Deadly Beloved(7)

The French doors to the kitchen swung back and Joey came in, his face looking only half shaved, his neck looking too red where the barber had cut his hair too close to the skin. The face and the neck didn’t go with the suit. Razors and haircuts were things Joey was required to buy for himself. He always bought the cheapest kinds available. The suit was something Molly had bought for him. It was a good summer wool, custom-made at Brooks Brothers, and it looked much too good for someone who worked in the customer service department of a bank. When Molly was being critical, she had to admit that Joey never looked as if he worked in the customer service department of a bank, or any other department of a bank, and not because he looked too good for it. Joey had been the town hood when Molly first met him, and in some ways he still was. No matter how many times he got his hair cut short, it still wanted to form a ducktail at the nape of his neck. No matter how many times he put on good suits and wing tip shoes, he still walked with the hip-jutting swagger he had learned in tight jeans and shitkicker boots. Molly sometimes thought of that, of the way they were together when they first met, and always surprised herself. She could even remember being happy, in an abstract way that had nothing to do with her emotions. The only emotion she could feel, looking back, was an anger so hot and wild it threatened to drown her. It took in everything: the motorcycles and the cars and the sex and the taste of warm Pabst Blue Ribbon stolen out of somebody’s mother’s pantry; the abortion in New York with its mingled scents of sweet anesthetic and sour gin; her wedding with its six bridesmaids in shell-pink gowns; this house; this furniture; these dishes; this silverware; this latest abortion; this life. Anger, Molly always thought, was a traitor and a trick. It could ruin your life faster than children could.

Joey sat down at the table and folded his hands in front of him, like a child waiting for class to begin in a Catholic school. Joey had never gone to Catholic school, although Molly had. Her father had given the biggest contributions to the Parents’ Education Drive every year, and Molly had been chosen to play Mary in the Christmas pageant two years in a row. Joey was four years older than Molly was, and his face was lined and pitted, ragged and slack. Some wild boys grow up to be wilder men. They harden and plane down. Their faces take on an individuality wrongly supposed to belong only to the American West. Joey was the other kind. He would have run to fat already if Molly had let him. Even with all the working out she forced him to do, Joey had a pronounced pot on his belly and jowls hanging off the curve of his jaw. He was white and pasty too, as if he never got any sun—as if he never spent his Saturdays on the terrace at the club, dressed in golf shorts and a sun visor, talking to all the other men about sports.

Molly pulled the paper toward her again and folded it one more time. It was now too tightly squashed together.

“Well,” she said.

“Well.” Joey cleared his throat. Then he rubbed his hands together. His hands were fat and white, just like his belly. Molly had a sudden vision of him as a gigantic jellyfish, slick and slimy, curled up on her bed like a piece of animated ooze. She looked away.

“Well,” she said again. “There’s a dinner tonight. At the club. A planning committee dinner.”

“A planning committee for what?”

“A planning committee for a benefit thing. It’s Sarah Lockwood’s committee. I told you about it.”

“Sarah Lockwood,” Joey said.

Molly got out of her chair and went to the sunroom’s wall of windows, to look out on the pool in the backyard. Sarah and Kevin Lockwood lived in the French Provincial with the curlicue roof. They were the people in Fox Run Hill whom Joey liked least. He disliked them, in fact, for all the reasons Molly wanted to know them. Before her marriage, Sarah Lockwood had been an Allensbar, a real live member of real live Philadelphia Main Line Very Old Money family. Sarah had come out at the Philadelphia Assemblies and had her picture in the paper with a crowd of other girls, all wearing white dresses and carrying red roses. Kevin Lockwood was the president of his own brokerage firm in Philadelphia, one so small and exclusive, it didn’t even advertise. There were rumors all over Fox Run Hill that at least one of his clients was a former United States president, and that another was a member of the English royal house.

“I don’t want to go to dinner with Sarah Lockwood,” Joey said. “She makes me uncomfortable. She talks down to me.”

Molly didn’t turn around. “It’s only for a couple of hours. And all the other husbands will be there.”

“All the other husbands are shits. I don’t know why it matters so much to you to hang around with shits.”