“You don’t have to make excuses,” she said, nibbling the corner of a scone. “These are good, aren’t they.” She fed the rest to the dog. “Don’t let me take any more.”
She stood, stretched, and walked to the window. Her backlit form was lithe, and with sudden, agonizing clarity, Pfefferkorn remembered how much he had loved her. The seams of youth, those lines where disparate traits meet and fuse, had been gently effaced by time, and now he looked at her and saw womanhood in its most complete form. He saw what he had sought in his early lovers, in his ex-wife. All had come up short. How could they not? He was comparing them to her. He watched her for a moment, then set down his food and went to join her.
The window overlooked a stone terrace, which in turn overlooked the grounds, which were in keeping with the rest of the house: at once intricate and overwhelming. Other wings jutted obliquely, massive clay walls and burnt-orange roofs.
“All this,” she said.
“It’s a beautiful home,” he said.
“It’s grotesque.”
“Maybe a tad.”
She smiled.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t able to speak,” he said.
“It’s all right.”
“I feel bad.”
“Don’t. I’m just glad you’re here. It’s been so long, Arthur. I feel as though I have to get to know you all over again. Tell me about your life.”
“It’s the same. I’m the same.”
“How’s your daughter?”
“Engaged.”
“Arthur. That’s wonderful. Who’s the lucky fellow?”
“His name is Paul,” Pfefferkorn said. “He’s an accountant.”
“And? What’s he like?”
“What do you think he’s like? He’s like an accountant.”
“Well, I think it’s wonderful.”
“It will be come April fifteenth.”
“You are happy for her, aren’t you?”
“Sure I am,” he said. “I hope it works out.”
Carlotta looked alarmed. “Do you have reason to suspect it won’t?”
“Not really.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“There isn’t any.” He paused. “I think I always pictured her with—I know how it’ll sound, but—someone more like me.”
“And he’s the opposite of you.”
“More or less.” He tapped his lips. “It feels like a rejection of everything I stand for.”
“And what do you stand for.”
“Poverty, I suppose. Failure.”
“Tch.”
“I’m jealous,” he said.
“Think of it this way. She thinks you’re so fantastic a man that she could never hope to find someone as fantastic unless she chose someone utterly unlike you.”
“That’s an interesting interpretation.”
“I try,” Carlotta said. “When’s the wedding?”
“They don’t know.”
“That’s the way it’s done these days, isn’t it. Get engaged and wait until having children becomes medically impossible. It was different in our day. People couldn’t wait to get married.”
“They couldn’t wait to screw.”
“Please. You make it sound like we grew up in the fifteenth century.”
“Didn’t we?”
“Oh, Arthur, you really are such a grump.” She pointed below to a narrow path, barely visible, that led into an area of unchecked greenery. “That’s the way to Bill’s office.”
He nodded.
“Would you like to see it?” she asked.
“If you’d like to show it to me.”
“I would,” she said. “And I think he would have wanted you to see it, too.”
14.
They moved through the underbrush, ducking ferns and low-hanging vines, the dog bounding ahead in pursuit of a dragonfly. The light turned murky. Pfefferkorn felt as though he was heading into the heart of darkness. Rounding a mossy outcropping, they came to a glade flecked with dandelions and Queen Anne’s lace. Botkin sat by the door to a boxy wooden building, his tail swishing.
“Voilà,” Carlotta said.
Pfefferkorn regarded the building. “Looks like a barn,” he said.
“It was.”
“There you go.”
“The previous owner was something of a gentleman farmer. He bred champion goats.”
Pfefferkorn snorted.
“Don’t laugh,” she said. “The good ones go for upwards of fifty thousand dollars.”
“For a goat?”
“You don’t live around here if you’re poor. You know the part on a ballpoint pen cap that sticks out? So you can clip it onto something? He invented that.”
“My future son-in-law will be impressed.”
“Bill loved it out here,” Carlotta said. “He called it his refuge. From what, I wanted to know. He never did say.”
“I’m sure he didn’t mean it literally,” Pfefferkorn said. “You know how he could be.”
“Oh I know. Believe me.” She smiled mischievously. “Sometimes when I’m out here I swear I can smell them. The goats.”
Pfefferkorn tried and failed to smell the goats.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s see where the magic happens.”
What struck Pfefferkorn most of all about Bill’s office was its modesty. Only a tenth of the barn had been sectioned off and finished, and that left comparatively spare. Indeed, it was strange to think that such phenomenal wealth as Pfefferkorn had just seen could be produced in a room so plain. Atop a rickety desk were an electric typewriter, a jar of pens, and a neatly stacked manuscript. The familiarity of the arrangement caused Pfefferkorn to shiver.
There had been few embellishments in thirty-some-odd years. There was an easy chair that looked as if it had been slept in a lot. There was a low bookcase filled with Bill’s own prodigious oeuvre. On the wall above the desk hung a framed photo of Carlotta, a formal portrait made perhaps fifteen years prior. Below it was a photo Pfefferkorn identified as the source for both the pop-up invitation and the enlargement displayed at the funeral. The uncropped original had been taken at the marina. Bill stood on a dock piled with rope, smiling jauntily from beneath his captain’s hat as sunset inflamed a sliver of ocean.
The dog, seeking his missing master’s feet, settled morosely beneath the desk.
“I almost went out with him,” Carlotta said.
Pfefferkorn looked at her.
“That day, I mean. I changed my mind at the last minute.”
“Thank God.”
“You think? Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I have any notion of us waltzing off together into some spongy afterlife . . . Still. There’s guilt.” She indicated the manuscript. “That’s the new one.”
It was hefty, five hundred pages or more. Pfefferkorn wiped the title page free of dust.
SHADOWGAME
a novel of suspense
William de Vallée
Whatever Pfefferkorn’s opinion of Bill as a writer, the idea of the novel going unfinished gave him a pang.
“What’s going to happen to it?” he asked.
“Honestly, I haven’t given it much thought. It hasn’t seemed important, given everything else.” She rubbed her cheek. “Sooner or later I suppose I’ll have to burn it.”
He looked at her with surprise.
“I know,” she said. “Très eighteen seventies. It sounds pointless in the computer age. Believe it or not, he still did all his first drafts on the Olivetti. That’s the only copy.”
He continued to stare at her.
“What,” she said.
“You’re going to destroy it?”
“Did you have a better idea?”
“I’m sure his publisher would love to have it.”
“Oh, I’m sure they would, too, but Bill never would have approved. He hated anyone reading his unfinished material. That includes me, by the way. Way back in the beginning I used to give him feedback but it wasn’t good for our marriage.”