True Believers(13)

“She went out of her way for you, do you remember that? She sent you books. She gave you advice. She suggested magazines that might be willing to take your work, real magazines, not that rag you have your face in once a month—”

“Thank you very much for supporting me in my professional aspirations.”

“She told you how to put together a book proposal. And it worked. You sold the book.”

“To a freethought publisher. Don’t make it more than it was. To a freethought publisher, not to the mainstream.”

“Well, Edith, she told you. You’re not going to make it into the mainstream writing about how God doesn’t exist.”

“None of this is about Bennis Hannaford,” Edith said.

“Right,” Will said. “This is about the fact that I came home early from work last week and you were in our very own bed in our very own house with our very own lawyer, fucking like a rabbit.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Edith said.

Will’s coffee cup was empty. He got up and put it—and his saucer, and his spoon, and his crumb-filled breakfast dish—in the big stainless-steel sink. Edith didn’t think she had ever heard Will use that word before. He didn’t use words like that. He almost never said “hell” or “damn.” He really was an Eagle Scout.

Will turned on the water and rinsed off his breakfast things. He put them in the dish rack on the counter and wiped his hands on the towel they kept threaded through the handle of the refrigerator.

“There’s a funeral on at St. Stephen’s today. Be careful when you go out. What’s-his-name will probably be there with his pickets.”

“Roy Phipps.”

“Whatever. I think you’re wrong, you know. I think this does have something to do with Bennis Hannaford. And with—who was it, before? When we had just started going out. That woman at the Foundation for Secular Studies, or whatever it was called. You’ve got this habit, do you know that, Edith? You always kill the ones you love.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Will looked around—as if he might have something left to do, as if he’d forgotten that he’d done it all already. He wiped his hands one more time and put the dish towel back. Edith just wished that he’d get mad at her. He should be screaming, shouting, stomping around the house. He should have put his fist through a wall. She could still see him standing in the doorway to the bedroom last Wednesday afternoon, leaning against the doorjamb as if he were watching two cats play in the sun. They had been in the sun, too, she and the—the lawyer. She couldn’t make herself say his name anymore: Ian Holden. They had been lying, stark naked, on top of the quilt instead of under it, because they’d both been too damned hot and in too damned much of a hurry. She’d been sitting straddled on top of him and yelling “heigh ho, Silver!” at the top of her lungs every time she’d let her body rise and fall back down into the saddle she’d made of him. She’d been acting more like fifteen than fifty—but she had certainly looked fifty. She’d seen it in the stripe of light that had fallen across them from the opened door. Her hands were pocked and lined. Her breasts sagged.

“Look,” she said.

“I have to get to work,” Will said. “I’ve got a project deadline I’m not sure I’m going to make. I’ve been a little distracted lately.”

“I’ve said I’m sorry. I don’t know what you want me to do except say I’m sorry.”

“Annie Heston.”

“What?”

“The woman from the Foundation for Secular Studies,” Will said. “I remembered her name. I think it’s interesting you didn’t seem to.”

“I don’t see why we can’t talk about what happened,” Edith said. “I don’t see why we have to go at this as if we were a couple of teenagers playing at how all love is such an agony we’re never going to be the same again.”

“Right,” Will said.

He walked out of the kitchen and down the long hall to the living room. Edith heard him open and close the front-hall closet. He would be getting the puffy down vest that was all he ever wore to work no matter how cold the winter. She got out of her chair and went after him, hurrying just a little. When she reached the living room, he was just opening the front door.

“You can’t leave like this,” she said. “You can’t keep leaving like this. It’s been going on for days.”

“You used to tell me you hated it, being on top,” Will said. “You used to say it made you feel too self-conscious to concentrate on the sex.”