success.”
He went to the bar, refilled his glass, and held up the bottle.
“Yes, please,” she said.
In some strange way she was beginning to enjoy herself. Winning wasn’t nearly as much fun without a few hurdles to jump over and she was certain she had just cleared a major one.
After refilling her glass he returned to his desk and took a pile of folders from a drawer. “Do you know what this is?” he asked, brandishing one.
Anne shook her head.
“It’s a proposal I received three years ago from a young fellow out in Wisconsin who was producing those floppy stuffed animals my grandchildren can’t get enough of. He wanted two million dollars. If I’d given it to him I’d have tripled my money by now. This is another proposal that came in at about the same time as yours. It’s from a computer refurbishing company out in Palo Alto. They wanted three million. If I’d gone with them I would have cashed out for eight million. You don’t get it, do you, Anne? You think you can waltz in here in that ass-hugging dress and dazzle me with pie in the sky and I’ll just sit with my mouth open and cut you a check. Home is running twenty percent below projections, and you’re starting to make me look like a fool. I’m a businessman, not a baby- sitter.”
Anne felt as if she’d just been punched in the solar plexus. For one awful moment she missed her father. She looked down into her wineglass; her mouth tightened.
“ Home is going to succeed,” she said finally, firmly, trying to control her voice. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of an easy retreat. She looked up and met his stare. It was one of the hardest things she’d ever had to do.
He put the files back in the drawer and crossed to the couch, sat facing her at the other end, his arm draped across the back. There was a long silence. Anne heard the faint buzz of a lawn mower. “My wife is very ill,” he said finally in a low voice.
Why was he telling her this? Now?
“I’m very sorry.”
“We’ve made a sizable donation to the Museum of Fine Arts. They’re naming a gallery in our honor. Marnie may not live to see the dedication ceremony.”
It made Anne uncomfortable to have him so close. She should have waited until the next day, shown up bright and early with Trent in tow. This was all wrong.
“I’m not used to being alone,” he said.
He lifted his hand and gently touched the back of her hair.
Anne took a measured sip of her wine, glancing at him over the rim of her glass. He looked nothing like the benevolent WASP grandfather who might sneak a glance at her thigh and nothing more.
“There’s a superb restaurant that’s opened a few blocks from here. I’d love to take you there for dinner. We can discuss the future, our partnership.” He stroked her hair and then let his hand rest on her shoulder; it felt warm and heavy. “Some risks are worth taking, don’t you think, Anne? I suppose that’s what keeps life interesting. But I’m not in the mood to go over all the details at the moment. And you look a little tired yourself, my dear, all flushed and overheated. We can relax here for the rest of the afternoon. What do you say?”
Anne wanted to say “Fuck you and your money, you manipulative old lecher,” but when she opened her mouth, “Sounds wonderful” came out.
“Shall I make the reservations for, say, seven o’clock, give you time to catch the last shuttle back to your famous husband?”
His hand was stroking her neck, trembling slightly with anticipation. His fingers slipped under her collar, dry and insistent.
“Seven o’clock is fine,” she said.
He got up and walked to his desk and picked up the phone. “Shall I draw the drapes?” he asked.
“Please,” she said. “The sunlight is a little glaring.”
Anne wakes with a start-what’s she doing on the living room couch? Early gray light pours in the windows, and for a moment she’s afraid. And then she remembers-the baby, the life growing inside her. That goddamn unreliable diaphragm. She remembers coming home from Cambridge, the money secured, but feeling soiled, guilty, enraged. She will never give birth to Farnsworth’s child. But what if Charles is the father? Where is Charles? She sits up and rubs her neck. He’s not in the apartment; she can sense it. He didn’t come back last night. Anne feels that dreaded sense of overload. She takes the whole mess and shoves it to one side of her consciousness, out of view. Big day: she’s going to crack the whip on those website designers; she wants Home on-line in eight weeks or they’re history.
Tea, fruit, shower. Then it hits her-she knows where Charles has disappeared to. Fine. She has her own problems. What she will do is call the employment agency, hire that Emma, get Charles moving whether he likes it or not. Anne gets up and heads into the kitchen to start her day.
8
Charles speeds across the George Washington Bridge and onto the Palisades Parkway and then the New York State Thruway, heading north, due north, away from the city. As the first gray of morning spreads up from the eastern horizon, he drives-the speedometer on his black Jaguar hovering around 80-through the lush, mottled Indian-summer landscape of the Hudson Valley. From the car phone, he leaves Anne a message that he has to get away. He speeds past Albany and still he drives north. The ancient Adirondack Mountains, vast and virtually unpopulated, loom up and encircle the Thruway with their deep green forests.
Charles feels he’s entering uncharted terrain, a place where all measures of ourselves must be recalibrated, where the forests and lakes and mountains demand an honesty that matches their own. Charles exits the Thruway and heads west, through tiny rustic towns that survive on the trade of transient hunters and hikers. Surrounded by the glorious riot of autumn, he drives for hours, rarely seeing another car, deep into the wilderness, winding along roads that tunnel through the endless forest. Finally he turns off paved road and onto a rutted, rocky track that jackknifes its way up a mountainside. He comes to a clearing that opens like a welcoming hand. There, perched on a rocky promontory above a small lake, sits a cottage that is the stuff of a hermit’s dreams-weathered, snug, crisscrossed by an orgy of incestuous vines. Charles gets out of his car and savors the sight. The afternoon sun is warm on his face. He listens to the dueling calls of the mountain song-birds, takes a deep breath and tastes the cool air. He knows he’s done the right thing, come to the right place.
“Take that, you little flickers!”
Charles smiles at the sound of the familiar voice and walks around the side of the cottage. Making her way around the periphery of her garden with the aid of a cane, sprinkling deer poison as she goes, is Portia Damron-tiny Portia, well into her eighties, a Pall Mall sticking from her scowling lips, her weathered, wrinkled face a map of the world’s sorrows.
“Hello, Portia.”
Focused on her mission, Portia ignores his greeting, doesn’t even glance in his direction. “There’s only one thing in this world I hate more than people-deer. Bambi was a pack of lies. They should make a sequel and reveal them for what they are: pesky, voracious, and disease-carrying.” She angrily jiggles her cane in the direction of a half-devoured cabbage.
The job done, Portia straightens up and meets Charles’s eyes for the first time. “You look like hell, Charles. Of course, you live in hell, so it no wonder.” Without waiting for a response, she heads toward the cottage. “Sun’s just about past the yardarm. Let’s have a martini and try to forget we’re alive.”
As a chicken roasts in the enormous old cast-iron oven, Charles sits by the fire with his feet up. He feels utterly at home, safe and protected in the cavelike cottage with its overflowing ashtrays and half-filled coffee cups and books, books everywhere-overflowing the shelves that line the walls, heaped in piles on the floor, spilling off tables and chairs. Across the room in the open kitchen Portia is whipping up dinner-between drags on her Pall Mall-with a vigor that belies her years. Root vegetables, tiny red potatoes, a salad of the season’s last greens, corn bread-suddenly Charles is ravenous.
