Robert said, “Well, I guess it all worked out all right. Doesn’t seem to be any excitement.”
“I can’t wait to ask Bradford,” she said.
“Will you call me and tell me?”
“First thing in the morning,” she promised. “But it will turn out to be nothing at all.”
“Tell me anyway,” he said. “I hate suspense.”
“I will.”
The gate was open. They drove through and headed for the house. When they got to it, there were only a few lights still burning. Evelyn said, “Good Lord, what time is it?”
“Little after midnight.”
They’d gone for a drive after dinner, and stopped for a while by an anonymous river bank — it was merely a quarter moon, not very good for seeing — and then dropped in at ‘their’ bar for a nightcap. Robert had claimed he wanted to see if the bartender remembered how much to charge for a vodka and tonic, but a different man had been working there tonight. (He’d charged the same as the other one, which displeased Robert.)
“Bradford has probably gone to bed,” she said. “I won’t find out myself until tomorrow.”
He stopped the car at the door, climbed out, and came around to help her through that awkward moment of balance in getting out of any low-slung car. With his hand for support, she flowed naturally up out of the car and into his arms. They kissed, and she whispered, “You’re my first date in a hundred years.”
“Let down your long hair, lady, I’m here to save you.”
Did he mean that? She was too afraid it was merely gallantry, she couldn’t take him up on it. She slid backward out of his arms, saying, “I do have to go in. And my first date was a beautiful one.”
“Only a sample,” he said. “What are you doing tomorrow night?”
“You can’t do that,” she said. “It’s over a hundred miles, you can’t drive two hundred miles every day.”
“Why can’t I?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “I don’t want you to get tired of me. I’m not free until — next Friday.”
“A whole week? You won’t remember who I am by next Friday.”
“Oh, yes, I will,” she said. “Believe me, I will. This was the happiest — I will, that’s all.”
“Tomorrow night,” he said.
“No.” She shook her head, saying, “Definitely not. Really. We’ll talk on the phone tomorrow, and I’ll see you next Friday.”
He was reluctant, but she was determined, and she had told him the truth about her reason. She didn’t want him to tire of her, to have too much of her too soon. She didn’t want him to lock himself into a pattern of driving hundreds of miles three and four times a week, and get sick of all the driving — as he would, as anyone would — and go on doing it because the precedent was already established, and from there on it would be a short but rocky fall to the finish. From out of nowhere Robert Pratt had become very important to her, and even if it turned out they wouldn’t be together very deeply or very long, it was still true that he was in the process of rediscovering for her the possibilities of living. (The specter of Ann Gillespie, fading away in the shade in Paris under Carrie’s capacious wing, still haunted Evelyn’s mind, and two or three times had even directly entered her dreams.)
They agreed at last that she would call him tomorrow morning and he would come take her out again next Friday night. “This time I’ll be ready when you get here,” she said, and he said, “Make me wait for you, it’s good for me,” and kissed her again, and she went into the house.
She stood with her back against the door a moment, hearing the Jaguar roar and then recede. It was all too tremulous, she was afraid to smile for fear the house of cards would come tumbling down. Robert Pratt. Unfortunate, that last name, not that it mattered. But, still. Robert Pratt. She wondered why no one ever called him Bob, and decided he was too big to be a Bob. He’d been a football player, of course, he’d almost played with a professional team. But also a runner. Big, but lean. Broad, but hard. Too male to be called Bob or Bobby. But was Robert right for him? Shouldn’t he be a Matt, or a Jack, or a Mike?
No, because there was a serious side to him, too, an intelligent side, the history teacher. Robert was a good name, all in all, a perfectly acceptable name. It was the Pratt that was unfortunate.
Evelyn Pratt.
“Oh, don’t be stupid,” she said aloud, and started walking, mostly to distract herself. Evelyn Pratt! For Heaven’s sake, they’d had one date.
She went upstairs and looked in on Dinah, as she always did when she’d been out for the evening, and the child was peacefully sleeping, her security blanket wrapped as usual around her left arm. Evelyn tiptoed from the room and was about to go down the hall toward her own room when she noticed the light shining through the crack of the slightly-open door of the back library. Curious, she walked down the hall and pushed the door farther open, and Bradford was in there, reading.
“Bradford?”
He looked up. The only light in the room was the floor lamp just behind him and to his left, putting his face in shadow. He looked very tired, the darker right side of his face seeming actually to droop. “Is that you, Evelyn?”
She came into the room, saying, “Why are you still up?”
He closed the book and rubbed a palm over his face, saying, “I couldn’t sleep. Perhaps I can now.”
“Was it because of what happened this evening?”
“I suppose so.”
“I still don’t know anything about it,” she said. “Robert and I just saw their car when we were going out. They were Chinese, weren’t they?”
“Yes.”
“Communist Chinese?”
He nodded. He put the book on the table to his right.
“What did they want?”
“They wanted to give me a copy of Kwong Lan Quey’s suicide note.” He put his head back and looked up at her, and his eyes looked hollow. “They said it was a suicide note.” His shoulders moved in a small shrug. “They wanted me to know, if ever I had anything to say to China, I could say it to them.”
4
GEORGE HOLT CAME WALKING over the teetery narrow boardwalk between house and car, knowing just how incongruous he looked. The Atlantic Ocean was behind him, appropriately aquamarine, beneath an azure unclouded sky. The house he had just walked up to and was now returning from, having spoken briefly with Grace through the screen door, was a tilty A-frame redwood summer cottage. Sand surrounded him, tufted with coarse weed-bunches. And how was he dressed? In a narrow dark gray suit, a stiff white shirt, a narrow black tie, shined black oxfords, elasticized black socks. He looked like a New Yorker cartoon and knew it, and found a half-smile in the idea of looking down beneath his feet for the caption. What would it say?
Another of the things he couldn’t share with Marie. He could visualize that conversation. He’d slide into the car again, behind the steering wheel, and say, “It suddenly occurred to me while I was walking back that I looked like a New Yorker cartoon.” There was a straight line, if there ever lived one. She’d cut his head off in ten words. He couldn’t guess ahead of time exactly what ten words they would be, any more than he could think up a caption to go beneath his feet, but that was all right. He knew he wasn’t clever. Everyone else was much more clever than he, he had to make do with reliability. Good old dependable George Holt.
He reentered the maroon Chrysler, and the icy lifeless air inside the car was a shock after the warm but flavorful sea breeze outside. Perspiration he hadn’t been aware of suddenly cooled on his collar, chilling his throat. He thought briefly and wistfully of shutting off the air-conditioner and rolling down the window, but he knew Marie would hate it.