“If they did that, you’d have other reasons besides traffic for not hearing the play. This isn’t that big a park.”
“Well, they have to get here somehow,” Bennis said, “and they obviously do, because they’ve been having this play for the last two weeks, and nobody’s complained that I know of. I don’t understand you sometimes, Gregor. You get a perfectly interesting problem like a couple of shootings and you don’t think anything of it. And then you take off after some simple piece of nothing like this business of the animals as if it were the most fascinating puzzle since the Gordian knot.”
“It’s because he’s lonely,” Tibor said. “You should consider this, Bennis. It is not good for a man of Krekor’s age to be without a wife.”
“You’re my age,” Gregor said, “or just about. You don’t have a wife.”
“I have the grace of God to see me through my difficulties, Krekor. You have only Lida Arkmanian’s cooking.”
“I wish I had Lida Arkmanian’s cooking,” Gregor said.
“I wish we had some kind of map,” Bennis said. “That’s the one thing the people who wrote this brochure didn’t think of. I suppose they thought in a town this small there was nothing to draw a map of. Never mind. I’m with Gregor. Tibor, we ought to get in out of the cold and at least get some coffee or something. What time is it?”
“Ten to eleven,” Tibor said.
“I don’t know what you think you’re trying to do,” somebody else said, “but I’m not going to let you do it. It’s been my part in this play for the last two weeks, and I haven’t done a single thing wrong with it.”
Gregor turned around. In the beginning, he had thought the voice was coming from somewhere in the middle of the park. Then he’d realized that couldn’t be true. The park was what out-of-staters would have called a “common.” It was a flat, empty stretch of land with nothing but the gazebo in it and a few benches. The animals were there, and the small man who was walking them. Nobody else was. The voice they had heard was high-pitched, hysterical and definitely a woman’s. It had cut through the cold-thickened air as if it had edges made of razor blades.
“There they are,” Bennis said. “Up by the Bethlehem News and Mail.”
Bennis was right. They were up by the Bethlehem News and Mail—all the way up. You couldn’t really talk about “blocks” in Bethlehem, Vermont, although everybody, including the brochure on the Bethlehem Nativity Celebration, did. Main Street was sort of broken up into them, since it was paved and crossed by smaller streets here and there. The intersection pattern was random, though, and not neatly or precisely laid out. It was as if cows had wandered over this area many years ago, and the paths they made had been paved and christened roads. What Gregor meant when he thought of the offices of the Bethlehem News and Mail being “at least two-and-a-half blocks” away from where he was standing was two-and-a-half Philadelphia city blocks. A long way away, in fact. Far enough to make it surprising that they had heard this woman’s voice at all.
There were three of them, two women and a man. Gregor knew immediately that the voice he had heard had come from the small blonde woman and not the other one. The other one was blonde, too, but a studied kind of blonde, as if she had her hair dyed strand by strand to produce the proper effect. In spite of that, she was not particularly attractive. There was something leaden about her face, something uninspired about the way she held her body. That could have been the distance from which he was looking at her, but Gregor didn’t think so. The smaller woman looked to him like a Botticelli angel, and the way she held herself was—he couldn’t pin that down. There seemed to be a dozen things going on in her at once, but there was fire and passion in all of them.
The other woman was talking now. Gregor could see her lips move, but hear nothing of what she said. Beside her, the man was rocking back and forth on his heels, his hands in the back pockets of his jeans, his denim jacket open to the wind. Gregor had a hard time deciding whose side he was on, or which woman he was with. The smaller blonde one, he finally decided, because the other one looked too expensive. The other one looked as if she’d only be interested in men in suits.
“I’m fine,” the smaller blonde woman said now, her voice still hysterical, still carrying, still sharp. “I’m just plain fine. I don’t need any help from you. I don’t need any help from anybody.”
The man leaned over, said something, leaned back. The small blonde woman recoiled instinctively and then seemed to force herself to stand perfectly still. Then she turned her back on both of them and crossed her arms in front of her chest.