“The point is-”
“The point is that you don’t need to be fun the same way Marino is,” I reply. “In fact I’m hoping you might be a good example.”
“Of what? A boring adult?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of a sexy brilliant federal agent who drives fast cars and wears designer clothes. Desi just doesn’t know you yet.”
“Apparently Desi does know me. Marino told him I’m a retired school principal, and Desi asked me about it. I told him it was a hundred years ago when I was just out of college and working on my master’s degree,” Benton says.
“Did you explain that when you were getting started, a lot of FBI agents came from educational and legal backgrounds? That in other words yours was simply a sensible career path?” Even as I say it I’m aware that it’s too much explanation, and the well has been poisoned.
“There was no reason for Marino to bring that up except to make Desi afraid of me. Which is harmful and ill-advised because he’s headstrong enough already. I’ve noticed that increasingly he doesn’t like being told what to do.”
“I agree he doesn’t like to be controlled. But then most of us don’t.”
“Marino’s goal is to be Good Time Uncle Pete while I’m the school principal,” Benton says, and I watch the darkness settle heavily, hotly.
We’ve reached the wide brick patio arranged with wooden tables, red umbrellas, and potted shrubs and flower beds. On this last Wednesday of September, there shouldn’t be an empty chair out here. But there’s no one sitting outside the Faculty Club, no one in the world but us.
CHAPTER 5
THE ENTRANCE COULD BELONG to a private home, and that’s what the Faculty Club has become to my FBI-profiler husband, who didn’t graduate from Harvard. Benton went to Amherst just like his father and grandfather did.
A home away from home. A portal to another place where pain, fear and tragedy aren’t allowed. Benton can spirit himself away to his immaculate neo-Georgian escape in the heart of the campus and pretend for a brief spell that there’s no such thing as ignorance, bigotry, politics, and small-minded bureaucrats.
He can enjoy a cloistered retreat where everyone celebrates enlightened ideas and our differences, and there’s no such thing as violence or aggression. Benton feels safe here. It’s one of the few places where he does. But not so safe that he’s not carrying a gun. I can’t see a pistol but I have no doubt he has one in his briefcase, and his backup somewhere on his person. His Glock 27 or concealed-carry Smith & Wesson Model 19 that he won’t leave home without.
We’ve stopped in front of flanking pilasters that are painted white, and there’s a transom over the dark red door. I gaze up at the perfect symmetry of the brick facade, and my attention lingers on the multipaned bay windows of the upstairs guest rooms.
“Maybe another time.” Benton looks up too and knows what I’m thinking.
“Yes, I guess there will be no sleepover tonight, thanks to my sister. But if I had anything to change into I’d rent a room anyway right now and take a shower.” I can almost hear the creaking carpeted old wooden stairs leading up to the second floor.
I remember the sound and feel of the fabric-covered walls, the cozy elegance and most of all the narrow beds where Benton and I don’t get much sleep. Ours is a well-practiced ritual that we engage in regularly and don’t talk about with anyone but each other. It belongs exclusively to the two of us, and I wouldn’t call it a date but consider it more like therapy when we come here once a month, assuming the stars are properly aligned.
So often they’re not, but when they are we get a welcome reminder that decency and humanity still exist in the world. Not everybody lies, steals, rapes, abuses, neglects, tortures, kidnaps and kills. Not everybody wants to ruin us or take what’s ours, and we’re so lucky to have found each other.
We walk into the chilled quiet of formal antiques, fine paintings and Persian rugs. Benton closes the door behind us, and we’re surrounded by sconces and mahogany paneling, dark tufted leather furniture, and wide-board flooring. Fresh flowers are arranged on the entryway table, and tonight’s menu is displayed on a Victorian oak podium.
I detect the layers of familiar scents, the cut lilies and roses, and beeswax with a patina of musty staleness, that are reassuring and part of an old-world charm that makes me think of poetry, cigars and rare leather-bound tomes. I could close my eyes and know where I am. The energy is different in here. There’s a gravitas, a formality that should be expected in a place that’s hosted heads of state and some of the most accomplished people in the world.
I pause in the entryway, in front of an antique oval mirror, running my fingers through my limp blond hair. I stare into the pitted glass at the tall handsome man behind me in pale gray, hovering over me like a breathtaking apparition.
“Do I know you?” I ask Benton without turning around.
“I don’t think so. Are you waiting for someone?”
“Yes.”
“What a coincidence. I am too. I’ve always been waiting for someone.”
“So have I.”
“Well not just someone. The right person.” His reflection looks at me.
“Do you think there’s only one right person for each of us?” I ask the mirror on the wall.
“I can only speak for myself.”
We don’t have a name for our little game, and nobody is wise to our delightful choreography of meeting as if we’re strangers. It’s refreshing, sobering but also good psychology if one can handle the truth. What would happen if we really were meeting for the first time right now in the entryway of the Harvard Faculty Club?
Would we notice each other? Would he still find me as attractive as he did the first time we met? It’s not always the same for men when their wives get older, and some mates may say they’re just as in love when they’re not. It’s brave to ask such questions and face the truth unflinchingly. What might we feel were we to meet now instead of decades ago when Benton was married and I was divorced and we worked our first case together?
There’s no scientific method for answering such a question, and I don’t need one. I have no doubt we’d fall in love with each other all over again. I’m certain I would have an affair with him that would result in my being called a home wrecker. And I wouldn’t care because it’s worth it.
Benton places his warm graceful hands on my shoulders, and rests his chin on top of my head. I smell his earthy cologne as we look at our reflections in the convex mirror, our faces Picasso-like abstractions where the silvered glass is eroded.
“How about some dinner?” he says into my hair.
“Will you excuse me for a moment?”
I check my shopping bag in the coat closet, and step inside the ladies’ room with its formal wallpaper and vintage Victorian theater posters. I set my leather messenger-bag briefcase on the black granite countertop and dig out a cosmetic kit. I face the mirror over the sink, and the woman in khaki staring back at me is slightly shopworn and disheveled.
Actually there’s nothing slight about it, I decide. I look like hell, and I take off my damp suit jacket and drape it over a chair. My bra has soaked through my white blouse, and I turn on the hand dryer and blast hot air inside my collar, doing what I can so I don’t sit around in wet underwear. Then I dig out powder, lipstick, a toothbrush. I contemplate my appearance and what else I intend to do about it. Not much.
I can’t reverse the effects of lousy sleep, of running myself ragged and walking in the extreme heat. I feel a touch light-headed, and I’m weary and hopelessly clammy. I need food and drink badly. I need a shower most of all, and I take off my ruined panty hose and toss them in the trash. I douse a hand towel with cold water, cleaning up, but there’s no quick remedy for rumpled sweatiness.