Act of Darkness(20)
She didn’t want to tell Gregor about the drinking. She didn’t want to tell Gregor about the marijuana. She didn’t want to tell Gregor about the men.
Most of all, she didn’t want to tell Gregor that she had once spent four months having an affair with Stephen Whistler Fox.
TWO
[1]
IN A WAY, GREGOR Demarkian’s first sight of Great Expectations was a shock. It wasn’t that the house was bizarre. He had expected that. Great Expectations was infamous for being one of the most flagrant examples of modernist architectural abuse ever constructed, and Victoria Harte was even more infamous for the way she had rammed its plans through the stiff-lipped, tradition-bound snobbery of Oyster Bay’s notorious zoning board. People said she must have blackmailed half the North Shore just to get permission to break ground. In an enclave of nineteenth century buildings and buildings made to look nineteenth century, Great Expectations looked not so much out of place as impossible. Ostentatiously impossible. Most of the big properties on the North Shore were landscaped for concealment, but Great Expectations was not. If anything, more trees had been cleared than necessary, so that the house seemed to be framed in grass and posed for exhibition. Its more striking particulars were visible from as far away as the highway: rooflines that soared to unpredictable heights at unpredictable angles in unpredictable places; windows that had been cut into lopsided trapezoids and asymmetrical triangles; extensions and porticos that reminded Gregor vaguely of the last New York World’s Fair. It was as if a UFO had landed on the lawn of Buckingham Palace during the reign of Queen Victoria.
Actually, Gregor thought, backtracking, it was more as if the men from Mars had come to give aid and succor to the American Revolution. He’d been so involved in private speculations on the character of Stephen Whistler Fox, and the political character of the coming weekend, he’d almost forgotten which weekend it was. He’d certainly failed to register the determinedly patriotic decoration of the landscape around him, the American flags hanging from almost every house and store, the papier-mâché Minutemen statues on the lawns of empty-for-summer-vacation schools, the red-white-and-blue banners strung across the main streets of one small town after the other. He had been peripherally bothered by the fact that their driver had gotten off and on the highway to no apparent purpose, taking them down two-lane blacktops and through half a dozen tiny hamlets. Wouldn’t staying on the interstate have been quicker? Now he realized it would have been anything but quicker. There was a yacht parade in Long Island Sound this weekend, and four days of fireworks displays that had been advertised as “more spectacular than the bicentennial.” The island was filling up with tourists, and the interstate was probably filling up with cars. Gregor wondered if their driver was using a CB to keep them out of trouble. The thought of a CB in a Rolls limousine made him want to laugh.
By now, they were off the interstate for good, on the flat winding road that led to Great Expectations’ front gate. The gate, in fact, was right in front of them, not quite blocking off the world at the end of 300 feet of lawn and asphalt. Even at this distance, Gregor could see that there were polished metal hearts dotted across the cedar shingle roof shakes. There were polished metal hearts linked together to make that gate. Just beyond the gate, Gregor was sure he saw even more polished metal hearts, studded into the drive.
He turned to Bennis, who seemed to have put her manuscript away for good and taken up smoking as an avocation, and said, “You won’t believe this, but I feel like an absolute ass.”
Bennis tapped ashes into the tray beside her and said, “What for?”
“For the way I’ve been thinking about these people,” Gregor said, gesturing at the gate in front of them, coming closer by the minute, but not at any great speed. The road was narrow and pocked, and the driver was more interested in protecting the Rolls than in getting them anyplace in a hurry. “I’ve been so—fixated—by Senator Fox and his problems, I’ve been thinking of this house as his.”
“You’ve been thinking of Victoria Harte’s house as his?”
“I know whose house it is, Bennis. I always did. I just meant—”
“I know what you meant.” Bennis’s cigarette was out. She lit another one. “It’s just funny, that’s all. Under the circumstances.”
“Under what circumstances?”
“Under the circumstances that the house belongs to Victoria Harte in particular,” Bennis said.
They had covered the three, or however many, miles to the gate, and stopped. Their driver had gotten out and gone to speak into a small metal box in the gate’s left wall. He was doing a lot of talking, as if someone on the other end was making up for the inadequate security wall by indulging in verbal annoyance.