He dodged around the bed and opened the door to what the broker had called the walk-in closet but which would not accommodate anyone with shoulders wider than the average coat hanger. Connie’s clothing took up all of her side and most of his. He stripped down to his underwear, straight-armed a number of her cocktail dresses, and hung up his suit. Feeling claustrophobic and not wanting to jitterbug past Connie like Emmitt Smith squeezing through the off-tackle hole, Truitt sat on the edge of the bed with its duvet of roses and hyacinths and looked at his wife in the vanity mirror.
He couldn’t stand it any longer. “How did it go today?”
“I had lunch with Stephanie,” she said, her eyes meeting his in the glass.
Objection! Not responsive. Your Honor, please admonish the witness to answer the question.
“They’re building a gazebo in their backyard,” Connie continued.
Truitt pondered this tidbit of news. Just what does one say to a wife whose sister is building a gazebo in the backyard of her showy two-million-dollar home? That it will be a nice addition to her Jacuzzi, lap pool, and sauna? That it must be nice being married to a lobbyist whose basic claim to fame is being the son-in-law of a former senator-fame enough to make $850,000 a year, more than five times the salary of a Supreme Court justice.
“Gazebos are nice,” he said, prudently.
“She showed me the plans. It has a gas grill, a microwave, dishwasher, full-size refrigerator, plus an ice-cream fountain and a wet bar with two beer taps.”
Why is she dragging it out? Am I going to be a father or not?
“What, no roller coaster?”
“There’s no need to be sarcastic,” she said. “Or a snob.”
“What!”
“A reverse snob, actually.”
He was stumped. “What does that mean, that I look down on people who are better than I am?”
“No, you look down on people who have attained goals which you think are”-she paused to find the right word, searching the breadth and depth of her Bryn Mawr-Sorbonne vocabulary-“inconsequential or frivolous.”
“I cop a plea,” he said. “Guilty as charged. What are the sentencing guidelines for a repeat offender?”
“Life,” she said, “without parole.”
He smiled with real pleasure. That was the old Connie. In the fencing match that was their life, a parry was usually followed by a thrust. Sometimes he yearned for the early days when they made each other laugh and competed to see who had the sharper wit. Connie usually won.
He watched his wife lift her long, chestnut hair into some impossible upswept pile that she clasped with several silver barrettes. Most of the time, she wore her hair parted in the middle, where it fell, long and swingy, across her shoulders. It made her look like a college coed. Now, with her hair up, she looked regal, Princess of the Capitol, with a long, slender neck and prominent cheekbones, her dark hair set off by flawless porcelain skin.
He pondered the nature of their relationship. Did he love her? Maybe it wasn’t a raging passion, but there was still care and affection and occasionally, warmth.
Sam Truitt had met Constance Parham at her family’s third home, the summer cottage on Nantucket. Truitt was an assistant professor at Harvard Law with no particular interest in politics, but he had a professed animosity toward many of President Reagan’s appointees to the federal bench. Senator Lowell Parham was the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, and after reading one of Truitt’s diatribes in The New Republic, he began calling on him to draft questions for judicial appointees considered unqualified.
Truitt was not ordinarily an introspective man, but he thought now of the forces that had brought him to Connie. Constance Parham was eight years his junior, just finishing up a graduate degree in art history when they met. He remembered the instant attraction to this tall, sassy brunette with a quick wit and a lethal tongue. She had the clean WASP features of her mother, a high forehead with a widow’s peak, a wide smile, and the gift of her father’s laughter and intelligence. Connie could hold her martinis, crack wise, and beat most men at tennis.
Looking back now, Truitt thought he fell in love with the family. The senator was a liberal without being a sissy, a Harvard intellectual who liked to hunt, fish, and drink bourbon. His wife was a descendant of Massachusetts Puritans who made several fortunes in New England textile mills and had the foresight to shift their wealth into Arizona real estate just before their businesses succumbed to foreign competition. Alice Parham adored her husband, who returned her love in both public and private displays of affection. Constance Parham grew up with the benefits of status and privilege, boarding school in Europe, a college curriculum that required a commute to Paris, and an endless supply of eligible suitors, some Cabots, some Lodges, some Kennedys. And one Truitt.
“It’ll be nice for the kids,” he said, after a moment.
“What?”
“The ice cream bar. Maybe the beer taps too, for all I know.”
“What are you implying?” Irritated now.
“Nothing, just that the gazebo will be nice for your sister’s children, our nieces and nephews, the little blond platoon of well-fed Virginia storm troopers.”
Actually, there were only four of them, all in braces, all in private schools, all with their own horses in their own stables. The orthodontics and tuition alone must be astounding, he thought, not to mention the oats and carrots. Harold Bellows, his brother-in-law, had an eighty-acre estate in Virginia. In the basement of the sprawling home was an English pub. A real one, the stained glass and dark wood stripped from a country pub in the Cotswolds. To Truitt, it represented the essence of ugly-American acquisitiveness. Taken from a place enjoyed by an entire village, the old scarred wood bar-ripe with the wet scent of a hundred years of spilled ale-was now used, if at all, by one pudgy, overpaid apologist for sugar growers, oil companies, and heaven help us, handgun manufacturers.
“You’re attacking me,” she said angrily.
“What? How?”
“You’re reminding me in a cheap and cowardly way that we don’t have children, that I can’t have children, that my tubes are scarred, but your sperm count is in the top one percent. You’re a first team All-American sperm machine with a wife who can’t complete a pass.”
Oh no. God no.
His heart sank. She had answered the question of the day, the question of the decade, the question of their lives. He walked over to the vanity and put his arms around her. Her shoulders felt like pillars of ice. “Connie, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She glared at him in the mirror. “If you were truly sorry, you wouldn’t have used Stephanie’s children to disparage me.”
He wondered if every marriage had one wound that would never heal. “I didn’t! Sometimes a gazebo is just a gazebo. I was just making conversation about our spoiled nieces and nephews and a goddamn gazebo that’s probably bigger than our house.”
“Exactly! You were striking out at me because of the gazebo. You thought I was belittling the amount of money you make in comparison to Harold, so you brought up the children to hurt me, to remind me that I’m defective, that I’m not a whole woman.”
“No! I swear-”
“It’s your fault as much as mine,” he fired back. “You’re the bastard who knocked me up back on the island.”
The ferocity of her words startled him, and he backed off, retreating to the bed. His head throbbed. Their arguments were becoming more severe, Connie’s attacks more cutting.