "I shouldn't have teased about your name."
"I'm not mad," he said. And then laughed. "Actually, you're Mad."
She got the pun at once and winced. "I guess if I can call you Tin, you can call me Mad." She raised an eyebrow. "I can call you Tin?"
"Only if you'll have dinner with me. Monday?"
"I was going to fly back home tomorrow."
"Where's home?" he asked.
"The old family manse is way up the Hudson. I usually fly to Newark. I've already sent home most of my stuff. Not that I had much. I travel light, I live light."
"Upriver on the Hudson. I don't know any good restaurants there. So you'll have to pick."
"Oh, don't be absurd. You wouldn't fly to New York just to have dinner with me."
"Oh, is that excessive?"
She studied his face for a moment, perhaps trying to find the irony in his words. "You're really sweet."
"My homeroom class voted me the most likely to be the guy your mom wishes you were dating."
"I think you might just be the one my mother would like me to date. My grandmother won't agree, of course, but who cares about her?"
"Let me meet your grandmother and I promise, I'll win her over."
She smiled vaguely and looked away. "Maybe I won't go yet."
"But if you've shipped all your things home..."
"As I said. I travel light. Where are you taking me to dinner?"
"I'm new around here. I've been living in Herndon. You tell me."
"What's your budget? Because you are paying, you know."
"I can eke out at least one good dinner at a really nice place."
"I don't even know what you do for a living."
"I'm between jobs, but I have a little saved up from my last one."
"If you're serious about a really nice place, there's a French restaurant near Herndon. Some-French-word Chez François. Close to the Potomac. I've never eaten there, but I hear it's good. The kind of place where they scrape the crumbs off your table between courses."
"Wow," said Quentin. "Is that class or what."
"Give me your number, I'll call you when I get the reservation."
"I can take care of that, you know," said Quentin, writing his local number on his business card.
"But I'm not going to give you my number, and then what would you do with the reservation?"
"Take your grandmother." He handed her the card.
"I don't have a phone number and I'm not sure which friend I'll crash with when I don't take my flight tomorrow. So I'm not being unfriendly. I will call."
"I've heard that line before."
"No you haven't," said Mad. "That's the guy's line, so I know you haven't heard it, and I don't think you've even said it."
"Am I so obviously naïve?"
She touched his cheek lightly. "I think you're sweet."
"But not powerful."
"I told you—power was my dream. You're real."
She turned and walked away from him.
"Can't I take you home? Take you wherever you're crashing tonight?"
But she kept walking as if she hadn't heard him. He took a few steps after her, then thought better of following her, then thought again and followed her anyway, only she had already made her way through the crowd and she wasn't anywhere in the house, top to bottom.
Of course she wasn't going to call, he knew that. But still, it had been a wonderful half hour there by the ancient unblooming cherry tree. She might not have looked like Lizzy, the way his hallucination did, but she bantered with him in the same easygoing playful way that Lizzy always had. It was the first time he had actually enjoyed the company of a woman as a woman. It was possible. That's what this evening meant. There was hope for him to find someone. There really were interesting women out there and there were even some who might find him interesting, not for his money, but for his conversation, his company. He refused to be disappointed that this particular encounter hadn't led anywhere. It was enough that Madeleine Cryer had opened a never-opened door.
And then the next day, Sunday afternoon, she did call. They had dinner that night. They met for lunch the next day, a picnic by the Great Falls of the Potomac. They broached the delicate subject of money and each confessed to having some. Her fortune was much older, his was much larger, but it wouldn't be a barrier between them. That afternoon he bought them both English racers and the next morning they rode the whole length of the W&OD bike trail from Purcellville to Mount Vernon and at the end, with rubbery legs and covered in sweat, he asked her to marry him and she said yes, as long as he promised never to make her ride a bike that far again.
Everything seemed to be going so well. Yes, he still had a vague worry in the back of his mind about how this all started—hallucinating a grown-up version of his dead sister—but with Madeleine in his life Quentin was beginning to realize how deeply unhappy he had been all these years. It took such small things, just her smile, her hand resting on his, and he would get this glow inside and he'd find himself wearing a goofy grin and nodding at everything she said and he'd realize: This is pretty good! This is what other people have known about all these years and tried to tell me! This is what kept my parents going even when their daughter died, even when their son became this weird wandering recluse, because they had this between them, this secret that you can't guess from outside, you have to be inside it, and then it's all so clear, it transforms the world like getting your first pair of glasses and suddenly you can read all the signs and recognize people from far off and pick out individual birds in the sky, that's how it felt and as far as Quentin was concerned, he wouldn't mind a bit if it kept going like this pretty much for the rest of his life.
Then he flew to San Francisco for meetings with some of his older partnerships. At the end of the trip he stopped in to see his lawyer, Wayne Read, to take care of the changes the marriage was going to require, like rewriting his will and changing the beneficiary on his insurance policies.
"Does she have a lawyer?" asked Wayne.
"I don't know."
"Does she have money? An estate?"
"I don't know."
"I need to know if I'm supposed to unilaterally write the prenup or negotiate it with another attorney, and if she has an estate that needs protecting or if it's just yours I need to worry about."
Quentin was annoyed. "I don't want my estate protected. When we're married it'll be our estate."
"You've known her what, a week and a half?"
"But I've been waiting for her all my life."
The lawyer just looked at him.
"That was humor," said Quentin.
"No, you meant it," said Wayne. "Listen, Quen, I've been your lawyer ever since you could afford one. I know that you've been miserably lonely that whole time. Now you've fallen in love and you don't want to believe anything bad can happen. But all these years you've been paying me to be the friend who will always tell you the truth. The friend who can give you bad news."
"The friend who charges me three hundred bucks an hour."
"The friend whose job is to know a lot more about how the world works than you do, and keep you from falling into heavy machinery."
"Metaphorically speaking."
"Sometimes people aren't what they seem."
"I know that, Wayne."
"No you don't, Quen. Because you are exactly what you seem, and so you always assume that other people are, too."
"I've had partners who cheated me."
"Who tried to cheat you. I draw up too good a contract for them to actually succeed."
"They got away with the money."
"Only because you let them. Only because you never let me sue or bring criminal charges."
"It was only money."
"No, after they embezzled it from you it was only money. When you had it, it was something more than money. It was fertile seed. It was the power of life. In your hands money makes things grow. In their hands it bought new cars and TV sets and some nice dinners out and then it had disappeared and nothing came of it."
"My point is that I don't care enough about money to need a prenuptial agreement. If Madeleine turns out to be a fake or even if the marriage just turns sour or something, don't you think that will be much more devastating than losing a few million bucks in a lousy divorce settlement? If I lose the woman I love, who cares about the money?"
"Quentin, you only say that because you've never lost either. Broken hearts heal. But when a fortune is gone, it stays gone forever."
"I'm still employable."
"No you're not, Quen. They're programming Pentiums and PowerPC chips and they're doing it in C. You don't know anything about that."
"She's not going to divorce me and she's not after my money. Can we get to the business I came here for?"
They got down to business and it didn't take long. On the day the marriage became valid, the new will would take effect, and Madeleine would become cobeneficiary of his insurance policies, along with his parents.
Wayne rose from behind his desk. "I'm very happy for you, Quentin. True love is rare."
Quentin stood up and shook his hand. "I hope I'm not being billed for that bit of counsel."
Wayne laughed dryly. "Since you're not listening to me anyway, I'll go ahead and ask the really lousy question: Have you got her HIV test results?"
Quentin took back his hand. "Wayne, you deal with my papers, not my sex life."
"Forget the HIV test, then, but at least tell me you've been using protection."
"Wayne, you're way over the line here."
The lawyer offered no hint of apology, just regarded him, waiting for an answer.
"But to ease your mind," Quentin finally said, "Mad and I haven't slept together."
Wayne looked genuinely stunned. "Are you living in a time warp?"
"The sixties never got to my house, and that means the nineties have nothing to scare me with."
"You've never even tried to sleep with her?"
"Wayne, you can shut up any time now." Quentin was still smiling, but it was getting thin.
"She's probably wondering by now if you're gay."
Quentin stopped in the doorway and said, "Wayne, you may think of yourself as a paid friend, but I think of you as my lawyer. Everything that happens with my business is your business. But what happens with my pants is between me and my dry cleaner."
"Marriage is a contract, Quentin. And my business is to warn you when you're walking drunk along the edge of a cliff. Congrats on the wedding, though. I'm sure you'll be very happy."
Quentin let the door make just the tiniest slam as he left.
But Wayne had said what he said, and now Quentin couldn't get it out of his mind. These were the nineties, after all. He wasn't so disconnected from the world around him that he didn't know how things had changed since he was in high school and the guys he knew had to work themselves up just to hold hands with a girl, let alone kiss her. The whole sexual revolution and then herpes and AIDS, he knew about them. They simply hadn't touched his life because he was one of the good kids who didn't play around. What about Madeleine, though? Somebody like her, it was impossible to think that in the nineties she hadn't had plenty of guys make moves on her. Had she moved back? Somebody on NPR about five years before had said something about how when you slept with somebody, you were also sleeping with everybody they had ever slept with. How many guys had Madeleine slept with? Up till he talked with Wayne Read, he had assumed that Madeleine was a virgin just like he was. When he thought about it, he realized that he had pretty much assumed that all nice women were virgins.
Wayne was right. He was in a time warp.
This was absurd. Wasn't the double standard supposed to work the other way? A guy who was all worried about whether his fiancée was a virgin was supposed to be a hypocrite with plenty of notches on his own belt.
And it wasn't just a question of past partners and sexually transmitted disease. Quentin was hopelessly naïve. There were magazine articles at every grocery checkstand talking about techniques for satisfying a woman every time, but Quentin hadn't read any of them. Was Mad expecting him to know all these techniques? Did they even work? Was it hard to learn them? How romantic would it be on their wedding night if he had to keep stopping to check with a manual?
He had a couple of hours to kill before his flight. Instead of turning in his rental car he kept going down Bayshore and got off the freeway at the Hillsdale Mall, planning to pick up a book on how to be a good lover—he knew that no self-respecting American bookstore would be without a few of those. But to his chagrin Hillsdale was apparently the one mall in America without a single bookstore.
He ended up at the airport newsstand, which had an issue of Cosmopolitan that offered to explain how a woman could satisfy a man; but that wasn't really the subject matter he was looking for. On the flight east he tried to watch the movie, gave up and tried to sleep, and finally ended up trying to imagine what it was that he remembered from high school locker room talk and from being at Berkeley in the early seventies and from movies and television shows. Touching breasts was a big deal, he knew that. But was it a big deal for the guy or for the girl or both?
He was in a cold sweat, there in the airplane seat, just as if he had woken from that dream of being on a stage, expected to say lines in a play, only he didn't know what the play was and he'd never been to a single rehearsal. Sweating and trembling because he was going to have to take off his clothes and get into bed with a woman who had high expectations of him and he wasn't going to be able to deliver. He was going to botch everything. He remembered a couple of movies in which some teenage kid had his first chance at sex and got so excited he finished before the girl had even started, and this was apparently the most degrading, humiliating thing that could happen to a man. The woman's contempt would destroy him on the spot. At the time he had assumed this was all comic exaggeration and that such things either never happened at all or if they did, it was no big deal. But now he knew that it would happen to him and it would be a huge problem and she would despise him.
It might have been OK when he was young, being sexually inert in a culture—his parents' culture—that valued chastity. But it was certainly doing him no favors now.
And then there was the last thing Wayne had said. That Madeleine might be wondering if he was gay. He had kissed Mad a few times, and it had felt very good, and every one of those times he had a pretty good indication that he was oriented toward heterosexuality. But she wouldn't know about that. Would she? Do women look for that kind of thing? The man sitting next to him came back from the airplane lavatory and looked at how Quentin was gripping the arms of his seat. "Yeah, I used to be a white-knuckle flier, too." Quentin smiled wanly and looked away. He didn't bother explaining to a stranger that the plane crashing sounded like a pretty good idea, compared to his terror of having sex with the woman he was going to marry. Thirty-four years old.
He had to resolve the question before the actual marriage. Not have sex with her—you don't jump off the cliff the first time you go rappelling. He just had to try something. Make a move.
From Dulles Airport he drove down the toll road to the Reston Parkway and found a plentiful selection of books about sex in the self-help section of the Little Professor Bookstore just before it closed. He went home and was already reading, trying to imagine himself and Madeleine doing these things, when she called.
"Weren't you going to phone me?" she asked.
"I meant to," he said. "I'm just wiped out. I didn't think you wanted to talk to somebody as stupid as I am right now."
"Does this mean you don't want me to come over?"
That was how things went—she always came over to his apartment because she was moving around from place to place, camping on couches in friends' tiny apartments. Her phone was a cellular so the number was the same wherever she was staying. He had offered to put her up at a hotel but she laughed at him. "I don't want you spending money on something as stupid as that when I can stay with my friends for free. They all owe me, so don't worry about it." He never met any of the friends. Was she ashamed of him? Or of them? No matter—it was her he wanted, not her friends.
So if they were to get together, it meant she would come to his place.
"It's after ten," he said lamely.
"I have two tubs of Ben and Jerry's chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream."
"I have dishes and spoons."
"Then we belong together. See you in a minute, Tin."
Not even during exam weeks in college had he ever read so fervently and rapidly and intensely as he did during the twenty minutes he waited for her to arrive.
By the time she got there he had already decided against most of the things the books suggested. Maybe people who had been married for ten years might be comfortable enough to do stuff like that with another person, but no way could he imagine trying it with Mad. All he wanted to do was see if he could, as the books suggested, give her any kind of pleasure during mild foreplay; and, of course, by so doing assure her that he was in fact straight, if inept.
And maybe he was also hoping to see if she, in turn, was at all interested in him as a sexual partner. That would be, all in all, a great deal of very useful information for them to gain from what would be quite a minor event, taken in its proper perspective. Besides, skimming the books, however rapidly and urgently, had left him in a state of dazed arousal. Or, to use the more technical term, rampant horniness.
They talked, they ate ice cream, they laughed, they sat down to watch the news and then maybe catch Letterman before she went home, and there on the couch with the weatherman occluding his fronts and alofting his lows, Quentin touched her cheek and turned her face toward him and kissed her and realized for the first time how chaste all their kisses had been, and so he tried the thing where you slide the tip of your tongue along your partner's lip during the kiss and—
And that was the end of the kiss. She looked rather startled and laughed nervously and put her arms around him and hugged him with her face against his shoulder.
Did he do it wrong? Even pimply teenagers used their tongues when they kissed, for heaven's sake—couldn't he manage even that much?
No, no, it just startled her, that's all.
He ran his hands up and down her back. She giggled.
"What?"
"That tickles. What are you doing?"
"I'm trying to, uh, introduce a new level of physical closeness in our relationship."
She looked at him like he was crazy.
"Look, I'm just—I just thought it was maybe time we—"
We what? The only image that could come to his mind was the most weird of the suggestions the sex manuals offered. That wasn't at all what he wanted to do, at least not today, but still there was that picture in his head and it pretty much drove out of his mind the words he had meant to say.
But apparently she interpreted his silence in the worst possible way. She shuddered with revulsion and leapt up from the couch. "No!" she shouted. "Do you want to make me puke?"
This reaction was way beyond anything his dread had conjured up.
"All I did was—"
"If you think I'm ever going to do anything so disgusting with you for love or money—"
What did she think he meant? Since he had said nothing—did she mean she didn't want to have sex at all? "We're getting married," he said. "Married people generally touch each other without one of them puking. Most people assume that getting married means that somewhere along the line you—"
"I hate you!" she screamed at him.
He had never seen her like this, as she frantically picked up her purse and put on her flats—or rather, halfway put them on—and hobbled to the door as she finally settled her heels into her shoes. She slammed it on the way out, or at least an attempted slam, since the weather seal around the door kept it from making a satisfying noise. By the time Quentin could get to the door, she was already pulling away from the curb in her Escort.
He tried to call her that night and all the next day but only got the voice mail on her cellular service. All the time, he kept trying to think what he had done wrong. What had she thought he meant to do? They were engaged, weren't they? It wasn't as if he meant to have sex with her that very night—he intended to wait till they were married. He had been raised that way. But couldn't he touch her? Or was he so bad at it that it physically revolted her?
Or was it him at all? Maybe she was—what, frigid? Was there such a thing really? He thought that feminism had declared frigidity to be a myth that men made up to explain why women didn't want to have sex with sweating ignorant louts. Admittedly, he was ignorant and probably had been sweating. But—a lout? That was harsh. Had something happened in her childhood that made her interpret all sexual advances as something vile? By afternoon he had a couple more books, this time about sexual dysfunction, and read intently until he fell asleep by the still unringing phone, the fifth of his abject apologies and pleadings still unanswered on her voice mail.
The next morning he awoke to the doorbell ringing. Insistently, ring, ring, ring. Groggily he tried answering the phone, which was not ringing, and then got up, slipped on a robe, and went to the door.
It was Madeleine, carrying a bunch of daisies and looking as if she hadn't slept much the night before. "You must hate me," she said.
"I thought you hated me," he said.
"Can I come in?"
"Yes, of course, come in."
"You have to understand that I—I know I overreacted the other night. I thought you were—oh, who cares what I thought? I do want to marry you, you know, and of course marriage means physical intimacy and I just—I've never been with a man that way, you know, and so I—I'm just so sorry."
"Mad, it's all right, you don't have anything to apologize for, I was insensitive I guess, I just—"
"No, it was my fault, I—"
"Didn't you get my messages?"
"I listened to them over and over. I couldn't believe you still loved me after the way I acted. I just—I couldn't call you because I didn't know what to say, I—"
"At least let me put these flowers in water. And your coat, is it that cold this morning?"
He pulled a glass pitcher out of the cupboard and put in the daisies. He meant to fill it with water but first he turned around to speak to her and saw that she had unbuttoned the coat and under it she was wearing nothing.
The coat was sliding off her shoulders but then she saw the look on his face. It must have seemed like a look of horror—not that she wasn't beautiful, her body was perfect, but from the way she acted two nights before this, it was too much, and besides, Quentin was terrified, he didn't know what to do. He dropped the pitcher onto the counter, just a couple of inches' drop so it didn't break, and the handle kept it from rolling off.
Her face changed from a smile to embarrassment, consternation. She shrugged the coat back on and wrapped it around herself and sank down onto the couch into a near fetal position and began to moan. "I've blown it again. I'm so stupid! I can't believe I—"
"No, no, Mad, it's all right, I just—I mean it was sweet of you, but that isn't what I wanted the other night, I just—"
"But that was supposed to be a real turn-on or whatever, that's what the article said—"
He laughed out loud.
"Don't laugh at me," she said miserably. "I'm sitting here naked in a coat with a polyester lining and polyester gives me a rash."
"No, come here, come with me." He got her up from the couch, trying not to notice how the coat fell open and she couldn't really close it efficiently with him holding one of her hands. "Come here."
He led her into his bedroom. "You have to see this," he said. He bent down and picked up the whole stack of sex manuals he had been studying. "Were you reading, perhaps, one of these?"
She looked at the sides and it dawned on her what they meant. She laughed, too. "Oh, you're kidding. You, too? There's another person on this planet as naïve as me?"
"Maybe most people are like us," said Quentin. "They're just ashamed to admit it."
"No, nobody gets to their thirties as ignorant as we are. How did two freaks like us ever get lucky enough to find each other?"
"Listen, Mad, let me tell you something. I'm glad to know you have such a beautiful body. Such a... terrific body. Such a..."
"I get the idea."
"But I don't need to see you like that again until we're married, OK? Pressure's off for now. We can sort of work up to this. Pretend we're teenagers or something. Put off the dreadful day."
"That's fine. That's good," she said.
"And when you remove the startlement factor, whatever it was you read—I have to tell you, it really wasn't a bad suggestion."
"It was an article in Cosmo. A bunch of ways to please your man."
"Bummer. If only I'd bought that issue when I saw it in the airport in San Francisco. I would have known my part of the script."
"They don't give the man's part in Cosmo. They just sort of take it for granted that you already know your lines and stuff."
"Well, I don't," said Quentin. "I'm just winging it."
"So am I."
"The blind will lead the blind."
"Until we fall into a pit."
They laughed. He kissed her. She went home to get some clothing. Later, at lunch, they laughed about it all over again. "That's going to be such a great story to never tell our kids," said Quentin.
She rolled her eyes. "Of course we'll tell our kids. Just not in front of each other, that's all."
"Do parents tell kids things like this?"
"This is the nineties, Quentin," she said. "Isn't it?"
"Next time I fly to the coast, Mad, come with me."
"I'm unemployed and homeless. I think I can fit a trip to the coast into my schedule."
"I want you to meet my parents."
"Won't they hate the girl who's going to take away their little boy?"
"Are you kidding? They'll kiss the ground you walk on. They gave up hope of having grandchildren years ago. And the bonus is, with any luck the kids will look like you."
"I'd love to meet your parents," she said.
"And when do I make the trek to the Hudson River Valley to meet your folks?"
Her face darkened and she looked away. "My family isn't like yours, Quentin. I think I want us to be married before I take you home."
"Are you kidding?"
She shook her head. "Let's not talk about it, OK? Not today."
"You don't want me to meet your family and you don't want to talk about it?"
"Just picture me naked in that stupid coat and it will take your mind right off my family."
"Not true. It just makes me imagine your father holding a shotgun."
She giggled. "My father holding a shotgun. Now there's a picture. He'd never touch a weapon."
"A pacifist?"
"No, a klutz. He'd shoot off his own leg." She laughed again, but in a moment that dark, distant look was back on her face. It wasn't until Quentin moved the conversation far away from parents and families that the mood cleared and she was happy again.
Was it possible that his parents liked Madeleine too much? Quentin expected them to be delighted that he had a fiancée at all and that he had brought her home to meet them, and he expected her to charm them because she was, after all, charming. But within hours they seemed to have lost all sense of proportion. Everything she said, they laughed or oohed or tsk-tsked or whatever the appropriate response was. Their attention toward her never flagged. They offered her drinks, food, their own bed—it was way beyond hospitality.
They were obsequious. It was as if they were servants and Madeleine was the mistress of the house. It embarrassed him, but he couldn't seem to get either of his parents alone to tell them to lay off a little; nor could he seem to find a moment alone with Mad to explain that they didn't always act like this, that they must be compensating for all those years that they had given up on the idea of his marrying.
Poor Mad must be going crazy with them fawning on her all the time, but she was a trouper, she didn't show a sign of irritation. Just acted as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
Quentin tried to take her out to dinner.
"The four of us?" asked Mad.
"Nonsense," said Dad. "The two of you just go."
"The lovebirds need some time for tête-à-tête," said Mom, smiling.
"But you must come," said Mad. "How often will we be together like this? We have to make memories together."
"And I'll bet the crockpot chicken I was making will be just as good tomorrow," said Mom.
"Oh, that's right, Tin," said Madeleine. "I forgot that I helped her pound the chicken this morning."
"But it doesn't matter, if Quen wants to take you out."
"I wouldn't dream of missing out on the chance to taste your crockpot chicken when it's just so."
Quentin wanted to scream. It wasn't just his parents gushing over her, she was also gushing over them. If everybody would just stop trying so hard, maybe they could have a civilized visit. But that apparently wasn't going to happen without some kind of intervention.
"Listen," said Quentin, "I don't really care if we eat in or out. I don't care if we have chicken or Big Macs. I brought my fiancée here to meet my parents. And the way it looks right now, we're going to leave here without ever having done that."
They all looked at him as if he were insane.
"Quen," said Dad, "here we are. There she is. We've met."
"That's my point. My parents have a personality. They have habits and customs. They have a life. I wanted to bring Madeleine into the life. So she could see who you are, the family we are together. But you two are being so completely, insanely accommodating that—it's like your own personalities have been completely erased."
Tears filled Mom's eyes. "We've just tried to be nice."
Madeleine looked desperately embarrassed. "Tin, I thought it was all going really well."
"We only want you two to be happy," said Dad. He put his arm around Mom.
"Look, I'm sorry, I didn't want to make a scene," said Quentin. "Tell you what, you three stay here and have the crockpot chicken and tell each other how perfect it is and then spend the rest of the night insisting that the other person choose what TV show to watch or game to play. I'm going to the movies."
He turned and headed for the front door. He had his hand on the knob when he heard something that stopped him cold.
Laughter. Warm, throaty laughter. Lizzy's laugh.
He caught his breath. He turned. It was Madeleine. But now the laughter had changed. Still low, still warm, but no longer Lizzy's voice. Mad didn't look at him.
"Well, shucks," said Mad, speaking to no one in particular. "Maybe there is such a thing as getting along too well." She looked at Dad and winked. "Let's have a fight, Mr. Fears. It'll make Tin feel so much better."
Dad smiled and nodded. "Well, maybe not a fight. Maybe just a tiff."
"I know we're all joking and we're embarrassed and all," said Mom, "but there is just the one thing, just the tiniest thing—I know you have a right to call him by whatever pet nickname you want, but... calling him 'Tin'..."
Mad put her hand to her mouth. "Oh, I should have known. I should have realized."
"How could you have known that our Lizzy called him..."
"But he did tell me that," said Mad. "It just never crossed my mind, after all these years, that it would—but of course, it was this very house where she—it did seem all right with Tin—with Quentin—and so I just—please forgive me."
"No, no," said Mom. "Now I feel just awful for mentioning it. Because it is all right. I just—I just thought that—"
"Acknowledging her," said Dad. "That's all that was needed, maybe. To acknowledge her. That she called him that. And then it's OK."
"Yes," said Mom. "You can call him that, really. It won't bother me now, because I've, because I've spoken of her."
"But you should have spoken of it before," said Mad. "Two days I've been driving you bonkers with—"
"No, no, nothing like that," said Mom, "I just—every time you said it, you called him that, I wanted to speak, to say, 'That's what Lizzy called him,' and it wasn't even going to be a complaint, just a comment, just to say, I don't know, that she still has a place in our home, in our memories. But when I thought of saying it, I just, it just felt like something clamped down inside me and I couldn't speak."
"Well," said Dad, "you're speaking now."
"See?" said Mom. "Quentin was right to just bring things out in the open. We were being on our best behavior a bit too much, weren't we? Why, I'm—I'm almost exhausted with politeness. And yet I really do like you, Madeleine, dear. I just wanted so much to make a good impression, I suppose."
"The main thing," said Dad, "is this: Dinner in or dinner out?"
It was dinner in and now, at last, it was as if his parents had come out of hiding. There was chatter and banter and some catty gossip about neighbors and other church members, and the laughter was genuine and Mad actually got to see what life in his home was like.
And when, about ten that night, he suggested that he and Mad might take a walk around the old neighborhood, Dad yawned and said, "About time we got rid of you for a few minutes, you two. Let these old bones go to bed." And that was that. Mad and Quentin would be alone together.
They held hands walking from streetlight to streetlight. "They used to just be mounted to the telephone poles," said Quentin. "Then when they were building the expressway over the old creekbed behind the house, they buried all the phone lines and put up these aluminum poles. Shame, too. Because Lizzy and I had scratched graffiti into all the old poles. Like marking our territory. No good trying to mark anything on these things." He slapped the pole and it rang metallically.
"It's her shadow in the house that made everything so tense, wasn't it?" said Madeleine.
"Not her shadow. Her memory isn't a shadow," said Quentin.
"Losing her was a shadow," said Mad. "That's what I meant."
"I don't think it had to do with her," said Quentin. "My parents—I've just never seen them act like that. Like complete strangers."
"I wouldn't know," said Madeleine. "I've never known a normal family."
"What, your parents have eight legs each?"
"Life in the Family Arachnid," she said, laughing. "No, my parents were fine. But... well, to be honest, they acted like your parents were acting, all the time. When I actually saw them, of course. Just always sort of—what—on, I guess."
"On what? Cocaine?"
"More like on stage." She jabbed him. "They weren't that hyper."
"I didn't mean to make a scene like that," said Quentin. "But I couldn't seem to get you alone. Or them either."
"I was so afraid that I wasn't doing it right," said Mad.
"Well, it wasn't you, anyway. They were the ones acting strange. You were a hero about it all."
They walked on to the corner. "That way was where I used to ride my bike to junior high. The elementary school was back that way, through an orchard. Now it's a park. The orchard. The school is gone. My Scout Troop once took on the job of distributing flyers for a supermarket through the whole neighborhood. I had two hundred of them to tuck into people's screen doors. I did about twenty and then dumped the rest in a culvert, right down there."
"There's no culvert there."
"That used to be a bridge over a creek. Everything's changed. I wish I could show you the place I actually lived in. You're lucky that way—didn't you tell me your family had lived in their house forever?"
"Not forever. We're all descended from immigrants."
"It must be nice, though, to go back and have nothing changed."
She laughed but it was nasty. "Oh, yes, it's so nice."
"Is there really some major problem between you and your family?" said Quentin.
"It's not a feud or anything," said Mad. "There was a rift for a while, but I've had it under control for years now."
"But you still won't take me to meet them."
"Oh, in good time." She turned and faced him. "After we're married."
"What, you think they'll come between us if we're merely affianced?"
"I want to be part of your family before I take you into the bosom of mine."
"Do I hear the sound of somebody moving up the date of our wedding?"
"We haven't set a date yet."
"I meant from 'let's talk about it sometime' to 'let's get married pretty soon.' "
"Sooner than that."
"How soon?"
"I suppose tonight wouldn't be practical."
Quentin kissed her. "There's the matter of a license."
"As soon as possible. Here, in this town. At your family's church. Surrounded by your parents' friends."
"Nothing would make them happier."
"And you? Would that make you happy, Tin?"
He nodded.
"And yet you still look sad."
He shook his head, smiling. "Not sad at all. Very happy. The sooner the better—you know that's how I feel. Short engagement, yes, but then I've been waiting twenty years for you."
"Do you love me as much as her?" asked Mad.
Quentin made a show of looking over his shoulder. "Who?"
"As Lizzy. Your sister."
"Let's put it this way—I never would have married my sister."
"No, I was wrong even to bring it up. But I've felt it—I've felt it almost from the start. Another woman. And yet you kept insisting that there was no other woman, there had never been another woman, only every time you had a memory of childhood Lizzy was in it. She's the other woman, the one in your past. And because she's... dead... I can never measure up to her."
Quentin kissed her, long and thoroughly. "You're not being measured against Lizzy. She's my childhood, my memory, my past. But you're my future."
"It's selfish of me, isn't it? But you have to love me. More than anyone, you have to love me, or I can't... can't anything. Can't be happy."
"Mad, you're already off the scale. I love you more than life."
She clung to him under the streetlight.
But as he stroked her hair he wondered—was it true? Did he love her more than Lizzy? Was there still some crazy part of him that clung to Lizzy and wouldn't let her go? After all, he had never hallucinated seeing Madeleine.
He shook off the thought. It was Madeleine who had opened up his life and given it meaning. He was excited for the future now. That was something that his memory of Lizzy had never been able to do. Hallucinations, but no dreams.
It took longer than they thought, because a proper church wedding required some lead time—invitations, if nothing else, took a week. But by the end of August they were married, full church wedding and all, the bride like a goddess in white, the groom grinning like an idiot, or so Dad assured him just before the ceremony.
The honeymoon was Hawaii, of course, because neither of them had ever been there and from the bay area, that was the only place you could go with a more pleasant climate. They made love for the first time on their second morning in the Turtle Bay Hilton, after recovering from jet lag and post-wedding exhaustion. They were both shy and awkward but it worked pretty well. "After all," said Madeleine, "if it was really hard, stupid people wouldn't have so many children."
They snorkeled, they visited Japanese Buddhist temples, they flew to Maui and the big island, they ate fresh pineapples and shopped in the open-air mall in Honolulu and stood at the pass where hundreds of warriors plunged to their deaths in an ancient Hawaiian story. They watched the show at the Polynesian Cultural Center and tried out some of the dances back in their room, minus the costumes, of course. Quentin noticed during the week that he actually had something of a knack for having fun.
But there was still a shadow between them, and it wasn't Lizzy, because the shadow wasn't in Quentin, he was sure of that. It was in Mad. They would make love and he would hold her in his arms and she would smile at him and he would say, Yes, it was wonderful, it was sweet, I love you. And she would assure him, too, only he knew, though he wasn't sure how, he knew that he was telling the truth and she was lying. It wasn't good for her. Something was wrong with this part of their marriage and she wouldn't tell him what. He couldn't even ask her, because she really wasn't giving any outward sign of dissatisfaction. It was more as if there were some inner pain that she couldn't shake off, that nothing he did could ease. A pain that became most painful in those moments after sex when she should have been happiest, should have felt most loved, most worshiped by her husband. Something was stealing joy from them, something in her past.
Something in her family. Something in that mansion on the Hudson that she was determined not to let him visit.
Was she molested as a child? Beaten? Emotionally starved? If she didn't want to tell him, how could he find out? This was certainly one case where it wouldn't help for him to get his lawyer working on finding the answers. Besides, Wayne would have such a smirk. Married a week, and already you're having me investigate her family? Maybe if you had let me investigate them before the wedding...
No, he wanted her to tell him. When she trusted him enough. And so he would make sure she never had cause to doubt his love and loyalty, his strength and honor. When she knew that nothing she told him could shake his bond with her, then she would speak.
At the end of the week, she was the one who brought up the future. "Our week is almost up," she said. "And it occurs to me we haven't said anything about what happens next."
"We could stay another week. Another month, if you want. I made kind of an open-ended reservation."
"This was a wonderful week, but the best part of it was you, Tin, and I get to keep you wherever we go. Have we even decided where we're going to live?"
"I have connections in most cities in North America. But don't feel limited by that—I'm sure that we could find a way to get along in England. Or France. Paris? Provence?"
"I don't think I'm cool enough for Provence."
"But you have the body for the beaches of the Riviera."
"Nobody would even notice me there."
"I wouldn't be able to keep the Frenchmen's hands off you."
"Really, Tin, where will we live? Your stuff is in Virginia, and mine is still packed, my family can ship it wherever we decide to live. Have you finished your business there? Are you ready to move on?"
"I don't know," said Quentin. "I mean, that wasn't exactly a career. It was more of a pastime. I was marking time till I met you. So now... I don't know."
"It was a wonderful pastime," said Mad. "Making other people's dreams come true."
"Helping them make their own dreams come true, you mean."
"What I mean is, Tin, why stop?"
"Well, for one thing, too many of them have succeeded."
"What does that mean?"
"When I talked to my lawyer about revising my will to include you, he had me get my accountant to provide me with a complete inventory of my assets. Some of my partnerships are now worth more than the fortune I started with. My point is that I'm now rich on a whole different scale. Maybe it's time to help somebody with a truly extravagant dream."
"Who?"
"You."
She looked at him as if he were crazy. "You're my dream, and here you are."
"No, that's not what you told me. There in the garden. Under the cherry tree."
"En château de la grande dame."
"Remember? You coveted power, you said. To pick your candidates and help them get started. What you didn't have was money."
"But what do you care about politics?"
"That's why it's a partnership. You pick the candidates, I fund them."
"It doesn't work that way. There are election laws. Limitations on contributions, that sort of thing."
"We'll form PACs. Foundations. We'll contribute to local party organizations and encourage them to support the candidates we favor. Mad, if there's one thing I've learned, it's that when you have enough money the law is a reed that will always bend your way."
"You make it sound possible."
"Not only possible, but completely legal. And if we can't contribute directly, so much the better. The goal wasn't to have candidates beholden to us, was it? The idea was they should be independent and wise and sane and—telegenic, wasn't that part of it?"
"Do you mean it?" she said.
"As I said, I have connections in every city that matters. Let's make the grand tour. Attending the parties that I've avoided for all these years. You'll dazzle them, and I'll talk turkey with the local politicos. We'll pick our candidates and start the ball rolling. Isn't there an election next year? Is it too late to find candidates for Congress?"
"If only it weren't too late to choose a candidate for president."
"President schmesident," said Quentin. "We could probably make more difference if we concentrated on state legislatures."
"You're right, Tin. What I care about is finding good people and getting them started. And it might very well be state legislatures. County commissions! City councils! School boards!"
"We have our work cut out for us."
They fell back on the bed, laughing. "We sound like a silly old movie," said Quentin. "Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. 'We can put on our own election.' "
"I have no idea what you're talking about," said Madeleine.
"You've never seen an Andy Hardy movie?" asked Quentin. "You can't be serious. You're—you're not even an American!"
"No, I'm just not an elderly American. You really did grow up in a time warp!"
It was only later, as she slept beside him on the plane, that it occurred to him that Wayne Read had accused him of living in a time warp, and he had never told her about that conversation. Had he?
He must say a lot of things without realizing what he was saying. Because he had never told her that "Tin" was Lizzy's nickname for him. He wasn't stupid—when she first called him that it was in the garden, under the cherry tree, and the last thing he had wanted at that moment was to get prickly and say, Don't call me that, it was my dead sister's nickname for me. And later, he didn't want her to change, it felt right having her call him that, so why would he have told her that Lizzy used that name for him? When would he ever have told her? And yet she knew. Before Mom explained, she knew.
Maybe she just put things together. Picked up clues, reached a conclusion, and then thought he had said it outright. So she was observant. He couldn't hide things from her. It was a good thing he intended to be a faithful husband.
Their new political career wasn't as easy as they had thought. Oh, their initial plan worked very well. A man of Quentin's wealth and a woman of Madeleine's beauty and grace had no trouble at all being admitted to the highest circles of political activity in either party, in any city. The trouble was that in those circles they never met anyone that fit Mad's criteria for a good candidate. That was the basic contradiction of their plan: If the ruling cliques already knew a person, he or she was already too "inside" to qualify.
They needed to find people who weren't politically aware, or at least not politically self-aware. So through the autumn of 1995 they widened their net. They established their credentials with the insiders, yes, but they also went to service organizations, to activist groups, to charities and churches; they took newspaper reporters and city bureaucrats to dinner and asked them who really made a difference in the community, the men and women they actually admired. And slowly but surely they began to find people. Not in every city, but now and then one face, one name would come to the fore.
It was exhilarating work, and Quentin could see why Mad loved it, even though it wasn't something he would ever have chosen to do on his own. And watching her do it, that was almost miraculous. His money opened political doors and made campaigns possible, yes, but she was the one who persuaded these reluctant candidates, who kindled the ambition that had lain dormant within them, or had been turned outward to some cause. You can make a difference. If you don't run, who will? Instead of fighting city hall, you can be city hall—and you won't be beholden to anyone. You'll have the courage and strength that come from not caring—because you don't care whether you get reelected, do you? So you won't always have your eye on the polls—you'll be free to follow your heart and mind. And if you lose—well, you tried, didn't you, and you'll only have made more connections to help you in the work you're already doing.
They bought it. They absolutely bought into her dream and made it their own and after a while the only thing that continued to surprise Quentin was how little it cost. National politics might cost millions, but local politics could still be paid for out of pocket change, as long as you had willing volunteers—and Madeleine had the knack of finding people who really could inspire others to spend hundreds of hours stuffing envelopes or knocking on doors or manning booths or phoning people. And once the candidate began to emerge, other financial supporters gathered.
"Mad," Quentin said to her, as they drove from the airport to his parents' house for Christmas. "Mad, this politics thing isn't working."
"Are you kidding?" she said. "I think it's going great!"
"Oh, sure, for you it's going great. But it was supposed to help me get rid of all this money, and we're just not spending it fast enough."
"That's because you're in the wrong country," said Mad. "America isn't corrupt enough yet. There are some Latin American countries where you have to compete with drug lords when you want to buy an election, and you can soak through a hundred million in no time."
"Well, I'm going to have to start another hobby. Something really expensive. Donating to universities, for instance—I hear that's a bottomless hole."
"A Fears Building of Something on every campus, is that it?"
"Or a Cryer Building," he said. "They don't have to be named for me."
"Not that name," she said. "I don't want my name on anything."
"Too late. I've got it on a marriage certificate."
"You tricked me! Just to get my autograph!"
Christmas was wonderful, even though Mad complained a little about the green lawns and the lack of snow.
"We can't all live in the perfect climate of the Hudson Valley," said Dad.
"Californians are climate-deprived," said Mom. "The things that do go wrong aren't seasonal. There's no earthquake season, for instance."
"There's a mudslide season," suggested Dad.
"But not every year."
"Next year," said Dad, "Madeleine should invite us all to Christmas with her family. So we can tramp around on snowshoes. Do you have any nieces or nephews, Madeleine? Or—heavens, you're young enough—you might still have younger brothers and sisters at home!"
"No believers in Santa Claus, if that's what you mean," said Mad, laughing.
Quentin watched her, waited for her to sidestep the issue. But she didn't.
"Maybe I will have you all come out."
"No," said Dad immediately. "I was just joking. We don't go inviting ourselves to other people's Christmases!"
"Not Christmas Day, maybe," said Mad. "We don't do much for Christmas anyway, I think you'd be disappointed. But the week after. Don't you think, Quentin? Wouldn't that be a good holiday next year?"
"Sure," he said. "Sounds great."
But it bothered him. She wouldn't take him home to meet her family, after all these hints. And yet she'd invite Dad and Mom to come along with them. Of course, she was inviting them a year in advance—she might find a thousand excuses for canceling before then. Or maybe whatever she dreaded there might be easier if his parents came along with them. Or maybe she had simply overcome those fears, right now, today, in this conversation.
"You don't sound very enthusiastic," said Mom. "Are you afraid we'll use the wrong fork, Quen?"
"Oh, it's just that Mad has told me such terrible things about her family. Visitors have been known to arrive and... disappear."
Mad looked at him in consternation. "No such thing."
"That's why she's never taken me there. And her house is haunted. And it was built over an old chemical sludge factory. People get cancer just flying over, the airlines have to route around it."
"There were no factories making chemical sludge when the family manse was built," said Madeleine. "All the rest is true, though."
"Don't forget the Indian burial mound, Mad," said Quentin. "Her family bulldozed a whole burial mound because it blocked their view of the river. But on the spot where the mound was... nothing grows."
"That's not true," said Madeleine. "It's always a jungle of briars and poison ivy."
"Which your mother harvests and uses to make those unforgettable prickly salads."
"All right," said Madeleine, laughing. "I'll take you home first, to meet my folks."
Mom and Dad were appalled.
"Quentin hasn't even met your parents?" Dad asked. "How does he know idiocy doesn't run in your family?" He was trying to make a joke out of it.
Mom's reaction was sympathetic—but not to Madeleine and Quentin. "Oh, but your mother must be so hurt that you married without telling her!"
"Oh, don't worry. I told her. I just didn't invite her."
"Oh, worse and worse!" cried Mom.
"My family's very odd," said Madeleine. "You have to understand—they would have thought it presumptuous of me to expect them to come. You simply have to understand that... I mean, when I came here—did you people pose for Norman Rockwell or what?"
"That depends," said Dad. "Do you like Norman Rockwell paintings?"
"I dreamed of Norman Rockwell paintings when I was a child," said Mad. "I thought they were a wonderful fantasyland. Or heaven—if I died, that's where I'd go, to a Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving or Christmas. Like the one we just had."
"Well, what does your family do, beat the servants and burn down the neighbors' house?" said Dad, carrying the joke too far, as usual.
Madeleine smiled wanly. "Servants always used to quit before we had time to beat them," she said. "They finally gave up hiring them."
Mom was outraged at Dad, though of course she put a jesting face on it. "I can't believe he's teasing about your family, Madeleine, dear, he just has no sense of tact, he never has." She playfully punched her husband on the arm; but Quentin could see that it hurt, and Dad didn't like it. It was a pattern already familiar from his childhood—Dad always got a small, painful bruise when he went too far. And yet it didn't stop him from going that far. As if painful jabs were the medium of exchange in the economy of their quarreling. Would he and Madeleine evolve ways of hurting each other and then ignoring it and going on?
"Oh, please," said Madeleine. "Let's just take it as a given that my family is weird. I'm simply the normal-looking one who can go around in public. But I'll tell you what. Quentin has been dying of curiosity and I think he's sort of hurt that I've never taken him, so this is it. Next week. After New Year's. We'll drive up the Hudson Valley and I'll take him into Château Cryer and when he comes back here he can tell you all the weird things he saw. Believe me, you can't stay there for three hours without having a dozen very bizarre tales to tell."
"Tell us some now," said Quentin.
"You see?" said Madeleine. "Now that I've actually agreed to take him, he's afraid and he wants me to prepare him in case he wants to back out. Well, I'm not going to tell him a thing. He'll just have to come with an open mind."
"I'm sure your family is perfectly wonderful," said Mom, "and that's what Quentin will tell us."
"Maybe," said Madeleine with a knowing smile. "And maybe not. But I'll tell you this. Nobody in my family makes a banana cream pie like yours, Mother Fears. And the half-pie in your fridge is moaning my name."
"The pie doesn't know your name," said Quentin. "That was me you were hearing. But we'll settle for the pie for now."
"Quentin," said Mom reprovingly. "You're not such a newlywed anymore that we should have to put up with your innuendos."
"Innuendo?" said Quentin. "Why, whatever do you mean, Mother dear?"
After the pie, as Mom cleaned up in the kitchen and Dad signed on to America Online to send after-Christmas e-mail to his brothers, Quentin gave Madeleine a chance to back out of her invitation.
"But I don't want to back out. I'd already decided it was time for you to meet them. I would have told you privately but then the conversation just went that way and—you don't mind, do you?"
"Not at all. In fact I'm relieved. That you trust me enough to take me home."
"It wasn't a matter of trusting you, Tin, my pet, my poo. I know you can handle it. They just have a way of getting under my skin. With you to hold on to as an island of sanity, I think I can get through a day with my family. Just a day, mind you."
"And then a night at the Holiday Inn?"
"Well, of course we have to stay overnight, but you know what I mean. Twenty-four hours and then we go, no matter how my family pleads with you to stay, do you understand me? Because even if I'm wearing a plastic smile on my face and saying, 'Oh, yes, Quentin, let's do stay,' trust me, I do not want to stay, I want you to get me out of there before we reach the witching hour."
"Which is?"
"If we arrive at noon, then by the next noon we must be gone or I will turn into a puddle of mucus on the floor."
"That's an attractive image. If I kiss it, does it turn back into a princess?"
"No, it just turns into a cold." She kissed him. "Your kiss has already turned me into a princess."
The limo met them at La Guardia in the late afternoon on New Year's Day and they started out on the drive up the Hudson. "Shame we won't be able to see the river," Quentin said. "It'll be dark before we get over the Triborough."
"You can't see the river anyway," said Madeleine. "Not the way you can from the bluffs. The great houses were all built to be seen from the water. That was the highway then, the steamboats up the Hudson."
"The house is that old?"
"A fireplace in every room. The kitchen is an add-on. The bathrooms are carved out of hallways and stuck under stairs. All afterthoughts."
"They built these huge gorgeous mansions and then went outside to the privy?"
"Don't be silly," said Madeleine. "They had fine porcelain chamberpots. Which were emptied by the servants."
"Let me guess about the toilet paper."
"Every room had a water basin and towels. What do you think they were for?"
"Oh, for the good old days," said Quentin.
"I suppose your people all had flush toilets from the fifteenth century."
"No. But they dug their own latrines and built privies and used the Sears catalogue. Nobody handled anybody else's sewage."
"The idea of money was different then," said Madeleine. "If there was a filthy job, other people did it, and you paid them."
"My people believed in independence. You did for yourself, beholden to no one."
"The snobbery of the poor."
"The helplessness of the rich."
"Only you're the one with money."
"What, your family's broke?"
"We have what we need, I guess. Nothing on your scale."
"My money's an accident, Mad. It fell on me while I was doing what I cared about. I was lucky to be in a company run by a marketing madman. And once I had money, I couldn't stop it from growing."
"That's what I love most about you, Tin. You have no ambition whatsoever."
"One ambition. To make a future with you."
She smiled at him.
He pulled the Beatles Anthology CD out of his carry-on bag and put it in the player in the limo. "I haven't had a chance to listen to this since you gave it to me."
"I thought you might want something from your childhood."
"It's not like I remember them. I was three years old when they did the Sullivan show."
"It's all ancient history to me."
"You're not that much younger than I am." On the marriage license she had put 1965 as her year of birth.
"I lived on another planet then," she said. "We didn't even have a radio in our house."
"Chamberpots, no radio."
"I did love to crank the Victrola."
"Seriously?"
"No. I suppose there was a radio somewhere, but it's not as if anyone would dream of letting me choose the station. We didn't get out much."
"Why not? Didn't you go to school?"
"Tutors. Family tradition."
"Were they trying to isolate you?"
"I think perhaps so," said Madeleine. "Grandmother ruled with an iron fist. She never liked me."
"Grandmother? Will I meet her?"
"I don't know. She ought to be in a rest home, with tubes sticking out of her."
Quentin had never heard such venom from her.
"Alzheimer's?" he asked.
"Advanced bitchiness," she answered.
"Give me a little preparation. Who is it I should try hardest not to offend?"
"Tin, don't you get it? I don't care who you offend. I've been free of their control for years now. I'm bringing you here to show them that there are good people in this world and I found one of them and if they don't like you, screw 'em."
Quentin digested this for a while, listening to the music, then looking at the booklet that came with the CD. "It's funny how all their early stuff sounds so much like Elvis. Only not as good."
"What?" She looked baffled.
"The Beatles."
"Oh, sorry, I wasn't listening."
"Listen to it now. That's Paul singing, only listen to what he's doing to his voice. Distorting it like crazy. They don't even sound like the Beatles."
"He can't hold his pitch very well, can he."
"That's what I mean. It's like they haven't found their own sound yet. Not one of these cuts before their first studio singles even sounds like the Beatles. It's like they walked into the studio as a club band that did Elvis and Ink Spots imitations, and came out as the Beatles."
"I thought you said you were only three when the Beatles came along."
"Yeah, well, when I was old enough to listen to music, what was there? England Dan and John Ford Coley. 'I Put My Blue Jeans On.' 'She's Gone.' And who can forget Fleetwood Mac?"
"I guess they must be forgotten because I never heard of any of those groups. 'I Put My Blue Jeans On' sounds like a commercial."
"It was a song, by this squiggy little guy from England I think. And they did make it into an ad jingle. Or maybe it started that way, what do I know? And 'The Year of the Cat.' Man it was bad. Lizzy and I went back and listened to the old stuff. My parents were Elvis nuts but they also liked the Beatles. It was in their closet."
"Well, if the Beatles were Elvis clones at first, that's understandable."
"The recorded stuff wasn't. What did you listen to?"
"I told you, nothing."
"Had to be disco. Let's see, you'd've been fifteen in 1980. Oh, I know. Michael Jackson! 'Billy Jean'! 'We Are the World.' Or maybe Springsteen."
"What is this, a test? A final exam or something?" She looked really annoyed.
"Look, I'm just talking about music, that's all."
"Well I don't know any of it! And there's no reason that I should, so stop it!"
She looked furious and frightened as she turned to look out the window into the deepening night. Lights and signs whipped by on the freeway.
"It wasn't a test," said Quentin quietly. "Why would I be testing you?"
"I don't know," she murmured.
"Well I wasn't. I love you whether you care about music or not. I was just trying to think what would have been current when you came of age. People usually know the music that was hot when they were about fifteen or so, and then for a few years till they get married. I got into it early because Lizzy took me with her when she was that age. And I never stopped because I didn't get married till now. You have friends in DC, didn't they play any music?"
"It never sounded like music to me. Nine Inch Nails." She shuddered.
"But they didn't play you any Counting Crows? Martin Page? Natalie Merchant?"
"We were bureaucrats. And what I cared about was government." She turned back to face him. "The Beatles. They were rich, weren't they? Famous, right?"
"More popular than Jesus Christ, I think the saying was."
"Yeah, well, what did they do with it?"
"Do?"
"With their money and fame. What was it for?"
"Music, I guess. Songs."
"No, that's what it was from. What was it for?"
"For itself." He studied her face, wondering if someone he loved so much could be so blind to something as simple as this. "They did music because they loved the songs. Writing them and singing them."
"Like you loved the programming, is that it?"
"Sure. You do what you love, and sometimes money happens or fame happens, but mostly it doesn't happen but that's OK because you were doing what you loved."
She shook her head. "Like a kid who's given this big wonderful present, only when he unwraps it, all he can think to do is play with the box it came in. With the wrapping paper and ribbon."
"OK, so what's the present?"
She leaned toward him and spoke with such intensity that her words scoured his heart. "Running things."
He remembered what she had said in the garden. About power.
"But that's just the box, too," he said. "Power, I mean."
"No it isn't."
"Sure it is. What's power for?"
"I don't get what you're asking me."
"You asked the same question about money and fame—what are they for? Well, what about power? Running things? Running them for what? To accomplish what?"
"Whatever you want." The answer was so obvious to her that she clearly didn't understand a word he was saying.
"That's the point? What do you want?"
"To run things," she said.
"But all these candidates we've been encouraging, Mad, didn't we pick them out because they had purposes? Causes?"
"They had causes," she said. "That doesn't mean I have to."
This attitude was so baffling and unpleasant that Quentin wished he hadn't got into the conversation. "I thought you chose these people for their causes."
"I did," she said. "Nobody's easier to control than a politician with a cause."
He shuddered. "That doesn't make any sense."
"Sure it does," she said. "I assumed you understood that. As long as he's accomplishing his cause, he'll do everything else you tell him to. Like you do with the people you got into partnerships with."
"What is it you think I'm doing with them?"
"They have their dream—as long as they get to accomplish that, then you get everything else your way."
He could certainly see how it might seem like that to someone with her perspective. His partners brought their dream, their drive, their expertise—but everything else was done Quentin's way, which is why he never lost much money with even the worst failures. He had control. And as soon as they weren't accomplishing his purpose, he cut them off and set them adrift. Uninjured, but they were no longer useful to him and so he had nothing more to do with them.
That's how it looked, yes, if you chose to see it that way. But that wasn't what he meant, or who he was. He wasn't using these people, he was helping them.
"Get real," said Madeleine. "Nobody ever helps anybody except in order to help themselves. Not even you. Not even when you do your best lying to yourself about it."
"I don't like this conversation," said Quentin.
"It's your conversation, Tin. But I thought we both understood this. I haven't lied to you. I told you from the start it was power that I wanted most. You knew that's what you were signing on to when we went into partnership."
"Partnership?" The word was sour in his mouth.
"I don't mean our marriage. I mean our partnership. The candidates. We're building up a network of people we can control without their even guessing we're controlling them. Maybe only two or three times in their career will we have to make them do something, and when we do, it won't violate any of their principles because it'll have nothing to do with their pet cause. We'll just ask them to help us out on this or that, whatever it is, and they'll know that they owe us everything and so they'll do it. And never think twice, because it'll be so small, so nothing. An appointment. A single vote. Locking something up in a committee. Confirming an appointee their party opposes, or opposing one they're supposed to support. As a favor to us, the ones who got them started on their wonderful career that's been so good for their cause."
"So we're the fat cats after all," said Quentin.
"No, not at all!" She laughed at the idea. "Tin, you've seen the fat cats, they strut around getting in petty catfights about stupid local matters that amount to nothing. They show off their jewelry and their tans at local fundraisers. They pride themselves on mingling with the common people and then pride themselves on being more 'inside' than the common people. We're not like that."
Quentin shook his head. It was as if he hadn't really known her. And yet she was the woman he loved. He had to think about this. It wasn't anything like what Wayne Read had warned him about. After all, he'd known her for months now. And maybe she was right, maybe he should have understood this attitude of hers from the start. What did it matter, anyway? So she was more open about wanting power than most people, what of that? It was honesty, of a sort. Integrity.
Or else it was cynical manipulation, so deeply evil that few politicians could bring themselves to conceive of it.
He shook off that dark thought. This sweet, naïve, childlike woman beside him simply had a childlike, naïve view of the romance of political power. It was an outsider's vision, that's all. Just as he had found with money, she would soon find with power—that it got boring once you had enough of it, and then you had to rethink everything in order to find something worth doing with it.
Evil indeed. What dark thing dwelt in his heart, to make him think of such a word in relation to his Mad? He would say nothing to her to imply criticism. Better to treat it lightly, as a game, and then help her gain a wiser view later, as she gained more experience in the political world.
He leaned over and kissed her. "When you rule the world, Mad, do I get to be prince consort?"
She laughed. "Why do you think I married you?"
He laughed with her. He was relieved to see that she could mock herself. As long as she could see the humor in her own desires, they would never get the better of her.
The Beatles sang about how they wanted money. The other stuff, you can give it to the birds and bees. You really got a hold on me. Roll over, Beethoven. And the CD ended.
Silence filled the car for a while. Except that he could hear his own heartbeat, pounding like Ringo's relentless drum. With her head on his shoulder, could she hear it, too? His heart? Now that it belonged to her, did she hear it?
They never would have noticed the entrance to the estate if she hadn't been there to point it out. Even as it was, with her saying, "Right here, turn here, right now!" the driver overshot it and had to back up.
"Sorry," he said. "I couldn't see it till we passed it."
"No sweat," said Quentin.
"I can see how it's easy to miss in the darkness," said Madeleine.
The lane they drove up was so overgrown that branches scraped both sides of the car, and sometimes limbs hung so low that it seemed the lane ended entirely.
"Tearing up the side of the car," the driver murmured.
"I paid for the insurance coverage, didn't I?" asked Quentin.
"Oh, yes sir, no problem, sir, just talking to myself."
"I suppose they've been forgetting to have the gardener come out to the lane," said Madeleine. "Or maybe it's just Grandmother's idea of privacy."
At last the lane opened up onto a large field of snow. Not a tiretrack or footprint disturbed it, even though it had been days since the last snowfall. Only a slight depression in the snow showed where the lane went.
The house emerged from the great ancient trees that surrounded it, but could never have hidden it in the daylight, for it rose five rambling stories above a sweeping front porch with a stairway surely as wide and high as a Greek temple.
"How many hundreds of people live here?" asked Quentin in awe.
"In its heyday, there were probably half a dozen families. Nobody moved away. We were such a tightknit clan back then." She laughed. "Money requires a big house, anyway, Tin. No matter how many people actually live there. You're the only one who doesn't understand that."
A silent servant stood waiting for them, a tall thin man, the cliché of a butler. He wore only a lightweight jacket but didn't seem bothered by the cold.
"How did he know we were coming?" asked Quentin.
"I'm sure someone noticed the lights coming up the lane."
Quentin wasn't quite sure what the servant was there for, since he didn't open their car doors or help them get their luggage out of the car—the driver did all that. Quentin tipped the driver and sent him off. The tires crackled in the gravel and the engine sounded like a windstorm as the car swept away, its taillights streaking the snow with red.
"Much more Christmasy than anything in California," said Quentin.
"It doesn't feel Christmasy to me," said Madeleine. "It feels oppressive."
"Welcome home, Miss Cryer," said the servant softly.
"You see?" said Madeleine. "They know I'm Mrs. Fears now."
"Beg your pardon," said the servant. "Habit of decades."
The servant led them up the stairs. He must have come out of the house another way, since theirs were the first feet to break the crust of snow on the steps. Quentin carried his own bags; the servant was carrying Madeleine's. Was this a sign of things to come? Madeleine belonged here, and Quentin was barely tolerated? Or maybe if Quentin had simply left his bags, the servant would have come back down and picked them up later. He had no idea, really, how the whole business with servants worked. And from what Madeleine said, it might all be different here anyway. Her family followed its own rules.
Which was all the more apparent when not a soul from the household came to greet them. They were led up silent, empty stairs to a room on the third floor—a huge room, well furnished, but lighted by only two lamps with cloth cords that plugged into ancient two-prong outlets. "I guess nobody's brought this old place up to code," said Quentin.
The servant looked at him as if he were a newly noticed crack in the plaster, and then left the two of them in their oversized but ancient bedroom.
"Well, Mad, is there a bathroom attached to this room or do we wander down a hall?"
She laughed. "There's a bathroom attached to all the rooms now—somebody went on a modernizing kick back in the 1920s. When they put in the electricity they also put in the plumbing. But you can see up on that wall how the moldings aren't exactly right. That's because the wall didn't used to be here. This is a false wall added on so they could fit in two bathrooms, ours and the one attached to the next bedroom over." She showed him in to the quaint old bathroom, with a clawfoot tub and a toilet with the tank high on the wall. And a pull chain.
"Oh, really," said Quentin. "Surely this was old-fashioned even in the twenties."
"My family cultivates an air of eccentricity."
"I feel like we've walked into the castle of the beast."
She raised an eyebrow. "I know the place smells musty, but—"
"In the story of Beauty and the Beast. How she lived there but never met a soul for the longest time."
"Oh, they're all in bed."
"It's not that late."
"I didn't say they were asleep. The house keeps Grandmother's schedule. Quiet time begins right after supper. Everybody to their bedrooms. Including arriving guests. We can go on down to the kitchen and make sandwiches, though. As long as we don't slide down the banisters or shout through the halls. Everybody will stay out of our way until tomorrow."
"Who's everybody?"
"How do I know till I've taken inventory in the morning?"
So they divided up the drawers and closet space and unpacked and changed out of their traveling clothes into pajamas and bathrobes and padded downstairs in slippers to the basement kitchen. "This must be convenient for the servants," said Quentin.
"That's what dumbwaiters are for," said Madeleine. "It's so low-class to have the food prepared on the same floor where the family and company live." She laughed. "Oh, Tin, are you beginning to see why I didn't want to bring you here right away?"
"I remember the grande dame telling me that in the old days, everybody married for money. New money married old money. Is that what I am? New money?"
"No," said Madeleine. "You're nothing but a love machine to me."
"You have mustard on your lip." But while she was still looking for a napkin, he kissed it off. They carried their sandwiches upstairs.
In the morning, watching through half-open eyes as Madeleine staggered from bed to bathroom, Quentin wondered why he had been so emphatic about wanting to meet her family. Not because he actually wanted to feel this nervous, worried about whether he'd measure up to their expectations—or, worse, fit them exactly. It didn't help that Madeleine had been so maddeningly vague about what was wrong with her family. Or even, for that matter, who they were. The only one she ever mentioned specifically in connection with this house was her grandmother. Quentin's own grandmothers were so funny and loving and kind, each in her own way, that it was hard to imagine that any grandmother could be awful. What would an evil grandmother do, bake cookies without sugar? Refuse to babysit?
"Wake up, Quentin."
"Did I doze off?"
"I wasn't that long in the bathroom. I think you're just hoping to avoid meeting my family."
"Maybe. Unconsciously, I assure you."
"You still haven't opened your eyes."
"Who else am I meeting today? Besides your dreaded grandmother?"
"Whoever's in residence, of course."
"I'll meet your parents, won't I?"
"I doubt it."
He felt his insides twist. "Then why are we here? Mad, I wanted to meet your parents."
"You never said that. You said you wanted to meet my family."
"And are those two separate entities?"
"My parents don't live here. My mother had a falling out with my grandmother."
"Well, why don't we go meet your mother, then?"
"Because this is home," said Madeleine. "This is my inheritance."
"You're the only heir?"
"Tin, I think you're stalling."
"I just don't get how your family is related."
"Grandmother begat Mother, and Mother begat me. Like in the Bible."
Quentin pulled the pillow over his head. She jerked it off at once, then pulled off the covers. There was a definite chill in the room.
"Come on, it's cold."
"You should have put your jammies back on last night."
"After you went to all the trouble of pulling them off with your teeth?"
"In your dreams."
"You mean I was dreaming?"
"The glass of cold water comes next, Tin. Rise and shine."
Quentin immediately quoted: " 'Whenever I hear you saying, Rise and shine, rise and shine, it makes me think how lucky dead people are!' "
"What are you quoting?"
"Glass Menagerie. Tennessee Williams. High school English class."
"Get. Out. Of. Bed." She began pulling on his foot. He let her drag him to the floor, then tried to pull her down on top of him. But instead she planted a foot on his chest and said, "Rise or die, Tin."
"Oh, well, if that's my choice."
The bathroom floor was icy. The water from the tap was icy. He ran and ran the hot water. The temperature didn't change. He stuck his head out of the bathroom door. Madeleine was shimmying into a dress. She never wore dresses in the daytime.
"How long do I wait for hot water?"
"There's no hot water in the morning here. Didn't I tell you? Grandmother believes morning baths are bad for the health. The hot water is turned on at two in the afternoon so that you can have a hot bath between four and six, in time for supper."
"Are you joking?"
"Was it funny?"
"So cold water is all I get?"
"It's good for what ails you."
He splashed the stuff onto his lace and shivered into the face towel. He toyed with the idea of not shaving—his beard wasn't all that heavy and the color was light, and he often went a day without shaving. But Grandmother—he had to make the right impression on her, didn't he? If Mad was wearing a dress...
A few minutes later, dressed in sweater and slacks—she had warned him not to bring jeans, as there would be no occasion for which they would be regarded as appropriate—he gave Madeleine his arm, opened the door, and led her out into the corridor.
A man was standing there, arms folded. He had a beard, dark and cut to a point at the chin. His bearing was military, but his clothing was civilian. A suit, and rather an old-fashioned one. "About time the two of you came out of there."
"Why should it have bothered you, Uncle Stephen?" said Madeleine in a sickeningly sweet tone. "Did you need to use our bathroom?"
"Your grandmother wouldn't let anyone eat breakfast till you came down."
"So she's in a good mood. Glad to hear it."
Uncle Stephen scowled and marched down the stairs.
"She waited breakfast for us?" asked Quentin, incredulous. "It's noon!"
"It's actually a good sign, believe it or not," said Madeleine. "If she were angry at me, she would have made everybody else eat at dawn, and then make sure there was nothing in the kitchen for us to eat."
"So she makes everybody else fast, because she's feeling well-disposed toward you?"
"It's never a question of whether there will be suffering, Tin. The only question is who's going to be the victim. So far so good."
"Who's Uncle Stephen?"
"My father's brother."
"He's here, but your father isn't?"
"My father has a life."
"So Uncle Stephen isn't even a blood relative of the family? Just an in-law?"
"I didn't say that. My mother and father are cousins."
"Second cousins?"
"Wouldn't you like it better if I told you yes? But no. Uncle Stephen's father and Grandmother were brother and sister."
"But Grandmother got the house?"
"Grandmother gets what she wants. Except me."
Madeleine's parents were first cousins. Well, that didn't necessarily mean anything. Cousins marrying didn't mean there would be birth defects, only that the likelihood was increased.
They reached the main floor and Madeleine nodded toward a pair of doors standing only slightly ajar. "During the winter we always have breakfast in the library. The sun warms the room."
"Sounds cheerful."
As they walked toward the doors, Madeleine added, "I should warn you that Grandmother probably won't speak to you."
"You've got to be kidding."
"Don't take it personally. She likes to disorient people. She can go weeks at a time without speaking a word."
"Then how do people know what she wants?"
"Oh, trust me, she makes her wishes known." Madeleine was still chuckling as they passed through the doors into the library.
The walls were lined with books, floor to ceiling, just as in the grande dame's house, but there was no ladder. Apparently no one ever needed the books on the top shelves. Quentin got the feeling that this wasn't a living library, constantly being added to, borrowed from. Rather it was a library by custom. Some ancestor had bought the books, but no one had actually read any of them in a century. They were wallpaper.
The heart of the room now was the long table that ran parallel to the array of floor-to-ceiling windows. It was of a dark wood polished so deeply that the scant morning light from the windows shone every bit as brightly in reflection as in reality. The bone-white china also had a deep luster, and the crystal was so fine that it seemed not to exist except as bright sparkles of light in the air.
Seated in formal array around the table were six adults, with two empty chairs for Quentin and Madeleine. The empty chairs were at opposite corners of the table.
Everyone's eyes were on them, of course, except for the bent, gray-haired woman, shawled and stooped, who sat with her back to them in the tall chair at the head of the table. Grandmother, obviously, since no one else in the room could possibly be a candidate. The only other woman at the table was in her fifties at the oldest, which made it impossible for her to be the ruler of this roost.
Madeleine led Quentin forward quite boldly until her hand was resting on the tall back of Grandmother's throne. "How lovely to see you all. May I present my husband, Quentin Fears. You may call him Mr. Fears. And you may call me Mrs. Fears. Quentin, darling, allow me to introduce my family."
She was going to have her family call her Mrs. Fears? Only with difficulty did Quentin keep his broad smile riveted to his face.
"Uncle Stephen you met in the hall upstairs."
Uncle Stephen half-rose from his chair. "Charmed, I'm sure."
"The pleasure is mine," said Quentin, relying more on dim memories of dialogue from high school Spanish class than on any actual knowledge of formal manners. "Am I to call you Uncle Stephen?"
"If you should have occasion to address me, Mr. Fears," said Uncle Stephen, "you may feel free to call me 'sir.' "
"Thank you, sir," said Quentin, trying to keep the irony out of his voice.
Madeleine laughed lightly. "Uncle Stephen was in the military for a few minutes during the Korean War and he allows no one to forget it—though I'm never sure whether he understood the difference between the Korean and Crimean wars. He's a Light Brigade-ish sort of soldier at heart. Ours but to do and die, right, Uncle Stephen?"
"Only Madeleine may speak to me so jocularly," said Uncle Stephen coldly, addressing Quentin. "In case you thought her jaunty airs might be tolerated in someone else."
"I'll try to avoid error, sir," said Quentin.
"The charming lady next to Uncle Stephen is Aunt Athena. She is Grandmother's youngest sister, the one who never married. Her real name is Minerva, but she hated it and chose the Greek version of the name when she was in her twenties. Aunt Athena is noted for her wisdom."
Aunt Athena smiled broadly. "Oh, Magdalena, I've missed you so much. Where have you been?"
"Busy busy busy," said Madeleine. "Isn't my husband a fine one?"
"Husbands are usually so overrated. But as long as he makes you pregnant and you produce an heir to this great empire of love." Aunt Athena suddenly realized what she had said, blushed, and pressed her hands to her cheeks. "Did I say 'pregnant'? Oh, what a tongue I have."
"The next empty chair," said Madeleine, "is yours, Quentin, but I fear that my chair, which is next to it at the foot of the table, is inappropriately occupied."
The young man sitting there—he could be no more than thirty—looked up and grinned saucily. "Grandmother lets me sit here all the time now, Mrs. Fears."
"But not when I'm home, Paul. We've had this discussion before."
"It's a chair, darling," said Paul. "Just a chair. You can sit anywhere."
"Paul is my mother's younger brother," said Madeleine. "He's really forty-five. He only looks so young because he wears makeup. He's also very short and wears lifts in his shoes. I have no doubt that he's sitting on a dictionary right now."
"Charming as ever, aren't you, darling?" said Paul. "Maddy was always my favorite niece, Mr. Fears. You can call me Paul, by the way. And don't go near the bluffs with Maddy. She's a pusher."
"Move," said Madeleine. "And try not to lick the forks before you do."
Paul got up and walked around the table to the other empty chair, at Grandmother's right hand. At the same time, Madeleine led Quentin around the table the other way, waiting for him to help her into the chair at the foot of the table. There really was a dictionary sitting there. She handed it to him. Heavy. After a moment's hesitation he set it on the buffet a few paces beyond the table. He rushed back to help Madeleine slide gracefully into her chair and push it up to the table. Not until he was seated himself, at her right hand, did he get a chance to look up to the head of the table and see the face of the fabled Grandmother.
She was asleep.
Madeleine continued the introductions. "To my immediate left is Simon. Simon is a friend of the family. He's been living here since... when was it, Simon? 1950? Was Truman still president?"
Simon looked bashful and confused. In his seventies, he had only the barest fringe of white hair. He ran one hand and then the other over his scalp. "The Cryers have always been extraordinarily generous to one who has nothing to offer but his meager friendship, which, despite its little value, is at least constant."
"I'm pleased to meet you," said Quentin, starting to rise from his seat.
"No don't!" cried Simon. "Don't get up! Not to me! Pretend I'm not here!" Then he hunched his head toward one shoulder and grinned as his body shook and his tongue darted in and out at the corner of his mouth. Apparently this was what passed for laughter in the obsequious Simon.
"Keeping Simon here is one of Grandmother's aesthetic statements," said Madeleine.
The comment stung Quentin with its vicious-ness. "Mad," he said softly.
She grinned and patted his hand. "He's deaf as a post, darling. And dumb as a stump."
Since Simon had just finished speaking, he could only assume that she meant "dumb" in the sense of "stupid."
"And last but not least," said Madeleine, "is my cousin Jude. I'm not sure where on the convoluted family tree he actually fits, but he's long been a favorite of Grandmother's and as long as she lives, he'll have a place at her side."
"Oh, Mrs. Fears, you're always such a lark!" cried Jude. He was a bushy-eyebrowed old codger, even taller apparently than Uncle Stephen, but stooped so far that his head was rather near his plate, and he had to lift his head to bring the goblet to his lips. "Howdy, Mr. Fears. We're glad Madeleine—Mrs. Fears—found her a fine young man like you. Welcome and glad, we are to know you. Are you really richer than God?"
"Now, Cousin Jude," said Madeleine, "you know that God's millions are counted in a more dependable currency than American dollars. There's no comparing."
Cousin Jude thought this was the funniest joke. As the old man laughed, Quentin's eyes wandered to the head of the table, where he was startled to see that Grandmother's eyes were wide open, staring at him like headlights on bright.
Quentin turned to Madeleine and spoke softly. "Your grandmother..."
"Yes, Tin?"
But glancing back at the old lady, he was chagrined to see that her eyes were closed again.
"I thought she was awake."
"Oh, she's hearing everything, be sure of that. In and out of sleep, but aware all the time. And she has the hearing of a bat, so she's listening to our little whispers right now. Aren't you, Grandmother."
But Grandmother's eyes remained closed, her face slack with sleep.
At her right hand, Uncle Paul leaned forward with a grin. "Going to introduce me again, darling? I can change my name if you'd like."
"No need, Uncle Paul," said Madeleine. "Shall I ring for breakfast?"
"Please," said Uncle Stephen. "Some of us need to take nourishment at regular intervals."
"It's your bell, dear," said Aunt Athena.
Madeleine reached out and rang a small bell that sat beside her place at the table. It occurred to Quentin that hers was the place where Uncle Paul had been sitting. So he really had been an interloper there.
As soon as the bell rang, the same quiet servant from the day before opened the door from the butler's pantry, and two footmen came in with steaming plates, one of biscuits and one of scrambled eggs and bacon. Both began serving with Madeleine, and worked their way down the two sides of the table, crossing behind Grandmother and working up the other way. But no food was put on Grandmother's plate.
The collection of people around the table was odd, Quentin supposed, and there were certainly family tensions, but he couldn't help noticing that it was Madeleine who seemed to rule here, not Grandmother. It wasn't an idea he liked much, that Madeleine herself was the main source of family tension. And it wasn't fair, either. He had no idea of what had actually gone before. All the hostility might well have been earned. What did he know of these people? Uncle Paul, with his smarmy smile and ingratiating manner, was only fifteen years older than Madeleine but looked her age. For all Quentin knew, Paul might have molested Madeleine when she was a girl, or tried to; he might richly deserve Madeleine's goading. Not that Quentin took such speculation seriously, but after all, Madeleine had recoiled from his first attempt at any kind of serious physical intimacy with her. Wasn't it possible that Paul—or someone—had done something which made even a husband's caress at first repellent to her?
No, no, it wasn't right to start assigning unspeakable crimes to strangers. If Madeleine hadn't accused them, why should he?
The eggs were hot, the bacon cooked perfectly. The biscuits were steaming, freshly sliced, the butter still melting inside them. Whatever other failings this house might have, the cuisine had the simple perfection that approached the platonic ideal. Not scrambled eggs, but the scrambled eggs that all other scrambled eggs were imitating. The bacon of bacon, the biscuit of biscuits.
"Delicious," said Quentin to Madeleine.
She smiled, then leaned close to him and whispered, "Tin, in the upper classes one doesn't compliment the food. It's assumed that the food will always be perfect, and it isn't to be discussed."
He started to laugh, but caught himself when he realized she wasn't joking. All he could do was look at her oddly for a moment and then dig in to eat more. This was the food she was used to; he cringed to think of where he had taken her, what he had cooked for her. He had never wanted to live rich, but when they built a house, it would have to have a kitchen where a first-class chef would be glad to cook; and the chef would have to have a budget that would allow the acquisition of such ingredients. He could do no less for Madeleine, even if she said she didn't need such things.
The footmen came back for a second pass, this time with fruit—slices of pear so ripe they dissolved sweetly in his mouth almost without chewing; chunks of fresh pineapple with not a trace of acid sting to them; raspberries so plump and tart that the flavor seemed to dart through his whole face the moment he bit down on one. He closed his eyes to enjoy the perfect flavor without distraction.
"He's asleep!" crowed Simon. "Put him right out!"
Quentin opened his eyes, startled.
Simon looked crestfallen. "Oh, shame! No nap after all! Poor boy! Newlyweds get no sleep at all, do they!"
Madeleine put her hand on Quentin's knee under the table, to still his response. "Now, Simon," she said loudly, presumably to pierce Simon's deafness. "Mr. Fears is still a young man. He doesn't think of a nap as recreation yet."
"Not recreation!" cried Simon. "A feat! The great Olympic monathlon! To sleep, perchance not to dream! To obliviate one's dire sins in the wine of night!"
Grandmother was looking at Quentin again. And this time her eyes didn't close when he glanced at Madeleine and touched her sleeve.
"Grandmother," said Madeleine. "I hope he meets with your approval. He's everything I need, don't you think?"
Grandmother said nothing, but her eyes continued to drill into Quentin's soul, or so it seemed. He wanted to beg her pardon. He wanted to leave the room.
"With him beside me, I can open the box, don't you think?"
Grandmother's eyes slowly closed.
"Grandmother is annoyed with me," said Madeleine.
"Box?" asked Quentin.
"My inheritance. My grandfather left it for me. But by the terms of his will, I was forbidden to open it until my husband stood beside me."
The words cut him to the heart. She had never spoken of this before, never a hint that she stood to gain financially as soon as she brought a husband home.
"Oh, relax, Tin," she said. "I don't actually care about the inheritance. Not like I did when I was a girl. It bothered me then, of course, to see that box every day and know I couldn't open it. I grew out of that. I would have been happy never to come back here, never to open it. But since I am here, and do have a husband...."
"I knew you weren't marrying me for my money," said Quentin. "It never occurred to me you might be marrying me for yours."
He said it with a smile and a laugh. But it was only barely a jest.
"It isn't money, I'm quite sure of that. Or if it is," said Madeleine, "it isn't much because the box isn't all that large." She laughed and patted his hand. "Quentin, you're taking all this too seriously. I called it my treasure box when I was little. I even made maps of the house to where it was buried, though of course it isn't buried at all, it just sits there in the open."
"That seems a cruel temptation to a child. You might just have opened it."
"If I open it prematurely, I can't keep what's inside," said Madeleine. "I think Grandmother always hoped I would open it, and lose it. That dear old temptress." Madeleine's laugh was light and not unkind-sounding. Yet it was unkind, Quentin thought. She can be unkind without even noticing it. Do I know my wife at all?
Madeleine leaned over and rested her head on his arm. "Quentin, I don't like who I become when I'm here. And you don't like me either. You would never have loved me if you had met me here. But when I go back outside with you, I'll be myself again, you'll see. My true self, my best self. Not this awful... whatever you think I am."
"I think you're my dear wife," said Quentin. "But going outside sounds like a good idea. You were going to show me the river."
"You had enough breakfast?"
"Full as a tick," said Quentin.
"Grandmother, do excuse us to take a walk along the bluff."
Grandmother's eyes followed Quentin as he rose to his feet and pulled back Madeleine's chair so she could also rise. But she said nothing.
Simon's voice piped up loudly. "Everyone here who is actually real, please raise your hand!"
Madeleine murmured to Quentin, "When they get to a certain age, I think they should be locked up somewhere."
Quentin laughed and shook his head. "Why, when he's already locked up in a dream?"
"Oh, you put that so beautifully." She squeezed his arm. "I love you."
The library had only the windows to link it with the outdoors. They had to cross the entry hall and go into the official dining room in order to reach a door leading out onto the back portico. It was a broad expanse of flagstones with five wide steps leading down to the snow-covered lawn. The lawn itself, interrupted only by an occasional tree that was invariably surrounded by a circular bench, flowed on to the bluff overlooking the river. The river itself was, of course, below the level of the bluff, but in the clear, weary light of a winter afternoon, they could see the dark shadows of trees against stark and shining snow on the bluffs on the opposite side of the river. Miles and miles away, it seemed, though it could hardly be that far.
"It's a little bleak," he said.
"Imagine it with leaves," said Madeleine. "Imagine it filled with life. Imagine it when the country was still young and you might hear the tootle of a steamboat on the river below, and the sound of children laughing as they ran along the bluff."
As she spoke, the pictures she conjured in his mind delighted him, and he smiled. "All right," he said. "I'm willing to admit that winter has its own beauty, too."
"This house wasn't always filled with strange old people, you know," said Madeleine. "It was once alive and bright."
"When you were a little girl here?"
"I was a solitary child when I lived here," said Madeleine. "And Paul—he was no company for me."
Quentin wondered again whether Paul might have molested her, or tried to.
"But Mother told me what it was like when she was young. She and Paul were little here, and even though that was well after the age of the steamboats, of course, they knew the stories—Aunt Athena told them—and they'd play steamboat captain down by the river or up in their attic playroom."
"The idylls of childhood."
"Whatever that means. Exactly."
"But Aunt Athena can't be old enough to remember steamboats, either."
"Oh, of course not. Just a conduit for old stories. Family memories. She has to use her head for something. Keeping the old tales alive isn't a bad occupation for it."
"Mad, you're so nasty about them."
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm always so frightened when I come here, I'm not at my best."
"What are you afraid of?"
She didn't answer and she didn't answer, and then they were at the bluff and the river scene unfolded below them. Even with patches of ice along the edges of the river, it was formidably wide. Quentin remembered paintings by the Hudson River School and tried to apply those magnificent pastorals and landscapes to the scene before him. It wasn't hard. Before the river was a highway, it was a habitat, and now that the traffic was gone, perhaps that old life was coming back. Some old docks still touched the icy river edge, but at other places the verge of the river had been given back to the woods. How many squirrels were living off stored nuts in those trees in the lee of the bluffs? How many coons and rabbits, field mice and weasels lived without the sight of man for months on end?
Her hand stole around his waist and she leaned into him. "Oh, Quentin, I do love this place, I do love it. This is what brings me back, even though I hate who I become when I'm here."
"So let's open the treasure box and go. I can buy you another place on the river with a view just like this. Or better."
"There is no place just like this."
"You don't want me to look for another Victorian mansion?"
"Pre-Victorian, dear," said Madeleine. "Victorian is so... nouveau."
They laughed.
They walked on the path along the edge of the bluff. In a few places the drop-off was rather steep, and the path did skirt rather close. He couldn't help remembering Uncle Paul's jocular warning: Maddy's a pusher. And he was walking on the side by the river. But she wasn't pushing, she was holding him, and he loved the feel of the way their bodies moved, not quite together, but rubbing against each other, hip to hip, his arm across her shoulders, her arm around his waist. The breeze was a little chilly, but the sun was warm.
They reached the end of the family property and turned back to the house. They took a different path this time, and it led around a small stonewalled graveyard with an arched entrance. "Isn't it kind of morbid, keeping the family dead here on the property?" asked Quentin.
"It depends on how you regard the dead," said Madeleine. "They were part of us in life. Shouldn't they be part of us in death?"
"Will you be buried here someday?" he asked.
"I intend never to die," she said.
"Statistically, almost every woman who marries is signing on for widowhood at some time in her life."
"Do you want to be buried here?" she asked teasingly.
"Not unless I'm really dead," he said. "No fair burying me while I'm still snoring."
"You admit you snore?"
"Everybody snores," said Quentin. "But they only hear the other guy's snoring."
"And sleep through their own," said Madeleine. "Isn't that the way it goes."
"Does my snoring annoy you?"
"I think it's sweet," she said. "And when it keeps me awake, I pinch your nose and then you think you woke up to go to the bathroom and while you're in there trying in vain to aim somewhere near the toilet, I fall asleep very very quickly."
"What an efficient system. By the way, I may miss sometimes, but I've never yet peed on my feet."
"Or if you did, it didn't wake you," she said.
"You're as gross as a kid," said Quentin.
"It's one of the things you love best about me, though."
"Maybe," said Quentin. "But you have to promise to act shocked when our children talk gross. It's no fun if your parents can match you, ick for ick."
"I promise to be shocked."
They were back at the house. The dining room was empty. So was the library, and the table had been de-leafed and turned the other way, so it didn't take up the whole space between the vast walls of books. It wasn't as warm and inviting as the library in the grande dame's house had been. Instead of ladders, there was a balcony around three sides of the room, with a narrow spiral staircase leading to it. It all looked cold and uncomfortable, like a high canyon that you could only scale by taking your life in your hands climbing up a rickety narrow ladder. He went to the shelves to examine the titles, but Madeleine caught his arm almost at once. "Quentin, there's nothing readable there."
"In a house this old," he said, "there are bound to be some real finds."
"There aren't, trust me. Nobody actually reads. When this room was remodeled into a library, they bought books by the yard."
"Oh." Quentin was disappointed. He had once held a first edition, first printing of Uncle Tom's Cabin. In his hands, a book that started a war and changed the world, perhaps one of the very copies that had done it. But if the library was recent instead of old... still, even books bought at estate auctions sometimes had gems.
Nevertheless, he understood that Madeleine was more eager to open her treasure box than she wanted to admit. He let her lead him out into the entry hall and then into a parlor in the northeast corner of the house. It was lighted only by the windows, which on a winter afternoon meant the room was dim indeed, especially because heavy brocade curtains were closed at the top and swagged open near the base, so they more than half covered the glass.
Everyone was gathered here, though all but Uncle Paul and Grandmother seemed to hang back as close to the walls as the furniture allowed. Grandmother stood firmly, despite her shrunken, ancient appearance, her hands atop an intricately engraved mahogany box that stood on a small table in the middle of the room. Uncle Paul hovered near her, looking down at the box and then up at Madeleine and Quentin.
"Oh, darling, do hurry," said Uncle Paul. "I'm so eager to see what's left for you in there."
"I can bet you are," said Madeleine dryly. "Try to contain yourself."
Nevertheless, Paul's hands kept darting down toward the box, though he never quite touched it.
Grandmother's eyes stayed fixed on Quentin.
"Tin, dear," said Madeleine. "Why don't you open the box?"
"Oh, it's really not my place," said Quentin. "Your treasure, after all, and wanting to open it all these years."
Grandmother's eyes bored through him.
"Tin, I know it's silly, but now that it's come down to it, my hands are trembling so much I—isn't it silly? I guess this meant more to me than I thought. Won't you please help me out?"
"Is there a key or something?"
"No key!" Uncle Paul offered.
"Do keep your helpful information to yourself, Uncle P," said Madeleine.
"Oh, I know, darling, it's your prize."
"It is," said Madeleine. "There's nothing in there you can use. Count on it."
"Oh, I know," said Paul. "But we're all just so... intrigued with it. Like Christmas—you're dying to find out what's in everybody's packages, not just your own."
"Quentin," said Madeleine. "Please don't say no to me."
Quentin sighed and stepped to the box and put his hands on it. The wood was warm and smooth, the surface clean and polished. The geometric etching was intricately done, almost lacy in places. It was a beautiful box.
It was also a box with Grandmother's hands on it. Not to block him; her fingertips touched only the back corners of it. But her eyes still drilled into him, and even though she said nothing, he couldn't help but assume she was forbidding him to open it.
"I don't think your grandmother wants me to open it."
"Did she say so?" asked Madeleine.
"She hasn't been very chatty so far today," said Quentin, "but as you said, she lets people know what she wants."
"Quentin, everybody else here knows it's my right to open it. And my husband's right—what's in there is as much yours as mine, isn't it? You didn't ask me to sign a prenup, and I didn't ask you to sign one, either."
"You know what just occurred to me?" Quentin said, laughing. "Wouldn't it be a kick if it turned out that the box itself was the inheritance? You know, a keepsake. Nothing in it at all, just the box itself. The magical dreams of childhood, preserved forever."
"There's something in it, all right," said Madeleine.
"It's just chock full of stuff," said Uncle Paul.
"Something is chock full of something, anyway," said Madeleine. "You're not helping, Uncle Paul."
"I'm not?" said Paul. "Oh, foo. Fum. Fee fie foe."
"Tin, aren't you going to open it for me?"
"Sure, of course," said Quentin.
"Then do. Just open it."
"I am," said Quentin.
"You are what?" said Madeleine.
"Opening it."
"The evidence of my eyes says otherwise," said Uncle Paul, leaning close and looking him right in the eyes. "Open the damn box, you impotent lickspittle."
The venom in his voice almost stung. Quentin took a step back, removing his hands from the box.
Grandmother was still looking at him, but was she smiling a little?
"Tin!" wailed Madeleine. "Just go to the box, take hold of the corners of the lid, and lift it up. There's not even a latch!"
He stood there in embarrassment, unsure of why he couldn't quite bring himself to do this simple thing for his wife. "Is this a joke? Is something going to pop out at me?"
Madeleine abruptly began to beat the air with her fists like a tantrum-throwing child. "Open it open it open it!" Her face twisted into a grimace of weeping.
"Good heavens, Mrs. Fears, what a display!" cried Uncle Paul.
"Madeleine," said Quentin. "What's going on? This is too weird for me."
Abruptly she stopped the tantrum and was in control of herself, but the damage had been done. Quentin had seen a side of her he didn't know existed. Like a spoiled child. That's how she had acted ever since coming into this house. Like a bratty kid who was used to being able to say anything to anybody and no one would reprove her.
"It's her stopping you, I know it," said Madeleine. "Grandmother won't let me have what's rightfully mine."
"Madeleine, I just don't feel right about opening it," Quentin said. "Can I help that? If it's so easy, you open it, not me. I want you to, really. I'm just not part of this. Open it."
She slapped at him, though she was too far for her hand to reach him. Bursting into tears she screamed, "Why did I marry you if you can't do the one thing I want most for you to do!"
"Look, I'll open it!" Quentin said. "But I hope you know this isn't the most attractive you've ever looked in your life."
"Open it!" She was frantic now, almost panicked.
Quentin touched the box again. It was so warm. His ringers tingled. This whole business is turning me into a basket case, he thought. Obviously this box was far more important to her than she had let on. And yet she had kept it a secret from him through their whole engagement and these months of marriage. Plotting and planning. It meant that he had been manipulated and he hated that. Hated manipulating and being manipulated.
"Mad, I really think this isn't a good time to open the box," Quentin said. "You're upset and I'm upset and we need to have a talk about this first."
She wailed at him, sinking to her knees. "There's nothing to talk about! It's mine!"
"I know it's yours. But it's waited all these years, can't it wait till we talk this out?"
"Do you think talking will help?" she retorted. "She's stopping you. She's getting her way and I hate her for it! I'll kill her, I swear it."
"She's not stopping me, for heaven's sake, Mad!" But in a way she was, those fingertips on the box, those piercing eyes.
"What do you know about it!" Madeleine wailed. "All this work, all these months, I'm so tired! All for nothing!"
"I hope you're not referring to our marriage," said Quentin, trying to sound like he was joking. But of course he was not joking. He was frightened.
"If you loved me," said Madeleine, rising again to her feet, her face a mask of fury. "If you loved me like you say, you would open this box right now. This minute. This second."
Quentin turned to the box again, put his hands on the lid. The box trembled. "My hands are shaking," he said. "I don't think—right at this moment, Madeleine, I'm wondering—you make me wonder if our whole marriage is a sham, just so you could get me to open this box. Tell me that isn't true, Mad. This whole thing is so crazy, it can't be true."
"Open," she whispered, her face a mask of fury. "The. Box."
Quentin took his hands away from the trembling box and pressed them to his face. "Mad. Mad, what's happening to us?"
She screamed. Not the scream of a child in tantrum, but a high wail that sounded like a woman keening with grief. He turned to her, reached out his hands in pleading. She recoiled from him, spun around, and ran, staggering, from the room.
Confused and frightened and hurt, Quentin turned back toward the box. "I'll open it, Mad! Come back, I'm opening it, see?"
But Uncle Paul's hand was on the box now. "Not without Mrs. Fears in here, Mr. Fears," he said, smiling. "It's in the will."
Quentin looked around the room. Somehow, without his noticing it, all the others had slipped out of the room. Well, he wasn't surprised—this hadn't been a pleasant scene to watch. Only Uncle Paul and Grandmother remained, both of them touching the treasure box. Quentin looked Grandmother in the eye. "Doesn't she love me, Grandmother?" he asked.
The old lady's lips began to move. Slightly, no sound coming out.
"I should follow her," Quentin said. "I'm going to follow her and bring her back and we'll open the box and then we'll get out of here and everything will be all right. That's what I should do, isn't it?"
Her lips moved again. He leaned close, to hear her.
"Babbling old woman," murmured Uncle Paul, but he removed his hand from the box and stepped back out of the way.
Grandmother, almost nose-to-nose with him now, whispered to him. "Find me," she said.
It made no sense at all. The woman was senile. She was no more in control of this house than Quentin was.
Madeleine. Somehow she could explain it all. She could make sense of it. She was his wife, after all. She loved him, he loved her, they had everything in common, they had their lives together, she was his and he was hers forever. This was just some insane quarrel, some stupid misunderstanding.
Where was she? He ran out of the parlor into the entry hall. He checked the library, the drawing room, the dining room. The door to the back portico was open, the winter chill already skimming the floor so his feet went cold as soon as he entered the room.
He ran to the French doors leading out to the portico. She wasn't there. He cast his gaze out across the lawn of snow just in time to catch a glimpse of her, her hands at her face, as she ran awkwardly into the walled graveyard.
Immediately he took off after her across the snow.