All the Carterets are strait-laced, and Fay Carteret Loomis, flesh of their flesh, wouldn’t cut an inch of slack for a blind man balancing on an airplane wing. I mean, one extra beer at an old friend’s bachelor party, and it’s like the second coming of Benedict Arnold.
All right, maybe two extra beers, maybe even three. And what if I did miss the Carteret family barbecue that night due to a perfectly understandable lapse of memory.
“Lapse nothing. You were drunk as a skunk, and I wouldn’t even mind that so much except you just used it as an excuse. The fact is, you don’t like my family.”
“I do like your family, in bits and pieces, but when they come at you in battalion strength...”
“Oh, how you can twist things, Roy Loomis. Everybody thinks it’s LaMar who’s the song-and-dancer, but it’s really you. You, Roy Loomis, have an honest face and a deceitful nature.”
And with that she packed two bags and flounced off. River’s Edge is where she came to earth, of course — the Carteret compound where all hurt Carterets go to lick their wounds.
That was five weeks ago.
Till then we’d never been apart more than a few days in four years of marriage. According to LaMar, we’re a pair of stubborn jackasses, but the fact is I didn’t desert her in the middle of a political campaign.
True, when she left, none of us (except LaMar maybe) knew there was going to be a campaign, but how much does that change things? She knows now, doesn’t she?
It was a quiet night at Minnie O’s, Desertion Day plus eight, and there I was sitting on a barstool sharing insights with Barney Cox when my banty cousin came roostering in. He thumbed Barney to some other corner.
“You stay where you are, Barney,” I said, alerted to danger by LaMar’s body language. “Nobody died and left him king.”
But since Barney is on the Gazette payroll — a combination obit writer, classified-ad taker, and demon photographer — LaMar’s word weighed the heavier. He was gone. I was talking to the wall.
“Roy,” LaMar said, settling in. “Boozing isn’t going to get Fay back.”
“I don’t want Fay back.”
“And I don’t want a Pulitzer Prize.”
“Anyway, you’re being ridiculous. A beer or two while discussing, among other things, the dark side of marriage as an institution, is not boozing. You sound like a Carteret, for God’s sake. LaMar, when are you going to marry?”
He sensed the ill feeling behind the question and chose not to reply.
Minnie put a cold one before him, leaning forward as she did in behalf of her famous cleavage. For a moment the male segment of her patronage held its collective breath.
Minnie’s both a good-looking widow and a Black Rock success story. In her forties now — red hair, lively blue eyes — she still has the figure that electrified the eighth grade of her time.
When Mike O’Hara got mistaken for a three-point buck a few seasons back, Minnie took over the Shamrock Bar & Grill (now Minnie O’s) one step ahead of the bankruptcy court. To the surprise of all, it turned out she was this natural businesswoman. Did some redecorating. Hired two new short-order cooks. Pretty soon much of Black Rock had developed the Minnie O’ habit, dropping in for a bit of finger food, some conviviality, and rations of gossip. Married ladies, too, though a segment of that segment was impelled by the need to reconnoiter.
They knew, the county knew, Minnie was sleeping with someone’s husband. Discreet as she was, however, there was no way to find out who if you weren’t willing to be active.
Actually, only a few of us ever found out anyway.
But I’m getting slightly ahead of my story.
“I was rooting through the Gazette files this morning,” LaMar said, remembering he had an axe to grind, “searching out background for my Sunday material. I’d got to thinking about corruption and how easy it is to get comfortable with it. In the end, as someone bright once said to me, societies fall apart because of the cheats they tolerate. You probably forgot who that someone is.”
I kept silent.
“So I’m going through the files, and lo, I come across the story I did on a certain FBI guy who, through sheer cussedness, broke up an embezzlement scam involving very big fish in six states.” He paused. “Roy, you were one hell of an FBI guy.”
“What do you want me to say, LaMar?”
“I sure miss that cussedness.”
And he looked at me admiringly. I have to admit that LaMar has a way of doing that to which I am partial. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t do it all that often. Once every two or three years is about his quota. So I found myself momentarily nostalgic — just as if shark-eat-shark politics hadn’t made a career switch entirely sensible for that certain FBI guy.
“I was pretty damn cussed, wasn’t I?”
“As cussed a law enforcer as you’ve been white bread as a lawyer.”
Trust LaMar to give it to you between the eyes. And yet it was no more than I’d said to myself on lonely truth-telling nights. In the years since I’d returned to Black Rock, my private practice had grown increasingly private.
“It’s because your heart isn’t in it, and people sense that,” LaMar said. He paused. “I told that to Fay last night.”
“LaMar,” I said, irritated. “Does it ever occur to you that Fay is another man’s wife?”
“She was this man’s girlfriend once.”
“That was back in high school, for God’s sake.”
He put the beer mug down, then turned to face me squarely. “I’ve told you before and I’ll keep telling you until you take me seriously. There’s only one woman in the world for me, and that’s Fay Carteret Loomis. If I could steal her from you I would. In a New York minute. No matter what the consequences. But I can’t, you fool. She has this weakness for you, which is the only thing about her I find less than admirable.”
I let my breath out in a heavy sigh. “Okay, what else did you tell her?”
“When?”
“Last night, when you were doing your best to poison the air.”
His expression remained unchanged. It was his noblesse oblige look, almost as familiar to me as his snake-oil salesman’s.
“I told her you weren’t the man to survive working at what bored him. I said it’s why you’d been boozing. And I also suggested that maybe, just maybe, she’d been paying too much attention to Carterets at the expense of a Loomis.”
“You really did?”
He nodded. And I believed him. And right there, I guess, is the reason why hopping mad as I sometimes get at him, I’ll always, at bottom, love him.
“LaMar...”
“What?”
“Thanks.”
“Would you care to hear what she said?”
“Yes.”
“She told me to keep my pointy nose out of her business.”
In some manner — I bet LaMar could tell you exactly — we moved from there to a discussion of just how shamelessly bent Felix Foxx was. And how Black Rock County deserved better. And how all my friends were damn sick and tired of me sitting on my tailbone. And this and that, until willy-nilly I was off my tailbone and onto the minority-party ticket.
The irony here is that Felix Foxx and I have always got on. We have a history. He and my daddy became friends as second-graders, hunting buddies later. Felix visited our house a lot when I was growing up — even after Daddy was named to the State Supreme Court as its youngest associate justice.
But they were yin and yang really, and a split was inevitable. I was there when it happened. Actually, as things turned out, I was a pivotal figure.