Deadly Beloved (4 page)

Out in the kitchen, Kevin was washing dishes. Sarah could hear the clink-clink of glassware going into the wire rack. Ever since Kevin had lost his job, he had been crazy about doing the dishes. He hated seeing dirty dishes sitting in the sink. Sarah couldn’t count the number of glasses he had broken already, throwing things around out there. Lalique crystal. Steuben. Royal Doulton bone china. Sarah could still see herself, going from store to store in downtown Philadelphia, pulling out her gold MasterCard and her gold Visa card and all the rest of them. For a few years there she had been very well known to the people who ran the better jewelry stores and glassware specialty shops in Philadelphia. She had imagined herself to be the kind of woman she had imagined her great-grandmother to be. Known everywhere. Exacting in her standards. Meticulous about detail. A real grande dame of the real Main Line.

Actually, Sarah thought now, she knew exactly how people lived when they didn’t have any money. She had grown up in a family without any money—just that big house in Bryn Mawr with the portraits on the walls; just the yearly invitation to the Philadelphia Assemblies and the obligatory listing in the Philadelphia
Blue Book
. In the end, they’d had a listing in the
Social Register
too. When you don’t have two dimes to rub together, you can’t afford to be a snob—although, God only knew, people on the Main Line were snobs about the
Social Register
. Sarah remembered nights sitting at the long table in the formal dining room in her father’s house, eating bread and gravy off all that Royal Doulton, because the food money had been spent on horseback-riding lessons for herself and her sister. She remembered sitting in the dark on the second floor in the middle of a heavy snowfall, wishing she had enough light to read—because the money that should have gone to pay the electric bill had gone instead to pay her subscription fees to Philadelphia’s most prestigious junior dance. She was only eleven years old that year and she had already figured out what was important. She understood that nothing else mattered as long as you were able to live richly among rich people.

Now she was fifty—
fifty
—and she no longer lived richly among rich people. She lived here, where people had just enough to feel important but not enough to really understand what kind of mess she was in. People from Fox Run Hill saw her at the country club or the health club, a tall woman with ash-blond hair and a deep tan and the kind of body Anglo-Saxons get when they do too much exercise—and they made instant evaluations. Sarah Lockwood the debutante. Sarah Lockwood the Main Line Society lady. If I were a Main Line Society lady, Sarah thought, I would be living on the Main Line and moving in Society. Instead, I am living here, moving among nobodies, a failure. Any minute now I am going to be an even bigger failure. I am going to be a bankrupt.

Kevin was still clinking glasses in the dish rack. Sarah got up and moved through the family room to the kitchen, past the miniature date palm trees in their clay planters, past the Braque etching in its plain blond wood frame, past the broken little statue of Aphrodite on a seashell they had bought that time they took their vacation in Greece. She might be in debt, Sarah thought, but at least she was in debt with good taste. She knew what to buy and how to make it work for her.

Kevin was standing directly in front of the sink, holding up a blue crystal sugar bowl as if he had never seen it before. Like her, he was tall and tan and blondish, overexercised and thin. Like her, he was very, very tense. The difference was that Kevin had always been tense. Sarah could remember the first time she saw him, standing in a navy blue blazer that didn’t quite fit, at the samovar end of a long buffet table set up on the lawn of her friend Margaret Delacord’s house. He had been brought home from Dartmouth by one of Margaret’s brothers and then dressed up for this occasion. She should have married one of the boys from her own circle. She should have married one of the boys whose bank account she knew better than his golf scores. That was what all the bread-and-gravy dinners and lightless winter nights had been about. Old name with no money married much money with new name. A Philadelphia Main Line tradition.

But she really
couldn’t
have married anybody else. It didn’t matter what Kevin’s background was, or what his bank account had been on the day she met him, or what his prospects for employment were now. From the moment she had first seen him, Sarah had felt him as a part of her. Blood and skin and bone, muscle and nerve: Going to bed with Kevin Lockwood was a form of narcissism, an implosion as well as an explosion. Sarah thought of it as reaching a state of perfection, an essence of Sarah, like one of Plato’s ideas. Even after all this time she was always on fire for him. She would come awake at four o’clock in the morning and peel back the covers so that she could look unrestrained at the curve of his arm, the knobbed column of his spine. Even now, with her head full of figures and an ache full of fear beginning to grow like a puffball at the back of her head, what she really wanted to do was to run her fingers over all the hair on his body, even the hair that was so carefully hidden between his legs.

Kevin saw her come in and put the blue crystal sugar bowl in the dish rack. He put the plaid terry-cloth dish towel down on the counter next to the sink. The muscles in his shoulders were still powerful, although he was slighter than he had been when Sarah first met him. His eyes were harder too, deep blue and cold.

“Well?” he said.

Sarah shrugged. “I’ve been over it and over it. It always comes down to the same thing.”

“You’re sure.” It was not a question.

“I don’t see how we could ever be sure,” Sarah said carefully. “Why don’t we just say ‘likely.’ Nothing else seems ‘likely’ at the moment. Nothing else seems possible.”

“We couldn’t borrow any more money.”

“Nobody would lend it to us.”

“We couldn’t hold out a few more months to see if I got another job.”

“We’ve held out for eighteen months as it is. If we don’t do something soon, I’m going to have to start missing payments. And you know what that will mean.”

“This will be quick enough so that we don’t have to miss payments?”

“We have about three weeks. We could do a lot in three weeks.”

Kevin nodded. “But we don’t just want to make payments,” he said. “That wouldn’t do us any good. We want to clear out that credit card debt.”

“I know.”

Sarah put her palms flat on the kitchen counter and pulled herself up until she was sitting on it. She had on a bright white golf skirt and a red short-sleeve jersey polo. She had on no underwear at all. The kitchen was dark and cool and shadowy.

“Jesus,” Kevin said.

Sarah kicked off her espadrilles. “We can start tonight at the dinner,” she told him. “I can talk to the women and you can talk to the men.”

“Some of them may have heard I got fired.” Kevin put his hand on Sarah’s knee.

“None of them will have heard that you got fired. They don’t use words like ‘fired’ in the circles you move in. They say things like ‘left to pursue other interests.’”

“It comes to the same thing.” Kevin inched his hand higher, to the flat side of her thigh, sinewy and hard.

“None of them will know it comes to the same thing,” Sarah told him. She was beginning to feel what she wanted to feel. She was dizzy as hell. “None of them will know anything. You can tell them anything you want to tell them. All you have to do is tell them what they want to hear.”

“That I have a deal for them.”

“That we’re going to invite them here,” Sarah corrected him. “That we’re going to give a party and they’re going to be allowed to come.”

“And you really think that’s going to be enough.”

Sarah inched forward on the counter and into Kevin’s hands. In her mind she could see Molly Bracken’s face over the broccoli at the Food Emporium, eyes getting wider and wider, smile getting more and more eager. Even the dark roots of her hair had seemed to pulse, as if an electric generator had gone off inside her head, as if at any minute she would start to glow.

“Yes,” Sarah said now. “It will be enough. It will be enough for the women, and they’ll make it enough for the men.”

“You can be a sexist little bitch,” Kevin said.

Sarah twisted herself against him. Her clothes had begun to feel too tight, too hot. Everything was too hot. They had made love for the first time on the first day they had ever met, that day at Margaret Delacord’s parents’ lawn party—and that was thirty years ago, for God’s sake. People didn’t do things like that then. People didn’t steal magnums of champagne from the open bars at post-deb receptions and get drunk on the floor of four-car garages in a thick envelope of summer heat. People didn’t forge weekend permission slips and sneak away from college dormitories to spend night after night in cut-rate motels, making the sheets burn with sweat and cigarette ashes. People didn’t stop planning and scheming and hoping and studying just to give themselves over to the moment. At least, people like Sarah didn’t.

“Sarah?” Kevin said now.

Sarah got her hand under his shirt and stroked the hair on his chest. She pulled at his shirt buttons until they came undone.

“I love it that you stopped wearing undershirts,” she told him.

“Everybody stopped wearing undershirts,” he shot back.

The next thing she knew, he had lifted her up off the counter and put her down on the floor. She could feel the cool smoothness of ceramic tiles against her back. Her red jersey polo was gone and she couldn’t remember it coming off. The air conditioner was turned up high and she was freezing. She felt pliant and stiff at once, like folded meringue.

“Jesus Christ,” Kevin said. “Are we really going to get away with this?”

“Yes,” Sarah told him.

Then she pulled off her skirt by herself and threw it over her head.

B
Y THE TIME PATSY
MacLaren had finished her errands and arrived in West Philadelphia, it was noon. The back of the Volvo was now loaded with packages wrapped in plain brown paper. Patsy’s thin silk blouse was damp with sweat across the shoulder blades. Out on the street, people were moving slowly. College students were walking around with their shirts unbuttoned and their blue jeans cut off high on the legs. She was only a few blocks from the University of Pennsylvania. This was not Philadelphia’s best neighborhood. She would have gone somewhere else if she had had a choice, but she hadn’t. She circled one block and then the next. She found a high-rise parking garage and turned into its entry lane. The man in the little glass booth was half asleep. Patsy had to honk the horn to get his attention.

The man in the little glass booth was used to people just driving through. All you had to do coming in was take a ticket. It was going out you had to talk to somebody about, so that you knew what you owed and you could pay. Patsy waited patiently while the man readjusted himself, shifted from one foot to the other, slid back the little glass window, leaned out. Then she said, “Do I have to get a special ticket for all day? Or do I just settle that when I come out?”

The man in the little glass booth blinked. He was old—so old, Patsy wondered if he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. She leaned closer to the driver’s side door so that he would be sure to see her. She stuck her head out the window so that she could be sure he would hear.

“For an all-day ticket—” she said again.

“You can’t have an all-day ticket,” the man interrupted her. “It’s already noon. You won’t have been here all day.”

There was a certain logic in this. Patsy counted to ten in her head. “Is that a rule?” she asked him. “To get an all-day ticket you have to come in in the morning?”

“It’s not a rule,” the man said. “It’s just common sense.”

“But if it’s not a rule, I could buy an all-day ticket now,” Patsy pointed out. “There wouldn’t be any reason not to.”

“Sure there would be a reason not to,” the man said. “It wouldn’t make any sense.”

Patsy tapped the windshield with her fingernail, meaning to point to the sign that hung from the rafters just a little way ahead. “It would be cheaper,” she pointed out. “If I’m going to stay here for at least six hours, and I am, it would be cheaper to buy an all-day ticket.”

“That doesn’t sound right,” the man said.

“It is right though,” Patsy told him. “It’s a dollar fifty an hour, for six hours that’s nine dollars. But it’s only seven dollars for an all-day ticket. So you see, if I buy an all-day ticket I save—”

“Two dollars,” the man said.

“Right,” Patsy said.

The man leaned back against the far side of the booth and scratched his ear. He was really an awful man, Patsy thought, filthy and tired. He had deep streaks of black under his fingernails and smudges on his skin everywhere Patsy could see it. The hair on his arms was matted and slick. She could just imagine him sleeping between the garbage cans in the alley out back every night when his work was finished. She had no idea at all how people were chosen to do this kind of work.

He came back to her side of the booth and leaned out the little window again. “All right,” he said. “I can sell you an all-day ticket.”

“Fine,” Patsy told him.

“The thing is, you have to pay for an all-day ticket in advance. The whole seven dollars right this minute.”

“No problem at all.” Patsy unzipped the top of her thick black Coach bag and pulled out her wallet. It was a Coach wallet too. Stephen had always liked Coach. Patsy took out a five and two ones and handed them over. “Here you are,” she said.

The man took the seven dollars and put it in his gray tin lock box. Then he shuffled around among his papers for a moment while he found a stiff piece of oaktag that Patsy presumed was the all-day ticket. He stamped it with a hand stamp and gave it to her.

“There it is,” he said.

It was stamped
PAID
. Patsy put it in the visor over her head.

“Thank you,” she told him.

“I guess that’s how people get to be rich people like you,” the man said. “Playing all the angles.”