'I understand, I'm practically at the hospital now myself, I have to operate in a few minutes. The reason I called, I've got a few more thoughts about the party for John. Can we get together and discuss them?'
'Of course.'
He set a time and place for their meeting, then he said, 'I hope you appreciate yourself, Karen. I hope you know what a good person you are and how good it is for me to have you in my life right now.' His tone had dropped to the barely audible and Karen found herself reacting in kind, speaking in a near whisper.
'You're very special too, Stanley. I hope you come to realize it, I really do, because it's important.'
'Bless you,' he whispered, his voice scarcely more than a breath.
When she looked up the secretary was in the doorway once more, watching her. His face showed nothing but the proper formal deference but she thought she could detect the trace of a knowing look, as if it had been on his face a second before she glanced at him and now hung somewhere in the air, slowly dissolving. Karen felt herself blush to the roots of her scalp.
She told herself that she had nothing to be ashamed about, that she had been having a conversation with a friend, but in her heart she knew that was not entirely true. There was something about speaking to Stanley Kom that was unlike speaking to other men-the stakes always seemed higher, yet far less explicitly defined, as if by the very act of conversing she had agreed to play a game whose rules and wagers she was completely ignorant of. Yet the game did not seem dangerous, there was a very nonthreatening quality to Kom's friendship. Where with other men a friendship held the constant threat of emergent sex, however elaborately denied, with Stanley the sex seemed to be sublimated into trust and intimacy in a form that was almost neutered. Almost neutered. Karen did not delude herself that there was no element of sex whatever between them. He made her feel very good about herself, he flattered in a way that appeared totally, gratefully sincere, and therefore acceptable-but it never made her forget that he was a man. If she was being wooed-and at times she felt she was and at times she knew she wasn't-it was in a way she'd never experienced before.
What there was about Stanley, she thought, that made him different, the thing that replaced sex and yet added a flavor of excitement that would otherwise be missing, was the sheer intensity of his needs. Whatever it was he wanted from her, he seemed to want it completely. Nakedly.
Unapologetically. And he made her think she could give it to him. That was very attractive to a woman, she realized. It was nurture, after all. And perhaps that was why she liked him so much, she thought.
Perhaps that was why she saw herself responding to him on a level and in a way that she had not felt in a long time. She could help him-he needed her. A very seductive combination. Karen was bright enough to recognize what was happening to her, what Stanley was unconsciously making happen to her-but she was not cynical enough to stop it. It Hell, she told herself, within the realm of harmless flirtation, and in the meantime she was doing Stanley some good and she was doing Becker some good. If she received a bit of a lift from that herself, where was the harm in that?
AT ONE A.M. Tee's clock radio switched on, the volume turned as low as he could get it and still have it audible. He woke to the noise of static, switched it off, and eased himself out of bed, moving on tiptoe in order not to waken his wife. She rolled over with a loud grunt as he opened the bedroom door and slipped into the living room.
Making his way by the moonlight coming through the bay window, Tee walked to the hallway. His daughter's door was slightly ajar and he peeked in. Ginny lay asleep in a pool of pale lunar light, looking to Tee's adoring paternal eyes as innocent and angelic as a newborn fawn.
At fifteen her face was — in transition, the features and shapes of the adult emerging but still embedded in the child. He realized that he had not peeked in upon her for months, forced to respect her privacy in grudging deference to her age. It had been his great joy in the past to watch her sleep, and he and Marge would creep to her door together and stand for long minutes admiring her and, by extension, themselves. Marge had given up the practice first, acknowledging Ginny's growing maturity before Tee was willing to. It had struck him as strange, cold, somehow unmatemal, this precipitous rush to see her grown, and he had at first suspected that it was female jealousy over his daughter's slowly manifesting beauty. One night Ginny had opened her eyes and looked back at him as he stood in the doorway. In the past they had smiled at each other and he would tell her to go back to sleep and she would, comforted by his presence. This time she had smiled, and she had spoken gently, but her words stung as if she had shouted.
'I don't watch you sleep,' she had said. Stunned and suddenly uncomfortable, Tee had eased her door shut without a word. He had not been back to look at her until this night.
God, I love her, he thought, and felt his throat tighten and his eyes tear. We should have had more children, he thought, then felt disloyal because he didn't want any other children, he just wanted his Ginny, and he wanted her to stay his child, to be forever small and young and her daddy's darling. A surge of anger swept over him at the injustice of life, that it stole everyone's youth, his, hers, theirs.
Ginny shifted her position in bed and Tee quickly pulled away from the door. He slumped against the wall of the hallway in the instinctive lurch of the Peeping Tom, feeling both the anger and the tears and thinking what a mess he was. Some essential cement in his character seemed to have given way, allowing the elements to float freely, recombining in instantaneous, volatile, wholly unpredictable ways. That morning he had tucked his lover atop a cliff with as much regard for proprieties or his surroundings as an oversexed baboon, then minutes later had come within an inch of killing her, wanting to kill her. Naked as a jay, he had stood neck-deep in a reservoir, acting for all the world like a Hindu swami, and now he was close to sobbing at the sight of his daughter sleeping in the moonlight. This was not a midlife crisis, he thought, it was a fucking cataclysm.
Recovering himself, he went to the kitchen to the phone that was farthest from the bedroom. After closing the kitchen door, he spoke aloud for the first time since rising, testing his voice to be sure the fogginess of sleep was gone. He altered his tone and pitch, trying to disguise himself. When he was ready, he punched in a number and listened to the phone ring. His own house was so quiet that the ring on the other end seemed to shriek in his ear.
On the- third ring a man answered, sounding sleepy and annoyed.
'Yeah, what?'
Tee hesitated, wanting to just hang up but knowing that would send out alarms.
'Hello, hello?' the voice demanded.
'Is Mr. Conrad there?' Tee said in his altered voice.
'Who?'
'Conrad.'
'Wrong number,' the voice said, more angrily than before. The phone went dead. Tee opened the kitchen door and jerked back with a gasp when he saw Marge standing there.
'Shit a brick!' he exclaimed. 'You scared the hell out of me. '
Marge stood with her arms crossed over her chest, the pale skin of her cleavage shining like a ghost. 'Sorry.'
'You didn't have to get up,' he said. 'I tried not to wake you.'
'I know.'
'I was creeping around like a goddamned mouse,' he said. She moved slightly, making her cleavage even more prominent. Tee found he couldn't stop looking at it. In the pale light Marge looked younger, thinner, altogether more desirable.
'I know it,' she said.
Christ, I'm horny, he thought, finding it amazing after the morning's performance. He reached out a tentative finger, slipping it in the cleft between her breasts. 'Who is she, Tee?'
Tee stopped, puzzled. 'Who?'
'The woman you're calling at one in the morning from the kitchen phone.'
'That wasn't a woman.'
'Uh-huh.'
'I was calling McNeil.'
'Then who's Mr. Conrad?'
'How long were you out there listening?'
'Who is she? Is she anyone I know? Does she know me? Because I can't stand to be walking around and thinking she's watching me and pitying me.'
