Baptism in Blood(126)

“I think you’d better get out of here,” Ginny said.

“Ginny, please, all right? Please don’t do this to me. I’m trying as hard as I can.”

“You always try as hard as you can,” Ginny said, and suddenly Bobby could see it, deep in her eyes, everything she thought of him, and it was not good. Loser, whiner, weakling, mouse. Loser, loser, loser. Loser most of all. You never got away from the place you started at. You were always the person you were born to be.

“I think you’d better get out of here,” Ginny said again.

This time Bobby left, half running, not looking in through the open conference room door. He should have called for Jackson. He should have told someone that he was leaving. But he just ran and ran, ran and ran, until he was out in the air and couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there. There was a cool breeze in the tops of the trees and a chill on the ground. Or maybe it was hot. He couldn’t de­cide. He couldn’t tell. He didn’t know what he was going to do.

Ginny had always been his anchor, and now his anchor was setting him loose.





Six


1


IT WAS TWO DAYS later before Gregor was able to get out of Bellerton. The paperwork and odds and ends took much longer than he had expected them to. The waiting took forever. There wasn’t much to do except buy books at Maggie Kelleher’s bookshop and sit on David’s deck, read­ing them, while David tapped away on his computer in the study, working on his definitive history of American athe­ism—or whatever it was. When he was very, very restless, Gregor went into town and shopped for presents for people at home. Donna Moradanyan got a four-foot-tall ceramic statue of a guardian angel from Rose MacNeill’s shop. Her little son Tommy got a cap gun and caps, which were ille­gal in Pennsylvania but very legal here, where Gregor had seen dozens of little boys smashing cap strips with their shoe heels in the street. Walking around Bellerton wasn’t very comfortable. Now that the reporters were mostly gone, Gregor was the most visible stranger in town. David Sand­ler didn’t count, because he wasn’t a stranger here any­more. Gregor wasn’t sure he liked having people watch him the way they did here. It was so intense, he sometimes wondered if he were imagining it. Curtains seemed to flick in windows as he passed. Eyes seemed to move as he walked in front of them, doing nothing more important than buying an apple from the bin in front of Charlie Hare’s store. He wanted to buy a present for Bennis, but he wasn’t sure what. He wanted to call Bennis, too, but that seemed like the wrong idea. She hadn’t called him. In the end, he bought Tibor a T-shirt with University of North Carolina symbols on the front and back. He bought Lida Arkmanian a beautiful polished conch shell mounted on a frame. It was too hard to buy things for Bennis, he decided. She was too rich. She had too much already. She had ec­centric tastes. Besides, when he thought about Bennis he got restless, and the restlessness was almost unbearable. He didn’t know what he was going to do if he had to stay in North Carolina much longer.

When the day came, he laid his suitcase out on the bed in David’s guest room and did his best to pack it “right,” although he knew that neither Bennis (who would notice) nor Lida Arkmanian (if she were home) would think he had made anything else but a mess of it. He packed shirts and shoes on top of each other, neatly folded. He packed socks rolled into balls in the corners. He packed ties that he tried not to look at, because they were almost always a mess. He had no idea why he did what he did to ties, but they always ended up ruined. Maybe, this was some trauma left over from his childhood—some unexamined grief work, as the therapists liked to say—some resistance to leaving the im­migrant ghetto of Cavanaugh Street as it had been to be­come part of the great American middle class. Examined or not, though, he was just going to have to get over it. The Cavanaugh Street that existed now was nothing like the Cavanaugh Street that had existed then. He was going back to town houses, not tenements, and women who bought their clothes at Lord & Taylor.

The morning he was due to leave was as bright and warm as summer. Sun streamed in through the tall win­dows and skylights of David’s house, brighter than klieg lights. Gregor folded cotton sweaters and thought about David’s sleeping loft, which was the only room in the house that could be completely closed off from the sun. David’s guests, obviously, were expected to get up early. David sat in a corner of the room on a chair he had brought out from the kitchen. He had his legs stretched out and a cup of coffee in his hands. Gregor and David were the same age, but Gregor knew that David looked much younger. He was thinner, for one thing. He’d had less sadness and much, much less worry. Gregor didn’t know if he would have wanted that kind of life for himself or not. In one way, it was good. There was nothing noble about suffering, no matter how apocalyptic, or how trivial. In another way it wasn’t, because it left you cut off from reality. Gregor Demarkian had always liked reality.