“Out of town.”
“Then why do you have to go?”
“I just do. And Ned?”
“What is it, angel?”
His first term of endearment. “Don’t call me that. And don’t call here anymore. Not here, not at the office, nowhere.”
“You don’t mean that, Francie. You couldn’t. I’m not some stranger. I know you.”
She hung up. It rang again, almost immediately. Had he not only memorized her number but entered it in his speed dialer? How did that reconcile with his spycraft? Suddenly she saw him in a new light, knew what must have been happening inside his head for months, months of struggling against his own spycraft, fighting the urge to call, the urge to see her, the urge to live with her. Francie saw him in a new light, but she let it ring.
After it stopped, she got out of the bath, dried herself. There she was in the mirror again: nothing normal or composed about her now.
She put on her nightie, went down to the kitchen, brewed tea. Found herself brewing tea, more accurately, although she seldom drank it, didn’t like it. Brewing tea and thinking of Mackie, a Scottish baby-sitter hired by her parents when she’d been small. Mackie drank tea from morning to night, following a strict ritual, a ritual Francie followed now. Mackie: her red arthritic fingers wrapped around a china cup, her pale eyes squinting through the steam, her opinions. Mackie had many opinions-about Catholics: hypocrites; dogs: diseased; men: nasty-opinions that had given Francie nightmares and gotten Mackie fired. But the warm cup felt good now in Francie’s hand, and so did the hot tea inside her. Men are nasty, dear; don’t you ever be trusting them. But Mackie, what about Daddy? Now that’s a sharp question, isn’t it, dear? Some, not I, don’t you know, but some, might even say the kind of question a Jewish lawyer would be asking, not a sweet-tempered lass such as yourself.
There was a knock at the front door, perhaps one in a series only half heard. Roger? Home on some earlier flight, with sudden news, good or bad? Francie went to the door, put her eye to the peephole. Not Roger, but Ned. Ned with flowers in his hand, irises, fucking irises of course. She leaned her head against the door. He knocked again.
Francie opened up.
He smiled. “I like your nightie,” he said. “It’s so chaste.”
Francie, forcing herself not to glance furtively past him at the neighbors’windows like some cartoonish sloven that Grosz might have painted, said, “What do you want, Ned?”
“Aren’t you going to invite me in?”
“Go deliver the milk.” Francie closed the door in his face.
But she didn’t go away, just stood there. He knocked again. Francie didn’t move. He spoke, quietly, but she heard. “That wasn’t nice, about the milk,” he said.
Francie just stood there, just stood there for as long as she could, and then opened the door. Ned walked in.
He closed the door behind him. “Brought you some flowers,” he said, holding them out.
“I don’t like irises.”
“You don’t?”
“Not particularly.”
It wasn’t so much the crestfallen look on his face per se, but that of all possible emotional reactions to the situation they were in, it had dominated, that did something to Francie. He was mortified that he’d been giving her irises all this time and hadn’t known. There, standing in her front hall, the flowers now dangling uselessly at his side, he looked… adorable: a horrible girlish adjective, a horrible girlish trap, but there was no other way to put it.
She took him in her arms, could not stop herself.
“That feels good,” he said in her ear. “I was afraid it might never happen again.”
“This is the last time,” Francie said, but she didn’t let go.
“Don’t say that.” The tip of his tongue stroked her earlobe. The feeling triggered some force in her body, in her mind, irresistible. “Let’s go upstairs,” he said.
“No,” she said, pushing him away, or trying to, or at least sending her hands a message that he should be pushed away. But he stayed where he was, his breath in her ear, his arms around her, their bodies close, feeling together the presence of another world, not far away. “We can’t,” she said. “Anne.”
“There’s no help for that.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“No, Francie. This happened. It’s happening. You might as well try to… to…” He couldn’t think of an analogy. “We’re not machines,” he said, finding another image, “with an off switch.”
“But Anne,” Francie said.
“I’ll get a divorce.”
“No.”
“Then she can’t know, that’s all. She can never know.”
“No.”
“That’s the best we can do. No one gets hurt.”
No one gets hurt. Was it possible? Francie didn’t know. But how could it go on, now that she knew Anne, played tennis with her, had started to become a friend, knew her daughter? It couldn’t. There was no future for her and Ned. But tonight? Just one night? No one would get hurt tonight.
She turned toward the stairs. He followed her up, his hand trailing down her back like a charging device.
Having caught an afternoon flight from Lauderdale, having found Francie not at home, and having left a clever little bit of misdirection on the answering machine just because it felt like the kind of nifty move he would be making from here on in, Roger lay dozing on the couch in his basement room. The phone woke him. He ignored it, preferring to let his mind return to what it had been dwelling on during the plane ride, the details of the post-Francie stage of his life. At first, he’d imagined living alone, staying in the house, soldiering on. But why rule out female companionship? He thought of Brenda, Francie’s friend in Rome, thought of how she’d sounded on the phone. He remembered how attractive she was-rich, too, which was important because even with the insurance settlement he would never be able to see to the needs of a woman even more high-maintenance than Francie. Brenda: wasn’t there some story of a party she’d once been at where Pavarotti and Sutherland had sung Beatles songs around an upright piano? He could see himself building a life out of things like that. What was the name of that tailor’s shop near the Trevi fountain where he’d had that gray suit made, the one with the subtle navy flecks? He could picture the facade perfectly, but the name eluded him, was still eluding him when he thought he heard a voice upstairs-not a voice, but two voices, female and male.
Roger removed his shoes, left his basement room, crept up the stairs in stocking feet. The door to the kitchen hung open a few inches, admitting a yellow wedge of light. He hovered in the darkness, listening. He heard a man say something about divorce. A man with the sickening voice of a pleaser: radio boy. Then Francie said something he didn’t catch. And Roger wanted to hear, wanted to hear everything. He stuck his head in the kitchen, saw no one, nipped around the corner into the unlit back hall, and from there along the corridor, also unlit, that led to the front of the house. He hung in the shadows beside the stairs leading to the second floor. And there they were, in a foul embrace.
Whitey, I need you now.
Francie said, “No.”
Radio boy said, “That’s the best we can do. No one gets hurt.”
They were still for a few moments; then Francie turned, turned so that she was looking right at Roger, right at him, and he thought, Now you’re dead. But her eyes were wet and he was in the darkness, and she didn’t see him. Up the stairs she went-what had she meant by no? — and radio boy followed, up and out of sight, but not before Roger got his first good look at him, the image predictable. Roger listened to their withdrawing footsteps with all the concentration at his command, but it wasn’t necessary. He knew where they were going: into her bedroom, their bedroom, in fact, their marital bedroom. After a few minutes, he went up, too, silent as a big cat in his stocking feet.
The marital door was closed and no light leaked out from under. But Roger didn’t have to see; he heard the sounds of their lust, those cries of Francie’s that she’d never made for him, and the passionate noise of radio boy,
