“You know,” Gregor said, “I don’t think you really have to worry about Dickie Van Damm. He’s a nuisance and a damned fool, but he’s not dangerous to you, or to anybody except when he’s driving drunk. And I’ve heard he doesn’t do that anymore.”
“He hired a driver.”
“There, then.”
The saleswoman handed back Bennis’s credit card and then handed over the box. Bennis tucked the box under her arm and walked away. Halfway down the aisle to the back door, she stopped.
“It’s just that it’s going to be such a mess,” she said desperately. “It would have been a mess under any circumstances, but you know what he’s like. He’ll be all over the news. He’ll make a celebration of it. The dim-witted little prick.”
“Yes,” Gregor said—and now, all this time later, he said “yes” again, out loud to the air in his bedroom. Then he tightened the belt around his pants and slipped his feet into the penny loafers Bennis had bought to replace his standard FBI wing tips. It still felt strange to him that he didn’t have to bend over to tie his shoes. He still didn’t understand why the shoes didn’t just fall off his feet, without laces to hold them on.
He went back out to the living room. Bennis was still sleeping. The news was still on. Now it seemed to be about puppy mills, somewhere in Bucks County. Gregor leaned over the coffee table and turned it off.
Bennis coughed in her sleep, and moved. Gregor got the throw blanket from the back of the couch and tossed it over her. He didn’t think she had actually slept in a bed since that interview with the lawyer, and she didn’t look as if she were about to start sleeping in a bed anytime soon.
Ages ago, when Gregor was just out of the Army and engaged to Elizabeth, he had thought he knew what love was. Surely, when Elizabeth was sick, in those last awful years, he actually had known what it was. He would never have been able to stay with her, and to help her, if he had not loved her. Duty would not have been enough. Even so, this time around and with Bennis, he felt as if he didn’t know anything at all. She was such a complicated person. There were so many twists and turns and secrets to her body and her soul. He knew he would have been wrong to think that her life had been easy merely because it had mostly been rich—but he thought that that was what he must have thought, deep down, until very recently. Now he wanted to run the palm of his hand over her cheek, to feel the smoothness of it, to feel the heat. Sometimes it seemed to him as if his love for her reduced itself to these things: the visceral; the physical; the couldn’t-be-put-into-words. It surprised him, really. He had never been a primarily physical person, but his response to Bennis was intensely so, and so insistently present that he found himself coming to in stores and on street corners with the smell of her wrapped around him like a cloak.
The throw blanket didn’t cover anywhere near as much of her as Gregor would have liked, but there was nothing he could do about it but stretch it smooth in the corners. He did that and then planted a kiss on her forehead. She neither moved nor spoke. He backed away into his front hall and got his coat. They’d been through a lot together over the last however many years, and they would get through this.
Still, Gregor thought, I’d be happier if I wasn’t about to be the one responsible for the death of her oldest living sister.
2
It was later, sitting in the Ararat over coffee and eggs, that Gregor realized there was something he could do about what was going to happen. He couldn’t do anything about the execution itself, about the fact of it or its timing. He couldn’t even do anything about Dickie Van Damm, who was supposed to be the grieving widower of Bennis’s sister Myra—although he doubted if Dickie could hold a single emotion for the space of ten years, never mind a single thought. His mind flitted back and forth through the scenes at Engine House in the days after Bennis’s father had been killed, but he could never make it rest on Dickie Van Damm. Dickie himself was never at rest. He gestured and bopped. He hurried from one end of a room to the other. He talked, nonstop, while pulling at his tie hard enough to strangle himself. He had, Gregor realized with a shock, all the mannerisms that men of his own generation associated with homosexuality—except, of course, that he was not homosexual. The Truman Capote Syndrome, one of Gregor’s instructors at Quantico had called it. The memory made the past seem eons away instead of decades. Had they ever thought like that, as a matter of course, without even questioning it? Had there ever been a time when an “enlightened” view of homosexuality was that it wasn’t their fault, it was a kind of birth defect they were born with, and people who weren’t born with it should be less censuring than kind?