Sears came back into the room with two drinks in his hands and a freshly fired-up cigar in his mouth. Ricky said, "Sears, you're probably the only person I know to whom I could admit that sometimes I wish I'd never got married."
"Don't waste your envy on me," Sears said. "I'm too old, too fat and too tired."
"You're none of those things," he answered, accepting the drink Sears gave him, "you just have the luxury of being able to pretend you are."
"Oh, but you pulled out the prize plum," Sears said. "The reason you wouldn't say what you've just said to anyone else is that they'd be stupefied. Stella is a famous beauty. And if you said it to her, she'd brain you." He sat back in the chair he'd occupied earlier, stretched his legs out and crossed them at the ankles. "She'd slap a box together, dump you in it, bury you in five seconds flat and then run off with an athletic forty-year-old smelling of salt water and bay rum. The reason you can tell me is that-" Sears paused, and Ricky feared that he'd say, I sometimes wish you'd never married too. "Is it that I am hors de combat, or is it hors commerce?"
Listening to his partner's voice, holding his drink, Ricky thought of John Jaffrey and Lewis Benedikt speeding away to their houses, of his own redecorated house waiting, and was aware of how settled their lives were; of how much they had found a comfortable routine. "Well, which is it?" Sears asked, and he replied, "Oh, in your case hors de combat, I'm sure," and smiled, stingingly aware of their closeness. He remembered what he had said before, all change is change for the worse, and thought: that's true, God help us. Ricky suddenly saw all of them, his old friends and himself, as on a fragile invisible plane suspended high up in dark air.
"Does Stella know you have nightmares?" Sears asked.
"Well, I didn't know that you did," Ricky answered, as though it were a joke.
"I saw no reason to discuss it."
"And you've been having them for-?"
Sears leaned further into his chair. "You've had yours for-?"
"A year."
"And I. For a year. So have the other two, apparently."
"Lewis doesn't seem ruffled."
"Nothing ruffles Lewis. When the Creator made Lewis, he said, 'I am going to give you a handsome face, a good constitution and an equable temperament, but because this is an imperfect world, I'll hold back a little on brains.' He got rich because he liked Spanish fishing villages, not because he knew what was going to happen to them."
Ricky ignored this-it was all part of the way Sears liked to characterize Lewis. "They started after Edward's death?"
Sears nodded his massive head.
"What do you think happened to Edward?"
Sears shrugged. They had all asked the question too many times. "As you are surely aware, I know no more than you."
"Do you think we'll be any happier if we find out?"
"Goodness, what a question! I can't answer that one either, Ricky."
"Well, I don't. I think something terrible will happen to us. I think you'll bring down disaster on us if you invite that young Wanderley."
"Superstition," Sears grumbled. "Nonsense. I think something terrible has already happened to us, and this young Wanderley might be the man who can clear it up."
"Did you read his book?"
"The second one? I looked at it."
This was an admission that he had read it.
"What did you think?"
"A nice exercise in genre writing. More literary than most. A few nice phrases, a reasonably well-constructed plot."
"But about his insights…"
"I think he won't immediately dismiss us as a bunch of old fools. That's the main thing."
"Oh, I wish he would," Ricky wailed. "I don't want anybody poking around in our lives. I want things just to keep on going."
"But it's possible that he will 'poke around,' as you say, and end by convincing us that we are just spooking ourselves. Then maybe Jaffrey will stop scourging himself for that blasted party. He only insisted on it because he wanted to meet that worthless little actress. That Moore girl."
"I think about that party a lot," Ricky said. "I've been trying to remember when I saw her that night."
"I saw her," said Sears. "She was talking to Stella."
"That's what everybody says. Everybody saw her talking to my wife. But where did she go afterward?"
"You're getting as bad as John. Let's wait for young Wanderley. We need a fresh eye."
"I think we'll be sorry," said Ricky, trying for one last time. "I think we'll be ruined. We'll be like some animal eating its own tail. We have to put it behind us."
"It's decided. Don't be melodramatic."
So that was that. Sears could not be swayed. Ricky asked him about another of the things on his mind. "On our evenings, do you always know what you're going to say in advance, when it's your turn?"
Sears's eyes met his, marvelously, cloudlessly blue. "Why?"
"Because I don't. Not most of the time. I just sit and wait, and then it comes to me, like tonight. Is it that way with you?"
"Often. Not that it proves anything."
"Is it like that for the others too?"
"I see no reason why it shouldn't be. Now, Ricky, I want to get some rest and you should go home. Stella must be waiting for you."
He couldn't tell if Sears were being ironic or not. He touched his bow tie. Bow ties were a part of his life, like the Chowder Society, that Stella barely tolerated. "Where do these stories come from?"
"From our memories," Sears said. "Or, if you prefer, from our doubtless Freudian unconsciouses. Come on. I want to be left alone. I have to wash all the glasses before I get to bed."
"May I ask you one more time-"
"What now?"
"-not to write to Edward's nephew." Ricky stood up, audacity making his heart speed.
"You can be persistent, can't you? Certainly you may ask, but by the time we get together again, he will already have my letter. I think it's for the best."
Ricky made a wry face, and Sears said, "Persistent without being aggressive." It was very much like something Stella would have said. Then Sears startled him by adding, "It's a nice quality, Ricky."
At the door Sears held his coat while he slipped his arms into the sleeves. "I thought John looked worse than ever tonight," Ricky said. Sears opened the front door onto dark night illuminated by the street lamp before the house. Orange light fell on the short dead lawn and narrow sidewalk, both littered with fallen leaves. Massive dark clouds moved across the black sky; it felt like winter. "John is dying," Sears said unemotionally, giving back to Ricky his own thought. "See you at Wheat Row. Give my regards to Stella."
Then the door closed behind him, a spruce little man already beginning to shiver in the cold night air.
Sears James
1
They spent most days together at their office, but Ricky honored tradition by waiting until the meeting at Dr. Jaffrey's house to ask Sears the question that had been on his mind for two weeks. "Did you send the letter?"
"Of course. I told you I would."
"What did you say to him?"
"What was agreed. I also mentioned the house, and said that we hoped he would not decide to sell it without inspecting it first. All of Edward's things are still there, of course, including his tapes. If we haven't had the heart to go through them, perhaps he will."
They were standing apart from the other two, just inside the doorway to John Jaffrey's living rooms. John and Lewis were seated in Victorian chairs in a corner of the nearest room, talking to the doctor's housekeeper, Milly Sheehan, who sat on a stool before them, dangling a flowered tray which had held their drinks. Like Ricky's wife, Milly resented being excluded from the meetings of the Chowder Society, unlike Stella Hawthorne, she perpetually hovered at the edges, popping in with bowls of ice cubes and sandwiches and cups of coffee. She irritated Sears to almost exactly the same extent as a summer fly bumping against the window. In many ways Milly was preferable to Stella Hawthorne-less demanding, less driven. And she certainly took care of John: Sears approved of the women who helped his friends. For Sears, it was an open question whether or not Stella had taken care of Ricky.