Читаем The Great Leader полностью

“I’ve seen that a half dozen times. A couple begins quite romantically doing a lot of things together and then it begins to die if the man becomes overabsorbed in his work. It can go the other way. A friend of mine started working in an animal shelter and found it more interesting than taking care of her husband who was anyway less than fascinating. Another friend saw her kids off to college and then went back to finishing her nursing degree. Now she’s a surgical nurse and lives in New York City and her husband is still down the road from us in Bedford wondering what hit him.”

Sunderson was looking down at the beautiful table before them feeling the full impact of his own shabbiness. His desk at the office had always been the most grungy of any of his colleagues with its accumulated gummy spilled coffee, dust, and scraps of paper. Roxie had never been permitted to touch the desk or he might lose track of what he comically called “important papers.” Now he thought of the old saying pigs love their own shit as he looked down at the finely made table and the frayed, soiled cuffs of his sport coat. There was a longish, more than awkward silence as if they were both asking themselves, “Why are we depressing each other?”

“Marriages get moldy real slowly,” he said, then paused to take out the flask of whiskey from his coat pocket. She nodded and he poured into their empty brandy glasses thinking that she had likely never drunk cheap whiskey. Sure enough she winced at her first sip.

“My God what is this, paint thinner?” She laughed and took another sip. “Sorry, I interrupted you.”

“I was saying that marriages slowly get moldy and then are no longer mutually vital. You just keep dancing the same polka steps.”

“I never danced the polka. We fox-trotted out East or waltzed.”

“I could show you but I’m sure that Tucson is not a polka town. Anyway, we had a lot of fun camping in the summers in our twenties and thirties. It’s wonderful to make love in a tent. In the winter we’d do a lot of cross-country skiing. When we got into our forties we stopped doing both. In the summer we’d rent a cabin, which wasn’t the same as a tent, and in the winter we’d vegetate.”

He had made himself nervous and finished his ample whiskey in a single gulp. He could no longer bear her nominal resemblance to Diane and imagined her living in a colonial house with daffodils in the yard in the New York City suburb of Bedford. He got up to leave.

“Please don’t go just yet.” Her eyes seemed to be misting and her voice was less strong. “When you spoke about your new hobby of investigating the crime of religion, I found myself agreeing intellectually but emotionally I have to protect my own religion. We lost our baby girl, our first child, Lucy, when she was five months to a defective heart. My husband insisted she be called after me because he loved the name Lucy. Probably because of dreams I had the irrational belief that my little daughter became a bird and that her soul passes through generations of birds. I even became a bird-watcher though I had never much noticed them before Lucy’s death. We raised a son and a daughter but with them my feelings were never as intense as they were with Lucy. We knew that we were going to lose her for three months but I never accepted it.”

“We never got beyond a couple of miscarriages,” Sunderson said lamely. He began to finally feel the extreme fatigue of having awakened at three a.m. and also a niggling twinge of desire for her. It seemed crazed that he could hear this terrifying loss and it made him want to make love to the mother. He remembered that Diane, who knew so many nurses in her work as a hospital administrator, had said that they tended to be very sexually active because they’re around death so much. “At least fucking stands for life,” she had said, shocking him because it was the only time in their marriage she had used the word.

“I can’t believe it.” She suddenly burst into laughter.

“Believe what?” he asked timidly, already sensing that she had read his thoughts about her similarity to Diane.

“It’s outrageous. And funny. Maybe flattering.” She paused, and then added with mock seriousness, “You better go now.”

He took her seriously and headed for the door. She followed and put an arm around his neck.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“Just teasing. I have a bottle of wine that’s perfect for a Sunday night.”