Act of Darkness(19)

“The truth is,” she told Bennis, “I’d love to have you down here for a couple of weeks. It could be a couple of months. Hell, honey, it could be a couple of years. Maybe you could talk me out of getting married the next time it occurs to me.”

“I just hope you marry rich,” Bennis said.

“I always marry rich. I’m not attracted to fortune hunters, Bennis, just lunatics. This last one tried to dress all my Greek statues in green underwear.”

“Right,” Bennis said.

“Take the plane,” Rosamund said. “I know my way to the airport. I haven’t the foggiest notion if a train station even exists in this place.”

Then started a three-month stretch that Bennis was never able to remember in detail, but was unfortunately unable to forget completely. It had a lot of alcohol in it, and a lot of cigarettes, and the only marijuana Bennis ever smoked in her life. It also—inevitably, since Rosamund had a hand in it—had a lot of men. Bennis was fairly sure she hadn’t slept with all of these men, or even most of them, but she had slept with enough of them so that their faces blurred for her into an impressionistic pudding made up of arrogance, stupidity, and lust for power. At least, she supposed what she was seeing was lust for power. It certainly wasn’t lust for sex. To a man, these idiots had been more capable of being aroused by the sight of the presidential seal on a souvenir postcard than they ever would be by her.

The exception showed up in the middle of January, at one of those parties Rosamund threw in a halfhearted attempt to turn herself into a Washington hostess, if Rosamund had really wanted to be a Washington hostess, she would have been one. Instead, she only thought she ought to want to be one. Rosamund had never been much good at doing what she ought to do. The party in January, populated by half the House of Representatives and most of the Senate, was a combination of embarrassment and farce. The embarrassment came from the decor, which Rosamund had dragged out of her attic for the occasion and which consisted of oversize posters from the sixties, each featuring a large muddy pig standing over a sign identifying it as one or another public official: senator, congressman, president. The farce came from Rosamund’s behavior, which was calculated to ruin her forever. She kept jumping on top of tables and doing the cancan.

It was too much. Bennis soon wanted to escape from that party almost as much as she had once wanted to escape from Boston. Because she didn’t have any place private to go—Rosamund’s house was one of those contemporary concoctions with the bedrooms off a balcony overlooking the main living room; with a party going on there would be as much noise in Bennis’s room as there was around the bar—she headed for the relative quiet of the garden.

She was contemplating the rump of a marble Aphrodite that rose from a patch of wilting bougainvillea when her exception appeared. She had had just a little too much noise and just a little too much to drink. She was feeling all floaty and discontented, as if she’d been promised a special Christmas present and gotten a pair of socks instead. He stepped out of a tangle of wisteria with a champagne glass in his hand and said, “That’s what I like to see. A woman with a little meat on her bones.”

Bennis didn’t know if he was talking about Aphrodite or her, but she wasn’t sure she cared. Here in front of her, she thought, was a man who was good-looking and well-turned-out and sophisticated. He was friendly. He was coming on to her. He was even blessedly free of a wedding ring, meaning he might not be just one more power junkie on the sexual make. He could, she thought, in her alcoholic party haze, be the answer to all her problems.

Of course, Bennis thought now, brushing off the scattering of ash that had fallen from her cigarette to her skirt when the Rolls went over a pothole at seventy miles an hour, he was nothing of the sort. None of the answers-to-all-her-problems she had spent her time discovering in those days ever had been. It was hard to put your life in order when you were never entirely sober and even less frequently sane.

Still, she thought, looking back at Gregor, still sleeping, the one thing she hadn’t expected was that this idiot would cause her problems, more than ten years after the fact. She accepted the long-term consequences of her youthful stupidities with equanimity, by and large: the smoking she now seemed incapable of giving up, the headaches she always got from drinking as little as a single glass of wine, the boredom she had developed with the whole subject of sex unconnected to the promise of a commitment at least as strong as that which cemented her parents’ marriage. It was just that love affairs were supposed to be over when they were over. They weren’t supposed to come back from the dead and kick you in the ass.