He looked at the floor and was surprised to see how bright the colors in the rug appeared in the firelight: the large, worn Oriental they had gotten years before, in Boston, that had once had to be folded over at one end because their room had been too small. It had been like a big, colorful wave, rolling over. That first apartment came back to him in startling detaiclass="underline" the drop-leaf table that now sat beside Sonja’s chair, with the leaves down, formerly their kitchen table. The chrome chairs they’d found at curbside on Boylston Street with the red plastic seats were gone, but the ceramic planter, now containing a large fern, sat a few feet from the fireplace. The underside of the leaves glowed silver in the firelight, so that it seemed a magic plant, a plant you would read about in a fairy tale. Perhaps that was what McCallum needed in the hospitaclass="underline" not serious literature, but picture books — photography, or an illustrated book of fables. His thoughts hovered around McCallum, and he remembered with a shiver McCallum’s blood on the walls. Was it possible, because of the colors within colors, that some blood might still be on the rug, indistinguishable in the complex geometric pattern? He was looking at the rug as if he held a great magnifying glass to his eye, yet the harder he stared, the more the details appeared fuzzily out of focus. He was quite certain that he should speak, say something immediately, yet it would of course be incredibly inappropriate to ask a question about the rug — an unanswerable question under any circumstances, how would Sonja know? Sonja. Her name made him realize her presence: she was slouched deep in the chair, biting her bottom lip, her hands tightly clasped on top of the tangled afghan. The fingers of her right hand, laced through the fingers of the left, nearly covered her wedding band. He looked at his own hand. He had never worn a wedding band. Did that mean anything, he wondered, though who should know the answer if not him? He looked again at the rug, thought the phrase: Rug pulled out from under. That was certainly what had happened to McCallum, and now it had just happened to him. Imagine McCallum’s horror when he realized his own wife was intent upon killing him. Imagine the things wives could do, the power they had. Sonja had just changed everything. He smiled a halfhearted smile, certain that she was both friend and enemy, and also hoping she’d understand his thoughts had been drifting. He felt paralyzed by stupidity. What could he say?
“Did you think you were in love with Tony?” he said.
“No,” she said. “It was a game. I realize that’s terrible. I had started to think of myself as so, you know, programmatic.”
“Programmatic?” he said, though he had silently resolved not to reveal the full extent of his stupidity by echoing her words. The words he had been most tempted to echo had been “Tony” and “over.” He thought the name. It didn’t have any good connotations. He remembered Tony had waited for them outside the police station, then had stood in the entranceway to the living room with him when the place was filled with police. But wait: What if they moved? What about leaving the rug behind? What if the two of them were cut free from the ordinariness of their lives — what if they really left the scene of the crime? Who knew how many times she had slept with Tony? Sane, stable Sonja. Sonja who had had an affair with her boss, whom she now hated, thank God, and it had happened because she’d felt programmatic.
“It’s okay,” he heard himself say.
Sonja’s frown deepened. “It is?”
“I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad—” What was he glad about? Nothing he could imagine. He finished the sentence: “I’m sorry you felt the way you did. I don’t think this has been a very good year for either one of us.”
“That’s all you’re going to say?”
“It does occur to me that it was rather odd you’d imply that I’d had an affair with Cheryl, while you didn’t rush to volunteer you’d been fooling around yourself.”
“I wasn’t any more sure of the timing than you were. I almost blurted it out the morning after McCallum spent the night. That would have made for an interesting day, wouldn’t it?”
“Do you think we could talk about this tomorrow?” he said. “I’m awfully confused. I didn’t expect to hear what I just heard. If there were clues, I didn’t pick up on them. I always thought he was an odd duck, so I guess on some level nothing he’s done could really surprise me. Did you think you were in love with him?”
“You already asked me that. I didn’t think that. We’d go into houses, houses that were for sale, empty houses, ugly houses, walking around with our checklist, I don’t know. I mean, of course that was my job, but it began to seem like we were inspecting tombs, or something. Caves. Big houses with the pipes drained and no heat, and no signs of life. Or at least it wasn’t recognizable life. They were like shells left behind when reptiles molted. It was the emptiness that started to get to me.”
“Why did it end?” he said. He had gotten up. He’d walked halfway across the floor.
“It couldn’t have gone on any longer,” she said. An evasive answer, but he preferred to think that Sonja had simply come to her senses.
“Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” he said.
“Do we have to?” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “Don’t you think this is the sort of thing we might talk about for more than a few minutes?”
“He said you wouldn’t care,” Sonja said.
“Well, I do care, but I’m in a state of shock.”
“It was stupid, wasn’t it? I could have thrown all this away. You might have stormed out of the house for good. You seem to be going to bed.”
“I am going to bed,” he said.
“You would have cared if I’d thrown it all away, right?”
“Yes,” he said. “But you’re telling me that was never your intention.”
“But if I had,” she said.
“Sonja,” he said, “I don’t think it’s fair that you’re asking for reassurance from me after hitting me over the head. Do you know what I mean?”
No answer.
He said, over his shoulder, as he walked out of the room, “Come to bed. We can talk about this tomorrow.”
When he left, she was a little in shock herself. Evie had advised her against saying anything. Evie’s reason for urging her not to confide in Marshall had come as something of a surprise, but she hadn’t been wrong. Evie had worried that Marshall wouldn’t be sufficiently enraged or jealous; basically, Evie had thought that he would insult her by not caring enough, which meant that Evie thought essentially what Tony thought. “Unemotive,” Evie had called him. Once out of childhood, it was the way he had always been. Evie accepted that — what did Evie not accept, once it was an established fact? — but also Marshall had been lucky. He had been raised by a woman who thought everyone made mistakes, and who included herself when she said that. How strange to think of Evie involved in physical passion — and with a person as cold as Marshall’s father had apparently been. In the nursing home he had lived in before he died, she had found out that his nickname was the Emperor. A man given to haughtiness and self-righteous pronouncements … who could imagine being in his arms? Then again, who would look at Tony Hembley, who was short and nervous and not very good looking, and decide to slip off her pants under her dress, pull the dress over her head, stand there, having quickly unfastened her bra, so that when he turned around from peering in a refrigerator where something spoiled seemed to be moldering, permeating the room with a sudden, ghastly odor — who would think anyone would respond so impulsively to Tony Hembley? That look on his face. He had flirted with her, but the quick strip had been her idea. She had almost told Evie exactly what she’d done, but now she was glad she’d held some things back. Evie had died thinking that although it was inadvisable to tell Marshall about Tony, he could nevertheless be expected to forgive her if she did say something, and that was what he seemed to be doing. And Evie had been right, too, about his drawing inward. There had been no professions of love, no pleading that she stay.