"That's great," he said vacantly. "Where is it?"
"In Foxrock."-
"Well. I'm very happy for you, Georgianne." His voice was straining ever so slightly. "I did tell you that you should get out and do something with yourself."
"Right. So, I'll see how it goes. I did think about moving to Boston and trying to find something to do in the city. I'd be close to Bonnie; we could even live together, share an apartment. But then I thought if I rushed away, it would look bad, you know-like I was admitting that Sean was involved in something criminal. And besides, it would be unfair to Bonnie. She's entitled to the experience of being away at college on her own, without her mother breathing down her neck."
"That's true."
"I'll stick it out here until next summer, and see how we both feel about things then."
"You're making some wise decisions," Jeff said, feeling as if he were talking by rote. His mind was in disarray, but he couldn't reorganize his thoughts and plans now. "It's all too easy easy to go off in the wrong direction after a major upset in your life. You've got to stay active, see people, do things. And work is good. But take your time before jumping into any big change."
"Right." Georgianne nodded.
Jeff forced himself to smile, but he hated this whole line of talk. It was worse than discussing Sean. He felt he was saying things that ran precisely contrary to what he hoped to accomplish.
Back in the hotel room late that afternoon, he tried to view it all in a constructive light. He had come here knowing that he couldn't rush Georgianne, knowing that it would take time. They had passed several hours easily, pleasantly, comfortably. The lunch had confirmed that he was safe and that Georgianne was well along the road to full recovery-at the very least, she was no longer deep in the pit of mourning. All of this was to the good.
Her job messed things up somewhat. Getting her away for a few days on a drive north was probably out of the question now, but it was too late for the autumn colors anyway. He would adjust. Mornings were gone, but the rest of the days and nights still belonged to him. He had the inside track. He had the time. But whatever it took, he would get her all the way into his life, where she belonged.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
"Georgie tells me you're doing business with Union Carbide," Burt Maddox said.
"No, not really," Jeff replied. "We were talking about working on something together, but it didn't come off."
"Oh, that's too bad," Burt said. "So this is just a pleasure trip for you then."
"A vacation, yes." Then Jeff added defensively, "My first in about five years."
In less than a minute he had taken a dislike to Burt Maddox. The man had a forced gregariousness that did nothing to hide the fact that he was sizing Jeff up. But the worst thing was his habit of referring to Georgianne as Georgie. Jeff hated it, and he could hardly keep from wincing whenever he heard it.
At the last minute, Georgianne had almost balked, and Jeff wished she had. A few of her friends had per suaded her to come to the Maddox house that evening. No party, no special occasion, just a handful of friends and neighbors getting together for a drink. Georgianne hadn't wanted to go, but she had finally given in, and Jeff had agreed to accompany her. Then, in the car on the way there, she had begun to worry about it again. It would look wrong. It was too soon. Sean had been dead less than three months. Jeff sympathized, but didn't want to argue the case one way or the other. He did point out to her that she had no reason to feel guilty. She would simply be stopping by a friend's house for a short visit. Georgianne looked pale and nervous when they arrived at the Maddox house, but she decided to go through with it, intending to stay for only an hour or so.
"I've been with them for nine years now," Burt was saying.
"Oh ... uh ... Union Carbide?"
Jeff could feel the blood leaving his face in a rush, and he bent over to take a hideous-looking hors d'oeuvre from a tray on a side table. It tasted awful, but the maneuver gained him a few seconds, and he hoped his cheeks had regained some color. His heart was pounding.
"That's right," Burt continued smoothly. "Didn't Georgie tell you? I'm a marketing manager." Then, with mock chagrin, "One of many."
"I see," Jeff said aimlessly. "It's quite an outfit."
Maddox would be a salesman, he thought contemptuously. He could tell the type: large, florid, incapable of tolerating two seconds of silence in a conversation, pursuing a rendezvous with a coronary-which in this case wouldn't come a day too soon, as far as Jeff was concerned.
Maddox tried to stick to the subject of Union Carbide, but Jeff killed it easily, and his host was too polite to persist. Jeff wished he had known ahead of time that he would be meeting someone from Union Carbide. It wasn't that he couldn't handle such an encounter, especially with someone as transparent as Maddox. But he didn't like surprises. For some time now, weeks, months, he'd felt as if he were walking a tightrope-a very long tightrope-to Georgianne. It had the effect of magnifying everything else in his daily life, and the most trivial vibrations could turn suddenly into tremors and quakes. How much easier it would be if he could simply whisk Georgianne away to some remote mountain cabin for a month or two, where he could win her over by sheer undistracted force of character and love. Instead, the tightrope stretched ahead indefinitely.
There were fewer than a dozen people scattered about the capacious, L-shaped Maddox living room. They all looked prosperous and satisfied, a little too much so for Jeff's liking. He wanted to see an edge in someone, but this crowd was round and soft. It was impossible to think of them as Georgianne's friends, even if, inexplicably, they were.
"Oh, I think Georgianne wants me," Jeff said, creating a flimsy opportunity to edge away from his host. "Excuse me."
"Catch you later," Maddox said, turning in the other direction to mingle.
Jeff drifted across the room and perched on the end of the sofa next to Georgianne. He lit a cigarette, acutely aware that all eyes were on him. Cool and professional, he told himself, that's the best stance to maintain.
"Georgie tells me you're doing some very exciting work with computers," Carole Richards said, leaning forward to rope Jeff into the conversation.
"Some of it is," Jeff allowed. He didn't like Carole Richards, because she had arranged the job for Georgianne. And because she called her Georgie too. It was appalling.
"And you two were in high school together?"
Everytime she spoke, Carole arranged her face in an expression of intense seriousness, which was utterly disproportionate to what she actually said. She was frizzy-haired and forty, Jeff figured, and trying to keep a young and intelligent look-and missing by a wide margin.
"'That's right."
"it's so nice that you got in touch again...."
And on and on. Jeff went to get fresh drinks, and Carole was still nattering on when he returned. It was definitely worrying. Georgianne seemed relaxed and at home with these people. But who were they? Maddox and his bouffant wife with the eyes of an appraiser. Carole Richards, a self-styled progressive teacher, and her husband, a financial adviser. The others, with names Jeff had already forgotten, included a local lawyer, a "publisher" of advertising supplements, an Audi dealer, and their spouses. There was a certain sameness about them, he thought, an enforced healthiness, an endless capacity for small talk, and a way of standing or sitting that seemed somehow practiced.
They were all apparently normal, but Jeff couldn't imagine himself knowing these people, seeing them regularly-much less ever think of an evening like this as fun. Were they enjoying themselves? Perhaps, but he couldn't help thinking of it as the shared jollity of people stuck in the same boat-one that he had no desire to board.