Conspiracy Theory(5)
“Maybe I’ll leak it to that man. Michael Harridan. The one with the Web
site.”
“Michael Harridan is taken about as seriously as Bugs Bunny.”
“You don’t take me seriously. And that’s a mistake, Tony. I promise it is.”
“We’re getting off the turnpike,” Tony said. “We’ll be home in less than twenty minutes.”
Charlotte turned her face away, her long neck straining against the stiff white collar of her linen shirt. She was too thin, the way all these women were. The muscles in her neck looked like ropes. He was not afraid of her. There was nothing she could do to him, and nothing she would really want to do, once she thought about it. She made him tired, so that all he could think of was sleep, endless sleep, black sleep, the kind that was supposed to come over you when you drowned in the waters of Lethe.
Still, if he’d been somebody else, somebody poorer, somebody less hedged in by security and position—he would have wrapped his hands around her neck and ripped her windpipe out.
3
There was a single short moment, at almost exactly six o’clock, when Anne Ross Wyler considered staying home for the evening. She had that priest coming over, for one thing. Lucinda had printed his name in block letters on a three-by-five card and tucked the card in her mirror, so that she could practice pronouncing it: Father Tibor Kasparian. It seemed ironic as hell to her that she had managed to give up almost everything about her former life, but this. She still could not pronounce “foreign” names with anything at all like grace. Tony would probably tell her she was insane, that there was nothing about life with the family that could have made her tone-deaf to Eastern European ca-dences—or maybe he wouldn’t have, because, in his own way, Tony was as odd and contrary a person as she was. Whatever it was, though, she couldn’t do it. Even Italian names threw her, and by now it was practically an Old Philadelphia tradition to be Italian. Every once in a while, she would veer to her mirror and try the name out, stretching the syllables, worried that she was getting it more wrong every time she tried to say it. She was only grateful that she had so many other things tucked into the mirror’s edges and hanging over its top and sides that she couldn’t see herself at all. There was one thing she did miss about the way she had been when she had still been part of All That. She missed the fanatical discipline of the body. God only knew, she didn’t do anything for herself when she was left to herself. She was fifty-five years old, and she looked it. “Stumpy,” one of the newspapers had called her once. One of the local television stations had described her as “the once elegant Mrs. Kendrick Wyler.” She ran her hands through her very thick grey hair and felt it stop abruptly in midair. This last time, she had cut it off herself with a pair of pinking shears one afternoon when she’d been busy and it had got in her way. Other women, millions of them, managed to live sane lives in the world without turning themselves into poster children for bag ladies, but with her it was like the “foreign” names. She couldn’t seem to manage it.
The other reason she had considered not going out was that it was cold, as cold as she could ever remember it being in November in Philadelphia. Down on the first floor, there was ice along the edges of the windowsills. If they ever got enough money together, they would have to replace those windows. Surely it made sense that, in weather like this, the girls would not be out on the street where anybody could see them. That was what she would have thought, her first year at Adelphos House. Before that, she had never even wondered what whores did when it got cold. They could have gone to Florida for the winter, and it would have made sense to her. She hadn’t ever wondered who the whores were, either, or where they came from, and if she had she had probably thought that they must be black. That was what you saw in the movies, when you went to that kind of movie. She couldn’t have said what you saw on television, because at that point in her life, she had never owned one, and never watched one except on trips to Europe, in those five-star hotels where every mechanical convenience was provided for Americans who were assumed to be mad for technology. God, she had been such an incredible, unbelievable snot. Worse, she had been a happily ignorant snot, and there was nothing more evil on this planet than happy ignorance.
The whores would be out tonight, in the cold. They would stand together in tight little huddles near parking meters, wearing fake-fur jackets that shed when they walked, and too much makeup, and fishnet stockings that left huge patches of the skin on their legs bare to the cold. The johns would be out tonight too, but they would be in cars.