Storm Tide (33 page)

Judith made her entrance in a red crepe dress, devastating but simple,
slit along the side with a U-neck just low enough to show the slightest hint of décolleté. Between her breasts she wore a heavy silver necklace; her earrings were discs of hammered silver. She had changed for the party but also for me. Our eyes met and did not let go. “I called the town clerk. I couldn’t wait,” she said between gritted teeth. “They’re only three-quarters counted.” Later, over the dancing, she shouted, “David! I just got word. They’ll be finished by eleven.”

The music was a mix of sixties rock and big band swing. Mattie was doing a lindy with the passionate plumber, placing her palm over her bosom to cover it whenever she did a dip backwards. The Birdman, with no party of his own, was chewing Gordon’s ear off. If Gordon hadn’t looked tired during the last week of the campaign, he did now. Judith got him into a comfortable chair. Stumpy Squeer cleared himself a corner of the buffet table; a fork in one hand, a beer in the other, he looked alternately at each as if unable to choose which to place in his mouth. Twice Natasha called from school, and twice Judith told her that they were still counting ballots. Tommy had come in (without Michelle) and was hunched over the bar. Judith looked worried about the election results, about me, about her guests’ wine sloshing over the Xerox machine.

At five to eleven I was summoned to the telephone. “Hello, David,” a woman said somberly. “It is my sworn duty as clerk of the Town of Saltash to call each of the candidates in descending order of the number of votes they received ….” As I waited, I realized the music had stopped. A crowd of perspiring bodies had formed a horseshoe around me. For all that I’d convinced myself I didn’t want to run, blood beat against my temples like a rubber mallet. “And I’m calling you first.”

“That means I won?”

The cheer was so loud I didn’t hear her response. My knees threatened to give. Had Gordon not been the first to shake my hand, had a hundred people not lined up to wish me well, I might have run to Judith’s arms. I might have rushed her upstairs to the loft and knelt in front of her to press my cheek to her belly. I wanted to undress her slowly and thank her in the dark. She had given me much more than help; she had given me a new vision of myself, proven to me I could win again. “Thank you so much, thank you,” I said, to anyone and everyone, fighting my way to Judith, drawing her into a corner.

“I knew you could do it! I knew you could!” She pressed her lips to my cheek, demurely, for Gordon was here and she would never embarrass
him. “My friends!” Suddenly she was addressing everyone in the room. “I know all of you are as proud as I am. Not only of David,” she linked her arm tightly in mine, for all to see, “but of yourselves. For what we’ve accomplished. David Greene is the rallying point for a new kind of politics, an era of open, accessible, democratic government in the life of this town.” Over the applause she said only to me, “You came through. You stuck with it.” I could barely hear her. “I’m so proud of you.”

“Judith, I want you.”

Through a smile, just beneath the noise of the crowd, she said, “Can you stay with me tonight? Can you come back to the house?”

“Yes, yes,” I said. “Why not?” But followed the doubt in her eyes to the crowd in front of me, parting for a woman in a fringed western skirt and satin blouse, with tears running into her smile and a little boy in pajamas in her arms.

Crystal spoke as if there was a period at the end of every word. “We. Are. So. Proud. Of you. Tell him, Laramie.”

“I love you, Daddy!” Laramie jumped into my arms. There was nothing I could do but catch him as the crowd stepped back and sighed. A flashbulb popped. Judith was gone.

The music began again. A new line formed at the buffet table. Cars streamed into the parking lot. Word had gotten out. Even Holly came, leading my mother in her royal-blue suit. The forces of good had won. A new day was dawning in Saltash. I swung around, searching for Judith. Laramie spotted the desserts and asked for a piece of chocolate cake. I lowered him into Crystal’s arms.

Judith was not looking for me. She was standing behind Gordon, massaging his shoulders as he held forth in a circle of friends.

“I lost you,” I said. “In the crowd.”

She smiled coldly. She could hardly say what was on her mind. She could hardly ask, Why, David? Why did you do this to yourself? Why did you sink so deeply, so unnecessarily? Why couldn’t you trust me and Gordon? Why couldn’t you give us a chance? “Yes, it’s gotten very crowded in here.”

“Could I see you tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow.” For a moment I was sure she’d say no. She seemed taller, harder. There was no trace of emotion on her face. “Yes. That would be a good idea. Call my office. We have a great deal to talk about.”

People touched my shoulder. They grabbed my hand. One man said, “You must be exhausted, son. You look ready to keel over.”

Crystal had come to stand beside me again, pressed into me as she held Laramie upright. He was falling asleep on his feet.

My mother studied my face. “I thought you’d be happy now that you’ve won? Aren’t you happy?”

“Sure, Mom. Just a little tired, that’s all.”

“You look as if you’re ready to kill somebody, doesn’t he, Holly?” She had no idea who. Or why.

J
UDITH

    The morning after the election, Gordon slept until ten. Judith worked at the kitchen table, hoping to have breakfast with him before she took off. He came out grinning with pride after a very personal victory over Johnny Lynch. But he knew what was on her mind. He said, “Look, you don’t understand because you aren’t susceptible in the same way. You’re divinely pragmatic, sane and sensible. But I wasn’t. I was as stupid as David with some women I got involved with.”

Judith was forcing herself not to pace. It was not fair to Gordon to dump her grief on him. “Never that stupid. She’s one of the most blatant manipulators I’ve ever encountered. I’ve met murderers I trusted more.”

“Judith, isn’t it possible she’s just desperate? A woman with a family that’s apparently of no use to her, a kid to raise alone. Little training or education. The boy’s father doesn’t help her. She’s in that old situation of women, where she needs a man to support her. It’s unfortunate for us she picked David.”

He was right, of course, about Crystal’s desperation, but that didn’t excuse David. “But he picked her too! He could have refused to allow her to move in. He never had to get involved in the first place!”

“Remember the second Mrs. Stone? Beverly, now Caldwell. Beverly eats gold. Her proper environment is pure money. She can’t breathe without it. Yet it took me ten years and two children to figure out I could never satisfy her. And to bruise my ego further, while I was used to being now and then unfaithful, I was not accustomed to having it done to me. She had an affair with her therapist. She had an affair with Larry’s orthodontist. Believe me, I feel for David. I understand. That bimbo had me eaten up with jealousy.”

“You call Beverly a bimbo, but you invite her here every summer.”

“She was my wife, Judith. She’s the mother of two of my children. I have an obligation to get on with her. Besides, I can enjoy her now that I don’t have to support her. You have to admit, she can be funny. She knows how to enjoy herself. Dying puts a lot of things into perspective, including exes.”

“She drinks like a fish.”

“I used to, my Judith. I used to do the same.” Gordon sighed, collapsing on the couch. Half an hour later he returned to bed. Every day he had managed to get up, but now that David’s campaign was over, he seemed empty. He was supposed to be revising one of his most famous books:
The Sociology of Fantasy: Americans Who Want to Be Somebody Else
. Over the past months, he had made scant progress. She wished she could provide him with an assistant who would keep him interested.

Thursday, Judith was glad her office was air-conditioned. The temperature had risen twenty-five degrees since yesterday. As suddenly as if the heat had hatched them, tourists were everywhere, driving too fast or too slow on every road, standing in clumps staring at buildings as if the town were a museum. She had a court date tomorrow, and the tides were not cooperative, so she was staying in her office. She expected David, but she was feeling anxiety instead of pleasant anticipation. She ran over her memos, her notes and her brief while she waited. The leaking roof case was finally coming up.

Mattie had left for the day. Judith rubbed her temples. A year ago the thought that she could love a man besides Gordon had appeared absurd. She simply did not look at other men as sexual or romantic objects. Gordon had primed her for experiencing a possible attraction, but until David, none had occurred. Then it had happened quickly, without her willing it or even becoming aware until it was there, full grown, in the middle of her consciousness. She had not quite realized until one night in her office when they were sitting before her gas fire discussing his running for selectman, that she was going to become involved with him. She had not considered the possibility. She was used to men looking at her as David had, with evident attraction, but in fourteen years she had not responded.

She wondered sometimes if she had not plunged into this out of her habit of pleasing Gordon. She knew he was worried about his ultimate creation, his menagerie of buildings, as Natasha worried about the animals she had brought home and who now lived with them, cared for by Judith. They were both terrified she would move away.

Now she considered herself a fool. She had fallen hard, seriously, passionately, for a man who seemed to prefer a coarse and manipulative woman—younger, yes, a liar. Who had grown up here. Who had a child for whom David seemed to care a great deal. All those points Judith had gone over with Hannah, with Barbara, with Natasha, and, in a more restrained way, with Gordon. She had found herself distracted in court last week when she should have been paying close attention to a hostile witness’s testimony. She had not been so sloppy and absorbed in something
irrelevant to a case since Gordon had been diagnosed with cancer. Her intense focus was her best weapon and she had almost lost it. She owed her clients a housecleaning.

David stood in the parking lot, looking weary and uncertain. He could not guess she was observing him. He grimaced, almost a wince, and then came slowly toward the building. Did he dread seeing her? Did he guess how estranged she felt? More likely the latter. He was observant and smart about people; mostly, that is. He had no smarts about Crystal.

She offered him coffee. They sat facing each other. She needed the distance. They spoke for a few minutes about the election. However important that had felt twenty-four hours before, it did not seem to be foremost on either of their minds. “David, don’t you find it a little embarrassing to have Laramie, as sweet as he seems to be, call you Daddy? He has a real father, doesn’t he?”

“He was abusive. Violent. Maybe dealing drugs … I’ve never told Laramie to call me Daddy. Crystal tells him to. I can’t hurt him by telling him not to. I can’t, Judith.”

“Do you intend to be his father?”

David shrugged, running his hands roughly through his dark coarse hair. He was darkly tanned. His eyes seemed lighter than ever, chips of something luminous and rare. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Are you going to marry her?”

He gripped the sides of his chair. “No, but what am I supposed to do? I feel trapped. She had no place to go. Laramie has to have a home.”

“David, she has a job. She ought to be getting child support from the boy’s father. Do you want me to check if Massachusetts has a reciprocal agreement with Washington? I would pursue this for her if you want me to.”

“I should try calling him,” David said dispiritedly.

She wanted to shake him. He seemed flaccid, without will. “I ask you again, do you want to marry her? You seem bound on that road.”

“I can’t hurt the boy, Judith.”

“Do you think you’d feel this guilty about a boy you met twelve weeks ago if you saw your son on a more regular basis? If you felt truly involved with Terry?”

“I can’t deal with that many ‘ifs.’ Terry’s my son, and the more I’m around Laramie, the bigger hole I feel in my life, hardly seeing him ….” He shook his head as if he had no hope.

“How long do you intend for her to live with you?”

“Just until she finds a decent place.”

“Is she looking?”

“Is this your best courtroom manner?” He tried a grin. It didn’t come off.

“I use the tools I have at hand to come at the truth, David.” She forced herself to lean back in her chair. “I assume your lack of answer means she is not looking. So you plan to live with her until death do you part?”

“I read the real estate ads to her every week.”

“David, we can barely see each other. When we do, I never know when she is going to have the boy call or charge in herself. We can’t be together in your place. You’re always nervous with me now. If you want to go on seeing me, give her a real honest deadline.”

“I’ll try to talk to her again. I’ll do something. I promise.”