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Skeleton Key(26)

By:Jane Haddam

The problem with this—situation—with Bennis was that he didn’t have a name for it. It wasn’t a marriage. They weren’t married, and Gregor wasn’t even sure that Bennis would marry him if he asked. They had other things together, things Gregor had never had with anyone else—they had gone off alone together, to Spain, for an entire month, just a little while ago, and the memories of it could still make Gregor turn bright red—but he was sure you couldn’t base a life on that kind of thing. It wore off eventually, or the woman got tired, or you did. Besides, he and Bennis had been together for years before they had been together like that. Bennis had bought her apartment, on the floor just below this one, just to be near to where he lived. They had to have something going with each other, something deeper and more complicated, maybe even something simply more mundane, than—

—sex.

The water was boiling. Gregor took the kettle off the stove. He dumped a heaping teaspoon of Folgers crystals into the bottom of his mug. Then, thinking better of it, he added another. He took the water off the stove and poured it over the instant coffee. He watched the water turn a darker brown than he should have allowed himself to make it.

Maybe this was the problem, the thing he hadn’t been able to get past. Maybe it was the sex that was bothering him. Because the more he thought about it, the more he realized that sex had been filling his life, taking it over, ever since they had gone to Spain. It wasn’t that they spent all their time actually having sex. If it had been that, it would have been over very quickly. Gregor wasn’t twenty anymore, and he had no intention of getting addicted to Viagra. It was that he seemed to spend all his time thinking about sex, or about things related to sex. Before Spain, when he had called up an image of Bennis in his mind, it had been Bennis in her working uniform: jeans, knee socks, turtleneck, cotton crew-neck sweater. Now, when he called up such an image, he saw her in the gray silk nightgown she had bought especially to be with him in Spain, or in one of his shirts, buttoned only halfway up, and asleep next to him in bed.

“Sex gets in the way of friendship,” he said aloud, trying it out He felt instantaneously foolish. That was the kind of thing boys said to girls in high school, or girls said to boys—the kind of thing that, before you knew any better, you thought was kinder than coming right out and telling someone you found her unattractive.

Gregor considered putting milk in his coffee and rejected it. He didn’t want to cut the strength of the caffeine. The caffeine was the point He picked the mug up in one hand and the plate of stuffed grape leaves in the other and went into the living room. He put the mug and the plate down on the coffee table and went over to the window.

Cavanaugh Street, these days, was not a marginal place. The tenements were gone. The brownstone row houses had been converted into single-family townhouses or, like this one, refurbished into three or four floor-through cooperative apartments. The cramped little rooms Gregor remembered from his childhood had been knocked together. His own apartment had a living room large enough to play table tennis in and a big fireplace with a grey marble surround and a mantel made of polished walnut. Across the street, one floor down, Lida Arkmanian’s townhouse had a living room that took up two-thirds of the entire second floor. The last third had been made into a dining room.

Things change, that was what he had to remember. Things change, and not all the changes are for the worse. Elizabeth had died, yes, but Cavanaugh Street had gotten rich. Bennis had given up her restlessness to settle with him. The local school district had given up on corporal punishment and rote learning to dedicate itself to critical thinking. Richard Nixon had resigned.

Gregor thought he might be losing his mind.

Instead of sitting down on the couch, he picked up his coffee and grape leaves and took them into the bedroom. He put them down on the table in the corner and sat at the chair there to boot up the computer. The computer had been a gift from Bennis, as had a year’s subscription to America Online. Gregor still hadn’t been able to get the hang of the Internet. It still seemed to him like a waste of time.

Gregor waited for the desktop icons to settle on the screen—there was cat wallpaper, engineered for him by Donna Moradanyan Donahue, who hadn’t been able to stand the gray ugliness of the default background that had been built into the machine—then clicked the mouse in all the right places and brought up the Free Cell board. He had never in his life heard of Free Cell before he got this computer, and now he seemed to be addicted to it.

The real problem with the—situation—with Bennis, Gregor decided, as he moved cards around the board, was that they’d both spent so long deciding to create it that they didn’t know what to do with it now that they had it. If they were honest with each other, they would have to say that they had both wanted to be lovers from the moment they first saw each other, in Bennis’s father’s Main Line house. Even though Gregor had not been over the death of his wife. Even though Bennis had been living with a man in Boston. They had wanted to be lovers and resisted their desire, and now all they really knew how to do was to go on resisting each other.