Blood in the Water(10)

He’d stopped there and waited for a bit. Then he’d said, “I really am gay, you know. And it isn’t Martha Heydreich who’s using me.”

Now she sat in the kitchen and tried to make sense of it. If Michael and Martha Heydreich had been out all night together, Arthur would know about it. He would at least know that his wife had been out. Would he know that his wife had been spending time with Michael? Eileen had no idea how these things worked. Stephen could have been having affairs with every other woman at the club, and she wouldn’t have been able to tell.

The kitchen was a cavern. It echoed. Copper pots hung from the ceiling. A stove big enough to cook for a restaurant took up most of one wall. How had she imagined that she would be able to work in here, cook in here, feel at home in here?

It had been so long since she had felt at home anywhere—ah, but that was a cliché. Michael would hate the sound of it.

She took a very deep breath. She sucked up all the air in the room. She could always do the most obvious thing. She could always walk herself right over there and ring the doorbell. She wondered what the house was like. She’d never been in it. Maybe there were pink carpets on the floors. Maybe there were pink wallpapers on the walls. Arthur Heydreich was somebody she saw around once in a while. He was so normal. He did something professional in Philadelphia.

She would not go over to that house. She would not ring the doorbell. She had no idea what she would say if she did. Michael was nineteen. He could do what he wanted to do. He could do everything except buy alcohol. Did that make even the least amount of sense?

She thought about calling her sister-in-law, but she didn’t. Stephen’s sisters thought it was all her fault. No other Platte had ever turned out like Michael. She must have done something to him. She thought about calling her own sister, and didn’t. Her sister was one of those people for whom bad luck is a myth, a rumor—the kind of thing that happened to other people, and was probably an excuse for their own fault. She thought about calling one of those advice programs she sometimes listened to on the radio, and then she felt like an idiot.

Michael was out there, somewhere. He was either dead or dying, lying in a ditch, on the side of the road, in an alley somewhere where he’d gone to buy drugs and ended up getting robbed and murdered instead. He was with a prostitute, who would make him ill. He was with Martha Heydreich, who was making him crazy. He had told her the truth when he told her he was gay. He had lied when he told her he was gay. She had lost him, utterly and completely, before he was ten years old.

And she didn’t know why.

5

Horace Wingard knew for a certainty that everybody who lived at Waldorf Pines knew that his name was a fake, just as they knew his accent was a fake. Fake was not an issue at Waldorf Pines. He knew it wouldn’t be as soon as he saw the place. That was why he had felt it was so important to get the job here when he first thought about it. It was all well and good to say that you should be yourself. What if yourself was not what you really were? Not everybody had the good luck to be born into exactly the right circumstances. Some people didn’t have the luck to be born into even approximately the right circumstances. Horace himself had bombed out completely in the luck department, being born, but he thought he’d won the sweepstakes on substance. Horace was exactly the person he wanted himself to be. He only needed to tweak the ornamentation a little bit to make it all perfect.

Or nearly perfect. There was nothing Horace Wingard could do about time, and that meant he was living in the twenty-first century instead of the nineteenth. He would have done much better in the Philadelphia of the 1890s, when people knew how they were supposed to live.

Horace looked across his desk and frowned a little at the computer. The computer always looked out of place. Then he got the big ledger book out of the desk’s center drawer and opened it at the computer’s side. He liked the ledger book better than anything else he had to work with managing Waldorf Pines.

“Miss Vaile?” he said.

Miss Vaile put her head through the door at the far end of the room. Horace had hired her the way men usually hired secretaries, for her looks—but not for the kind of looks most men would have gone in for. Horace did not care one way or the other about a large chest or a face like Marilyn Monroe’s. He had no idea if he was gay or straight and didn’t want to find out. The whole idea of sex had always seemed to him to be more than a little insulting. No, he wanted Miss Vaile because she was the picture of the sort of woman who would have been secretary at a golf club in a novel by Henry James, except that in a novel by Henry James she would have come to her job through a distress in her circumstances.