“I think we’ll have to do some further work on this in the morning,” Carella said judiciously. “In the meantime, they’re waiting for me back at the table.”
“Who’s they?” Meyer asked.
“Teddy. And Bert and his wife.”
“Some people get to eat in nice restaurants,” Meyer said, “while other people eat in prisons upstate.”
“I’ll talk to you in the morning,” Carella said.
“Yeah, good night,” Meyer said.
“Good night,” Carella said.
In bed with Teddy that night, holding her close in the dark, the rain lashing the windowpanes, Carella was aware all at once that she was not asleep, and he sat up and turned on the bed lamp and looked at her, puzzled.
“Teddy?” he said.
Her back was to him, she could not see his lips. He touched her shoulder and she rolled over to face him, and he was surprised to see that there were tears in her eyes.
“Hey,” he said, “hey, honey... what...?”
She shook her head and rolled away from him again, closing herself into her pillow, closing him out — if she could not see him, she could not hear him; her eyes were her ears, her hands and her face were her voice. She lay sobbing into the pillow, and he put his hand on her shoulder again, gently, and she sniffed and turned toward him again.
“Want to talk?” he said.
She nodded.
“What’s the matter?”
She shook her head.
“Did I do something?”
She shook her head again.
“What is it?”
She sat up, took a tissue from the box on the bedside table, blew her nose, and then put the tissue under her pillow. Carella waited. At last, her hands began to speak. He watched them. He knew the language, he had learned it well over the years, he could now speak it better than hesitantly with his own hands. As she spoke to him, the tears began rolling down her face again, and her hands fluttered and then stopped completely. She sniffed again, and reached for the crumpled tissue under her pillow.
“You’re wrong,” he said.
She shook her head.
“I’m telling you you’re wrong.”
She shook her head again.
“Honey, she likes you very much.”
Her hands began again. This time they spilled out a torrent of words and phrases, speaking to him so rapidly that he had to tell her to slow down, and even then continuing at a pace almost too fast for him to comprehend. He caught both her hands in his own, and said, “Now come on, honey. If you want me to listen...” She nodded, and sniffed, and began speaking more slowly now, her fingers long and fluid, her dark eyes glistening with the tears that sat upon them as she told him again that she was certain Augusta Kling didn’t like her, Augusta had said things and done things tonight—
“What things?”
Teddy’s hands moved again. The wine, she said.
“The wine? What about the wine?”
When she toasted.
“I don’t remember any toast.”
She made a toast.
“To what?”
To you and Bert.
“To the case, you mean. To solving the case.”
No, to you and Bert.
“Honey—”
She left me out. She drank only to you and Bert.
“Now why would she do a thing like that? She’s one of the sweetest people—”
Teddy burst into tears again.
He put his arms around her and held her close. The rain beat steadily on the windowpanes. “Honey,” he said, and she looked up into his face, and studied his mouth, and watched the words as they formed on his lips. “Honey, Augusta likes you very much.” Teddy shook her head. “Honey, she said so. Do you remember when you told the story about the kids... about April falling in the lake at that PBA picnic? And Mark jumping in to rescue her when the water was only two feet deep? Do you remember telling...?”
Teddy nodded.
“And then you went to the ladies’ room, do you remember?
She nodded again.
“Well, the minute you were gone, Augusta told me how terrific you were.”
Teddy looked up at him.
“That’s just what she said. She said, ‘Jesus, Teddy’s terrific, I wish I could tell a story like her.’”
The tears were beginning to flow again.
“Honey, why on earth wouldn’t she like you?”
She looked him dead in the eye. Her hands began to move.
Because I’m a deaf mute, she said.
“You’re the most wonderful woman in the world,” he said, and kissed her, and held her close again. And then he kissed the tears from her face and from her eyes, and told her again how much he loved her, told her what he had told her that day years and years ago when he’d asked her to marry him for the twelfth time and had finally convinced her that she was so much more than any other woman when until that moment she had considered herself somehow less. He told her again now, he said, “Jesus, I love you, Teddy, I love you to death,” and then they made love as they had when they were younger, much younger.
7
He knew she was on the island, he had heard the launch pulling into the dock more than an hour ago, but she had not yet come to see him, and he wondered about this, wondered if he’d done something to displease her. She had left the island shortly after she’d fed him on Friday night, and he had not been fed since. The clock on the wall — a new acquisition he’d had to beg for — read 9:15. He’d had no breakfast today, and no lunch, and he wondered now if she was going to forget about dinner, too. Sometimes, he cursed the clock. Without the clock, there had been an almost blissful sense of disorientation. Minutes faded into hours to become days and then weeks and months. And years. He had looked up at the clock when he’d heard the launch last night — 8:30 P.M., which meant that she’d be on the mainland by 9:00, that’s how long the trip took, a half hour. Figure close to two hours into the city, she’d have been in Isola by a little before 11:00.
He wondered where she went in the city, wondered about her life outside this room and off this island. He had seen her in the city only once, the night they’d met, and that had been seven years ago — she had let him keep a calendar before she allowed him to have the clock. He would try to count the days, but there were no windows in the room and he never knew when the sun had risen or when it was setting. In the first year, he miscalculated by a month. He thought it was Easter. By his reckoning, trying to keep time without a clock, marking off by guesswork the days on the calendar, he thought it was Easter already. She laughed and told him it was only February the twelfth, he’d been there only five months, was he growing tired of her so soon?