“And then your two best serves of the night, right after. Bang bang. I could have kissed you.” Beer came, and water, lots of water. Pink with exertion and victory, Anne talked on and on, reliving the match, her words sometimes tripping over themselves. Francie hadn’t seen her like this, suspected it didn’t happen often. She wondered about Anne’s husband.
Anne paused for breath, took a big drink of water. “Was it Jimmy Connors who said that tennis is better than sex?”
“Maybe his tennis,” Francie said. “Not ours.”
Anne glanced at her, and in that glance Francie saw her realizing she’d been talking too much, at least in terms of some inner code. Her mood changed, the blood draining from her face, leaving her pale. Her eyes took on an inward look: something was on her mind, something unrelated to tennis. She tried some beer, started to speak, stopped, and finally said, “Can I ask you something, Francie? I hate to be too personal, but the truth is I find you so easy to be with-like someone I’ve known for a long time.”
“Ask away,” said Francie.
Anne said, “Are you a good cook?”
“That’s the question?”
Anne nodded.
“I have two surefire appetizers, two surefire entrees, one dessert,” said Francie. “The rest is silence.”
Anne smiled, an admiring smile that made Francie a little uncomfortable. “I thought my lemon chicken was surefire, too,” she said, “but I guess I was wrong.” The inward look again. Francie waited. “Does your husband ever bring people home for dinner at the last minute?” Anne asked.
“He’s actually been doing the cooking lately,” Francie said.
“Aren’t you lucky.”
Anne added something else that Francie didn’t catch. She was thinking of their own dining room, and the happy sounds that used to fill it. At one time she and Roger had entertained a lot, then less, and since the loss of his job, not at all. Plotted on a graph, she wondered, would those dinners track the health of their marriage? Down, down, down, with upturns here and there: a stunted marriage, like a tree growing in the face of an impossible wind.
“Thursday of all days,” Anne was saying, “when he usually works late. It was going to be a McDonald’s night, and then boom. So I threw together the lemon chicken, but they hardly touched it. And I suppose the wine wasn’t very good either, although that didn’t stop them from drinking plenty of it. I’d read an article on Romanian wine, goddamn it.” Was Francie imagining it, or had Anne’s eyes filled with tears? Tears, yes: and Anne saw that she saw, and tried to explain. “He cares so much about his career. The least I can do is put a decent meal on the table.”
Francie could imagine Nora at this point, saying, Your husband sounds like a jerk. She toned that down. “I don’t see the connection. And if he’s any good at his job, a failed lemon chicken won’t make any difference.”
“You think? He’s so ambitious.”
“I do. Lighten up, for God’s sake.”
Anne’s eyes cleared. “I’m sure you’re right,” she said. “You’re so clearheaded, Francie, so in control.”
Francie, suddenly picturing herself under the ice at Brenda’s cottage, her breath escaping in silver-and-black bubbles, said nothing.
“Can I ask you a favor?” Anne said.
“But first do me one,” Francie said. “Stop asking if you can ask and just ask.”
Anne laughed. “With pleasure.” She reached across the table, touched Francie’s hand. “Give me one of those surefire recipes of yours.”
Francie took the paper napkin from under her glass and wrote:
Francie’s Roast Lamb, serves 8
7 cloves garlic, 1 halved, rest chopped
2 pounds baking potatoes, peeled and…
She came to the end, added the reminder to keep the gratin warm while waiting to carve the lamb, handed the napkin to Anne. “Enjoy.”
“Oh, I’m sure I will,” said Anne. “The very next time we have company.” Her face brightened with an idea. “Maybe you and your husband would like to join us?”
“That sounds nice,” Francie said.
9
Anne, having checked her watch and said “Oh my God, the sitter,” left in a hurry; Francie sat alone at the corner table in the bar. Looking down on court three beneath her window, she watched the second seeds playing their match. They were good, but nothing like the pair she and Anne had just beaten, nothing like the pair she and Anne had so quickly become. Francie couldn’t remember playing this well at any time in her life. How was it possible, with so much on her mind? Her near-drowning, her stupid on-air phone call, the loss of oh garden, my garden, Roger’s attempted seduction, to put the kindest light on it, and his subsequent attentiveness, just as disturbing. Some of it had to do with Anne, of course-they fit together so well-but was the rest simply chance? Or was it one of those Faustian bargains, her life falling apart while her tennis got better and better? She wanted no part of that. Tennis was her game, but just a game. In any case, her life wasn’t falling apart-not with Ned in it, no matter what happened. Francie paid her bill, went downstairs to her car, started for home.
Roger sat before his computer. The Puzzle Club was up, but he was not really attending. In fact, he was staring through the words on the screen, into a translucent beyond, his mind working out the possibilities of planting a bomb in an Israeli consulate, having first ensured that a visiting art consultant would be inside at just the right moment. A wretched idea, he concluded: messy, inelegant, leaking evidence, guaranteed to provide a full- scale investigation, and he knew nothing of bombs, bomb-making, bomb-planting. He leaned his head against the screen and thought, What am I doing? The computer hummed quietly against his brain.
Perhaps he was wrong about everything. All his evidence was circumstantial. Even her note and the call to the radio show could be logically explained: maybe she had developed one of those fan manias for a celebrity, maybe it was all taking place in her head, maybe she and the smooth-talking poseur had not even met. Did that sound like Francie? No. But there was a basic instability to her character-indeed, in the character of every woman he had ever known-so nothing could be ruled out. For his own peace of mind, if nothing else, he required eyewitness evidence. For example, was she really playing in the tennis tournament, or was that a lie to cover her presence somewhere else?
Roger pulled into the parking lot of the tennis club just in time to see Francie come out the door and walk to her car. She was wearing a warm-up suit and tennis shoes, didn’t look his way, and probably wouldn’t have noticed him if she had. He could see in his headlights that she was lost in thought, no doubt had fumbled away a close match, probably choking on a big point. No matter: she hadn’t lied about the tournament. She drove past him, out of the parking lot, turned north, toward Storrow Drive and home. He followed. Once inside, he would offer her a drink, perhaps make a fire, if there was any wood in the storage room. From there he knew he could find some subtle way of bringing the conversation around to call-in shows. He needed hard evidence.
Francie’s car phone buzzed. She answered.
“Are you on speaker?” Ned. He had never called her on the car phone before.
“No.”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes. What-”
He interrupted. “What’s that sound?”
“I don’t hear anything.” She checked her rearview mirror: two rows of double headlights winding back toward the western suburbs.
Silence.
“I’m at the place,” he said.
“The cottage?”
