Silence

“What about Eric?”

“I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a great chef at work, but it’s hard to describe. He was tuned in. He had his eyes on everything that went on behind the kitchen door, cooking with seven or eight timers going in his mind at once. If a new molecule had entered the kitchen, he would have known it. He was always sweating, moving from burner to burner to plating table to mixing bowl. We talked about all the pairing off, but the social dynamics of the restaurant were my problem, not his. He said, ‘Who’s not doing his job?’ I said, ‘Everybody is.’ He said, ‘Then what’s there to worry about?’”

“So you both felt like outsiders?”

“Eric and I were in the center of it, but not part of it. We had hired people we found pleasant, and the consequence was that we ended up with young people who found each other pleasant. The atmosphere was charged. If there had been such a thing as a pheromone detector, it would have burned up.”

“I think you made a good decision. You stay out of people’s personal lives until somebody asks for your advice.”

“Well, anyway.” She looked away for a second. “That was the place, the atmosphere. We were there seven days a week, and working hard. People came in and out when the restaurant was closed, making deliveries or fixing stuff, cleaning and restocking. It was always active, always alive. We were surrounded with people. The business was charmed. We were making so much money that I paid off our start-up loans in a year. When I renegotiated the lease to buy the building, the landlord wanted to carry the mortgage himself. In the third year, we were making enough so that Eric and I bought a house with a big down payment. Around that time, he asked me to marry him. That was the beginning of the end.”

“Because you said no?”

“I said yes. It was a surprise, but not in the way you might think. When he asked, it reminded me that we weren’t already married. It was, ‘Oh. That’s right. We’re not officially related, are we?’ That kind of detail had been my job, usually—to keep us on the right side of the laws and solvent and secure. I knew that marriage was a necessary part of that, like liability insurance and fire coverage and a business permit. It was just a chore I had neglected.”

“Girls are always planning their weddings. Why do you suppose the idea of marriage wasn’t on your mind?”

“Yes, that’s probably why. I didn’t let myself suspect it, of course. I didn’t want to delve into how I felt about my parents or what they’d shown me about marriage. But even more, I didn’t want to spend time thinking about Eric and what I felt about him—or didn’t feel. He was like a relative, my only one.”

“I remember you said your mother had died when you were young. What about your father? He was an artist, right?”

She knitted her brows and shook her head. “That’s right. When my mother left him, he didn’t notice for a week or so that she had left me there, too, because his studio was always a gathering place for women—models, artists, dealers, buyers—and one of them took care of me. Her name was Margaret, and she was a rich woman who had come to learn to paint like Moss Harper. It took her a couple of years to realize that she never could, and she left, too.”

“Moss Harper? I didn’t realize that’s who your father was.”

“The great Moss Harper. When Margaret left, she took me with her. We went to her house in Poughkeepsie, and she was the one who raised me.”

“Just like that? Nobody signed any papers?”

“That only happens when there’s a possibility of a disagreement. He seemed to feel that taking care of children was the responsibility of the nearest woman, so when she left, he thought it was only natural that she took me with her.”

“Were you in touch with him?”

“I saw him once, for two days, when I was in college. I went to New York to his studio. It was like going to visit a person who had donated an organ to you. The excuse for going was to thank the person, but the real motive was curiosity, and that part was more egotism than interest in him. I was seeing one of the factors that had contributed to the making of the glorious twenty-year-old me. There was no connection, really. He didn’t care about me, and even my curiosity wasn’t reciprocated. He had seen a million twenty-year-old girls, and I didn’t strike him as one of the most interesting.” She walked along the dirt path on the spit that led them toward the looming rock. “No, my father wasn’t close to me. After Margaret died, only Eric was.”

“That’s why you agreed to marry Eric?”

“Of course. We told ourselves and each other that not marrying before was a small, amusing oversight. We didn’t make a big deal out of the engagement, or even mention it at the restaurant. I noticed something I hadn’t known before. Not being married was okay because some people assumed we were, and others thought we would be, but had some political objection to official marriage. Telling anyone we were going to get married would have weakened my position because Eric was the one who was indispensable, not me. As long as we seemed unbreakably tied together, I had authority. If I was just the boss’s girlfriend with wedding plans, it would be different. There would be a period of time when he was still up for grabs.”

Jack Till wondered why these were the details she was choosing to tell him, but he could see that she was choosing, so he waited.

“It became a problem. I knew that beneath all of the automatic stuff that was happening—like saying ‘I love you’ at all the right times, but hearing it sound like ‘God bless you’ or ‘You’re welcome,’ instead of ‘I think about you all the time and you make my knees weak,’ there was something missing. We both felt that way, I think, but we didn’t want to admit it even to ourselves.”

“What did you say to him?”

“Nothing. What could I say?”

“And Eric?”

“Now we’re getting close to the sad part. It makes me sad to remember it, anyway. Maybe I’m just feeling sorry for myself because my life is a mess.”

“I can make your life better if you can just give me some hard information about the men who are after you or the girl who was killed. Anything might help. Even her name could do it.”

“I’m getting to it. Today I’m finding that I can talk about it only by talking around it first. And only after I’ve stamped down all the weeds around it can I go to the center. The next thing that happened was Olivia.”

“Oh, yes. Olivia.”

“Yes. Olivia Kent was where I started, so I’ve completed the circle, walked all around the truth.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “Eric cheated on me with Olivia.”

“I’m sorry. It must have hurt.” He had to be careful to keep the response simple and sympathetic. If she detected a false tone, it might make her see him as a manipulator and shut down.

“It was pretty much what I said earlier. He was in an atmosphere that was like a slow-motion orgy, where people changed partners over a period of months, making the rounds of the place in a couple of years. But there was always looking and flirting, always an undercurrent. Olivia Kent was the only one, at first, who knew that Eric and I had just decided to get married, and understood that the period leading up to it was an opportunity for her.”

Till decided to follow the story she wanted to tell him, and hope that it led to what he wanted to know. “An opportunity to have a fling with Eric, or take your place permanently?”

“It’s hard for me to say what she was thinking. She had been with us for a long time, and she liked Eric. Maybe all that time she had been developing a hopeless crush on him, and unexpectedly learned that the crush wasn’t hopeless—was only getting hopeless, and that she had to make a move right then. It could have been more than a crush. But there are also women who get a thrill out of seducing men just before their weddings, and she may have been one of them. I had been her boss for almost four years, and maybe she had been building up resentment. I suppose it could have been all of those feelings in some proportion, because people are too complicated to do things for one reason.”

“So she used her opportunity.”

“Right. Eric proposed, I said yes, and we set the date for six months later. We said it was so we could do it during our least busy season, after New Year’s. That gave Olivia plenty of time to work, but she started the affair right away. She made a move and Eric didn’t hesitate.”