Cheating at Solitaire(138)

“What?”

“Australia,” Stewart said. “You know. We’ve talked about Australia. You said you’d like to see it.”

“I would like to see it.”

“So,” Stewart said, “we should go together, and on the way, we should stop in London and get married.”

“Married,” Annabeth said.

“I know it’s a little quick,” Stewart said, “but we’re neither one of us teenagers, and we both have children who probably don’t want to see their parents jetting off all over the world with a paramour. Or, you know what I mean. My children are all in and around London—well, except for Andrew, who’s in the Amazon, but that’s a long story. We’ll get him out of there long enough to attend the wedding—and we can fly your boys in, and then we can take off and call Australia our honeymoon. Go see the fairy penguins. That kind of thing.”

“Married,” Annabeth said again.

Stewart had a sudden feeling that this was not going well. He didn’t think he could have been that far off in judging the emotional climate between them. Why wasn’t it going well? He was beginning to feel a little panicked.

“When I’m not filming,” he plowed on, “we could travel wherever you liked. We could go to Rome. We could travel across the United States and see the places you want to write about. We could go to China.”

Annabeth had stopped making tea. She had the hot water half poured into a yellow and white polka-dot teapot, and she was still standing next to it, holding the kettle in the air, staring at him. Stewart had begun to feel like Jack the Ripper.

“Or not,” he said, in a last desperate bid to get a response out of her. “If you don’t like traveling, we could stay home. In Scotland, if you wanted. Or in Los Angeles. Or London. Or even, ah, here.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Marcey Mandret said. “You’ve got to go down on your knees or have a ring or some flowers or do something romantic. Don’t you know anything about anything?”

Stewart turned, feeling his face go brick red in a way he hadn’t since he was a third-former caught with a copy of a girlie mag in his Latin workbook. He was only somewhat mollified by finding that Marcey was not in her usual strappy little dress, but wearing sweats that covered everything as thoroughly as a burka. She was not, however, making fun of him. She was deadly serious.

“If you’re going to get her to marry you,” she said, “you’ve got to do something romantic. You’ve got to treat her like she’s worth doing something romantic for.”

This seemed to do something to Annabeth, who until then had been frozen in place. She looked at the kettle she was holding and then at the teapot. She poured more water into the teapot until it was full. She put the kettle back on the stove. She bit her lip. Stewart had the terrible premonition that she was about to give him one of those lectures about how they would always be friends.

Instead, she said, “It’s all right, I think. I don’t need anything romantic, at least not right now. I’ll marry you.”

“Don’t do it,” Marcey Mandret said. “Not till he at least comes across with flowers. If you don’t insist, he’ll just go on forgetting to do anything romantic for the next fifty years.”

“We don’t have the next fifty years,” Stewart Gordon said.

“Make him get you flowers,” Marcey said again. “Do it.”

Annabeth put the top back onto the teapot and brought the teapot over to the kitchen table. She put it down and then sat down in front of it. The cat was there, waiting, the way it always was. Stewart didn’t understand what it was about cats.

“We can take the cat,” he said. “We can even take him to Australia if you want to. I don’t mean to separate you from the cat.”

“Okay,” Marcey Mandret said. “You can go back to saying yes. He’s lost it.”

2

There were times when Carl Frank honestly thought that the majority of human beings should be prevented by law from viewing any kind of popular entertainment. Viewing it, or reading it—in Carl Frank’s world, books were not thoughtful histories of America’s role in the post–World War II reconstruction of Europe or insightful analyses of the iconographic elements in Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin. Books were like movies, and like television, and all three were engaged in an orgy of conspiracy theories and simple hyperbole that left nothing of reality untouched. Look at it, Carl thought, climbing carefully along the boardwalk as it started to get rocky and badly cared for. Look at the people, the otherwise sensible people, who believed that Kennedy was assassinated by a cabal led by Lyndon Johnson or that the Twin Towers came down on September 11 because George W. Bush had the CIA blow them up. Reality wasn’t good enough for them anymore. The messy, stupid pointlessness of it didn’t ring true. Maybe that part predated popular entertainment. It seemed to him that people had always preferred conspiracy theories to reality. That was why religions were so popular. No, it isn’t a matter of chance and circumstance that you’re here on this earth, or that your five-year-old child died of leukemia, or that you lost your job when the plant moved manufacturing operations to Taiwan. No, it isn’t chance and circumstance at all, it’s a plan, a vast cosmic plan, and you’re a very important part of it.