A Stillness in Bethlehem(113)

“I don’t think you’re being fair,” he told her, wishing his voice didn’t sound so tight, wishing he didn’t really care. “They’re not like that. Not most of the time. You know they’re not like that.”

“I don’t know what they’re like.”

“This has been a good place for you. I’ve been a good man for you. I don’t see how you can talk about walking out on it all after everything we’ve been to each other.”

“We haven’t been anything to each other, Peter. We’ve just been sleeping together. And sex is only important to men.”

“Sex used to be important to you.”

“No, it didn’t. Not really.”

Peter started to argue the point and stopped himself. It was a ludicrous point to argue. It was an argument no man could win. All the woman had to do was say she’d been faking it, and how would the man ever know? Peter got up and went to the window. He could see Main Street and the town park. He could see streets filled with tourists and the bleacher tents like giant blobs blocking his view. It had all gone back to normal in no time at all.

“It’s as if it never happened,” he said, watching a cluster of bright silver balls tied to a fire hydrant bounce in the wind. “It’s all back to normal. And it’s going to stay back to normal. It was some kind of catharsis.”

“It was the next best thing to a lynching.”

“They would never have lynched anybody.”

“You would never have lynched anybody,” Amanda said. “You’re you. They’re them. I’m sorry, Peter. It’s my fault, really. I didn’t realize what I was doing. I didn’t understand it could work out this way.”

“I don’t see why it’s your fault.”

“I have to get Timmy out of here.”

“He didn’t come with you to begin with. I wish I understood you, Amanda. I wish I knew what you wanted out of life.”

“I want what everybody wants,” Amanda said. “I want to be left alone.”

Peter didn’t think that was what everybody wanted, but Amanda was on her way to the bedroom and he was following her. She went to the big oak wardrobe he’d bought in Burlington and began to take her sweaters down from its high shelf. He stood in the doorway with his arms folded over his chest and felt the sweat come pouring down his forehead into his eyes.

“Amanda,” he said.

Amanda unhooked an empty felt Christmas stocking with her name on it from the wardrobe’s upper molding and tossed it on the bed.

“Don’t tell me how much I mean to you, because we’ll both know it won’t be true. I was never anything more to you than a convenience.”

“A convenience,” Peter repeated.

“That’s why I like Timmy,” Amanda told him. “He gets angry and sad and happy and horny, but he never tries to cover it up by saying it’s something else.”

Peter didn’t have an answer to that. He didn’t know where to begin to look for an answer to that. He hadn’t even figured out what to think about tonight. He did tell himself that the right thing to do right this second would be to get her to stop, to prove through force and ardor that he hadn’t felt about her as she assumed he had felt about her, that nothing was the way she thought it to be, but for some reason he felt paralyzed, and the paralysis translated into visions of Gregor Demarkian, going off to talk to Kelley Grey while the crowd melted away into the night.

Maybe Amanda was right. Maybe she had been only a convenience.

Maybe putting up with Timmy had been the coin of the realm.





3


When it was over, the first thing Stuart Ketchum wanted to do was to drive out to Rose Hill Cemetery and visit his mother’s grave. He hadn’t been there since the funeral and didn’t intend to go again. He went once to any grave that concerned him and then left it alone. That was what he’d done with the boys he’d known in Nam who hadn’t come home. If he found out where they were buried he went to see their markers, once, and then he walked away. It made sense. It made the only sense Stuart could think of, when it came to death. It had never ceased to surprise him just how final dying was.

He never made it to the cemetery. He stood in the middle of Main Street, watching it empty out, thinking of these people he had known all his life. He thought of himself holding that pistol in the air, that pistol he’d only had with him because he was going to go down to Burlington tonight and talk to his dealer about selling it off. He had started collecting guns of every type and only settled on rifles after a time. What would have happened if he hadn’t had it with him? What would have happened if he’d had one of the rifles instead, so that he was out there in the middle of that circle looking like an ad for the United States Marines? What would his friends and neighbors have done then? Minute by minute, he had a harder and harder time thinking of these people as “his friends and neighbors.” They were like the pod people from the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the ones that opened their mouths and made a horrible noise.