"Ladder of Years" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tyler Anne)

3

“Aren’t you clever to say so,” he had said, and, “Why, you’re very pretty!” and, “You have such a little face, like a flower.” Had he meant that she had such a flowerlike face, which incidentally was little? Or had its littleness been his sole point? She preferred the first interpretation, although the second, she supposed, was more likely.

Also, he had praised her marvelous blancmange. Of course the blancmange did not really exist, but still she felt a lilt of pride, remembering that he had found it marvelous.

She studied her face in the mirror when nobody else was around. Yes, maybe it did resemble a flower. If he had been referring to those flowers that seem freckled. She had always wanted to look more dramatic, more mysterious-more adult, in fact. It had struck her as unfair that she should be wrinkling around the eyes without ever losing the prim-featured, artless, triangular face of her childhood. But evidently Adrian had considered that attractive.

Unless he had been speaking out of kindness.

She checked for his name in the phone book, but he must have had an unlisted number. She kept watch for him on the streets and in the local shops. Twice in the next three days she drove back to the supermarket, on both occasions wearing the dress with the smocked, gathered front that made her seem less flat-chested. But Adrian never appeared.

And if he had, what would she have done? It wasn’t that she’d fallen in love with him or anything like that. Why, she didn’t even know what kind of person he was! And she certainly didn’t want (as she put it to herself) “something to start up.” Ever since she was seventeen, she had centered her life on Sam Grinstead. She had not so much as glanced at any other man from the moment she first met him. Even in her day-dreams, she wasn’t the type to be unfaithful.

Still, whenever she imagined running into Adrian, she was conscious all at once of the light, quick way she naturally moved, and the outline of her body within the folds of her dress. She couldn’t remember when she had last been so aware of herself from outside, from a distance.

At home, four workmen were installing air-conditioning-another of Sam’s sudden renovations. They were slicing through floors and walls; they were running huge, roaring machines; they were lugging in metal ducts and bales of what looked like gray cotton candy. Delia could lie in bed at night and gaze straight upward through a new rectangle in the ceiling to the stark bones of the attic. She pictured bats and barn swallows swooping down on her while she slept. She fancied she could hear the house groaning in distress-such a modest, mild house, so unprepared for change.

But Sam was jubilant. Oh, he could hardly fit in his patients between visits from repairmen. Electricians, plasterers, and painters streamed through his office with estimates for the many improvements he planned. A carpenter arrived for the shutters, and a man with a spray for the mildewed shingles. Twenty-two years Sam had lived here; had he felt so critical of his surroundings all along?

He had first walked into her father’s waiting room on a Monday morning in July, some three weeks after her high-school graduation. Delia had been sitting in her usual place at the desk, even though it was not her usual time (she worked afternoons, mostly), because she was so eager to meet him. She and her sisters had talked of nothing else since Dr. Felson had announced his hiring. Was this person married? they had asked, and how old was he? and what did he look like? (No, he was not married, their father said, and he was, oh, thirty-two, thirty-three, and he looked fine. Fine? Well, normal; perfectly all right, their father said impatiently, for to him what counted most was whether the man could ease his workload some-take over house calls and the morning office hours.) So Delia rose early that summer day and put on her prettiest sundress, the one with the sweetheart neckline. Then she seated herself behind the spinet desk, where she ostentatiously set to work transcribing her father’s notes. At nine o’clock exactly, young Dr. Grinstead stepped through the outside door, carrying a starched white coat folded over his forearm. Sunlight flashed off his clear-rimmed, serious glasses and glazed his sifted-looking blond hair, and Delia could still recall the pang of pure desire that had caused her insides to lurch as if she had leaned out over a canyon.

Sam didn’t even remember that meeting. He claimed he’d first seen her when he came to dinner. It was true there had been such a dinner, on the evening of that same day. Eliza had cooked a roast and Linda had baked a cake (both advertising their housewifely skills), while Delia, the baby, still two months short of her eighteenth birthday and supposedly not even in the running, sat across from Sam and her father in the living room and sipped a grown-up glass of sherry. The sherry had tasted like liquefied raisins and flowed directly to that powerful new root of longing that branched deeper minute by minute. But Sam claimed that when he first walked in, all three girls had been seated on the couch. Like the king’s three daughters in a fairy tale, he said, they’d been lined up according to age, the oldest farthest left, and like the woodcutter’s honest son, he had chosen the youngest and prettiest, the shy little one on the right who didn’t think she stood a chance.

Well, let him believe what he wanted. In any case, it had ended like a fairy tale.

Except that real life continues past the end, and here they were with air-conditioning men destroying the attic, and the cat hiding under the bed, and Delia reading a paperback romance on the love seat in Sam’s waiting room-the house’s only refuge, since the office and the waiting room were air-conditioned already. Her head was propped on one arm of the love seat, and her feet, in fluffy pink slippers, rested on the other. Above her hung her father’s framed Norman Rockwell print of the kindly old doctor setting his stethoscope to the chest of a little girl’s doll. And behind the flimsy partition that rose not quite all the way to the ceiling, Sam was explaining Mrs. Harper’s elbow trouble. Her joints were wearing out, he said. There was a stupefied silence; even the electric saw fell silent. Then, “Oh, no!” Mrs. Harper gasped. “Oh, my! Oh, my heavens above! This comes as such a shock!”

A shock? Mrs. Harper was ninety-two years old. What did she expect? Delia would have asked. But Sam said, gently, “Yes, well, I suppose…” and something else, which Delia couldn’t catch, for the saw just then started up again as if all at once recalling its assignment.

She turned a page. The heroine was touring the hero’s vast estate, admiring its magnificent grounds and its tasteful “appointments,” whatever those might be. So many of these books had wealthy heroes, Delia had noticed. It didn’t matter about the women; sometimes they were rich and sometimes they were poor, but the men came complete with castles and a staff of devoted servants. Never again would the women they married need to give a thought to the grinding gears of daily life-the leaky basement, the faulty oven, the missing car keys. It sounded wonderful.

“Delia, dear heart!” Mrs. Harper cried, staggering out of the office. She was a stylish, silk-clad skeleton of a woman with clawlike hands, which she stretched toward Delia beseechingly. “Your husband tells me my joints have just ground themselves down to nubbins!”

“Now, now,” Sam protested behind her. “I didn’t say that exactly, Mrs. Harper.”

Delia sat up guiltily and smoothed her skirt. She grew aware of the bunny ears on her slippers and the temptress on the cover of her book. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Harper,” she said. “Should I schedule another appointment?”

“No, he says I have to go to a specialist. A man I don’t know from Adam!”

“Get her Peterson’s phone number, would you, Dee?” Sam asked.

She rose and went over to the desk, scuffing along in her slippers. (Mrs. Harper herself wore sharp-toed high heels, which she kept planted on the rug in a herringbone pattern to show off her trim ankles.) Delia flipped through Rolodex cards arranged not by name but by specialty-allergy, arthritis… Nowadays, this office served most often as a sort of clearinghouse. Her father used to deliver babies and even performed the more elementary surgeries once upon a time, but now it was largely a matter of bee shots in the spring, flu shots in the fall; and as for childbirth, why, these patients were long past the age. They were hand-me-downs from her father, most of them. (Or even, Sam joked, from her grandfather, who had opened this office in 1902, when Roland Park was still country and no one batted an eye at running a practice out of a residence.)

She copied Dr. Peterson’s number onto a card and passed it to Mrs. Harper, who examined it suspiciously before tucking it into her bag. “I trust this person is not some mere snip of a boy,” she told Sam.

“He’s thirty if he’s a day,” Sam assured her.

“Thirty! My grandson is older than that! Oh, please, can’t I go on seeing you instead?” But already knowing his answer, she turned without a pause toward Delia. “This husband of yours is a saint,” she said. “He’s just too good to exist on this earth. I hope you realize that.”

“Oh, yes.”

“You make sure you appreciate him, hear?”

“Yes, Mrs. Harper.”

Delia watched Sam escort the old woman to the door, and then she dropped back onto the love seat and picked up her book. “Beatrice,” the hero was saying, “I want you more than life itself,” and his voice was rough and desperate-uncontrolled, was the way the author put it: uncontrolled, and it sent a thrill down her slender spine within the clinging ivory satin of her negligee.

Maybe, instead of running into Adrian, she could just sit still and let him track her down. Maybe he was even now dwelling on his image of her and cruising the streets in search of her. Or he had looked up her address, perhaps; for he did know her last name. He was parked down the block at this very moment, hoping to catch a glimpse of her.

She took to stepping into the yard several times a day. She seized any excuse to arrange herself on the front-porch swing. Never an outdoor person, and most certainly not a gardener, she spent half an hour posed in goatskin gloves among Eliza’s medicinal herbs. And after someone telephoned but merely breathed and said nothing when she answered, she jumped up at every new call like a teenager. “I’ll get it! I’ll get it!” When there weren’t any calls, she made a teenager’s bargains with Fate: I won’t think about it, and then the phone will ring. I’ll go out of the room; I’ll pretend I’m busy and the phone will ring for sure. Shepherding her family into the car for a Sunday visit to Sam’s mother, she moved fluidly, sensuously, like an actress or a dancer conscious every minute of being watched.

But if someone really had been watching, think of what he would see: the ragged disarray of Delia’s home life. Ramsay, short and stone-faced and sullen, kicking a tire in disgust; Carroll and Susie bickering over who would get a window seat; Sam settling himself behind the wheel, pushing his glasses higher on his nose, wearing an unaccustomed knit shirt that made him look weak-armed and fussy. And at the end of their trip, the Iron Mama (as Delia called her)-sturdy, plain Eleanor Grinstead, who patched her own roof and mowed her own lawn and had reared her one son single-handed in that spotless Calvert Street row house where she waited now, lips clamped tight, to hear what new piece of tomfoolery her daughter-in-law had contrived.

No, not a one of them would bear up beneath the celestial blue gaze of Adrian Bly-Brice.

The oldest of the air-conditioning men, the one named Lysander, asked what those hay-bunch things were doing, hanging from the attic rafters. “Those are my sister’s herbs,” Delia said. She hoped to let it rest at that, but her sister happened to be right there in the kitchen with her, stringing beans for supper, and she told him, “Yes, I burn them in little pots around the house.”

“You set fire to them?” Lysander asked.

“Each one does something different,” Eliza explained. “One prevents bad dreams and another promotes a focused mind and another clears the atmosphere after interpersonal strife.”

Lysander looked over at Delia, raising his gray toothbrush eyebrows.

“So anyhow,” Delia said hastily. “Is this job about wrapped up, do you think?”

“This one here? Oh, no,” he said. He plodded toward the sink; he had come down to refill his thermos. Waiting for the water to run cold, he said, “We got several more days, at the least.”

“Several days!” Delia squawked. She cleared her throat. “But the noisy part: will that be over soon? Even the cat is getting a headache.”

“Now, how would you know that?” he asked.

“Oh, Delia can read a cat’s mind,” Eliza told him. “She’s got all of us trained in cat etiquette: what kind of voice to use with them and how to do your eyes when you look at them and-”

“Eliza, I need those beans now,” Delia broke in.

Too late, though: Lysander snorted as he set his thermos under the faucet. “Me, I’ll take a dog any day,” he said. “Cats are too sneaky for my taste.”

“Oh, well, I like dogs too, of course,” Delia said. (In fact, she was slightly afraid of dogs.) “It’s just that dogs are so… sudden. You know?”

“But honest,” Lysander said. It sounded like an accusation. “Okay if I swipe a few ice cubes?”

“Go right ahead,” Delia told him.

He stood there helplessly, clasping the neck of his thermos, until she realized that he meant for her to get them. He would be one of those men who didn’t know where their wives kept the spoons. She dried her hands on her apron and went to fetch the bin from the freezer.

“Last place we worked?” he said. “Putting in a new heat pump? Guy next door owned one of them attack dogs. Dog trained to attack. Lady we was working for warned us all about him.”

He kept a staunch grip on his thermos while Delia tried to fit an ice cube in. It wouldn’t go. She hit it with the flat of her hand (Lysander not even flinching) and, “Eek!” she cried, for the ice cube flew up in the air and then skittered across the floor. Lysander stared down at it dolefully.

“Just let me at this little devil,” Delia told him, and she snatched the thermos from him and slammed it into the sink. She ran water over a second ice cube. “Aha!” she crowed, pounding it in. She started working on a third.

Lysander said, “So we’re hauling in stuff from the truck one day, come to see the attack dog rounding the side of the house. Big old bristle-necked dog like a wolf, growling real deep in his throat. Lord, I thought I would die. Then out steps the lady we worked for like she had just been waiting for this. Says, ‘Come along,’ and takes hold of his collar, calm-natured as you please. Walks him into the yard next door and, ‘Mr. What’s-it?’ she calls. ‘I’m about to shoot your dog dead unless you come out this minute and retrieve him.’ With her voice just as clear, just as cool. That was some kind of woman, believe me.”

Why was he telling this story? Was it meant to show Delia up? She dispatched the third ice cube with as little commotion as possible. For some reason, she imagined that the woman had resembled Rosemary Bly-Brice. Maybe she was Rosemary Bly-Brice. She wore an expression of tolerant detachment; she bent in a graceful S-curve; she hooked a single finger through the dog’s spiked collar. Unexpectedly, Delia felt a rush of admiration, as if her entrancement with Adrian extended to his wife as well.

She turned off the faucet, picked up the thermos, and offered it to Lysander. “Why, looky there,” Lysander said. Water was dripping rapidly from the bottom of the thermos. “Why, you’ve gone and broke it,” he said.

Delia didn’t apologize. She went on offering the thermos, wishing he would just take it and leave. In the supermarket, she recalled at that instant, she had made some reference to Ramsay, and Adrian had assumed she meant her husband. No wonder he hadn’t come by yet! He’d been looking for Ramsay Grinstead, who wasn’t in the phone book. Sooner or later, though, he would realize his mistake. She began smiling at the thought, and she continued holding the thermos out until Eliza, clucking, rose to fetch the mop.

In the dark the phone rang twice, and Delia woke with a start. She was reviewing her children’s whereabouts even before her eyes were fully open. All three were safe in bed, she decided, but her heart went on racing anyhow.

“Hello?” Sam said. “Yes, this is Dr. Grinstead. Oh. Mr. Maxwell.”

Delia sighed and rolled over. Mr. Maxwell was married to the Dowager Queen of Hypochondria.

“How long has she been experiencing this?” Sam asked. “I see. Well, that doesn’t sound serious. Yes, I’m sure it is uncomfortable, but I doubt very much if-”

A miniature babbling sound issued from the receiver.

“Of course she does,” Sam said. “I understand. All right, Mr. Maxwell-if you think it’s that important, I’ll come take a look.”

“Oh, Sam!” Delia hissed, sitting up.

He ignored her. “See you in a few minutes, then,” he was telling Mr. Maxwell.

As soon as he had replaced the receiver, Delia said, “Sam Grinstead, you are such a patsy. You know it’s going to be nothing. Why can’t he take her to the emergency room, if she’s so sick?”

“Well, neither one of them drives anymore,” Sam said mildly. He swung his feet to the floor and reached for his trousers, which lay folded over the back of the rocker. As always, he’d worn tomorrow’s underwear to bed and placed tomorrow’s clothes conveniently at hand.

Delia pressed a palm to her heart, which was only now settling down. Was this anything like what Sam had felt with his chest pains? She kept trying to imagine. Think of him operating a car at such a time-humming along toward a meeting and then noticing his symptoms and smoothly, composedly (she pictured) turning his wheel toward Sinai Hospital. Arranging his own admission and asking a nurse to phone Delia and break the news by degrees. (“Your husband wants you to know he’ll be a tad bit later getting home than planned.”) And Delia, meanwhile, had been reading Lucinda’s Lover by the fire, without a qualm.

She switched on her lamp and climbed out of bed. Two-fifteen, the alarm clock said. Squinting against the light, Sam reached for his glasses and put them on to look at her. “Where are you off to?” he asked. The glasses made his face seem crisper, less vague around the eyes, as if they had corrected Delia’s vision rather than his.

She drew her ruffled housecoat over her nightgown and zipped the front before she answered. “I’m coming with you,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“I’ll take you in my car.”

“Why on earth would you do that?”

“I just want to, that’s why,” she said. She tied her sash very tight, in hopes her housecoat would pass for streetwear. As she stepped into her flats, she could feel him staring at her, but all she said was, “Ready?” She collected her keys from the bureau.

“Delia, are you doubting my ability to drive my own car anymore?” Sam asked.

“Oh, no! What a thought!” she told him. “But I’m awake, why not come with you? Besides, it’s such a nice spring night.”

He didn’t look convinced, but he offered no more arguments when she led the way downstairs.

It was not a nice spring night at all. It was cool and breezy, and she wished for a sweater as soon as they stepped out the back door. Towering, luminous clouds scudded across an inky sky. But she headed toward her car at a leisurely pace, resisting the urge to hunch her shoulders against the chill. The streetlights were so bright that she could see her shadow, elongated like a stick figure in a child’s drawing.

“This makes me think of Daddy,” she said. She had to speak up, since Sam had walked over to his Buick to retrieve his black bag. She hoped he didn’t hear the shiver in her voice. “All the house calls I used to make with Daddy, just the two of us! Seems like old times.”

She slid behind her steering wheel and reached across to unlock the passenger door. The air inside the car felt refrigerated. It even smelled refrigerated-dank and stale.

“Of course, Daddy never let me drive him,” she said when Sam had got in. Then she worried this would give him second thoughts, and so she added, laughing slightly, “You know how prejudiced he was! Women drivers, he always said…” She started the engine and turned on her lights, illuminating the double doors of the garage and the tattered net of the basketball hoop overhead. “But whenever I was still up, he’d say I could come with him. Oh, I tagged along many a night! Eliza just never was interested, and Linda was so, you know, at odds with him all the time, but I was ready at a moment’s notice. I just loved to go.”

Sam had heard all this before, of course. He merely settled his bag between his feet while she backed the car out of the driveway.

Once they were on Roland Avenue, she said, “In fact I ought to come with you more often, now the kids are growing up. Don’t you think?” She was aware that she was chattering, but she said, “It might be kind of fun! And it’s not as if you go out every night, or even every week anymore.”

“Delia, I give you my word I am still capable of making the odd house call without a baby-sitter,” Sam told her.

“Baby-sitter!”

“I’m strong as an ox. Stop fretting.”

“I’m not fretting! I just thought it would be romantic, something the two of us could do together!” she said.

This wasn’t the whole truth, but as soon as she said it she started to believe it, and so she felt a bit hurt. Sam merely sat back and gazed out the side window.

There was almost no traffic at this hour, and the avenue seemed very flat and empty, shimmering pallidly beneath the streetlights as if veiled by yellow chiffon. The newly leafed trees, lit from below, had a tumbled, upside-down look. Here and there a second-floor window glowed cozily, and Delia sent it a wistful glance as they passed.

In front of the Maxwells’ house, she parked. She turned off the headlights but left the engine and the heater on. “Aren’t you coming in?” Sam asked.

“I’ll wait in the car.”

“You’ll freeze!”

“I’m not dressed for company.”

“Come in, Dee. The Maxwells don’t care how you’re dressed.”

He was right, she supposed. (And the heater hadn’t even started heating yet.) She took the keys from the ignition and slid out of the car to follow him up the front walk, toward the broad, columned house where those two lone Maxwells must rattle around like dice in a cup. All the windows were blazing, and the inner door stood open. Mr. Maxwell waited just inside, a stooped, bulky figure fumbling to unhook the screen as they crossed the porch.

“Dr. Grinstead!” he said. “Thank you so much for coming. And Delia too. Hello, dear.”

He wore food-stained trousers belted just beneath his armpits, and a frayed gray cardigan over a T-shirt. (He used to be such a natty dresser.) Without a pause, he turned to lead Sam toward the carpeted stairs. “It breaks my heart to see her this way,” he said as they started the climb. “I’d suffer in her stead, if I could.”

Delia watched after them from the foyer, and when they were out of sight she sat down on one of the two antique chairs that flanked a highboy. She sat cautiously; for all she knew, the chairs were purely for show.

Overhead the voices murmured-Mrs. Maxwell’s thin and complaining, Sam’s a rumble. The grandfather clock facing Delia ticked so slowly that it seemed each tick might be its last. For lack of anything better to do (she had thoughtlessly left her purse at home), she fanned her keys across her lap and sorted through them.

How many hours had she sat like this in her childhood? Perched on a chair or a bottom step, scratching at the insect bites on her bare knees or leafing through a magazine some grown-up had thrust upon her before leading her father up the stairs. And overhead that same murmur, the words never quite distinguishable. When her father spoke, all others fell silent, and she had felt proud and flattered to hear how people revered him.

The stairs creaked, and she looked up. It was Mr. Maxwell, descending by himself. “Dr. Grinstead’s just examining her,” he said. He inched down, clinging to the banister, and when he reached the foyer he settled with a wheeze onto the other antique chair. Because the highboy stood between them, all she saw of him was his outstretched trouser legs and his leather slippers, backless, exposing maroon silk socks with transparent heels. “He says he thinks it’s a touch of indigestion, but I told him, I said, at our age… well, you can’t be too careful, I told him.”

“I’m sure she’ll be all right,” Delia said.

“I just thank heaven for Dr. Grinstead. A lot of those younger fellows wouldn’t come out like this.”

“None of them would,” Delia couldn’t resist saying.

“Oh, some, maybe.”

“None. Believe me.”

Mr. Maxwell sat forward to look at her. She found his veiny, florid face peering around the highboy.

“That Sam is just too nice for his own good,” she told him. “Did you know he has angina? Angina, at age fifty-five! What could that mean for his future? If it were up to me, he’d be home in bed this very minute.”

“Well, luckily it’s not up to you,” Mr. Maxwell said a bit peevishly. He sat back again and there was a pause, during which she heard Mrs. Maxwell say something opinionated that sounded like “Nee-nee. Nee-nee.”

“We were Dr. Grinstead’s first house call-did he ever mention that?” Mr. Maxwell asked. “Yessir: very first house call. Your dad said, Think you’ll like this boy.’ I admit we were a mite apprehensive, having relied on your dad all those years.”

Sam was speaking more briskly now. He must be finishing up.

“I asked Dr. Grinstead when he came to us,” Mr. Maxwell said dreamily. “I said, ‘Well, young man?’ He’d only been on the job a couple days by then. I said, ‘Well?’ Said, Which one of those Felson girls do you plan to set about marrying?’ Pretty smart of me, eh?”

Delia laughed politely and rearranged her keys.

“‘Oh,’ he said; said, ‘I guess I’ve got my eye on the youngest.’ Said, The oldest is too short and the middle one’s too plump, but the youngest,’ he said, ‘is just right.’ So. See there? I knew before you did.”

“Yes, I guess you did,” Delia said, and then Sam started down the stairs, the instruments in his black bag cheerily jingling. Mr. Maxwell rose at once, but Delia stayed seated and kept her gaze fixed on her keys. They seemed uncannily distinct-dull-finished, ill-assorted, incised with brand names as clipped and choppy as words from another language.

“Just what I…,” Sam was saying, and, “Nothing but a touch of…,” and, “Left some medication on the…” Then he and Mr. Maxwell were shaking hands, and he said, “Dee?” and she stood up without a word and stepped through the door that Mr. Maxwell held open.

Outside, the grass had grown white with dew and the air itself seemed white, as if dawn were not far off. Delia climbed into the car and started the engine before Sam was completely settled. “You have to feel for those folks,” he said, shutting his door. “Aging all alone like that, they must dwell on every symptom.”

Delia swung out into the street and drove slightly above the speed limit, concentrating, not speaking. They were nearly home before she said, “Mr. Maxwell told me they were your very first house call.”

“Really?”

“The second day you worked here.”

“I’d forgotten.”

“He said he asked which of the Felson girls you planned to marry and you said the youngest.”

“Hmm,” Sam said, unzipping his bag. He checked something inside and told her, “Delia, remind me tomorrow morning to pick up more-”

“‘The oldest is too short and the middle one’s too plump,’ you said, ‘but the youngest one is just right.’”

Sam laughed.

“Did you say that?” she asked him.

“Oh, sweetie, how would I remember after all these years?”

She pulled into their driveway and turned the engine off. Sam opened his door, but then, noticing she had not moved, he looked over at her. The little ceiling bulb cast sharp hollows in his face.

“You did say it,” she told him. “I recognize the fairy-tale sound of it.”

“So? Maybe I did,” he said. “Gosh, Dee, I wasn’t weighing every word. I might have said ‘too short’ and ‘too plump,’ but what I probably meant was ‘too unconventional’ and ‘too Francophile.’”

“That’s not it,” Delia said.

“Why, Linda spent half the evening speaking French, remember? And when your dad made her switch to English, she still had an accent.”

“You don’t even know what I’m objecting to, do you?” Delia asked.

“Well, no,” Sam said. “I don’t.”

She got out of the car and walked toward the back steps. Sam went to replace his bag in the Buick; she heard the clunk of his trunk lid.

“And Eliza!” he said as he followed her to the house. “She kept asking my opinion of homeopathic medicine.”

“You arrived here that very first day planning to marry one of the Felson girls,” Delia told him.

She had unlocked the door now, but instead of entering she turned to face him. He was looking down at her, with his forehead creased.

“Why, I suppose it must naturally have crossed my mind,” he said. “I’d completed all my training by then. I’d reached the marrying age, so to speak. The marrying stage of life.”

“But then why not a nurse, or a fellow student, or some girl your mother knew?”

“My mother?” he said. He blinked.

“You had your eye on Daddy’s practice, that’s why,” she told him. “You thought, Til just marry one of Dr. Felson’s daughters and inherit all his patients and his nice old comfortable house.’”

“Well, sweetheart, I probably did think that. Probably I did. But I never would have married someone I didn’t love. Is that what you believe? You believe I didn’t marry for love?”

“I don’t know what to believe,” she told him.

Then she spun around and walked back down the steps.

“ Dee?” Sam called.

She passed her car without slowing. Most women would have driven away, but she preferred to walk. The soles of her flats gritted against the asphalt driveway in a purposeful rhythm, reminding her of some tune she could almost name but not quite. Part of her was listening for Sam (she had a sense of perking one ear backward, like a cat), but another part was glad to be rid of him and pleased to have her view of him confirmed. Look at that, he wont even deign to come after me. She reached the street, turned right, and kept going. Her frail-edged shadow preceded her and then drew back and then fell behind as she traveled from streetlight to streetlight. No longer did she feel the cold. She seemed warmed from inside by her anger.

Now she understood why Sam had forgotten his actual first glimpse of her. He had prepared to meet the Felson girls as a boxed set, that was why. It had not figured in his plans to encounter an isolated sample ahead of time. What had figured was the social occasion that evening, with marriageable maidens one, two, and three on display on the living-room couch. She could envision that scene herself now. All it took was the proper perspective to bring it back entire: the itchy red plush cushions, the clothlike texture of her frosted sherry glass, and the fidgeting, encroaching, irritating plumpness of the middle sister, next to her.

On a branch overhead, the neighborhood’s silly mockingbird was imitating a burglar alarm. “Doy! Doy! Doy!” he sang in his most lyrical voice, until he was silenced by a billow of rock music approaching from the south. Teenagers, evidently-a whole carload. Delia heard their hoots and cheers growing steadily louder. It occurred to her that even Roland Park was not absolutely safe at this hour. Also, her housecoat wouldn’t fool a soul. She was running around in her nightclothes, basically. She took a sudden right turn onto a smaller, darker street and walked close to a boxwood hedge, whose shadow swallowed hers.

Sam would be back in bed now, his trousers draped over the rocking chair. And the children didn’t know she was missing. With their jumbled, separate schedules, they might not know for days.

What kind of a life was she leading, if every single one of last week’s telephone messages could as easily be this week’s?

She walked faster, hearing the carload of music fade away behind her. She reached Bouton Road, crossed over, and turned left, and one split second later, whomp! she collided with someone. She ran smack against a stretch of tallness and boniness, overlaid by warm flannel. “Oh!” she said, and she recoiled violently, heart pounding, while somehow a dog became involved as well, one of those shaggy hunting-type dogs shouting around her knees.

“Butch! Down!” the man commanded. “Are you all right?” he asked Delia.

Delia said, “ Adrian?”

In the half-dark he had no color, but still she recognized his narrow, distinctly cheekboned face. She saw that his mouth was wider and fuller, more sculptured, than she had been imagining, and she wondered how she could have forgotten something so important. “ Adrian, it’s me. Delia,” she said. The dog was still barking. She said, “Delia Grinstead? From the supermarket?”

“Why, Delia,” Adrian’said. “My rescuer!” He laughed, and the dog grew quiet. “What are you doing here?”

She said, “Oh, just…,” and then she laughed too, glancing down at her housecoat and smoothing it with her palms. “Just couldn’t sleep,” she said.

She was relieved to find that he was not so well dressed himself. He wore a dark-hued robe of some kind and pale pajamas. On his feet were jogging shoes, laces trailing, no socks. “Do you live nearby?” she asked him.

“Right here,” he said, and he waved toward a matted screen of barberry bushes. Behind it Delia glimpsed a porch light and a section of white clapboard. “I got up to let Butch here take a pee,” he said. “It’s his new hobby: waking me in the dead of night and claiming he needs to go out.”

At the sound of his name, Butch sat down on his haunches and grinned up at her. Delia leaned over to give his muzzle a timid pat. His breath warmed and dampened her fingers. “I ran off with your groceries that day,” she said, ostensibly to the dog. “I felt terrible about it.”

“Groceries?” Adrian asked.

“Your orzo and your rotini…” She straightened and met his eyes. “I considered hunting up your address and bringing them over.”

“Oh. Well… orzo? Well, never mind,” he told her. “I’m just grateful you helped me out like that. You must have thought I was kind of weird, right?”

“No, not at all! I enjoyed it,” she said.

“You know how sometimes you just want to, say, keep up appearances in front of someone.”

“Certainly,” she said. “I ought to start a business: Appearances, Incorporated.”

“Rent-a-Date,” Adrian suggested. “Impostors To Go.”

“With blondes to pose as second wives, and football stars to take jilted girls to proms-”

“And beautiful women in black to weep at funerals,” Adrian said.

“Oh, why don’t they have such things?” Delia asked. “There’s just nothing like that… what? Like that fury, that prideful sort of fury you feel when you’ve been hurt or insulted or taken for granted-”

Well. She stopped herself. Adrian was watching her with such peculiar intentness, she worried all at once that she had curlers in her hair. She nearly raised a hand to check, till she remembered she hadn’t worn curlers since high school. “Goodness. I should get home,” she said.

“Wait!” Adrian said. “Would you like… could I offer you some coffee?”

“Coffee?”

“Or tea? Or cocoa? Or a drink?”

“Well,” she said, “I guess cocoa, maybe. Cocoa might be nice. I mean caffeine at this hour would probably… But are you sure it’s not too much trouble?”

“No trouble at all,” he told her. “Come on inside.”

He led her to a gap in the barberry bushes. A flagstone path curved toward the house, which was one of those lace-trimmed Victorian cottages young couples nowadays found so charming. The front door was paned with lozenges of glass in sugared-almond colors impossible to see through. Delia felt a sudden pinch of uneasiness. Why, she didn’t know a thing about this man! And no one else on earth had any inkling where she was.

“Usually if I’m up at this hour I’m up for good,” Adrian was saying, “so I fix myself a pot of-”

“What a lovely porch!” Delia exclaimed. “Maybe we could have our cocoa out here.”

“Here?”

He paused on the topmost step and looked around him. It was a depressing porch, really. The floorboards were battleship gray, and the furniture was painted a harsh bright shade of green. “Don’t you think you’d be cold?” he asked.

“Not a bit,” she told him, although now that she had stopped walking, it did seem cold. She stuffed both fists in the pockets of her housecoat.

He gazed down at her a moment. Then he said, “Ah. I see,” and the corners of his mouth quirked upward with amusement.

“But if you’re cold…,” she said, flushing.

“I understand,” he said. “You can’t be too careful.”

“Oh, it’s not that! Heavens!”

“I don’t blame you in the least. We’ll have our cocoa out here.”

“Really,” she said, “why don’t I come in?”

“No, you wait here. I’ll bring it out.”

“Please,” she said. “Please let me come in.”

And because she saw that the argument would otherwise go on forever, she took one hand from her pocket and laid it on his wrist. “I want to,” she said.

She wanted to come in, she meant. That was what she honestly meant, but the moment the words were out of her mouth she saw that they implied something more, and she dropped her hand and stepped back. “Or maybe…,” she said. “Yes, the… porch, why don’t we have our cocoa on the…” And she felt behind her for a chair and sat down. The icy, uncushioned seat took her breath away for an instant, as if she had heard a piece of startling news, or glimpsed some possibility that had never crossed her mind before.