The phone clanked down on something hard, the baby began to cry, and Gregor sat down on his bed and closed his eyes.
Curare, Bennis, and Carl Bettinger.
It was a triumvirate out of Fellini by way of Hieronymus Bosch.
SIX
[1]
THERE WERE TIMES WHEN Janet Harte Fox thought she was compulsive. She knew there were times when she took too much responsibility for too many things that were none of her business. Now she was standing at the head of the table in her mother’s dining room, counting forks and spoons, and wondering why she was doing it. Maybe it was a holdover from her political life. She had given so many dinner parties for the sake of Stephen’s career, so many cocktail parties for the sake of Stephen’s career, so many afternoon tea parties for the sake of Stephen’s career, she had become convinced that she was responsible for silverware. It didn’t matter that her mother had maids, or that her mother had insisted that this party was going to be all her own doing, the whole weekend. It didn’t matter that Janet didn’t know what was being served for lunch, meaning that she had no idea what silverware ought to be here. It didn’t even matter that she was tired enough to drop.
It did matter that Stephen was here, standing at the other end of the table, watching her.
Janet straightened a dessert fork at the head place, sucked in her breath, and mentally counted to ten. It had been so long since Stephen paid attention to her, she’d forgotten how uncomfortable it made her. She felt as if she were being stared at by a doll, and she had as much to say to him as she would have had to say to her Barbie—meaning nothing. Janet had never been a doll person.
She straightened a coffee cup on a saucer, which didn’t need it. Stephen was still staring at her, and she was thinking there was poetic justice in that, in what he had become. He had spent so much of his life being unable to make himself believe in the reality of other people. Now he had ceased being a person himself.
“I wish you wouldn’t stand there and watch,” she told him. “It makes me nervous.”
“I was just wondering what you were doing.”
“I’m checking the settings.”
“Doesn’t your mother have maids to do that?”
“We have maids to do that at home, Stephen, and I check them there, too. You can never really count on maids knowing what they’re supposed to do.”
“Oh.”
Janet moved around the side of the table and started to fuss with the first place on the right, where the lady of honor would have sat if this had been a normal household.
She looked up at Stephen. “You’re still staring at me,” she said. “Why are you still staring at me?”
“I want to talk to you. I was waiting until you weren’t busy.”
“What did you want to talk to me about?”
Stephen took out the chair closest to him and sat down in it. He looked sweaty and ill and feverish and excited all at the same time. It made Janet distinctly nervous. He wasn’t like himself. He wasn’t like anyone she could ever remember knowing, and what he was like was—”
She straightened another knife, straightened another saucer, took a napkin out from under a fork and folded it again.
“Stephen,” she said.
Stephen dragged himself out of whatever well he had sunk himself in. “I’ve been thinking,” he told her. “About Kevin.”
“What about Kevin?”
“You didn’t like him,” Stephen said. “You never did.”
“That’s true.” It was also an understatement. Janet bit her lip. “I thought he was an opportunist. I thought he had the morals of an alley cat. I think those same things about Dan Chester. I think those same things about you.”
“I know. I didn’t mean—”
“What did you mean?”
Stephen shrugged and looked away. “That’s the trouble with you,” he said. “You’re very hard to talk to. Every time I start I feel like I’m being tripped. Trapped. I don’t know what I’m trying to say. You make me stupid. And all I was trying to do was—”
“What?”
“Make you feel better.”
The cups in their saucers. There was silverware fanned out on each side of every plate. There was a centerpiece of yellow roses in the middle of the table, their stems twined around the smoked glass tendrils of an abstracted ivy plant. Janet tried to see them clearly, but her dizziness wouldn’t let her. Everything was blurred.
“I can’t believe you said that,” she said. “I can’t believe you said it. It’s impossible.”
“Why? It’s true. You always said Kevin put a lot of pressure on you and now that he’s dead—”