The Headmaster's Wife(31)

“Linda,” Gregor said, “what are you talking about?”

“Eat your breakfast,” Linda said, turning her back on them and marching away again.

Gregor pushed the plate away from him. He couldn’t imagine eating all that food. It looked like one of those precautionary photographs in a nutrition textbook: eat a meal like this, dripping with fat, and you’ll die of coronary disease before you’re thirty.

“Wonderful,” he said, “now she’s mad at me, and I don’t even know why.”

“She’s mad at you because Bennis is mad at you, Krekor;you don’t need to think about it. But you are not yourself. And you should think about that.”

“Am I really not myself just because I don’t feel like working? Is there something about me that ceases to be a real human being if I don’t want to investigate another murder? Other people retire. They go fishing or they join a country club and play golf. They read books. Why is that supposed to be so completely off-limits for me?”

“You have not joined a country club to play golf, Krekor; and more to the point, you’re not happy. Tell me about proposing marriage to Bennis.”

Gregor took a long sip of coffee. It was too hot. It made his throat scream. “I told you. I didn’t do it straight off like that. I didn’t ask the question. I just … brought it up.”

“Brought what up?”

“The fact that we probably ought to be married.”

“And you said it like that? That you ‘probably ought to be’?”

Gregor thought back about it, but he couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said. He did remember the sound of Bennis’s voice, and it hadn’t been good.

“Something like that,” he told Tibor. “I don’t really remember how it went. I was thinking of my brother, Stefan.”

“The one who died in the army.”

“That seems to be all I’ve ever told anybody about him. But, yes. That one. The only brother I’ve ever had. I was thinking about what it was like when he died, what I had felt like, and I was looking at the construction on the church. You can’t really see it from my window, you know, but you can see the trucks parked out front. So I was looking at that, and then I just sort of brought it up.”

“And?”

“And she grabbed her stuff and walked out. I’d say stormed out, but when Bennis storms she’s a lot more active than that. I don’t seem to be able to do anything right these days.”

Tibor reached across the table and took one of Gregor’ssausages. It was one of those paradoxes that tended to make Gregor depressed. Gregor was tall, but anything but thin. He looked like an older, out-of-shape Harrison Ford, or what Harrison Ford would have looked like if he’d aged ten years and never had a personal trainer. Tibor was short and wiry and as thin as bone, no matter what he ate.

“It is not the wrong thing,” Tibor said, “asking Bennis to marry you. So I assume that you didn’t ask. You said something instead.”

“Asking is saying something,” Gregor pointed out, “but I didn’t put it in the form of a question. And then she asked me if I was asking, and I said not exactly, I was observing, or something like that.”

“And now she has gone shopping. Yes, Krekor, I do see. You will have to find her and ask her properly. It will be all right.”

“I don’t think I can ask her properly,” Gregor said. “It’s—I don’t know what it is. It feels wrong on some level.”

“It seems wrong to you that you and Bennis should be married?” Tibor was surprised.

“No,” Gregor said. “It seems wrong to me that I should ask.”

“You think she should ask you?” Tibor was even more surprised.

“No,” Gregor said, feeling exasperated. “I don’t know, Tibor, I’m sorry. It seemed wrong to ask; and then she was upset with me because I didn’t want to help John with his black widow case, and I couldn’t get across to her how boring it all sounded. One more black widow. One more serial killer. Over and over again, the same things, the same motives, the same means, the same situations. You’d think human beings would have more creativity than that.”

“And that’s why you don’t want to work? Because murder has become boring?”

“I don’t know,” Gregor said.

Linda Melajian came back, saw that a single sausage had been eaten, and didn’t bother to give another lecture. She just refilled his cup with coffee and went away.

“I think you should go and find Bennis and make things up with her,” Tibor said. “Not go now. Wait until she comes back from shopping. She’s not in a good mood when she shops. But when she comes back, make it up with her.”