The fire settled more densely, the logs feeding each other's intensity like mutual enemies. The newspaper came. Susan got both the Globe and the Herald- American. We took turns reading through them, Susan much more quickly than I. We fueled the fire once or twice and returned to the couch in front of it, feet up on the old sea chest that Susan used as a coffee table, spines bent, sprawled on the cushions with our thighs touching in warm torpor. Susan went to shower. I asked her not to use all the hot water. She said she wouldn't. -I read the sports page. Already, barely a month after the World Series, there was talk of a baseball strike. There were ten contract renegotiations. The Red Sox had decided not to pay anyone, and everyone was threatening to be a free agent. It read like The Wall Street Journal. If 1 were a player, would I want six trillion dollars? Yes. I guessed I would. Did 1 find it interesting? No, I did not. Has the game changed? Say it ain't so, Joe.
Susan appeared in half an hour wearing jeans no tighter than the skin on a grape and a white oxford shirt with a button-down collar and cowboy boots, smelling of perfume and shampoo and soap. I inhaled. 'Sensual,' I said, 'but not too far from innocence.'
'Far enough,' Susan said. I went to shower and shave and put on clean clothes. When I came back we went to the kitchen and began Thanksgiving dinner. Johnny Hartman was on the stereo. The sun was halfway to zenith and made the tile kitchen glisten. The cooking steamed the windows a bit, filtering the sun slightly and making the brilliance of the kitchen a bit muted as we progressed. At noon Susan brought out a bottle of Dom Pdrignon 1971, which we shared as we cooked. The barrel-bodied Lab appeared at the back door and scratched to come in. Susan put down a bowl of water and she drank noisily and long. When she finished she looked expectantly at Susan, her ears a little forward, her tail in a slow scimitar wag. Susan took a round dog biscuit from a box in the cupboard and gave it to the Lab.
'Just one,' she said. 'You're on a diet,' The dog took the biscuit to the other side of the kitchen, wolfed it down, and lay down with a heavy exhalation and a solid thump. She lay on her side against the back door with her feet toward us and her tongue out and appeared to go to sleep. 'Whose dog is that?' I said.
'People down the street.'
By two o'clock dinner was nearly done, and Susan went to set the table while I did the last few tricks, and at 2:30 we sat down to dinner in Susan's dining room with a white linen tablecloth and pink linen napkins and champagne in a silver cooler. It was Susan's good English china and the silver she'd gotten for a wedding present from her ex-mother-in-law. The tall tulip-shaped champagne glasses I had bought her. I'd bought four, but mostly we used just two and drank champagne alone. Sonny Rollins was spinning softly in the background. We didn't insist on complete authenticity.
We began by eating hot pumpkin soup and then some cold asparagus with green herb mayonnaise on a bed of red lettuce. After that we each had half a pheasant with raspberry vinegar sauce and a kind of salon pilaf that Susan made from white and wild rice with pignolia nuts. For dessert we had sour cherry cobbler with Vermont cheddar cheese, and after we had finished with the last of the champagne and I had embarrassed myself with a second serving, we took coffee and Grand Marnier into the den and drank it in a near stupor on the couch before the' dwindling fire with the football game on the televi- sion. Susan hated football, so we turned the sound off. She had three back issues of The New Yorker and read a series on psychoanalysis that had run there, or pretended to, while I watched the Lions and the Packers, or pretended to. With a last desperate effort I got some more wood on the fire and then settled back on the couch. In fifteen minutes Susan's head rested against my shoulder, her mouth slightly open and her breath shifting occasionally into a faint snore. Before halftime my chin was against my chest and my cheek was pressed against the top of Susan's head.
It was dark when we woke up. The fire barely shimmered on the hearth. A newscast was progressing silently on the TV screen and Thanksgiving Day was nearly past. They ran the local college and high school football results on a crawl, and as the mesmerizing sequence went on it was like a rehearsal of small-town Massachusetts: clean- lined white buildings around a common, square brick schools, cheerleaders with pony- tails and chunky thighs, and parents in pride and contentment watching the children play. 'Nice day,' Susan murmured. 'For some,' I said. 'Not for most?' 'Pretty to think so,' I said.
Chapter 21
We were having leftover cherry cobbler for breakfast on Friday morning when I asked Susan about Mitchell Poitras.
'Oh, sure,' she said. 'I know Mitch.'
'He's living in a very expensive town house on Beacon Street with Amy Gurwitz,' I said.
'Poitras?' Susan said. It always irked me when she called people by their last name. One of the boys. Tough as a ten-minute egg. Wasn't my job to tell her how to talk, so I sat on the irksomeness.
'The very same,' I said. 'And he has a studio and lab set up for making porn films and tapes of very young girls and boys.'
'Poitras?'
'Mitchell Poitras,' I said. 'I gather he hadn't put that down in his curriculum vitae.'
'My God, are you sure?'
.`Yep.' 'How do you know for sure?' she said.
'I burgled his house Wednesday while he and Amy were off celebrating the harvest.'
'But how did you think… yes, of course, because that's where you found Amy and she used to be a friend of April's and you had nothing else to do. Why in hell didn't you mention him to me before?'
'Until I found evidence that he worked for the Department of Education I had no reason to think you might know him,' I said.
'Mitchell Poitras?' Better I thought. 'But, Jesus Christ, do you realize who he is?'
'Letters say he's Executive Coordinator, comma, Student Guidance and Counseling Administration.'
Susan nodded.
'It's a job that gives him access to every disturbed kid in the state-access to psychological profiles, teacher reports, principal evaluations, guidance recommendations, often police material. My good sweet Jesus,' Susan said. Her mind could integrate very swiftly.
'What big teeth you have, Granny,' I said.
