Carey said, “Dinner time. Don’t worry if the meat tastes funny. You’re already in the hospital.”
“ ‘Please be seated and the maitre d’ will call you when your stomach pump is ready’?”
“I can see you’ve been to benefits before. Why this one?”
She shrugged. “I’m new in town, and I saw it in the paper. Hospitals tend to be everybody’s charity. I thought it was a good opportunity to get a look at the local gentry and make it clear I’m one of the good guys.”
He looked at her in mock suspicion. “You’re some kind of businesswoman, aren’t you?”
“Good grief, no.” She giggled. “Nobody in my family has ‘been’ anything in ages. My father used to sit on boards of directors. That way he got mail and was allowed to own a briefcase. But he didn’t actually know anything or do anything, or they wouldn’t have wanted him around. His epitaph should have been ‘He Voted Yes.’ ”
“Your mother?”
“She voted no. When I was about three. She turned up a few years ago, but we didn’t have much to talk about. To complete the whole sordid family tree, I have an older brother. Come to think of it, he’s something—a fisherman.”
“A commercial fisherman?”
“No, silly. Trout. He spends his summers at his house in Jackson Hole and his winters in rehab places. They don’t seem to have any therapeutic value, but it’s a quiet place to tie flies, once his hands stop shaking.”
“I’m sorry.”
She touched his arm, and it felt as though it had been brushed by a bird’s wing. “Don’t sound so solemn. None of this just happened, you know. It’s all old history.”
As they reached the newly unscreened section of the cafeteria, Marian Fleming caught Carey’s eye and nodded toward the front of the room near the head table. He gave his head a tiny shake, and she picked up two place cards from the front table, ushered Leo Bortoni and his wife from the back to Carey’s place, and watched Carey take Susan Haynes’s arm and walk her to the rear table. He could see that Lily Bortoni was delighted, having interpreted the move as a sign that her husband was appreciated. He liked them both, and he congratulated himself for having accidentally made them feel good. He pretended he had been looking past them for someone else, gave a little shrug, and continued toward the back of the room.
Carey and Susan Haynes sat at a table for four, but they were alone. He looked at her. “I guess this is where we’re supposed to talk about Cornell.”
“Do we have to?”
“Briefly. Uris Library.”
“Cruel to put it at the top of a hill,” she said. “Thought I’d die.” One of the photographs in the alumni magazine had shown the view from the library, so its altitude was all she knew about it.
“Goldwin Smith Hall.”
“Big, old, and cold.” She said it with an air of profound boredom. She hoped that was the long, low one across the quadrangle with the statue in front, but whatever it was, the description seemed to satisfy him.
“Had enough?”
“More than enough.” She leaned closer. “So what about your life story?” she asked.
“I was born in this hospital, and sort of never got out,” he said. “My education was just a leave of absence. I’m a surgeon.”
“Married?” He wasn’t sure if she said it so quickly and adroitly because she didn’t care, or because she did care.
“Just. Three months ago. She’s out of town right now.”
“Oh, yes. Marian said something about that. I forgot. What kind of surgeon are you—plastic surgery?”
“If you need anything cosmetic done, Buffalo isn’t really the best place. There are hospitals in Los Angeles and Boston that do more of those in a week than we do in a year. What I do is mostly basic medicine. If you have no further use for your gall bladder or your appendix, I’m your man.”
Her eyebrow raised in a perfect arch. “Do I look sick?”
“Hardly. But you could be a hypochondriac. The rich ones sometimes give money so they’ll have a nice place to stay during their next anxiety attack. I promised Marian I’d explore every avenue.”
“You’re doing just great,” she said. “I feel as though I’d been strip-searched. All my avenues have been thoroughly probed.”
“Are you going to cough up the loot?”
She nodded. “Some. I told you before that if I’m going to live here, I have to establish myself up front as one of the good guys. That makes me eligible for unearned invitations and so on.”
“What made you pick Buffalo?”
She turned the big green eyes on him and looked at him shrewdly. “I like it. Or maybe it’s better to say that I don’t dislike it, which is not true of certain other places. And real estate is cheap, so I can sell my house that’s teetering on a precipice in San Francisco and buy something nicer here. As you may have guessed, my heart and Mr. Haynes’s no longer beat as one. Before that, we spent some time being no longer a fun couple. I used to come through Buffalo when I was in college, and I decided it was the sort of place where I could be happy.”
“Because it’s not on the circuit you’re used to.”
“If you’re tired of humanity, maybe it’s time to meet new specimens. That’s the theory, anyway.” She brightened. “Did I pass my examination?”
“Sure,” he said. “You’re healthy as a young Hereford cow and as sane as Monsignor Schumacher.” He glanced at the tables around him and nodded. “Evening, Monsignor.” He turned back to her. “I think you’ll like it here, at least for a time. It’s smaller than you’d think, and people are clannish. But you’re the sort of person who makes a good impression, and anybody who comes here voluntarily has passed the first test.”
“And you’ve passed yours,” she said. The caterers arrived and dealt out plates of food from a cart, leaning down to mutter into each person’s ear, “Careful, the plate is very hot.”
She tasted the salmon on her plate and said, “You can go unplug the equipment. It’s very good.”
“That’s Marian’s fault. She’s always destroying cherished traditions. Usually after these things we used to spend half the night admitting people, giving upper GIs and so on. I have no idea what we’ll do with ourselves.”
She looked at him, her chin resting on her hands. “That brings me to something I’m a bit concerned about myself.”
“Oh?” he said.
“Well, it’s kind of embarrassing. I leased this big black Mercedes when I got to town, because I figured it would be good on snow and ice. But I’m not very good with it. I managed to steer it to the hospital okay, but about half an hour ago I went out to get my makeup bag from the front seat …”
Carey’s lips slowly, involuntarily curved upward.
“This is nothing to smile about. I backed into an empty parking space and hurried to get inside, so I wouldn’t be late and get stared at by a lot of people who knew each other. There’s a color code and a sign, but I guess I didn’t see it because I backed in. Anyway, I guess it was for some kind of emergency vehicle, and the police towed my car away. Why are you smiling?”
Carey’s smile grew, and he began to chuckle.
“Are you some kind of sadist?”
“No,” said Carey. “I’m very sorry. I saw your car when I got here, and I wondered whether I should say something. That’s all.”
“Then why on earth didn’t you?” she asked. “I would have moved it in a second.”
He looked down at his hands, then forced his eyes to meet her stare. “I didn’t want to seem like a jerk. It was my parking space.”
It took two breaths for her face to register confusion, then shock, then understanding. Her eyes sparkled, and her laugh was clear and musical. It seemed to linger on her lips. “You know where I can get a ride to the impound lot after this thing ends?”
“It’s the least I can do.”
