‘Yes.’
‘Help me, Loretta.’
Obediently, Loretta stood up from the wheelchair and removed the long coat and big-brimmed straw hat. She put them on the bed along with her purse, which had been concealed in the wheelchair. Then she and Lesley helped Daniel get out of bed.
He was stronger each day, but still very weak. The muscles in the sides of his jaw bunched and moved with his determination. He got his legs over the side of the bed, and then, with one of them on either side of him, he made it to his feet.
Lesley said, ‘Can you stand alone?’
‘Yes.’ It was whispered through gritted teeth.
He stood unmoving, like a tree. They helped him put on the long coat, over the hospital gown that was all he wore, then helped him ease down into the wheelchair. He folded his hands in his lap, not to be noticeable, and Lesley fixed the straw hat on his head.
Meantime, Loretta had sat on the bed to remove her fake-fur shin-high brown boots. She had soft pumps in her purse that she now slipped on instead.
The boots had been too big for Loretta; they were the right size for Daniel. The hat, the long coat, and the boots covered him completely. As long as he kept his head down and his hands in his lap, he would look exactly like the person Lesley had wheeled in here.
Loretta stood up from the bed, wearing the blue pumps. She had on a shapeless blue-and-white-print dress. ‘Do I go out now?’ she asked.
Lesley considered her. ‘Don’t forget your glasses.’
‘Oh!’ Loretta took her blackframed glasses from her purse and put them on, becoming again the owlish, gawky person Lesley knew.
Lesley said, ‘You just walk out. We’ll be along in a minute.’
‘All right.’ Now that they were doing it, and nothing bad was happening, Loretta’s mood had unproved considerably. She very nearly smiled at Lesley, and when she looked at Daniel in the wheelchair her expression became concerned. ‘He should stay here,’ she said.
‘He has his reasons,’ Lesley assured her. ‘We’ll be along.’
Loretta left, and Lesley looked in the closet, expecting to find his clothes, surprised to see nothing in there at all. ‘Where’s your things?’
‘Cops kept.’
‘Oh. Well, let’s get you out of here.’
The return journey was simple, and outside, there was Loretta, waiting for them, standing over there beside the Voyager. As she pushed him across the parking lot, Lesley said, ‘I don’t know what you expect to do tomorrow night.’
‘Kill some people,’ he whispered.
11
Jack Young really did care for his new (old) wife, Alice, felt affection for her, enjoyed more about her than her money, though of course the money had come first. In fact, it had been just a joke at the beginning, when he’d met Alice Prester Habib up in New Jersey, where he’d worked for Utica Mutual as a claims examiner, and where, when he first became aware that this particular insured had the hots for him, it was nothing more than the subject of gags around the office.
It was Maureen, an older woman with the firm, computer processor, who’d put the bee in his bonnet. ‘You could do worse,’ she’d said, and when Jack thought about it, he coulddo worse, couldn’t he? He’d almost doneworse, two or three times.
It had been almost a year, at that time, since he’d broken up with his last serious girlfriend, or, more accurately, since she’d broken up with him. His life was a little boring, a little same-old same-old, and the idea of shaking it up in this really different and outrageous way came to appeal to him more and more. And don’t forget the money.
But the fact is, Alice was okay. God knows she was older than his mother, almost older than his grandmother, but she kept herself in shape like an NFL quarterback, and she was of an age where she had no timidity left in bed at all. So that part wasn’t so bad, and for the rest the knowledge that people laughed at him behind his back, the term ‘boy toy,’ which seemed to hover in the air around him like midges fuck ‘em if they couldn’t take a joke.
Because you can take the boy out of the actuarial business but you can’t take the actuarial business out of the boy, and Jack was fully aware that he was (a) Alice’s only heir, attested to in the prenuptial agreement, and (b) likely to outlive her by forty to fifty years. Forty to fifty richyears.
So all he had to do was pay attention, in and out of bed, and otherwise be discreet. For instance, when he and Alice walked into the big ballroom at the Breakers Thursday evening for the pre-auction ball, with the tall gleaming mirrors reflecting the posh crowd, and the radiant chandeliers, and the band’s swing oldies echoing in the high- ceilinged space, and the swirl of revelers in their sprays of bright colors and gleaming gold and winking silver and sparkling jewels, the very firstperson he saw was Kim Metcalf, and he barely gave her a smile of recognition. She, too, with her shrewd blue eyes under the cloud of fluffy yellow hair, returned only the briefest of impersonal nods, including Alice as much as himself, before she moved on, holding to the arm of her husband, Howard, a retired tax lawyer she’d met as a stew on a first-class flight New York to Chicago. (She was still so much a stew in her heart that to this day she preferred the label ‘flight attendant.’)
As the Metcalfs moved on, Jack turned his eyes firmly away from Kim’s twitching creased behind within the shimmering pale blue satin, but his mind said: Saturday. The apartment Alice would never know about, down among the condos, where he and Kim managed to meet once or twice every week, came surging into his memory. Kim’s body was softer than Alice’s, which was also nice, but by now, for the both of them, the main point was to be able to have a conversation with somebody whose memory bank had not become full before you were born.
