The Headmaster's Wife(27)

“Has he been talking to you behind my back?”

“It’s hardly been behind your back. He’s a friend of mine. He had that case in December of the woman who was poisoning her husbands, you remember; she’d already gotten away with three of them, and he was afraid she was going to get away with another—”

“She didn’t.”

“No, she didn’t, Gregor, but she’d have been in jail a lot sooner if you’d helped, and you know it. And he asked for your help. I’ve never known you to turn down John when he asked. I think he was insulted.”

“Then I’ll have to apologize to him.”

“This is impossible,” Bennis said.

He heard her fussing with something behind him, but he didn’t turn around to look at her. He was still looking downon the construction trucks and the people on the street. They were people he knew, by and large, but for some reason they didn’t look familiar, any more than the street did. He wanted to think it was just the time of day. Back before the church had been destroyed, he and Bennis had gone to breakfast every day at seven, instead of eight, and maybe the people on that schedule had been different than the people on this one—but he really knew it was not. They looked wrong, though, all of them. They looked very wrong.

Behind him Bennis had come around the back of the couch and sat down. He could hear her feet going up on the coffee table, even though he knew she wasn’t wearing shoes. She never wore shoes in the house. In the summer she didn’t even wear socks.

“Listen,” she said, “I know you feel responsible for that mess out there. I know you do. But nobody else does. Tibor doesn’t. Lida doesn’t. Hannah and Sheila and Howard don’t. Nobody does, really. And it doesn’t make sense for you to think that. And you know it.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It is that simple, Gregor. He’d have done what he did even if you’d never have existed—”

“He wouldn’t have done what he did to this church.”

“He’d have done it to some other church. Or to police headquarters. She’d have done what she did, too. She was unbalanced as hell. You have to know that.”

“Tibor could have died.”

“He didn’t die. Nobody died. A lot of structural damage was done to the church, and now it’s being rebuilt, that’s all. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

“It was a landmark.”

“It was a landmark badly in need of updating. It was drafty. It needed a new heating system. It needed new flooring in the sacristy—”

“Well, for God’s sake, Bennis, we could have done all that without blowing the damned tiling up.”

“Yes, I know we could have. My point is that the church was not a child, and it was not a pet, it was a building. And assad as it is to see a building destroyed when it’s been a vital part of the neighborhood for decades—”

“More than a century.”

“More than a century. It’s still just a building, Gregor, and it’s being put back up. It’s not being replaced by condominiums. You’re not going to find a Wal-Mart staring at you from across the street.”

“I don’t think Wal-Mart builds in cities.”

“I don’t care where they build. You’re making a huge leap of the imagination to give yourself a reason to feel guilty here. You’re in some kind of clinical depression. You barely eat. You’re driving Lida and Hannah crazy, and the Melajians think it’s all my fault. We don’t even talk anymore.”

“We’re talking now.”

“No, we’re not,” Bennis said. “I’m lecturing you. There’s a difference. You need to go back to work. It’s not about making money or being a gigolo. It’s not about whether I want you around the apartment. It’s about your sanity.”

The knot of people at the construction site had grown larger. It bothered Gregor to think that he hadn’t noticed the new people come in. “The thing is,” he said, “none of it interests me anymore. A woman who was poisoning her husbands. Well, yes. Women do that. For the insurance money. Because their husbands cheat on them. You might make a case for self-interest in the theory of women as serial killers. Women serial killers rarely kill for sexual satisfaction, which men almost always do. But you know, Bennis, I’ve been doing this for thirty years now. Over and over again. What’s the point of doing it some more?”

“It interests you,” Bennis said, “or at least it does when you get into it. And you help to get people off the street who are a danger to the innocent people on it.”