“I’m sorry. But if we take it so
seriously, why the hell are we in this mess.”
“Because we wouldn’t let it
slide,” Jenn said. “Because you
wouldn’t accept adultery. Because I wouldn’t accept suffocation.”
“I loved you very intensely,” Jesse said.
There was half a drink left in the shaker. Jesse added it to his
glass.
“You loved your fantasy of me very
intensely,” Jenn said, “and
kept trying to squeeze the real me into that fantasy.”
Jesse stared at the crystalline liquid in his glass. Jenn was still. Below them the harbor master’s launch pulled away from the
town pier and began to weave through the stand of masts going somewhere, and knowing where.
“That you talking or the shrink?” Jesse said.
“It’s a conclusion we reached
together,” Jenn
said.
Jesse hated all the circumlocutions of therapy. He sipped the lucid martini.
“Why do you think I’m so
wonderful?” Jenn said.
“Because I love you.”
Jenn was quiet. She smiled slightly as if she knew something Jesse didn’t know. It annoyed him.
“What the fuck is wrong with that?” he said.
“Think about it,” Jenn said.
“Think about shit,” Jesse said.
“Just because you’re getting
shrunk doesn’t mean you have to shrink me.”
“You think I’m wonderful because you love me?”
“Yes.”
They were both quiet. Jesse stared at her defiantly. Jenn looking faintly quizzical.
After a time, Jenn said, “Not the other way around?”
Jesse nodded slowly as if to himself, then got up and mixed a new martini.
9
Jesse’s hangover was relentless on Monday morning.
He sat behind
his desk sipping bottled water and trying to concentrate on Peter Perkins.
“We spent two days going over that guy’s apartment,” Perkins
said. “We didn’t even find anything
embarrassing.”
“And him a stockbroker,” Jesse said.
“So what do you
know?”
Perkins looked down at his notebook.
“Kenneth Eisley, age thirty-seven, divorced, no children. Works
for Hollingsworth and Whitney in Boston. Parents live in Amherst.
They’ve been notified.”
“You do that?”
“Molly,” Peter Perkins said.
“God bless her,” Jesse said.
“Coroner’s through with him,”
