“You wouldn’t have to worry if she didn’t spend half her time talking to the papers.”
“Do you ever wonder what you’d be like if you hadn’t ended up being a famous person named Jimmy Card?” Liz asked him. “Do you ever wonder what kind of jerk you would be if you’d tried all the things you tried but they hadn’t worked out and you were still playing bars in Long Island City? You don’t give any consideration to context.”
“I give my consideration to you,” Jimmy said.
He stretched out his hand and ran the tips of his fingers across her cheek, very slowly, the way he sometimes did when they first met at the apartment for an afternoon of making love. Liz knew that nothing like that was going to happen right here, right now. Her rule about sex in any place the boys were was absolutely unbreakable. It was just that she wished they really were married, as married as she had once been to Jay, so that she could stretch out on the bed with Jimmy beside her and not have to care at all what Mark thought might be going on on the other side of the door. It wasn’t that she was horny, as Mark liked to put it. It wasn’t as if she wanted sex the way she sometimes did when she was working in the city and knew she would be meeting Jimmy later, for lunch, or at the end of the day. She was not craving orgasm, but the comfort of a catharsis, something to prove that she was not Chris, she was not dead in somebody else’s backyard, she was not dead at all, and she was not likely to be indicted for a murder she didn’t commit. She wanted to twist around and wrestle Jimmy down to the bed and go at him the way she’d never dared to do when she had wanted sex.
“Are you all right?” Jimmy asked her.
“I’m fine,” she said, but she wanted to say something else, and it scared her. So she got up and went to the room-service table and made herself another cup of tea.
2
Emma was working on the checkbook when Peggy Smith came in, and for a moment she was even more disoriented than she had been. Was it after three o’clock already, that Peggy should be here? Had it really been raining all day? Peggy was as wet as Emma had ever seen anybody. Droplets as thick as the ones on chandeliers were falling from her hair.
Peggy seemed a little dazed. There was a slight swelling in her left eye socket that was going to turn into a shiner. At the moment, it only looked raw and painful. Peggy did not seem to notice it. Emma moved the checkbook around on the counter and bit the end of her pen. She didn’t like having Peggy in the store at the best of times—there was always the danger that Stu might show up—and she really hated it when Peggy was banged up.
Peggy stopped at the counter and put her handbag down. Her handbag was as wet as the rest of her.
“I didn’t realize it was raining so hard,” she said. “If I’d realized, I’d have worn my raincoat. Or brought my umbrella.”
“Right,” Emma said. She shut the checkbook, which was one of those big folderlike things for business checks. She had a regular-sized checkbook for her and George’s personal account upstairs in the apartment. “So,” she said, “it’s later than I realized. You’re already out of school.”
“What? Oh, I didn’t go in to school today. I wasn’t feeling well. But then, I thought, you know, staying cooped up in the house. It didn’t make me feel any better. So I thought I’d go for a walk.”
“In the rain?”
“It’s like I said. I didn’t realize it was raining so hard. I don’t think it was, when I first started out. At least it wasn’t enough so that I noticed it.”
Emma did not say that it had been raining in sheets since early this morning. She took a clean rag from the shelf under the counter and began to polish fitfully. “So,” she said. “How’s Stu this morning? I haven’t seen him around.”
Peggy gave her a sharp look. “Stu’s fine. He was sleeping when I left the house. I didn’t see any reason to wake him up.”
“Did you call in to the school to tell them you’d be absent?”
“Early this morning. God, Emma, what do you take me for?”
“You look sick,” Emma defended herself. “You look absentminded. People get that way when they’re sick.”
“I even turned the ringer off on the phone before I left,” Peggy said. “I’m really not a complete fool, Emma. I know Stu gets upset when his routine is interrupted. Did you and Belinda really go out to Betsy Toliver’s house yesterday afternoon?”
Stu got upset as a matter of principle, Emma thought. That was why you couldn’t trust him. She put the clean rag back on the shelf. The counter did not need to be polished. “We drove her son back there from the library,” she said carefully. “Where did you hear about that?”