A Stillness in Bethlehem(32)

He walked up to the table, put his hands on the back of the chair that would be his if he sat down and said, “Excuse me. Do we know you from somewhere?”

“We don’t know him,” Bennis said solemnly, “but he knows us.”

“He has read about you in the paper,” Tibor said. “You see, it is how I have told you, Krekor. In this place, you are famous.”

“It’s not just in this place,” the older man said fervently. Then he blushed, turned away, looked at the ceiling, looked at his shoes, looked out the window. Then he turned back to Gregor and stuck out his hand. “I’m Franklin Morrison,” he said. “Chief of police for Bethlehem, Vermont. And Mr. Demarkian, you have no idea how glad I am to get my hands on you.”





Three


1


FOR AMANDA BALLARD, HAVING sex was like eating vanilla ice cream: a fundamentally unpleasant physical activity that could be endured with patience; an unfortunate social necessity that could be learned well enough to put on automatic pilot. It was now four o’clock on the afternoon of Sunday, December 15th, and Amanda had been on automatic for several hours. That was because Peter had wanted to spend the day in bed. Peter always wanted to spend Sundays in bed. He said it was his new religion, now that he had given up the old one, which had been Presbyterian or something equally Old New England. Amanda hadn’t been paying attention when he told her. She had been paying attention when he told her about the sex, because she had had to. His attitude bewildered her completely. Peter was not the first man Amanda had slept with. He was not even the first man she had made the decision to sleep with. He was the first one who had been really involved with sex. In Amanda’s experience, what men really wanted in bed was a fast and furious in and out and a ricocheting payoff. If they got that, they really didn’t care about anything else. Peter always wanted her to feel things and make little cries in the dark. In the beginning, it had left Amanda feeling frustrated, confused and angry. Then she had done a very sensible thing. She went to Burlington twice a month to buy books. On one of those trips, she stayed a little later than usual and went to the movies. The movie she saw was called Having Miss Smith, and it had been a revelation. At times it had made her physically ill. Amanda thought she might have missed half the movie—which was shockingly short, considering what they charged for admission—because of the amount of time she spent with her head between her knees, trying not to vomit. What she had seen had been very useful in the long run, however, and so made all the rest of it worthwhile. On the following Sunday, when Peter had wanted to spend the day in bed, Amanda had come to the project with a whole new set of moves, and Peter had been delighted. He was still delighted. Every once in a while he referred to her “wonderful awakening” and her “exciting responsiveness.” Amanda made noises in his ear, closed her eyes and counted backward from one hundred in her head.

Right now, Amanda wasn’t counting backward from one hundred in her head, because she didn’t need to. The physical part of this session had reached a climax half an hour ago, and was unlikely to recommence until after dinner. She and Peter were sitting up in bed, half-watching It’s a Wonderful Life and half going through the notes Peter had for the upcoming issue of the paper. They had It’s a Wonderful Life on videotape, which was a good thing. Peter was always complaining about how, in the old days, the television stations used to show Christmas movies in the Christmas season. Now they showed reruns of The A-Team and Starsky and Hutch.

“We’re going to have to put in more about the shootings,” Peter was saying, “even though Franklin doesn’t know anything and the staties don’t care. It’s all people are talking about. I’m going to put it on an inside page, though.”

“It’s old news,” Amanda said judiciously.

“It’s bad news for the Celebration,” Peter said. He put his hands up and rubbed his face. “God, wouldn’t that be awful. All those flatlanders think we’re the next thing to hillbillies up here anyway. Hootin’ and hollerin’ and shootin’ up the scenery as soon as we get lickered up. That’s all we’d need.”

Amanda cocked her head. “Do you think that’s what happened? A couple of hunting accidents, I mean. Do you think all that’s true?”

“I don’t know what you mean by all that. I know what the state police said, and they’re supposed to know their job.”

“Well, yes,” Amanda said doubtfully, “but in this case it’s different, isn’t it? I mean, they didn’t know Tisha the way we knew Tisha.”