“I bought this red snapper out on the wharf this morning, fresh caught.” Violet Smith held the silver-lidded tray in front of her like a shield, half proudly, half defensively. “We should eat what the Lord provides for us in His seas and rivers instead of deliberately raising a bunch of cows and pigs and then slaughtering them.”
“Don’t proselytize,” Gilly said.
“I can’t do it if I don’t know what it means.”
“The hell you can’t.”
“Was I doing that what she said, Mr. Decker? Was I?... No? No. Mr. Decker says I wasn’t doing it. He shows good judgment. What a pity he can’t read. It diminishes a man not to be able to read his Bible.”
“He doesn’t own one.”
“It’s not too late. He could be saved in the nick of time like I was, Jesus be praised.”
“Just put the tray down and shut up.”
“I think he could be saved.”
“All right, work on it tonight at church. But kindly don’t use our real name. I won’t have a bunch of lunatics raving and ranting in public about us needing to be saved for committing God knows what sins. People might think this is a house full of thieves, crooks, murderers.”
“We are all flawed,” Violet Smith said coldly. “Just look who’s prosetizing now.”
“Proselytizing. And that’s not what it means.”
“Meaning is in the eye of the beholder. I think you were doing what you thought I was doing. Isn’t that right, Mr. Decker? Yes? He says yes.”
“Hurry up, you’ll be late for your meeting.”
Gilly looked at her wristwatch, noting with surprise how thin and wrinkled her arms were getting, as if her body were shrinking and aging in sympathy with Marco’s no matter how much food she ate or how many times Reed assured her she was still young. “You don’t look a day over forty,” Reed would say. “That’s because I’m not a day over forty, I’m ten years over forty.” “Oh, can that crap. Who counts, anyway?” She counted. He counted. Everybody counted, whether they admitted it or not. Age was the second thing a child learned. What’s your name, little girl? How old are you?... Gilda Grace Decker. I’m fifty.
Violet Smith put the tray on the adjustable metal table beside Marco’s chair and cranked the table to the correct height. “I forgot to give you Mr. Smedler’s message. He said eleven o’clock tomorrow morning in his office will be okay.”
“Thanks.”
“Some of these lawyers’ secretaries can be very snippy.”
“Yes, they can. Good night, Violet Smith.”
“Good night, Mrs. Decker. And you, too, Mr. Decker. I’ll be praying for you both.”
Gilly waited until the door closed behind her. Then she said to Marco, trying to sound quite casual, “It’s nothing for you to worry about, dear. I have to talk to Smedler about stocks, bonds, trusts, that sort of thing. Very dull, lawyerish stuff.”
It wasn’t dull, it wasn’t lawyerish, but this was not the time to tell her husband. He had to be told gradually and gently so he would understand that it wasn’t just a whim on her part. She had been thinking about it, no, planning it, for several months now. Each day it seemed more and more the right thing to do until now it was more than right. It was inevitable.
Two
The wind had come up during the night, a Santa Ana that brought with it sand and dust from the desert on the other side of the mountain. By midmorning the city was stalled as if by a blizzard. People huddled in doorways shielding their faces with scarves and handkerchiefs. Cars were abandoned in parking lots, and here and there news racks had overturned and broken and their contents were blowing down the street, rising and falling like battered white birds.
Smedler’s office was in a narrow three-story building in the center of the city a block from the courthouse. The lesser members of the firm shared the two bottom floors. Smedler, who owned the building, kept the third floor for himself. After an earthquake a few years ago he’d remodeled it so that the only inside access to his office was by a grille-fronted elevator. The arrangement gave Smedler a great deal of privacy and power, since the circuit breaker that controlled the electric current was beside his desk. If an overwrought or otherwise undesirable client was on the way up, Smedler could, by the mere thrust of a handle, cut off the electricity and allow the client time to acquire new insights on the situation while trapped between floors.
Gilly knew nothing about the circuit breaker but she had a morbid fear of elevators, which seemed to her like little prisons going up and down. Instead she used the outside entrance, a very steep narrow staircase installed as a fire escape to appease the building-code inspector. The door at the top was locked and Gilly had to wait for Smedler’s secretary, Charity Nelson, to open it.
Charity made much the same use of the bolt as Smedler did of the current breaker. “Who’s there?”
“Mrs. Decker.”
“Who?”
“Decker. Decker.”
“What do you want?”
“I have an appointment with Mr. Smedler at eleven o’clock.”
“Why didn’t you use the elevator?”
“I don’t like elevators.”
“Well, I don’t like taxes but I pay them.”
Charity unlocked the door. She was a short wiry woman past sixty with thick grey eyebrows so lively compared to the rest of her face that they seemed controlled by some outside force. She wore a pumpkin-colored wig, not for the purpose of fooling anyone — she frequently removed it if her scalp itched or if the weather turned warm or if she was especially busy — but because orange was her favorite color. She had been with Smedler for thirty years through five marriages, two of her own, three of his.
“Really, Mrs. Decker, I wish you’d use the elevator like everyone else. It would save me getting up from my desk, walking all the way across the room to unlock the door and then walking all the way back to my desk.”
“Sorry I inconvenienced you.”
“It’s such a lovely little elevator and it would save you all that huffing and puffing. I bet you’re a heavy smoker, aren’t you?”
“I don’t smoke.”
“Just out of shape, eh? You should try jogging.”
“Karate appeals to me more at the moment,” Gilly said.
She wondered why so many employees these days acted as though they worked for the government and were not obliged to show respect to anyone. Charity’s general attitude indicated that she was in the pay of the IRS, CIA and FBI and possibly God, in addition to Smedler, Downs, Castleberg, MacFee and Powell.
“Smedler’s waiting for you in his office.” Charity pressed a buzzer. “And Aragon will be up in a few minutes.”
“Who’s Aragon?”
“He’s your boy. You did specify a bilingual. N’est-ce pas?”
“N’est-ce pas. In a private, personal call to Mr. Smedler.”
“All of Smedler’s calls go through me. I am his confidential secretary.”
“You’re also a smart-ass. N’est-ce pas?”
Charity’s bushy eyebrows scurried up into her wig and hid for a moment under the orange curls like startled mice. When they reappeared they looked smaller, as if stunted by the experience. “Crude.”
“Effective, though.”
“We’ll see.”
Gilly went into Smedler’s office. He rose from behind his desk and came to greet her, a tall handsome man in his late fifties. He had known Gilly for thirteen years, since the day she married B. J. Lockwood. An old school chum of B. J.’s, Smedler had been an usher at both of his weddings. He could barely recall the first — to a socialite named Ethel — but he often thought of the second with a considerable degree of amazement. Gilly wasn’t young or especially pretty, but on that day, in her long white lace gown and veil, she’d looked radiant. She was madly in love. B. J. was short and fat and freckled and nobody had ever taken him seriously before. Yet there was Gilly, well over thirty and certainly old enough to know better, iridescing like a hummingbird whenever she looked at him. Smedler decided later that her appearance was, had to be, simply a matter of make-up, a dash of pink here, a silver gleam there, French drops to intensify the blue of her eyes. (He was frequently heard to remark during the next dozen years that it was not politics which made strange bedfellows, it was marriage.)