Читаем The Great Leader полностью

He slumped down in a chair by the door, looked at his scuffed shoes, and then watched her expertly opening the wine. Since Diane had left he had been strictly screw top. He made his way back to the table. The wine was a soft burgundy called Clos de la Roche and she said it was hard to get but her family knew the family that owned the vineyard. It was gradually occurring to him that she was rich, which had a dampening effect since he was an old-line left-winger and laborite, his sympathies deeply enmeshed in the fortunes of the union movement. He was honest enough, however, to admit that he had never really known a rich woman and the few he had met in Marquette were civil enough.

“How much would a bottle of this set you back?” It was certainly the most delicious liquid he had ever drunk.

“Oh God I could only estimate. My dad has it sent to me. Several hundred dollars a bottle I suspect. My dad’s from an old New England family though he’s a democrat. He says his family made a lot of money in the spice and slave trade and whaling so it’s his duty to try to correct certain ancient injustices. He’s always loathed my husband Harold who started as a broker and is now an investment banker. My dad refers to him as Swindler Harold. My dad was pleased when Harold’s firm went bankrupt. Harold has been in a depression for a couple of months. I support the family with my money but I could never leave Harold because the kids love their hopeless dad. Harold wants me to invest in a company he wants to start to recondition sailboats but dad has control of my money and won’t allow it.” She paused, almost frantic. “This must all sound strange to you.”

“It does sound remote. When my dad was dying of cancer at age sixty he was worried because he was three thousand bucks in debt. I paid it off with a loan from my wife. He didn’t know the money came from Diane but was proud that I had a good job.” He was pleased that they were talking nonchalantly about their families. “I never thought much about money because I had enough to buy books and live fine and now I’ll get by on my state pension okay.”

They were silent and drowsy drinking the wine and he suspected that his sexual feelings for her came out of the usual loneliness and that the wine had the curious effect of making her look even more like Diane. When you’re sixty-five, he thought, a fifty-five-year-old woman looks young.

She asked him if he’d like to go look at petrogylphs with her father early the next morning and at first he said no, that he was moving out to more reasonable quarters, would see his mother a few more times, then head out to find the Great Leader Dwight. She looked quite disappointed like Diane looked when he refused to go along with what she wanted to do so he changed his mind by saying “one more day won’t hurt” and then she smiled.

“Why do we seem to like each other?” she asked at the door.

“I have no idea,” he lied. He certainly wasn’t going to say, “You bear a resemblance to a woman I loved and lost.”

“Once, on a plane, I developed a crush on an anthropologist I was seated next to. I was turned on as the young people say. I told my daughter who thought it was hysterical. She asked, ‘Why didn’t you go for it mom?’”

Sunderson thought of this on his way back to his room, quite lost until he was helped by a night watchman. It was a troublesome night indeed as if he had just been on a fifteen-hour drive and couldn’t stop moving when he got into bed. Once he woke up weeping but twice it was laughter, and belly laughter. The tears were caused by a reality-based dream of when he had returned from a three-day meeting at state police headquarters and found her gone on a late Friday afternoon. He was in immediate tears as he had skillfully, he thought, remembered that it was their seventeenth anniversary and he had bought fifty bucks worth of cut flowers, a pointless gesture as it was late June and she had better flowers in her perennial garden. Some of their camping equipment was gone from the porch and it seemed odd that a woman fleeing from marriage would take this sort of gear. As a detective he might have figured out he was dulled from the four-hundred-plus-mile drive up from Lansing and a hangover from sitting in a disco rock bar watching college girls wiggle their toothsome asses. Fetching a beer from the refrigerator he saw the note. “Hoped you’d call last night but you must have been busy. Also hoping you remembered I’m camping this weekend at our spot near Big Bay. Your dinner in the blue Creuset is a blanquette de veau, a veal stew. I also made a salad dressing, etc. See you Sunday. Love, D.”