Bennis sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Then she stood up and got Gregor’s robe from where he had thrown it over the back of the wing-backed chair near the fireplace. They had to do something about these apartments, knock them together maybe, or expand them. It only worried her that it might be pushing things a bit far, even on Cavanaugh Street, to be that open about the fact that they were—uh—she didn’t have a word for it. At least she didn’t have a word that would do in this neighborhood. She wondered why that was. It wasn’t that they didn’t know what she and Gregor were doing. Half the street had been involved in the plot to arrange it. Even the Very Old Ladies didn’t really disapprove. They just put it down to These Days, which were so different from The Way It Used To Be that they couldn’t be judged by the same standard. Even Tibor never said a word about the two of them, and Tibor was a priest.
“I’d still feel better if we were married,” Bennis said, to the air—and then, mentally, she took it back. She would not feel better if she and Gregor were married. She didn’t want to be married. She had never wanted to be married. She would only feel better about openly living with him on Cavanaugh Street if they were married, and that was a very different thing.
She tied the belt of Gregor’s robe as tightly around her waist as it would go. Then she padded out of the bedroom and into the living room, where the big plate-glass window looked out over the street. This was Gregor’s apartment they were sleeping in. Gregor refused to sleep in hers, because she always had papier-mâché models of scenes in her books lying around everywhere, and in some of them there were trolls. If the apartments had been knocked together, though, she would have been able to get to her own computer without going out into the hall. She could have used Gregor’s computer, but he had done something to it again, and you couldn’t surf the Web on it. She was going to have to fix that for him someday soon.
The street below her was empty. It was too early for anybody at all to be up. Even Donna and Russ, who had the closest thing to an ordinary respectable schedule of anybody she knew, didn’t get up until six. The Ararat didn’t open until seven. Here was the real problem with smoking cigarettes, aside from the fact that it made her feel as if her lungs had been ripped out and she would never get enough air. When you didn’t smoke, you had no way to waste time. When you tried to waste time, you were far too conscious of the fact that you weren’t really doing anything. Of course, smoking a cigarette wasn’t really doing anything either. She wasn’t making any sense.
She went into the bathroom and shed the robe and her pajamas. She had a pair of jeans in there and a turtleneck. She really needed to go upstairs and take a shower and find clean things, but at the moment she was much too restless. She went back into the bedroom and found a pair of Gregor’s socks to put on, because she hated rewearing socks no matter what she was doing. Then she went into the hall and found her clogs. There was one person on this street who was likely to be up at this hour of the morning, because he was almost always up. Bennis didn’t know if she had ever seen Father Tibor Kasparian sleep.
She could have run upstairs for her coat, but she didn’t. She could have put on one of Gregor’s sweaters, for the layering, but she didn’t do that either. She did stop in the hallway to listen to the quiet of the house, and to wish, not for the first time, that somebody would rent the top-floor apartment. Ever since Donna and Russ had renovated their town house and moved down the street with Donna’s son Tommy, this place had seemed far too empty, and far, far too quiet.
It was freezing cold outside—at almost six in the morning in February, it would be. Bennis darted across the street and down the block. There were people awake, as a matter of fact There were lights on in the back rooms of the Ararat, meaning that Linda Melajian was already at work and trying to set up. Bennis ducked into the narrow alley next to Holy Trinity Church and came out in the courtyard in front of Tibor’s apartment. It could have been the one day in history when Tibor was actually asleep, but it wasn’t. All the lights in Tibor’s apartment were lit at once. It was as if the man thought he was a lighthouse in a fog, needing to turn the power up high to save a fleet of ships at sea.
Bennis let herself in Tibor’s front door—he never locked it; almost nobody on Cavanaugh Street locked anything, which was incredibly stupid, if you thought about it. Cavanaugh Street might be a safe place, but the rest of Philadelphia wasn’t. Just inside the door there was a big stack of paperback books leaning precariously to one side. The book on top was Jackie Collins’s Lucky. The one underneath it was Thomas More’s Utopia. Bennis straightened the pile a little and went into the living room.