Glass Houses(44)

“But I wasn’t,” Bennis said. “I suppose I must have been on some unconscious level because I left so many things here, but I wasn’t intending to—when I went.”

“I see,” Gregor said.

“I just couldn’t stay away,” Bennis said. “And if that’s not a good enough explanation for you, I don’t know what would be because I don’t have an explanation. I left, and I came back because I had to come back; and now I’m here to stay, one way or another. In your apartment or mine. Or both. Except that if it’s going to be your apartment, then I need this relationship to change just a little. I really need it.”

“So you did go because there was something wrong,” Gregor said, “something wrong between us.”

“No,” Bennis said. “There was nothing wrong between us. That was the problem.”

Gregor took a deep breath. He was still standing. He didn’t think he could make his knees bend to sit down. She was the one who should be hyperventilating. Why was he the one who was actually doing it?

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You not only took off and didn’t make contact for nearly a year, but you did it because there was nothing wrong with this relationship. Everything was fine. Everything was great. Everything was coming up roses. And that made you feel that you had to spend months reading Dante in Florence.”

“You heard a lot of that conversation,” Bennis said.

“I should have had you wired. Maybe I would have heard enough of it so that you’d start making sense.”

“I really can’t explain it to you, Gregor. It would sound stupid. It even sounds stupid when I try to explain it to myself.”

“You can’t do this to people,” Gregor said. “You can’t walk out on a relationship you’ve had for years—”

“But I didn’t walk out,” Bennis said quickly. “I was careful not to do that. I said I’d be back.”

“You can’t just walk out on a relationship you’ve had for years, and then come back and say you did it because everything was okay and now you’re back. There are people involved in this, Bennis, and not just me. People have obligations to each other. Friendships mean obligations. Relationships mean obligations. There are rules to this game. You have to know that.”

“I do know that,” Bennis said. “It’s just that I’m me. And things get complicated with me. That really is all. I just needed, I don’t know how to explain it, I needed to get this feeling to go away—”

“What feeling?”

“This feeling that the world was going to end any minute,” Bennis said. “There was nothing wrong, so I was always waiting for something to go wrong because something always does. It always has. We’d have a day together and things would be perfect, we’d be easy and at home with each other, you wouldn’t annoy me even a little bit, I’d be happy. And all the time the back of my mind would be on full alert, watching for whatever it was that was going to happen to ruin everything. And it never happened. And I couldn’t stand the suspense anymore. So I went away.”

“And that feeling’s gone? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Oh, no,” Bennis said. “It’s not gone at all. Except now, you know, there’s this part, so maybe something will be wrong because I made it wrong by going away. No, the thing is, I finally figured it out. I know what we have to do—to make it go away.”

Somewhere in the house there was a noise. Somebody had come in the front door, into the vestibule. Either Grace was home or somebody had a key. There were footsteps on the stairs, running. They were too heavy to belong to Grace.

“Bennis,” Gregor said, “if you try to tell me that we have to burn chicken entrails in an alley, or go to a counselor, I will personally take your head off.”

“Oh, no. It’s nothing like that,” Bennis said. “We have to get married.”

“What?” Gregor said.

There was a long moment when the world seemed to be silent, but it wasn’t really. There were those footsteps, and they had stopped on the landing right outside Gregor’s door. He was still searching for words—hell, he was still searching for a way around the shock—when the pounding on his door started and Russ Donahue was shouting. “Gregor. Gregor. Open up. Rob Benedetti called, and it’s an emergency.”





SEVEN


1


It was ten o’clock, and Elizabeth Woodville thought she would never get through the one more hour she would have to in order to feel she had the right to allow herself to go to bed. Margaret was somewhere in the house, muttering to herself and humming to herself in turn. Elizabeth could make out the song but not the muttering, but she understood the muttering better. Margaret would have her boxes out, all those keepsakes and odds and ends she kept of a childhood and adolescence Elizabeth had never been able to see as anything more than regrettable. She’d lay out the engraved invitations from the holiday subscription dances, the pressed flowers she’d kept from the cor-sages she’d been given for balls and college proms, the little favors she’d picked up at dinners during her season—and then what? That was what Elizabeth wanted to know. What good did it do to look over and over these things? Why would anybody in her right mind keep them? It was as if Margaret’s life had stopped dead on her wedding day, never to be started up again. Why she wanted to hum “Istanbul” while she was thinking about that, Elizabeth would never know.