Possessions (37 page)

I'll go home and cry, she thought. I haven't done that for a long time.

“My, my,” Leslie said as they reached the ground floor.
“That's a flashy lady Derek found to take your place tonight.”

Katherine followed her look in time to see Melanie put her arm through Derek's and whisper in his ear.

Claude made a sound between a cough and a snort. But his voice was level. “I suppose Ross was too busy with his new plaza. Good of Derek to accompany his sister-in-law.”

“The protective family lawyer,” said Katherine, as much to her own surprise as to Claude's. “Leslie, we should get to your ceremony.”

But Derek had seen her and with a quick word to Melanie, who turned a frozen face to Katherine, he made his way toward them through the crowd. “Claude,” he said as they shook hands. Leslie forced him to shake hers by holding it out and waiting. “Leslie . . . Katherine . . .” He glanced from one to the other as if trying to decide which one was Claude's companion. “A pleasant surprise.”

“An understatement,” Leslie murmured, the words almost lost in the noise of the crowd.

Claude heard. He smiled and took her arm. “The sooner you get that award, the sooner we can escape these crowds. Katherine?” He offered her his other arm.

Katherine was looking at Derek, her thoughts racing.

Derek and Melanie.

Derek and Katherine.

Derek and Jennifer.

“Katherine?” Claude repeated.

“If you could wait,” Derek said to her.

She nodded. “Do you mind, Leslie? I'll catch up.”

“Lovely dinner,” Leslie said, kissing her cheek. “Thank you.”

“It was your dinner. I should be thanking you.”

“You know what I mean. See you soon.”

Katherine watched them disappear in the throng, then turned back to Derek. “Was there something special you wanted?”

“Don't talk to me that way.” He put his arm around her waist and began to lead her toward a nearby coffee house.

“Derek, you can't—Melanie is—” She looked, but Melanie was gone. “Where is she?”

“I assume she's gone home or found other friends. I told her I wanted to talk to you. She's very understanding.”

That is a joke, Katherine thought as Derek moved ahead to
talk to the hostess. Somehow, in the crowded room, an empty table appeared. He held her chair. “Was there something special you wanted?”

“Yes. I want to ask you—”

“Wait.” He ordered cappuccino for both of them and sat back. “You look very lovely. How curious, that we are together here after all. As soon as we drink our coffee, which will give us time to adjust to our sudden good fortune, I shall introduce you to some friends upstairs who can be very useful to you.” He contemplated her. “What is the matter?”

“I was wondering . . . about Melanie—”

“Here you are now,” the waitress said gaily. She set mugs of the foaming coffee before them, with spoons and paper napkins.

“Melanie,” Derek said flatly. “What would you want to know about Melanie?”

“Not only Melanie. Jennifer, too. Jennifer and Melanie—and me. I wondered why—when there are so many women in the world—you've gotten involved with the three who are closest to your brother and your cousin.”

Not a muscle moved in his face or his body as he looked at Katherine through the steam curling up from their coffees. Then she saw the taut vein in his neck. “You've gone somewhat beyond your territory, my dear,” he said at last. His voice was light, almost pleasant. “You know very little about us, or, indeed, about anything, you've been Craig's sheltered little weed for so long. You seem to think that because you've learned to look like a flower you understand the garden. You have neither the knowledge nor the authority to speak about the things of the world. They are far beyond your comprehension.” He drank from his mug. “I've been patient with you; the smallest reward you could give me would be to understand that it is better to remain silent than to demonstrate that you are a fool.”

His light voice, almost a monotone, was a thin blade, cutting through the noise and laughter at the crowded tables, sliding coldly into Katherine. Her breath came faster. She remembered the desire that had eaten at her for so long and wondered at it. Surely it had been for someone else. “It doesn't help to call me a fool. That won't change the fact that you've been using me. You have been, haven't you, Derek? Because I'm married
to Craig and fifteen years hasn't been long enough for you to stop hating him. And you don't like Ross either. I don't know why, but it doesn't matter. And Melanie is married to Ross. And Jennifer was Craig's favorite.”

“Katherine.” His face and voice had not changed, but the muscles in his neck were quivering ropes. “You are in a singularly poor position to talk about being used. For months you have used me as your guide into a world that otherwise would have been completely closed to you. You have used me for lessons in behavior and for satisfying your insatiable need for praise; as an escort to replace the husband who discarded you, and for sexual titillation without a sexual liaison. You're a good match for your husband; both of you run from responsibility.”

Katherine's face burned. “You mean my responsibility was to pay for your services with sex.”

He let out a long breath, relaxing the explosive pressure behind his rigid muscles. “This will stop. Now. I am not ready to end our curious affair—”

“But I am.” Breathing rapidly, Katherine leaned forward. “I couldn't go on now. Because even though I did use you—you're right, of course; you've given me a great deal—but did I really take anything from you that you didn't want to give? You never said a specific coin was necessary to pay for what you did for me.” Feeling ashamed, she held her head high.

“How could I go on after this?”

“Are you asking for advice? Listen to me. You have grandiose ideas about making something of yourself, but you are no one in this city; you have nothing. The best thing for you is to go back to Vancouver, get some simple job that you can keep for more than a few months, and wait for your pathetic husband to crawl back into your lap, where he belongs and where you probably like him best.”

Katherine looked at him in disbelief. “Is that a threat?”

“I never threaten.” He picked up his mug and showed a flicker of surprise as he found it empty. “But if you were not a fool you would have learned something about power by now—in our family and in this city. That, too, was offered for your use; you had a choice between your husband's cowardice and the terms I might have offered if you'd been willing to be what I wanted. But you were afraid of that and threw it away.”

“I didn't—” A wave of revulsion made her choke. She fumbled blindly in her purse to take out a five-dollar bill and put it on the table. “This is for my coffee.” She stood, looking at him as if he were a small figure in a painting. “I won't try to pay for the food and drinks you've bought me since October; I paid for them in the last few minutes by listening to you insult me. I don't know anything about your kind of power because I don't care about it. I want a family, not a battlefield, and I wanted companionship from you, not a contest. If you do have power, that only proves to me that a man can be handsome and charming and powerful, and still, underneath, crude and vulgar. And that kind of man I don't want to see again.”

She took a step back as his face darkened with fury, then turned, forcing her way through the crowd. Unexpectedly, violently, she began to tremble, and she let herself be carried along with the brightly colored mass of people to an arch across the square, and through it, to the street. It was quieter there, almost peaceful. It's all right, she said to herself. It's all right. Everything is all right.

And as a cab came to a stop in response to her raised arm, she knew that, in fact, everything
was
all right. Once before, after she decided she would not sleep with Derek, she'd felt as if a burden had been lifted from her. Now another was gone. She did not want him; she did not need him. She was free.

R
OSS swiveled his chair to look through the window behind him. His gaze took in the steady stream of traffic on the Embarcadero, and beyond it the city's bustling piers, stretching like thin fingers into the choppy, deep blue bay. Two years earlier, when he was expanding his company to work on BayBridge Plaza, he had moved into this building, a former icehouse converted to bright office suites with interior brick walls and tall windows reaching exposed-beam ceilings. He had furnished his own office in rosewood and leather, with patterned American Indian rugs on the floor. No outside sounds breached the thick walls, and in the silence Ross let himself daydream about Paris.

“Work with me,” Jacques had urged earlier, on the telephone. In college he and Ross had shared an apartment; since then, across the thousands of miles between them, they had shared ideas about work, wives, their countries, and those thoughts often expressed more easily with someone far away. Now Jacques Duvain, believer in the new and modern, was in the midst of renovating a forty-room Parisian townhouse built
in 1605, converting it to four apartments of ten rooms each. “You always preach to me—‘Keep the past; as much as possible, keep the past.' Here is the past and I am being paid to keep it. Work with me on the Place des Vosges; be my consultant.”

“I know nothing about renovating seventeenth-century French townhouses,” Ross had said.

“And I,” Jacques promptly replied, “know little of new American renovation techniques. We will learn from each other. Besides, is this not a perfect way to pry my friend from his American drafting table to visit with me?”

Place des Vosges.
Ross pictured in his mind the magnificent square of brick and plaster townhouses surrounding a park, once the Paris residences of the royal court, lately—having survived almost four hundred years of use and misuse—being bought by investors for renovation as condominiums, shops, and restaurants. On his last trip to Paris, two years earlier, Ross had been given a tour of the square by Jacques, and he remembered still the elegant dimensions of the rooms, the grandeur of curving stairways, carved moldings and ceilings, and the intimacy of private courtyards hidden in the center of each of the houses.

He had wanted to go back, but work on BayBridge intervened. Over the two years, Jacques had sent him progress reports that in many ways matched the progress of BayBridge; now he was ready to make his detailed plans, and he wanted Ross to join him.

But I have two major projects already, Ross thought, brooding at the view from his window. BayBridge, which is just taking shape, and my marriage, which is losing whatever shape it had.

“Mrs. Hayward is here,” his secretary said over the intercom. “Should I call the others to tell them the meeting will be late?”

Her words were carefully chosen. Ross knew, from past experience, they meant there was a storm on Melanie's face that probably could not be dealt with in the five minutes before his scheduled meeting. “Yes, do that,” he said. “I'll let you know when we can get started. And tell Mrs. Hayward—”

But Melanie was already there, closing his office door as she walked in. With her ebony hair and tanned skin, wearing
a white silk blouse and red suit cut geometrically to make her shoulders broader and her hips narrower, she looked like a drawing in a fashion magazine—even, Ross thought, to the cold, faintly defiant look with which she swept his office, just as models sweep the audience as they glide down the runway.

Melanie glided across the office to drop her purse and gloves on his desk. “I was shopping and had some extra time, so I decided to stop by and talk.”

Flattering, he thought. But probably not true; she came expressly to talk, since we don't talk at home. Which means there's a crisis. He went to a credenza near a leather couch and chairs grouped beside the high windows. “Coffee?”

“You could offer me a martini.”

“If I had it. The best I can do is coffee.”

She shrugged and sat on the edge of the couch, drumming her fingernails on the glass coffee table. “Wilma tells me your Mr. Macklin is getting a divorce.”

“He's not mine. I don't even know him well enough to be interested in his affairs.” Ross handed her a cup and carried his own around the table to sit beside her. “Do you?”

“I'm interested in divorce.”

“So you've told me. Wilma's stock in trade.” He was playing for time; he knew she had not meant Wilma's gossip. “Was there something special you stopped by to talk about?”

With an exasperated clatter Melanie set her cup on the glass table. “Do you have to be difficult? Couldn't you once, just one goddamn time, be understanding? I'm not talking about Wilma; I'm talking about me.
I
am interested in divorce because
I
want a divorce. I've—”

“Just a minute. Wait.” They had always stopped short of this point. “We've never talked about this; we never even talked about finding a way to—”

“What difference does it make? I've found somebody who's better for me than you, somebody who really cares about
me,
about what
I
want and how
I
feel and what's good for
me.
So I want a divorce. Right away.”

“Someone else?” He hadn't heard any gossip; he'd never thought of that. “Who is it?”

“It doesn't matter. All that matters is that I've found someone who really cares about
me,
who pays attention to me and satisfies me—”

“Can you control your teenage tantrum?” Ross asked bitingly. “And use a few words besides
I
and
me?
”