It was because of the people who believed in God that moral questions had to be divided into two groups, that there had to be “hard questions” at all. Some of these people were drowning in superstition, and some of them were drowning in fear, but whatever they were drowning in they were managing to take a remarkable percentage of the rest of the country along with them. Things that ought to be perfectly simple, and private, and nobody’s business but your own, suddenly became complicated. You couldn’t come right out and tell the truth about them, because the God people twisted your words around and made you sound like Lizzie Borden. That was what had happened to her when she had given an interview to People about her mother. Patchen had been right about her mother. The old woman had been seventy, and the hip she had broken was never going to properly mend. What did it matter that she hadn’t been in a coma or brain dead or whatever you called it? Patchen didn’t think any rational person wanted to live when she knew she was going to be handicapped for the rest of her life, and she said so. Well, good Lord. You’d have thought she’d admitted to dumping nuclear waste in a game-preserve reservoir. She’d had pickets following her around for a month. It was just like Victoria Harte said. Most people were hopeless, locked into the hocus-pocus nightmares of their own imaginations. You had to walk right over them or you wouldn’t get anywhere at all.
Victoria Harte.
Patchen looked down at the collection of crystals and copper bracelets she had strewn across the coffee table and frowned. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and she couldn’t remember where the day had gone. It was always like this when she traveled. Getting to the airport and across the country and from the airport to the hotel seemed to eat up half her time, and then dealing with the hotel seemed to eat up the other half of it. Unlike Victoria Harte, Patchen didn’t stay at the Old Washington or travel with an entourage, although she did carry the home numbers of her astrologer and her channeler. She liked to stay in the kind of place real people stayed in, like the Sheraton or the Holiday Inn, in much the same way and for much the same reasons she preferred to wear jeans instead of designer dresses when she wasn’t at work. The problem was, the Sheraton and the Holiday Inn didn’t provide the kind of services the Old Washington did, and that she sometimes needed, as she needed them now. She needed them to ensure the privacy she would have to have if she expected to get Stephen into her bed on this trip, and she needed them to get in touch with Victoria Harte.
Victoria Harte. Victoria Harte. Victoria Harte.
Victoria Harte had been Patchen Rawls’s mentor, politically and theatrically. More than anyone else, Victoria ought to understand that marriage was an outdated institution, and shouldn’t be allowed to interfere with the natural course of natural passion. At the moment, Patchen Rawls was convinced that the natural course of natural passion was going to cause Stephen Whistler Fox to divorce his wife and marry Patchen Rawls instead.
Patchen got off the couch she’d been sitting on, went to the door of the smaller of the two bedrooms that opened off the living room of this suite, and knocked.
“Gerri?” she said. “Are you there?”
Gerri was her personal secretary, and Gerri was always there. There was the sound of bare feet on carpet, and the door opened.
“I’m answering mail,” Gerri said. “What do you want?”
Patchen bit her lip. She hated it when Gerri talked to her like—well, like just anybody. Sometimes she thought Gerri didn’t even respect her very much. She’d even tried to bring it up once, right out into the open, but the conversation had somehow ended up being about the Harmonic Conversion instead.
“It’s about Victoria Harte,” Patchen said. “I need to get in touch with her.”
“Do you?” Gerri’s eyebrows climbed up her forehead, all the way to her hairline. “Last we knew, Victoria Harte was not answering your calls. Her secretary called a little while ago to find out if you were going to the cocktail party,”
“Yes, I know, Gerri. But that’s just silly. She must have come to her senses by now.”
“Come to her senses about what? The fact that you’re trying to get her son-in-law away from her daughter?”
“Don’t be judgmental.”
“I’m not judging anything, for Christ’s sake. I’m stating a fact.”
“If that marriage wasn’t already dead, Stephen wouldn’t have been interested in me in the first place. I’m not trying to do anything, Gerri. Things just happened.”
“Right.”