already knew, after Orion would be Farstar, which would probably prove more demanding still. Involuntarily, Adam's eyes strayed back to the papers spread out before him.
Erica told herself: Don't rush! Don't push too hard! She said, 'While you're doing that, I think I'll go for a walk. I feel like it.'
'Do you want me to come with you?'
She shook her head. 'You'd better finish.' If he left the work now, she knew he would either return to it late tonight or get up ridiculously early in the morning.
Adam looked relieved.
Outside the house, Erica pulled tightly around her the suede jacket she had slipped on, and stepped out briskly. She had a scarf wound around her hair. The air was chilly, though the wind which had buffeted the Motor City through the day had dropped. Erica liked to walk at night. She used to in the Bahamas, and still did here, though friends and neighbors sometimes cautioned that she shouldn't because crime in Detroit had risen alarmingly in recent years, and now even suburban Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills once considered almost crime-free had muggings and armed robberies.
But Erica preferred to take her chances and her walks.
Though the night was dark, with stars and moon obscured by clouds, enough light came from the houses of Quarton Lake for Erica to see her way clearly. As she passed the houses, sometimes observing figures inside, she wondered about those other families in their own environments, their hangups, misunderstandings, conflicts, problems.
Obviously, all had some, and the difference between most was only in degree. More to the point, she wondered: How fared the marriages inside those other walls, compared with Adam's and her own?
A majority of the neighbors were automotive people among whom the shedding of spouses nowadays seemed routine. American tax laws eased the way, and many a highly paid executive had discovered he could have his freedom by paying large alimony which cost him almost nothing. The alimony came off the top of his salary, so that he merely paid it to his ex-wife instead of to the government as income tax. A few people in the industry had even done it twice.
But it was always the foundered marriages which made the news. Plenty of the other kind existed - lasting love stories which had weathered well.
Erica thought of names she had learned since coming to Detroit: Riccardos, Gerstenbergs, Knudsens, Jacoccas, Roches, Brambletts, others.
There had been outstanding second marriages, too: the Henry Fords, Ed Coles, Roy Chapins, Bill Mitchells, Pete and Connie Estes, the John DeLoreans. As always, it depended on the individuals.
Erica walked for half an hour. On her way back, a soft rain began to fall. She held her face toward the rain until it was wet and streaming, yet somehow comforting.
She went in without disturbing Adam who was still in the living room, immersed in papers. Upstairs, Erica dried her face, combed out her hair, then undressed and put on the nightgown she had bought earlier today. Surveying herself critically, she was aware that the sheer beige nylon did even more for her than she had expected in the store. She used the orange lipstick, then applied Norell generously.
From the living-room doorway she asked Adam, 'Will you be long?'
He glanced up, then down again at a bluebound folder in his hand.
'Maybe half an hour.'
Adam had not appeared to notice the seethrough nightgown which could not compete, apparently, with the folder, lettered, Statistical Projection of Automobile and Truck Registration by States. Hoping that the perfume might prove more effective, Erica came behind his chair as she had earlier, but all that happened was a perfunctory kiss with a muttered, 'Good night, don't wait for me.' She might as well, she thought, have been drenched in camphorated oil.
She went to bed, and lay with top sheet and blanket turned back, her sexual desire growing as she waited. If she closed her eyes, she could imagine Adam poised above her . . .
Erica opened her eyes. A bedside clock showed that not half an hour, but almost two hours, had passed. It was 1 A.M.
Soon after, she heard Adam climb the stairs.
He came in, yawning, with a, 'God, I'm tired,' then undressed sleepily, climbed into bed, and was almost instantly asleep.
Erica lay silently beside him, sleep for herself far away. After a while she imagined that she was once more walking, out of doors, the softness of the rain upon her face.
Chapter 9
The day after Adam and Erica Trenton failed to bridge the growing gap between them, after Brett DeLosanto renewed his faith in the Orion yet pondered his artistic destiny, after Barbara Zaleski viewed frustrations through the benthos of martinis, and after Matt Zaleski, her plant-boss father, survived another pressure-cooker work day, a minor event occurred in the inner city of Detroit, unconnected with any of those five, yet whose effect, over months ahead, would involve and motivate them all.
Time: 8:30 p.m. Place: Downtown, Third Avenue near Brainard. An empty police cruiser parked beside the curb.
'Get your black ass against the wall,' the white cop commanded. Holding a flashlight in one hand, a gun in the other, he ran the flashlight's beam down and up Rollie Knight, who blinked as the light reached his eyes and stayed there.
'Now turn around. Hands above your head. Move! You goddamn jailbird.'
As Rollie Knight turned, the white cop told his Negro partner, 'Frisk the bastard.'
The young, shabbily dressed black man whom the policeman had stopped, had been ambling aimlessly on Third when the cruiser pulled alongside and its occupants jumped out, guns drawn. Now he protested, 'Wadd' I do?', then giggled as the second policeman's hands moved up his legs, then around his body. 'Hey man, oh man, that tickles!'
'Shaddup!' the white cop said. He was an old-timer on the force, with hard eyes and a big belly, the last from years of riding in patrol cars.
He had survived this beat a long time and never relaxed while on it.
The black policeman, who was several years younger and newer, dropped his hands. 'He's okay.' Moving back, he inquired softly, 'What difference does the color of his ass make?'
The white cop looked startled. In their haste since moving from the cruiser he had forgotten that tonight his usual partner, also white, was off sick, with a black officer substituting.
'Hell!' he said hastily. 'Don't get ideas. Even if you are his color, you don't rate down with that crumb.'
The black cop said drily, 'Thanks.' He considered saying more, but didn't. Instead, he told the man against the wall, 'You can put your hands down. Turn around.'
As the instruction was obeyed, the white cop rasped, 'Where you been the last half hour, Knight?' He knew Rollie Knight by name, not only from seeing him around here frequently, but from a police record which included two jail convictions, for one of which the officer had made the arrest himself.
'Where I bin?' The young black man had recovered from his initial shock.
Though his cheeks were hollowed, and he appeared underfed and frail, there was nothing weak about his eyes, which mirrored hatred. 'I bin layin' a white piece o' ass. Don't know her name, except she says her old man's a fat white pig who can't get it up. Comes here when she needs it from a man.'
