could just imagine him with his face all scrunched up the way it got when it was puzzling on something, saying, “What do you think, Mary, should we send my ex Tamara an invitation or not?”
Well, damn him and her, too. Second-chair cello, second violinist-a couple of second-rate musicians who deserved each other and their second-rate lives in the City of Brotherly Love. She was well rid of that man. Sure she was. She knew it; everybody said so. So why did he keep popping up inside her head like a big black smiley jack-in- the-box?
Clue in, Tamara. You know why he keeps popping up. Takes time to get over somebody you thought was the love of your life. A lot more time than three months.
She hopped off the couch and went to pee again. World’s smallest bladder. When she came out, she detoured into the kitchen and looked in the fridge. Bottle of sauvignon blanc, nice and cold. No. Only make her more depressed, and she’d feel worse in the morning. She looked at the cans of Diet Coke, made a face, and shut the door. Well? Gonna do what now?
Uh-huh.
Work.
Only thing she was likely to get her head into tonight. Most nights, for that matter. If it wasn’t for the heavy agency caseload and the fact that she could do a lot of the Net searches and billing from home, somebody’d have to come in and scrape her off the wall.
Not that she minded the overtime. Thing was, she loved detective work, even the routine stuff. Never imagined she would, when she first went to work for Bill, after seeing Pop so tired from all the overtime he put in at the Redwood City PD and him drumming it into her and Claudia’s heads that one cop in the family was enough. Big career in the computer industry, that was what Tamara had mapped out for herself. But the detective business got into your blood after a while. Fascinating, for the most part. Stimulating-sometimes too stimulating. Partner in a growing concern, her own boss, and she made good money and eventually she’d make a lot more as the agency continued to expand.
Of course it had its downsides, same as police work. All the hours you had to put in, the sometimes boring routine, the kinds of people and situations you had to deal with…
Blink. New thought: The business not only sucks you in; it controls your life. Look at Bill, all those years running a one-man agency, a real workaholic loner before he met Kerry. Look at Jake, always on the move, still working 24-7 whenever he could, still a loner with his wife gone and his son not wanting anything to do with him. Look at her. Before she got into the game, she’d had a love life and a social life and she’d played hard and didn’t worry about much and didn’t have any hang-ups she couldn’t deal with. Now here she was, no love life, no social life, a solitary working fool herself. Maybe there was something about the business that screwed up normal lives. Or maybe it was just that people like Bill and Jake and her were the ones who were attracted to it. Maybe she hadn’t known herself as well as she’d thought; maybe underneath all the teenage grunge and cockiness and uptight racial bullshit there’d been a born workaholic loner inside her tubby body waiting to pop out.
Well, anyway, it was something to think about. Or not think about.
Okay. Work.
She went into the small second bedroom that Horace had used to practice cello compositions before the lowbrow neighbors complained. The apartment was his before she moved in and it was still jammed with his memory and his scent. Damn hand-me-down, like his Toyota Camry. She’d keep the car a while longer, but no way was she going to renew the apartment lease come the end of October. She could afford a better neighborhood than the avenues fog belt, a bigger apartment, and besides, living well was the best revenge. Wasn’t too early to start the hunt for a new place, see what was available in other parts of the city. Might as well start tomorrow. She didn’t have anything better to do on another boring Sunday.
The stack of computer discs Bill had given her was on the secretary desk. They were from a PC, so she dragged her old laptop out of the closet and plugged it in and booted it up. The discs dated back four years, to the time of Nancy Mathias’s marriage; each one had dates hand-printed on it, three months’ worth of entries on each. She fed the first one in, waited for it to download. Nancy Mathias’s diary. Dead woman’s diary. She sighed. This ought to be fun, she thought.
It wasn’t. All the entries were headed with the date and time they were written, which made the chronology easy to keep straight. But some were hard to decipher because the woman had been a sloppy typist and referred to people and places by their initials and didn’t use any apostrophes. And at first the entries weren’t all that interesting. Long descriptions of the Mathiases’ honeymoon on Maui, places they went and things they did after they got back to Palo Alto. Shorthand comments on art and art galleries-painting in watercolors had been the woman’s hobby-and somebody with the initials TQ whose impressionism she admired; on restaurants, plays, a ballet, weekend and holiday trips to some place called CV, wherever that was, probably a vacation home. Happy, chattery, lovey stuff. Almost every one had at least one reference to B-Brandon, her husband. Some of them were were embarrassing and annoying at the same time, like passages from a bad romance novel:
Every time I look at him, even now after three years together, my heart leaps. I never thought I was capable of such total devotional love for any man. I loved J but it was nothing like what I feel for B. I would walk through fire for him, I would lie curled at his feet like a dog if he asked me to. I have no pride, no mind of my own where he is concerned. I have no life without him.
No man was worth the slave attitude. What if she’d felt that way toward Horace? She’d be a basket case right now.
The references to the Mathiases’ sex life were even worse:
B and I made love last night. Fabulous as always. He touches me so deeply in so many ways, with his hands and his mind and his soul. When he moves and swells inside me I feel as if Im soaring, as if there are two of me, one reveling in the moment, the other high above watching with tears of joy in her eyes.
Mercy!
The second disc was more of the same, only not quite as happy-sappy. End of honeymoon, back to reality. By the third disc, a few mild complaints started to creep in. He was critical of her opinions and her personal appearance. He demanded perfection and didn’t like to be questioned about anything. They didn’t make love as often; B was working long hours and he was so tired when he came home, poor baby. They didn’t go out much anymore. They didn’t go to CV together. B didn’t like her sister, her friends, didn’t want her to spend time with them away from home. Not that she minded, oh no. Whatever B wanted, B got.
It went on like that for more than three years, B tightening the reins until she was no longer seeing her sister or her friends, not going to CV by herself as she’d done a couple of times, not even going out of the house much anymore. Classic control-freak crap that got Tamara’s blood heated up. But Nancy Mathias had bought into it with no more than an occasional whimper.
B made me cry again last night. I said something that displeased him, Im not even sure what it was, and he berated me mercilessly. Voice of ice, stare of ice. I look in his eyes and I see myself shriveled and cowering there and as always it frightens me to abject tears.
By the fourth year she wasn’t much more than a good little robot, put away and waiting for the master to come home and turn on the juice. She didn’t mention her painting or art galleries anymore. The entries were now one long dull, repetitive chronicle of what she ate and drank, what she read, the music she listened to, the little errands she ran. And B, naturally. Hardly a single entry without his initial in it.
Early this year, too late, she started to wake up. His hold on her was so tight she was feeling the pressure in physical ways-menstrual problems and intense migraine headaches. Every third or fourth entry was an expression of loneliness, bewilderment, frustration. Fear, too, that led her to question his love and commitment, if not hers. Tamara paid closer attention. Now she was getting to the kinds of things Bill had asked her to watch for.
Sometimes he looks at me as if Im nothing to him. Less than nothing, a piece of lint on his coat that he might brush off at any moment. It terrifies me. What if he decides hes had enough of me, brushes ME off? I cant conceive of living without him.
He doesnt hate me, he cant hate me, but his eyes last night, oh God, as if he wished I were dead. Did I imagine it? I must have. I know he loves me. He never says the words anymore, but I know he does. Hed never hurt me. He isnt a violent man, he has never touched me except with loving hands. How could he hate me?
So he’d never slapped her around, beat her up. Big deal. What the bastard had done was bad enough. In some ways, even worse.
B told me again how useless I am. How many times now? A hundred, a thousand? I cant stand it anymore. I
