She burrowed closer than I thought possible. I felt her fingernails through my shirt.
“You’ve got to give up your need to run things,” she said. “I don’t do well with that.”
“Maybe I could work on it.”
“Would you really?”
“Anything’s possible.”
“We’ll see. I’m about to tell you something that will test you severely. Are you ready?”
I wasn’t but she told me anyway. “I canceled my plane reservation this afternoon. I’m not going back to Denver, I’m staying with you. God help Mr. Dante if he bothers us.”
She unwound herself, spun away, and stood shivering in the wind. “So what do you say, Janeway? You lost once because of your attitude—are you going to blow it again?”
She squinted at her watch. “Hey, I think our forty days and forty nights just began.”
CHAPTER 29
I remembered half a dozen moments in my life, crossroads where everything would be different if I had gone the other way. I could tick them off in no particular order. When I became a cop. When I stopped being a cop. When I discovered Hemingway and Fowles and those three lovely books by Maugham, all in the same month. When I became a bookseller. When I found, won, and lost an unforgettable woman. Now this. Suddenly my world was shaken. Everything in it was different.
We met again at dawn. My telephone rang in the darkness and when I lifted it she said, “You sound awake, I hope.” I said, “I am awake.” She said, “Have you had any sleep?” Not much, I admitted: not enough to matter. She asked for the time; I looked at the clock and told her it was four twenty-seven. That’s what hers said too, as if clocks were suddenly untrustworthy. “Meet me on the Battery,” she said. I told her I’d pick her up, I had to come past her hotel anyway, but she wanted to be met at dawn at the top of the steps where the rivers join and the wall gets higher. “It’ll be so much more dramatic that way.”
The wind of last night had blown dark clouds over the city and the day promised rain. I walked over, arriving at first light after a fifteen-minute hike. She stood looking out to sea like the French lieutenant’s woman. She heard me coming: didn’t turn but wiggled her ringers in an endearing “hi, there” gesture. I climbed the steps to the high wall and wrapped my arms around her. She sank against me and I kissed her neck. “How are we doing?” I said.
“So far, so good. Thank you for not pitching a fit last night.”
I thought the jury was still out on that. Then she said, “Our lives are changing, old man,” and I heard the jury coming back early.
“It looks like there are two of us now,” she said. “That takes some getting used to.”
“Yes, it does.”
“I’ve been on my own forever.”
“Never a guy to answer to. Never somebody to lay down the law.”
“I’ve been way too career-minded. Maybe now I’ve got to be more…what’s the word?”
“The word is reasonable,” I said dryly. I spelled it for her, enunciating each letter clearly.
“You’re a regular walking dictionary. What can this mean?”
“You talk tough and you make a lot of noise. You set your mind on something and that’s it.” I gave her arm a squeeze. “You’ve got a few good points as well.”
“Do I tell you what to do?”
“Not in so many words.”
“How, then? I expect you to make your own decisions. But once you’ve done that, then I get to decide what I’m going to do.”
I could have said,
“This is why I actually believe in the forty days and forty nights,” she said.
“That seems like a long time in these wild, permissive days.”
“Does to me too. But it’s a good, honest test. Separates the wheat from the chaff.”
“Then it’s a good thing. I wouldn’t want to be mistaken for chaff.”
“Never fear. I’m a little self-conscious saying it, but right now I feel…glorious.”
“That’s good,” I said. “That’s good.”
“It is good, and don’t look so troubled about it all.”
“You know why. It’s this business with Dante. Can we talk about that?”
“Of course. See how reasonable I am?”
“I want you to leave. And it’s got to be soon, before anyone knows you’re here.”
