join the faculty at the University of Chicago. Muslims have always had Mecca; Tommy in those days had Chicago.
''I don't think I want to come with you,' I told him. 'I think I found out where it was that I've always been going. It was here. I want to stay here. You go if you want. I think you should.' 'So do I,' Tommy said, and he did.
'When he left, me and UMass. both, I think they felt a little guilty, too, somehow responsible. After all, they'd lured my young husband to Amherst and what'd he done but go off and leave me there all by myself.
Like it was partly their fault. I didn't discourage that. Whatever they wanted to think that helped me was perfectly all right with me.
I'd finally begun to come down to earth and realize I was never going to be the first-chair oboe in the Cleveland Orchestra and have a torrid affair with George Szell. He was getting a little old for me by then anyway, and since I didn't have a husband anymore I decided the first thing I'd better do was find a way to make a living. And that's why I stayed.
'You see what I mean?' Diane said. 'I don't really belong here? This is just where I washed ashore? You and everybody else I've met and gotten to know well here all seem to have some kind of inner gyro that controls you, determines how you rotate. It may be a little out of kilter, so sometimes you spin off-center; quite a few of you're like that. But I've never seen you go completely out of whack. You may teeter and wobble around, but generally you regain control and keep on spinning. And it looks to me as though you can do this without having to think about what you're doing.
'I'm not like that. If something's important to me, I have to have a program, how I'm going to handle it so it doesn't handle me. You're important to me now; we're important to me, so I have to have a program on how I'm going to handle us.'
'Why not just make it up as we go along?' Merrion said. 'That's what we've been doing up 'til now, isn't it? Worked out okay up to this point, or so I'd say anyway.'
'Because up 'til now it didn't involve sex,' she said. 'For you that apparently doesn't amount to a major change, but to me it does. I don't mean I'm a retroactive virgin here now. That's not what I'm trying to say. Sex is important to me and I've missed it since Walter died, and I have to tell you honestly that if you hadn't been around here the other night to do what you did so nicely; or if you'd made some excuse that made me think sex wasn't going to be a part of our nice friendship, pretty soon I would've had to start looking around for some other man who might be willing to devote some of his time and energy to keeping a refined lady comfortable.
'I've had the project in the back of my mind ever since a few days after Walter's funeral. Not that there was any emergency involved; I didn't have to restrain myself around the funeral director or anything like that. I just had it in my mind that sooner or later I'd have to start thinking about reaching an understanding with a discreet gentleman.
'And now that I've apparently done that, well, now I have to get everything all orderly and tidy, and settled in my mind.
Because I have to warn you, Amby, I've always been the kind of girl who's reasonably easy, but I tend to get attached to someone I'm having sex with. One-night stands're not my bag. So you have to be on your guard about that. I'm really asking quite a lot of you, I know. You have to provide me with sex and you have to be discreet and you have to be a gentleman about it. You may not want this job.'
'Lemme think,' Merrion said. 'The gentleman-part I think I can handle.
I've had experience with that. The attachment part, too. I was attached to someone once, and I liked it, but that was before I found out I was lots more attached to her than she was to me. When I found out I didn't like it, but it didn't matter much by then because she'd done what Walter did, only a lot sooner. Inna meantime someone else got attached to me, and a very nice someone else she was, and still is, but I didn't get attached to her. She didn't like that a whole lot.
But in this case, if you're telling me it's mutual, as you seem to be, then that shouldn't be that much of a problem.
'The discretion I may have some trouble with. The women I've known've been single like me. What we did was our business. I haven't had a lot of call for that particular specialty.'
'Well, you'll want to get to work on it, then,' she said. 'For the boys' sake, I mean. Rachel I'm not concerned about. Rachel, if I don't do something silly and get her all stirred up, will happily stay right where she is, down there in Washington; contentedly doing just what she does, 'working far too many hours' in the office of counsel of the National Association of Broadcasters; 'and spending far too little time with her husband and her kids. Not that Terry's liable to notice, since he's as bad as she is and works far too hard himself,' in the legal office of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
'The boys're a different matter.' They were both still at Mount Hermon then. Phil, nine when his father died, had taken it hard and was still recovering, very slowly. Diane, when she and Merrion had become lovers, was not confident that the boy, 'so much like his father,' had yet completely regained his equilibrium, and would not do so until Christmas, 1990, when he came home during his freshman year at Connecticut Wesleyan and announced he had joined the Army, signing up for a four-year program offering training in electronics, and wasn't going back to college, 'probably ever.'
'Walter made no secret of it, how he'd hated college,' Diane, much relieved, told Merrion then. 'Many times he told me how unhappy he'd been when he was away at school, and how wrong his grandfather'd been to've sent him, made him go. 'All I ever wanted to do when I grew up and came home from Mount Hermon was stay home from Mount Hermon and go to work in the agency and learn how to run the business, and then spend the rest of my life doing that.'
Her second son, Ben, four years younger, had been at Deerfield only a year when Walter died. He was a strange and solemn kid who seemed puzzled by his father's death, as though feeling he had never known his father well enough to miss him too much when he went away. He had already somehow begun to assemble what amounted to a new life for himself, using what Deerfield had given him to work with, spending all but his shortest vacations with a roommate whose family had a cattle ranch in British Columbia, putting so much emotional as well as geographical distance between himself and the house with the yellow door in Canterbury that he had in effect resigned from the family before his father's death.
'But that doesn't mean I think he needs to know that his mother's having sexual relations with the guy from the courthouse his old man used to have too much to drink with. I don't mind if he does know, if either one of them, Phil or Ben, starts to think about it, figures it out, and draws the obvious conclusion. As I'm sure in time they will they're not stupid kids, after all. But I want them to have the option: either of thinking about it, and figuring out that their mother's having sex again, or of not thinking about it, if that suits them, drawing no conclusion at all. So that's why you have to be discreet.'
What they had done was work out an arrangement that looked to Merrion as though it might last him, at least, for as many years as he had left 'maybe thirty or so,' he said one winter Saturday at Grey Hills when he'd had a game of racquetball with Heck Sanderson and then done ten laps in the indoor pool, 'if I keep this up,' as of course he had not.
The substance of it was what Hilliard had been looking to find out when he poked around, and what Merrion would not disclose. They had promised to take care of each other.
'You certainly look like hell this morning,' she said affectionately after he had parked in her driveway and come into her house through the back door without knocking.
'Thank you very much,' he said, getting a mug from the cupboard and filling it from the coffee pot on the counter next to the sink, 'so nice of you to notice. I suppose I probably do. I've fucking well come by it honest, up 'til all hours with a pack of criminals. What the hell else can you expect?' He drank some of the coffee. 'Actually, though, I feel pretty good. And you look perfectly great.'
The cat rubbed against her shins and she nudged it away with her foot, hard. 'Oh no, you don't, you no-good bastard,' she said. 'Think you're getting back in my good graces that easy, you miserable son of a bitch.'
'Peter been a bad boy?' Merrion said. In order to afflict the man he called his sometimes job-so-solemnly- religious, always-no-help uncle,'
Walter had named the cat Simon and called him Peter.
'Peter shat in the bathtub again last night,' she said. 'Peter's landlady damned near stepped in Peter's shit barefoot this morning when she went to take her shower, which would've made her good and mad at Peter if she
