“Of course now.”
“It’s Saturday afternoon.”
“I’ve worked most of the Saturday afternoons of my life.”
That wasn’t quite true—but Miriam thought it was more than justified. She hadn’t spent any of the Saturday afternoons of her life in bed with somebody else’s husband, and that ought to count for something.
[2]
It was one o’clock when Josh Malley showed up at Sam Harrigan’s front door, and by then Sam was in a very peculiar mood. On the one hand, he was happy—and happy to a degree he found embarrassing, considering the smallness of the incident that had made him so. At twelve forty-five he had received a phone call from Glinda Daniels. She was calling from the library—if she’d been calling from her little house, he’d have walked down the hill to her as soon as they’d hung up—and the news she had was not good. To Sam, the news didn’t much matter. It had been less than twenty-four hours since he had taken Glinda home after buying her dinner. He had spent that short period of time worrying about it. Had she liked him? Had she not liked him? He really was behaving like a fourteen-year-old—and yet, he wasn’t. Not exactly. There was something strange about the way Glinda Daniels responded to him. She was too hesitant and too afraid—and God only knew there wasn’t a single bloody thing about Sam Harrigan for a woman to be afraid of. One of those movie stars who periodically flitted through his life, more passionate about ecology than she was about him, had told him contemptuously that he was the least sexually aggressive man she had ever met. What she meant was that he took no for no whether she wanted him to or not. Sam Harrigan had made his rule about that long before the present feminist movement came to flower. He didn’t know enough about women to know if they always meant no when they said no, but he did know enough about people to understand that any woman who said no when she meant yes needed to have her head examined. The movie star had definitely needed to have her head examined. Aside from her attraction to rape games, bondage movies, and a host of frighteningly bizarre sexual devices, she thought the trees were giving her advice on the best way to murder Dan Quayle.
With Glinda Daniels, though, there should have been no ambiguity of any kind. One of the other rules Sam Harrigan had made for himself long ago was never to try to take a woman to bed on a first date. He’d tried it a few times and even succeeded a few times, but he hadn’t liked it much. His impression was that the women hadn’t liked it much either. It seemed that in this late decade of the twentieth century, sex had become obligatory. Women went through with it for the same reason they put on makeup in the morning—because it was expected of them, whether they liked the idea or not. Sam Harrigan wanted more than that out of his sex life. He wanted more than that out of himself.
He had taken Glinda out for a steak and bought her a big piece of triple-chocolate cake and two glasses of champagne for dessert. He had tried to bring the conversation around to something personal and had failed utterly. The whole time they were together, Sam had had the impression that Glinda was more than a little annoyed with him, he didn’t have any idea why. By the time he brought her home, he thought he was in for one of the more spectacular failures of his career. Glinda wasn’t simply not attracted to him. She loathed him. She wished he wouldn’t impose on her time any more. She wished—
Getting up this morning, Sam had changed his mind about all of it—he just wasn’t sure to what. He had asked and she had accepted. If she hadn’t wanted to accept, she had only had to say no. He hadn’t been pushy or crude. He at least ought to give the whole thing another shot, especially because, after several hours in her exclusive company, he was finding her more attractive than ever. It was the “extra” twenty pounds that made all the difference, physically. Sam didn’t find them “extra” at all. He found them crucial.
He was on phase three of this mental mess—wondering if Glinda was secretly and perhaps hopelessly, but of course irretrievably, in love with someone else—when the call came. He was also sitting out on his screen porch potting nettles. Potting nettles when your mind is occupied elsewhere is a very bad idea. You forget not to touch the leaves with your bare hands and your fingers begin to sting. When the ringer on the phone went off, his fingers had probably been stinging for some time. He hadn’t noticed. He did notice as soon as he had the receiver in his hand, because it stung.
“It was Scholastica who told me about it,” Glinda said, after she’d given him the news of Don Bollander’s death. Sam didn’t think he knew Don Bollander. Once the name was mentioned, he tried and tried to put a face to it, but he couldn’t do it. “Scholastica was there,” Glinda went on, “so I suppose I have a good chance of having heard the straight story. Within ten minutes after I finished talking to her, four people came into the library with other stories—”