Sight Unseen (16 page)

Within minutes they were all hard at work, and after a half-hour Lockwood had filled up sheet after sheet with Barths, Bergens,
Bornas, Burzows, Buxtehudes, Brunswicks, Bendorfs, and Backnangs. Manners, who had sat on the sidelines with a sour expression
on his face during Lockwood’s opening speech and had smirked and shaken his head over the opening stages of the clerks’ search,
got interested in spite of himself as a debate rose between Lockwood and the ladies whether “Berouthe” was German. He didn’t
show it, but Lockwood figured that Manners was a bit jealous over the flirting that flipped back and forth between Lockwood
and the ladies.

After three hours, it looked as if they would finish up in another hour. Lockwood went down the hall and asked the agent in
charge if he could use an office with a phone. He called Myra at her office at Northstar.

“Oh Bill,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d have any time for me.”

“I don’t,” Lockwood answered. “I’m making time. It’s all in Manners’ hands now. He’s got over two hundred names and addresses
to follow up, and his manpower can do that job best. Have dinner with me.”

“Aw,” she said, and sounded disappointed. “Is that all you have to offer?”

His heart leapt. “Dancing? A stroll in the moonlight?”

Her laugh sent a thrill through him. “I was looking for even more,” she said. “Oh, well, I guess I’ll have to look elsewhere.…”

“Don’t bet on it. It’s three. I’ll leave now and pick you up as soon as I get out there.”

“I’ll be waiting,” she said, and he heard a promise in her voice that excited him.

“Can I bring you something from the city?”

She laughed. “Don’t stop for anything. I’d rather have the extra time with you. Oh Bill—hurry, hurry, hurry. Leave now.”

Delighted, he laughed. “I’m leaving now.”

Lockwood phoned Hank and had him get the Cord ready. He was on the road in fifteen minutes, yet the trip out wasn’t the fun
he’d assumed it would be.

This afternoon all the traffic seemed too slow. He had an urge to run his car through the other slowpokes, and had to restrain
these impulses half a dozen times. He hardly understood his ragged feelings—after all, a drive on an April afternoon out into
the country to take one of the prettiest and most delightful girls he had ever known out to dinner and dancing and then very
likely into the sack—what was wrong with him? How come he felt so crabby?

Was it because he was leaving the case? Manners would put a dozen men to run down Mr. L.B. and Lockwood would be of relatively
little help. Sure, Mr. Gray would say he should work under Manners’ direction, adding one more person to the T-man’s manpower,
but screw it—Lockwood had been up all last night, and he wanted something more tonight than ringing doorbells.

No, there was something else. He tossed possibilities back and forth. Was it Josef Dzeloski? Those mikes planted at Barbara
Wilson’s cottage were still loose ends. Could Josef be behind this theft? Still, if Manners found Mr. L.B., Dzeloski would
either be implicated or be exonerated.

As he drove, Lockwood thought and thought, struggling to figure out what was bothering him, without luck. He saw that his
impulse to go to Patchogue wasn’t just for an evening’s entertainment, that he had wanted some time alone to think, and he
liked to think and drive the Cord at the same time.

Something was wrong, seriously wrong, and the closer he got to Myra’s house in the Moriches, the more certain he was of it
and the more it bothered him. He was eager to arrive, and yet dreaded it. Once there, he knew he would be so involved entertaining
Myra that he would put this aside, and he wanted it settled before he got there. Of course, Myra wasn’t dumb. He could bring
this up. Myra could help him figure out what was bothering him. His sudden inner lurch of refusal—he almost hit a car in the
parking lane—woke him up.

He laughed and laughed.

His nagging hidden problem was her! Lockwood dreaded coming out here to see her, and he couldn’t stay away. He laughed again
as he saw it. Him, William Lockwood, in
love
with Myra Rodman!

Warm, tender, and rapturous feelings swept over him, making him faint and dizzy. He fought for control. In a single instant
he saw the two of them as a single family, and then saw and felt the flash and caress of small chubby limbs. He wanted children
by her.

He had another half-hour of driving to go, and he was tempted to pull over and think this through, but out here there was
little traffic so he could both drive and think. He lit a cigarette.

This had never happened before. Up to now, Lockwood’s enjoyment of his bachelor status and its dozens of women had been simple.
Settling down had only occurred to him fleetingly, and never with such a thud of certainty.

He felt both pleased and wary. He didn’t trust himself in this—but why not? Because he couldn’t decide how to play tonight,
whether to say little and just watch how the evening went, to see how he was with her and she with him, or to share the news
of his feelings with her.

After all, what an explosion of good feelings if she felt the same way!

And she might not. That thought sobered him. What would it be like if she was married to that joke of being Madame Curie that
Greer and Dzeloski made about her? Something hard and ugly jerked in Lockwood’s stomach, a lurch that made him angry. Why
did she have to be so involved with that scientific nonsense? If another man beat him out, okay—but a goddamned bombsight?

After all, Myra was no spring chicken; and pretty and charming as she was, she must have given up man after man over the years
for her work, and what made him think he would win where others had failed? And even if he did snare her, would she leave
her job? If she didn’t, they could have no life if she kept her job in Patchogue and he his in Manhattan.

A flood of similar concerns rose in Lockwood, and he wanted to drive back to Manhattan and sit down with a bottle of Canadian
and sort them out, but he didn’t dare. He had a chance to see her, and he wasn’t passing it up. He wouldn’t bring this up
tonight; he would live with it and with her and with himself a bit more and see how all this went—but God, how the possibilities
excited him!

When she answered the doorbell, it was anticlimatic. He answered her big smile with his smaller grin, which he was sure gave
away his feelings, but she just said the ordinary things a woman says when a man comes to take her out to dinner, and he replied
with ordinary remarks in return.

Lockwood went through wooden motions in a light daze of talking, making her and him a drink, lighting cigarettes, and then
helping her on with her wrap.

He put the top down on the Cord, and as they drove, he was aware of the smells of the woods and grass and maybe a dozen different
flowers. He noted all this and paid no attention to it, only to notice how keyed up and alive he was. After all, in his whole
life he had hardly noticed twice that flowers had nice smells, much less that each smelled differently.

He made the right noises as she talked about the work at Northstar. Josef was going down to Washington to see if he couldn’t
get more appropriations so they could begin to remake the bombsight. Senator Longridge, the committee’s chairman, wanted to
transfer the contract to a company in his state, and Josef would have to sell the committee on Northstar all over again. Meanwhile,
she and her staff were drawing up new plans and struggling to figure out how long they could afford to work without pay. He
pulled into Gurney’s parking lot.

The headwaiter remembered them from last week, and on feeling the crinkle of Lockwood’s bill in his palm certainly had their
same table.

“What’s the matter, Bill?” she asked.

He jumped a bit. “Nothing. Why?”

“You seem preoccupied.”

He smiled. “We’re getting close, we think. They just barely got away—we were hours behind the thieves.”

Her mouth and eyes opened wide with excitement. “Oh Bill, you mean Baby hasn’t left the country!”

He hated and loved her excitement over this hunk of metal.

“We don’t think it has.”

“You might get it back!”

“Manners will be knocking on over two hundred doors tonight looking for your kidnapped baby.”

He filled her in, within the limits of what he felt would not upset Manners and his agency. The story made her eyes shine,
but after that the meal flagged. Lockwood brought up subject after subject, and he could see she was making an effort, too,
but their conversation held no flash or sparkle. It felt to him as if two mechanical dolls were chattering together. He longed
to reach out for her hand, but he also wanted to sit back, for he was afraid of the consequences and didn’t trust himself.
His spirits drooped. What had happened to this afternoon—all that flash of emotion and the surge of excitement in the Cord—had
been some fluke of his hormones. He and Myra didn’t get along well enough to marry. If they were so bored tonight, what would
it be like in twelve months or twenty years?

Nothing at Gurney’s helped either. The steaks arrived both overcooked and cold. Last week they had been served broccoli, tonight
dour-looking peas and carrots. The mousse cloyed, and the coffee tasted watery. They were two of twelve diners tonight in
a room large enough for two hundred, and the band limped through tunes that last week had been executed with dash and wit.

In silence he drove her home. He figured they had both given up. He didn’t know whether to press to stay tonight or simply
to give her a passionate kiss and make excuses about not getting any sleep last night, the long drive to Manhattan, and needing
to get back on the case. If he pressed her, he was sure she would turn him down, and he certainly didn’t want that on top
of his other, larger disappointment. On the other hand, he felt an obligation to press her a bit. Wouldn’t her feelings be
hurt if he simply said good night and left? Wouldn’t she feel that he had snubbed her?

He felt pulled in both directions—to stay and to go—when he pulled up to her house.

She said, “Come in and have a drink.”

“Gee, Myra, it’s getting late. I ought to get back. I was too tired to have—”

“Come in and have a drink,” she insisted, and she got out of the car and slammed the door angrily before he could refuse.

He watched her stride through the Cord’s headlamps at her no-nonsense speed and fought with himself. He didn’t want to go
in the house, yet he turned off the car lights and got out and followed her.

He found her sitting in the middle of the sofa in the living room. Her shoulders were scrunched together and her head was
bowed between her shoulders. She looked miserable.

“Sit down, Bill.”

He felt he had to drag himself through sand to get into a chair.

“I lied to you tonight,” she said. “That’s why the evening didn’t work.”

“Oh?” He looked at her sharply, with curiosity.

Myra nodded and threw him the barest of glances. Was she feeling as badly as he? He wondered if she had something to confess
about the bombsight.

“I wanted to play this cool and sophisticated,” she went on. “After all, I
am
thirty-two. I know what all the magazines say. Still, I did a lousy job at it.”

“At what?”

“Maybe we better not see each other again.” It had the form of a suggestion, but he heard very little in the way of give to
her tone.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

She sighed and looked at him through her bowed posture. “Bill, I can’t stop myself from saying this. I know I don’t have any
right to say it. But—I’m falling for you.” She looked more miserable, as if she might cry.

Within him something large and dangerous spun. He felt his finger scratch his chin, wondering how so much stubble got there.
Then he wondered why he was thinking about the stubble on his chin when she had just said something so important. The room
seemed full of dead objects and one dangerous vortex and unsettled all at once.

Myra continued. She didn’t look at him, and her face had withdrawn into itself. “Maybe all the women you go out with tell
you this. You’re very handsome and self-assured. But I can’t go out with you and play this sophisticated game of dating. In
and out of bed, as if it’s nothing. I’m just not that kind of woman.” She sat back and tossed her mane of hair. “I wish I
was, in a way. But I’m not. In a big sense this has been a first for me.”

Lockwood saw tears well up behind her eyes in a stretch of time that seemed hours. Her face blackened, and he was on his feet
and by her side before he was completely aware of whit he was doing. He held her to him, and she cried into the lapel of his
coat. Something within him relaxed and melted. He squeezed her and felt his tension flow out of him. Finally, they pulled
apart, and she gazed at him through her teary eyes.

“Bill, I’m such a fool!” she said.

“I love you, too.”

She snatched his soft handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped her eyes.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

He kissed her forehead gently. “It doesn’t feel like anything else I ever felt for another woman.”

She sniffled and laughed at the same time. “Maybe you just caught the flu.”

He took the handkerchief from her and wiped her face. She took his face in her hands and kissed him several times gently.
He kissed her back.

“No, you didn’t catch the flu,” she answered herself. “It’s been such a terrible evening. I thought you didn’t love me.”

“I thought you didn’t love me.”

They smiled.

“It’s been awful,” Myra said. “I didn’t know what I’d done wrong.”

“I thought I had misjudged you, me—us.”

They smiled again, this time with little hesitancy. Myra reached out to touch Lockwood’s face as if to make sure he was really
there.

“We didn’t tell each other what we were going through,” she said.

“No.”

“Let’s promise to tell each other the truth from now on. Always.”

“Yes.”

“You promise?”

“Yes, I promise.”