' Kate felt the nugget expand, and fought the sensation. 'He just needed to discuss some twists and turns in the politics at the hospital, ' she said evenly. 'I'll tell you about them later. How about we use the little time we have to plan some kind of strategic ambush for the Carlisles?'
'Don't poach. That's all the strategy we need, Now what was so important to ol' Yoda at eight-thirty on a Sunday morning?
' Although the words were spoken lightly, Kate noted that he had not yet put the car into gear. From the beginning of their relationship, he had been somehow threatened both by her career and by her unique friendship with her aging department head. It was nothing he had ever said, but the threat was there. She was certain of it. 'Later? ' She tried one last time. Jared switched off the ignition. The mood of the morning shattered like dropped crystal. Kate forced her eyes to make and maintain contact with his. 'He said that tomorrow morning he was going to send letters to the medical school and to Norton Reese announcing his retirement in June or as soon as a successor can be chosen as chief of the department.'
'A, nd… 9'
'And I think you know already what comes next.' Deep inside her, Kate felt sparks of anger begin to replace the tension. This exchange, her news, her chance to become at thirty-five the youngest department chief, to say nothing of the only woman department chief, at Metrothey should have been embraced by the marriage with the same joy as Jared's election to Congress would have been. 'Try me, ' Jared said, gazing off across the lake. Kate sighed. 'He wants my permission to submit my name to the faculty search committee as his personal recommendation.'
'And you thanked him very much, but begged off because you and your husband agreed two years ago to start your family when the election was over, and you simply couldn't take on the responsibility and time demands of a department chairmanship-especially of a moneyless, understaffed, political football of a department like the one Yoda is scurrying away from now-right?', Wrong! ' The snap in her voice was reflex. She cursed herself for losing control so easily, and took several seconds to calm down before continuing. 'I told him I would think about it and talk it over with my husband and some of my friends at the hospital. I told him either to leave my name off his letter or wait a week before sending it.'
'Have you thought what the job would take out of you? I mean Yoda's had two coronaries in the last few years, and he is certainly a lot more low key than you are.'
'Dammit, Jared. Stop calling him that. And they weren't coronaries. Only angina.'
'All right, angina.'
'Do you suppose we could talk this over after we play? You're the one who was so worried about being late.'
Jared glanced at his watch and then restarted the engine. He turned to her. There was composure in the lines of his face, but an intensity perhaps even a fear-in his eyes. It was the same look Kate had seen in them when, before the election, he spoke of losing as 'not the end of the world.'
'Sure, ' he said. 'Just answer me that one question. Do you really have a sense of what it would be like for you-for us-if you took over that department?'
'I… I know it wouldn't be easy. But that's not what you're really asking, is it?'
Jared shook his head and stared down at his clenched hands. Kate knew very well what he was asking. He was thirty-nine years old and an only child. His first marriage had ended in nightmarish fashion, with his wife running off to California with their baby daughter. Even Jared's father, senior partner of one of Boston's most prestigious law firms, with all the king's horses and all the king's men at his disposal, couldn't find them. Jared wanted children. For himself and for his father he wanted them. The agreement to wait until after the election was out of deference to the pressures of a political campaign and the newness of their marriage. Now neither was a factor. Oh, yes, she knew very well what he was asking. 'The answer is, ' she said finally, 'that if I accepted the nomination and got the appointment I would need some time to do the job right. But that is the grossest kind of projection at this point. Norton Reese has hardly been my biggest supporter since I exposed the way he was using money budgeted for the forensic pathology unit to finance new cardiac surgery equipment. I think he would cut off an arm before he would have me as a department chief in a hospital he administrated.'
'How much time? ' Jared's voice was chilly. 'Please, honey. I'm begging you. Let's do this when we can sit down in our own living room and discuss all the possibilities.'
'How much?', I… I don't know. A year? Two?'
Jared snapped the stick shift into first gear, sending a spray of ice and snow into the air before the rear tires gained purchase. 'To be continued, ' he said, as much to himself as to her. 'Fine, ' she said.
Numbly, she sank back in her seat and stared unseeing out the window.
Her thoughts drifted for a time and then began to focus on a face. Kate closed her eyes and tried to will the thoughts, the face, away. In moments, though, she could see Art's eyes, glazed and bloodshot, see them as clearly as she had that afternoon a. dozen years before when he had raped her. She could smell the whiskey on his breath and feel the weight of his fullback's body on top of hers. Though bundled in a down parka and warm-up suit, she began to shiver. Jared turned onto the narrow access drive to the club. To Kate's right, the metallic surface of the Atlantic glinted through a leafless hardwood forest. She took no notice of it. Please Art, don't, her mind begged. You're hurting me.
Please let me up. All I did was take the test. I didn't say I was going to apply. 'Look, there are the Carlisles up ahead of us. I guess we're not late after all.'
Jared's voice broke through the nightmare. Dampened by a cold sweat, she pushed herself upright. The assault had taken place the day after the second anniversary of her previous marriage, and only an hour after her husband, a failure first in a pro football tryout, then in graduate school, and finally in business, had learned that she had taken the Medical College Admission Test, and worse, that she had scored in the top five percent. His need to control her, never pleasant, had turned ugly. By the evening of that day she had moved out. 'Jared, ' she pleaded quietly, 'we'll talk. Okay?'
'Yeah, sure, ' he answered. 'We'll talk.'
The ball rainbowed off Jared's racquet with deceptive speed. A perfect topspin lob. From her spot by the net, Kate watched Jim and Patsy Carlisle skid to simultaneous stops and, amidst flailing arms, legs, and racquets, dash backward toward the baseline. The shot bounced six inches inside the line and then accelerated toward the screen, the Carlisles in frantic pursuit. 'You fox,' Kate whispered as Jared moved forward for the Uling shot they both knew would not be necessary. 'That was absolutely beautiful.'
'Just keep looking sort of bland. Like we don't even know we're about to beat them for the first time ever.'
Across the net, Patsy Carlisle made a fruitless lunge that sent her tumbling into the indoor court's green nylon backdrop. Kate watched the minidrama of the woman, still seated on the court, glaring at her husband as he stalked away from her without even the offer of a hand up.
Husbands and wives mixed doubles, she thought, games within games within games. 'Three match points, ' she said. 'Maybe we should squabble more often before we play.' A took at Jared's eyes told her she should have let the matter lie. 'Finish 'em with the ol' high hard one, ' she urged as he walked back to the service line. Her enthusiasm, she knew, now sounded forced-an attempt at some kind of expiation. Jared nodded at her and winked. Kate crouched by the net. Eighteen feet in front of her, Jim Carlisle shifted the weight of his compact, perfectly conditioned body from one foot to another. A successful real estate developer, a yachtsman, and club champion several years running, he had never been one to take any kind of loss lightly. 'You know, ' he had said to her on the only attempt he had ever made to start an affair between them,
'there are those like you-know-who, who are content to tiptoe along in Daddy's footsteps, and those who just grab life by the throat and do it. I'm a doer.'
The reference to Jared, even though prodded forth by far too many martinis, had left an aftertaste of anger that Kate knew would never totally disappear. When Carlisle sent the Samuels for Congress Committee a check for five hundred dollars, she had almost sent it back with a note telling him to go grab somebody's life by the throat. Instead, out of deference to her husband, she had invited the Carlisles over for dinner. Her hypocrisy, however honorable its purpose, continued to rankle her from time to time, especially when Carlisle, wearing his smugness like aftershave, was about to inflict yet another defeat on team Samuels/Bennett. At last she was beating the man. Not even a disagreement with her husband could dull the luster of the moment.
Through the mirror of Jim Carlisle's stages of readiness to return serve, Kate pictured Jared's movements
