Cheating at Solitaire(24)

Gregor stopped, and looked around, and realized that he was a good five blocks away from home, and not on a straight line, either. If he had been investigating his own behavior, he would have surmised that he was deliberately attempting to hide his activities from the people he lived with. Maybe that was true. He couldn’t stop himself from feeling relieved that no one from Cavanaugh Street would see him hailing this cab, or hear where he asked it to go. There was something else he missed, more than a little, about his life in Washington. There was no privacy on Cavanaugh Street. There never had been. There never would be. It went against the grain of the kind of place it was.

The first cab that deigned to notice him pulled up to the curb in front of him with a squeal of tires: not a good sign. Gregor swallowed the urge to tell the cabbie he’d changed his mind and got into the backseat, folding himself up like an oversized Murphy bed. Cabs always made him feel the full extent of his height. He slammed the door after him and double-checked to make sure he hadn’t forgotten his wallet, or had it lifted while he’d been walking and paying no attention to anything around him. Then he leaned forward and told the driver, “Christ the Redeemer Armenian Cemetery.”

The driver made no comment. There was no reason for him to, even though the cemetery was on the very outskirts of the city and the chances of picking up a fare to return were very small. Gregor could think of no reason at all why Donna Moradanyan or Father Tibor—or even Bennis—shouldn’t know that he was going out to the cemetery where his late wife was buried. He went there three times a year as a kind of ritual, to bring flowers and make sure the grave was being taken care of. Bennis didn’t think he’d hatched from an egg an hour and a half ago, which was a good thing, because she certainly hadn’t. Donna and Father Tibor would probably think it was very sweet that he still cared to go and visit this particular grave. When he’d first come out to Philadelphia, he’d visited it all the time, often as much as twice a week. He’d come out and stood at the foot of the plot and talked in his head to her, playing and replaying all the things that had hurt him so much in that last awful year, eventually asking her about the next few decisions he’d had to make, to find new work for himself, to settle down on Cavanaugh Street. At the time, he’d thought he’d had her approval—good, wonderful, go back to your roots, it will make you whole again. Now he wondered if he’d imagined all that. Would Elizabeth really have approved of his coming back home to Cavanaugh Street? Would she have wanted to come herself? She’d been almost as desperate to get out of the place as he had been.

The city was doing odd and twisty things outside the windows of the cab. Gregor had seen a fair percentage of it in the last few years, but in a way it had never been a city he really lived in. Even when he was going to the University of Pennsylvania, the university had been nothing more than a destination and a point of departure. He went there in the mornings, spent his time in classrooms and libraries, and came back to Cavanaugh Street as soon as it started to get dark. There was a fad these days for making movies about the wonders and warmth of insular little communities. There was that silly thing Donna and Bennis had made him see, about a big fat Greek wedding, and a hundred others about small towns and the emotional superiority of ordinary ways of life. Family Man. That kind of thing. The truth of it was, insular little communities were just that, insular. That was true if they were poor and struggling, as Cavanaugh Street had been, or rich and self-congratulatory, as Cavanaugh Street was now.

“It makes you feel as if you’re suffocating,” he said out loud.

The cabbie looked up into the rearview mirror and said, “Pardon me? Is there something you need?”

“No,” Gregor said. “Sorry. I was just thinking to myself.”

Actually, he’d been talking to himself, but he wasn’t going to admit that, and the cabbie wasn’t going to make an issue of it. They were nearly where he wanted to go anyway. He had no idea how long they’d been driving around, which meant he had no idea how long it would take him to get home when he finally wanted to go. Did he want to move away from Cavanaugh Street, was that it? Would Bennis want to move with him if he wanted to go? Bennis was Bennis. She came from a wider world. Cavanaugh Street was almost a hobby for her. She flitted in and out of it like a hummingbird flitted among the flowers.

“That was a god-awful image,” Gregor said, out loud again, but this time the cabbie didn’t appear to notice. They were almost at their destination. Gregor could see the great arched cast-iron gateway just ahead, the cross crowning the center of it, the letters fashioned to be something like Gothic without actually being that.