PART ONE
One
1
For Gregor Demarkian, the most frightening thing was not that he couldn’t sleep when Bennis was not at home, but’ that it mattered so much to him that Bennis shouldn’t know he couldn’t sleep when she was not at home. Like everything else about his relationship with Bennis Hannaford, this was a thought so convoluted that he almost couldn’t express it in words. He got it tangled up. He started talking nonsense, even in his own mind. Then he would get out of bed and go down the short hall to his living room. He would make himself coffee strong enough so that he wouldn’t even have to think about trying to sleep for hours. He would stand in front of the broad window in his living room and look down on Cavanaugh Street. This morning, like all mornings, was a dark and silent one. There might be crises in other parts of Philadelphia, crimes and accidents, parties that raged so loudly they broke windows in houses across the street, but in this place there was only sleep, punctuated by streetlamps.
He had a digital clock on the table next to his bed, one of the kind with numbers that glowed red. When he woke up, it said 2:37:09. He turned over onto his back and stared up into the dark. When he had first bought this apartment—when he was still newly retired from the FBI, and newly a widower—there had been times when he had thought he could hear his dead wife’s voice in the hallway, or her movements in the kitchen. That was true even though she had never been in these rooms. She had never even been on Cavanaugh Street when these rooms were in existence. Her memory of this neighborhood had been like his, then: a marginal ethnic enclave, marked by decaying buildings and elderly people who just didn’t have the resources to move. He still thought of the street that way sometimes, the way it had been on the day he and Elizabeth had come to Philadelphia to bury his mother. Sometimes he thought of it even further back, when he was growing up, when it was full of tenements and ambition. This was something he had never been able to work out. How much of a person’s childhood stayed with him forever? How much could he just walk away from, as if it had never been? Sometimes, sitting with Bennis in a restaurant or listening to her complain about work or parking tickets, it seemed to Gregor that the gulf between them was unbridgeable. Bennis, after all, had been born in a mansion on the Philadelphia Main Line.
When the clock said 2:45:00, Gregor sat up and got one of his robes. When Bennis was here, she always took one. It felt wrong, somehow, to actually be able to lay hands on his favorite and use it, for himself. He went down the hall and through the living room into the kitchen. He opened his refrigerator and took out a big plate of stuffed grape leaves. Lida Arkmanian had brought them over to him, as she did even when Bennis was here. Bennis couldn’t cook. Gregor and Lida had gone to school together right here on Cavanaugh Street, in the days when children got new shoes only for Easter and getting them was an event.
“Stuffed grape leaves,” Lida had told him, when they first began having coffee together, that Christmas after Gregor had moved back to Philadelphia. “Not stuffed vine leaves. For goodness sake, Krekor, you sound like a yuppie.”
Stuffed grape leaves didn’t have to be heated up. Coffee did, but that meant only putting the kettle on the stove and getting out the Folgers crystals. Gregor took a large white mug and a small white plate out of the cabinet and put diem on the kitchen table. He took stuffed grape leaves out of the bowl and put them on the plate. He made a mountain of grape leaves, high enough to be unsteady. He wished somebody was awake, somewhere on the street, or that Bennis was staying in an ordinary hotel where he could call her at any hour of the night Instead, Bennis was staying in some rich woman’s spare bedroom, and even Father Tibor Kasparian would be passed out on his couch with a book on his chest.
Was it even possible, to find someone to love when you were nearly sixty? And what was it supposed to mean? With Elizabeth, he had had all the usual things. They had started out together young. They had built a life, and would have built a family, if they had ever been able to have children. That kind of marriage was made of little things—a tiny apartment made the scene of many small sacrifices, endured to save the money for the down payment on a house; a period of trial and error over cookbooks; the choice of lights and decorations for a Christmas tree. Gregor understood that kind of marriage. He understood what it was for and why he had gone into it. He even understood, finally, that it had not all been ruined because Elizabeth had died badly. It was terrible what cancer did to people, and not just to the people who had it.