“I know this is a demand account,” Mrs. Havoric said sharply. “I just want to make sure you’re not taking this money out to buy an oil well, and then next week you come back here and try to sue us for not trying to stop you.”
“I won’t come back here next week and try to sue you. Word of honor. There is no oil well.”
“What if you walk out the door and get mugged?”
“I don’t think I’d have to worry about that if this was done discreetly,” Patsy said, “which, quite frankly, up to now it hasn’t been. Could I have my money in hundred-dollar bills?”
Mrs. Havoric tapped the top of her desk. She looked more than put out now. She looked angry. She was studying Patsy’s face with such concentration, Patsy thought she was trying to memorize it.
“All right,” she said finally. “Just a minute please. I’ll take care of it myself.”
Patsy pushed the Coach bag across the desk. “Put it in here,” she said. “That way, nobody has to see me with it.”
“Don’t you want to count it?”
“I’ll count it in a stall in the ladies’ room. If you have a ladies’ room.”
Mrs. Havoric squared her shoulders. “I can make a ladies’ room available to you,” she said. Then she walked away, strutting a little, like the high school English teacher nobody wanted to have for study hall monitor. Patsy watched her pull the teller away from her window and hold up a whole line of people waiting to do simple transactions.
This, Patsy thought, was what women’s lib had gotten them all. These days, the Mrs. Havorics of the world were bank managers instead of high school English teachers and it didn’t matter anyway. They still weren’t making much money and they still weren’t happy. That was what marriage did to you, no matter what anybody said about it. It split you and gutted you and stuffed you full of lemongrass. It made you all bitter.
Mrs. Havoric was coming back across the bank with Patsy’s Coach bag in her hands, and Patsy suddenly remembered.
She wasn’t married anymore.
She wasn’t married anymore.
She had given herself a summary divorce this morning, and now she was free.
6.
KARLA PARRISH ALMOST NEVER thought of herself as a successful woman. “Success,” in her mind, meant having a big apartment on a high floor in New York City or a BMW and a Porsche in the driveway of a house in Syosset or a lot of jewelry to wear to parties that had to be locked up in a safe afterward, for insurance reasons. Success, in other words, meant having a lot of things, and Karla had never had much in the way of things. Enough underwear to get through two weeks straight without doing laundry, as much in the way of other clothes as could be stuffed into a double strap pack without making her feel like she was lifting stones when she picked it up—Karla never seemed to need that much from day to day, and she honestly couldn’t think of what else she would buy for herself if she got the chance. She wore her long straight hair pulled back these days, instead of falling free to her shoulders, because she thought she had to make some concession to being forty-eight. She didn’t want to spend the time or the money to get it fixed up in beauty parlors. Her hips were beginning to spread a little now that she was racing through middle age. She was content to buy her jeans a couple of sizes larger and let it happen. Spending hundreds of dollars on a dress that would disguise the weight gain seemed so stupid, she had no idea why anyone ever did it. The one thing she did spend money on was her equipment—the cameras and the lenses and the tripods and the lights—but that was different. That was work. Karla Parrish understood absolutely why it was important to spend time and money on her work.
What she didn’t understand was the attitude of this man behind the registration desk at the George-V. She didn’t even understand what she was doing at the George-V. “Book us a hotel room in Paris,” she had told Evan when they were about to leave Nairobi—and then she had forgotten all about it, because she was tired and dirty and depressed, and the way things were going she wasn’t going to feel any better for weeks. She had just spent four weeks taking pictures in Rwanda, and her head hurt. Her film cases were full of images she didn’t want to see again. Every time she came to rest in a hotel room or a restaurant, she got phone calls from New York. She wanted to go someplace where she didn’t have to listen to anybody talking at her, but she didn’t know where that would be. Home, something in her head kept pounding at her, and that was when it had hit her. Karla Parrish was almost fifty years old and she didn’t have a home. She had a pied-à-terre in Manhattan with a lot of secondhand furniture in it. She had her camera equipment and the clothes in her pack and some books she’d picked up in the airport in London on her way out to Africa. She had this succession of hotel rooms that looked as if it was never going to end: Nairobi to Cairo to Lhasa to Athens to Tokyo to God-knows-where. Some of the hotels had electricity twenty-four hours a day. Some of them had electricity only some of the time. All of them had dust and bugs and heat in spite of their air-conditioning systems and their cheaper-than-cheap maid service.