Deadly Beloved(10)

Kevin was still clinking glasses in the dish rack. Sarah got up and moved through the family room to the kitchen, past the miniature date palm trees in their clay planters, past the Braque etching in its plain blond wood frame, past the broken little statue of Aphrodite on a seashell they had bought that time they took their vacation in Greece. She might be in debt, Sarah thought, but at least she was in debt with good taste. She knew what to buy and how to make it work for her.

Kevin was standing directly in front of the sink, holding up a blue crystal sugar bowl as if he had never seen it before. Like her, he was tall and tan and blondish, overexercised and thin. Like her, he was very, very tense. The difference was that Kevin had always been tense. Sarah could remember the first time she saw him, standing in a navy blue blazer that didn’t quite fit, at the samovar end of a long buffet table set up on the lawn of her friend Margaret Delacord’s house. He had been brought home from Dartmouth by one of Margaret’s brothers and then dressed up for this occasion. She should have married one of the boys from her own circle. She should have married one of the boys whose bank account she knew better than his golf scores. That was what all the bread-and-gravy dinners and lightless winter nights had been about. Old name with no money married much money with new name. A Philadelphia Main Line tradition.

But she really couldn’t have married anybody else. It didn’t matter what Kevin’s background was, or what his bank account had been on the day she met him, or what his prospects for employment were now. From the moment she had first seen him, Sarah had felt him as a part of her. Blood and skin and bone, muscle and nerve: Going to bed with Kevin Lockwood was a form of narcissism, an implosion as well as an explosion. Sarah thought of it as reaching a state of perfection, an essence of Sarah, like one of Plato’s ideas. Even after all this time she was always on fire for him. She would come awake at four o’clock in the morning and peel back the covers so that she could look unrestrained at the curve of his arm, the knobbed column of his spine. Even now, with her head full of figures and an ache full of fear beginning to grow like a puffball at the back of her head, what she really wanted to do was to run her fingers over all the hair on his body, even the hair that was so carefully hidden between his legs.

Kevin saw her come in and put the blue crystal sugar bowl in the dish rack. He put the plaid terry-cloth dish towel down on the counter next to the sink. The muscles in his shoulders were still powerful, although he was slighter than he had been when Sarah first met him. His eyes were harder too, deep blue and cold.

“Well?” he said.

Sarah shrugged. “I’ve been over it and over it. It always comes down to the same thing.”

“You’re sure.” It was not a question.

“I don’t see how we could ever be sure,” Sarah said carefully. “Why don’t we just say ‘likely.’ Nothing else seems ‘likely’ at the moment. Nothing else seems possible.”

“We couldn’t borrow any more money.”

“Nobody would lend it to us.”

“We couldn’t hold out a few more months to see if I got another job.”

“We’ve held out for eighteen months as it is. If we don’t do something soon, I’m going to have to start missing payments. And you know what that will mean.”

“This will be quick enough so that we don’t have to miss payments?”

“We have about three weeks. We could do a lot in three weeks.”

Kevin nodded. “But we don’t just want to make payments,” he said. “That wouldn’t do us any good. We want to clear out that credit card debt.”

“I know.”

Sarah put her palms flat on the kitchen counter and pulled herself up until she was sitting on it. She had on a bright white golf skirt and a red short-sleeve jersey polo. She had on no underwear at all. The kitchen was dark and cool and shadowy.

“Jesus,” Kevin said.

Sarah kicked off her espadrilles. “We can start tonight at the dinner,” she told him. “I can talk to the women and you can talk to the men.”

“Some of them may have heard I got fired.” Kevin put his hand on Sarah’s knee.

“None of them will have heard that you got fired. They don’t use words like ‘fired’ in the circles you move in. They say things like ‘left to pursue other interests.’”

“It comes to the same thing.” Kevin inched his hand higher, to the flat side of her thigh, sinewy and hard.

“None of them will know it comes to the same thing,” Sarah told him. She was beginning to feel what she wanted to feel. She was dizzy as hell. “None of them will know anything. You can tell them anything you want to tell them. All you have to do is tell them what they want to hear.”