“We’re not going to discuss the nature of being, are we?” Susan said.
“No.”
“Thank God.”
“Or whoever,” I said.
“Stop that,” Susan said.
She sipped her wine. I tossed the scallops in the saute pan one more time and slid them onto a plate.
“They don’t look cooked to me,” she said.
“Suze,” I said, “when you make tea, you burn the water.”
“Do I hear you saying shut the fuck up?”
“At least about cooking,” I said.
“Mum’s the word.”
I also dente’d the pasta and found it correct and poured it through a colander. I added some green peas and the sauteed scallops and tossed it all with some pesto sauce and put it on the counter. We ate at the counter, sitting side by side. Susan broke off a tiny piece from a loaf of French bread and ate it with a minimalist forkful of the pasta.
“You’re right,” she said. “You don’t need my help.”
“Not to cook,” I said.
“Or much of anything else,” she said.
I glanced at her sideways. “What about, you know?” I said.
“I don’t consider that help,” she said.
“Well, you are certainly not a hindrance,” I said.
“Sometimes I think it’s the only thing I’m good at.”
I drank some beer. “Well, if there could only be one thing…” I said.
She didn’t say anything. I could feel us drifting into a more serious corner of the evening.
“I can’t get that kid out of my head,” Susan said.
“The suicide?”
“Yes.”
“Would you expect to, this soon after?”
“No,” she said, “I suppose I wouldn’t.”
“In time,” I said, “the sharp edges round off.”
“I hope so.”
“Seems a shame,” I said, “that so harmless a variation should cause such pain.”
“I know,” Susan said. “People, especially young people, often think the circles they are in are the only circles that matter. They don’t realize that there is a world where nobody much gives a goddamn.”
Susan finished her wine. I poured her some more. She gestured me to stop at half a glass.
“It’s not the condition,” she said, “or whatever. It’s the concealment.”
“Like Watergate,” I said. “It wasn’t the burglary that caused all the trouble; it was the cover-up.”
“Something like that,” Susan said. “Pretending to be what you are not fills people with self-loathing. If they share their secret, even with a sex partner, then others have power over them. They are vulnerable to blackmail of one kind or another.”
I carefully twirled some pasta onto my fork. Susan could eat with chopsticks, but she was nowhere at twirling pasta.
“You know,” I said, “prior to Mary Smith, I cannot find any sign of a sex partner for Nathan Smith.”
“How old was he when he got married?”
“Fifty-one,” I said.
“Children?” Susan said. “With Mary?”
“No. But she told me that he was friendly with a number of young boys.”
“Maybe you’re looking for the wrong kind of sex partner,” Susan said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
There was a photographer I knew named Race Witherspoon who was gayer than springtime and quite happy about it. He had his studios this year in a fourth-floor loft in South Boston, just across Fort Point Channel.
His studio was cluttered with tripods, and reflector umbrellas, and props, and Diet Coke cans. Curled Polaroid peel-offs were everywhere. A Flintlock musket leaned in a corner. A red feather boa was draped over the edge of an old rolltop desk. A cowboy hat lay on top of a file cabinet, a pair of combat boots stood side by side on an
