It was more than ten percent of his attention, after all. But not so much that he would easily bear the burden of having had a role in Will's suicide, if that's what it was. "Did I tell you he's been calling me in the middle of the night to say he wants me back?"
"No."
"He thought I'd change my mind once the divorce came through. Thought I'd understand what I'd wrought, come to see the error of my ways. A few weeks ago he woke me at four in the morning and said he was coming to New York to talk to me. I convinced him not to. But it turns out I didn't." I touched Daniel's sleeve as I passed him and stepped into the walk-in closet where my dresser was, and my suitcase. "What are the seven deadly sins?"
"Hang on a minute. I have to ring Toinette and tell her I'm running late. I was supposed to pick up the cake at Jon Vie by six. Christ, I think they close early in the summer."
"Daniel, what are they?" I was dressing and packing at the same time. In a basket on my dresser I found the key to the safe deposit box at our bank on Swansea. My will was there, and his was too. Or it used to be. "There's lechery, pride, avarice, sloth-"
"You want Unitarian sins? What about missing an issue of The Nation? Forgive my levity. Shit, the line is busy… Shit, they're both busy. Sophy, where are you?"
"In here."
He was halfway across the room, dialing and redialing, unaware of what I was doing in the closet. I opened my little wooden jewelry box for a pair of earrings and was surprised to see my wedding band. I slipped it on my finger.
"I don't imagine you're keen for a party with the kids, but you shouldn't be alone now. Good, it's ringing."
"I'm going to Swansea."
"Toinette, hi. Sorry, terribly sorry, Sophy's had a problem. Her husband, her ex-husband-Yes, quite serious, but she's fine, though he's-I'll tell you when I get home. Good, you got the cake; I was worried. How are the children? I'll be there in fifteen or twenty minutes. Sophy will be with me, yes. I'll tell her, but I don't know if she's up to Dorothy and the red shoes tonight."
"Daniel, I'm going." I appeared in front of him, staidly attired, clutching a small canvas suitcase, an earnest girl in a thirties movie announcing to Mother and Father that she is leaving home, headed for the big city.
"Going where?"
"Swansea."
"The police said there was no urgency. He's going to the coroner tomorrow. These things often take days. Sometimes weeks. You can plan a funeral from here."
"We're not going to have a regular funeral. Will would never have-"
"Who's Tom?"
"What are you talking about?"
"The chap you mentioned to Will's friend on the phone just now."
"He saw us together on the street."
"Tom who saw us?"
"Will saw us. He told Diane he saw me with a man who looked like Tom Wolfe, but she couldn't remember whether he'd said Tom or Thomas."
"Old CIA agents don't die," he said with a sharpness verging on vehemence. "They just tail other subjects."
For a short, shocked moment I said nothing. Then I answered him with an edge of my own. "This one just died. And he hasn't been in the CIA for ten years."
"Most of the men you know are gay, and Will knows it. Why would he assume that because you're with a man, the two of you are-"
"He must have seen something in our demeanor. He's very astute that way. He was."
"We weren't fucking, for God's sake."
"You don't need to be to look as if you are."
"You're thinking that seeing us on a street corner led him to take his life?"
"Isn't that why you're in such a snit, because you feel guilty that it could be true?"
He was quiet for a long moment, fully dressed, his hair combed, and looking me over, a visual frisk, taking inventory. I'd changed into sandals with low heels, a khaki skirt and navy linen jacket, something for a Swansea summer funeral. Christ, she's gone starchy New England spinster on me; she's gone Emily Dickinson on me, when I had this arrangement all worked out with Fanny Hill.
"There's quite a lot to take in," he said in a kindly, hushed voice that startled me after my accusation and my flip fantasy of what he'd been thinking. "The police said it looked awfully much as if he died in his sleep. I hope he did. Are you sure you can get to Swansea at this hour? What if you're stranded at La Guardia or Logan?"
"If I make the eight o'clock shuttle to Boston, I'll be okay. In summer the small planes run from Logan to Swansea until ten."
"Have you enough cash for a cab?"
"I'm fine. Why don't we head out?"
"Sophy, do you really need to go to Swansea tonight?"
"Of course I do."
"But you're always so cool-headed, so distant when you talk about Will and your marriage. Now that this has happened, it's as if you'd never left him. I must say, I'm rather confused."
"Cool-headed and distant?"
Daniel nodded.
I was surprised at first to hear I came off that way, that I seemed to have had so little feeling for him, when the truth was that he had been the center of my life for ten years. But I'd had to steel myself in order to leave. I'd had to harden my heart to cause the pain I know I inflicted, and I suppose I'd continued to carry some of that hardness with me, until the police called.
"I can understand your confusion," I said to Daniel. "But I'd like to go tonight. I want to be with people who knew him."
"Let me take your bag."
We were silent in the hallway, but it was an eerie silence, or maybe it was the start of everything familiar becoming eerie and surreaclass="underline" a state of hyper-awareness, when you notice the weight of your eyelids blinking. I had not had much experience of this kind, but I imagined the presence of such fresh grief would smooth out rough edges, would make us embodiments of gentleness. I suppose it already had, briefly, when I cried in bed and Daniel held me and the word "darling" slipped accidentally from his lips.
In the elevator he said, "The children will miss you tonight. I'm not sure yet what to tell them about why you're not there. The truth seems rather an excessive-"
"Tell them my dog is sick," I said without thinking. "Did the police say anything to you about Henry?"
"Who?"
"The dog."
"Not a word."
"Ben must have taken him in. The neighbor who found Will."
"I suppose it's that kind of place, Swansea. Small-town America, everyone full of the milk of human kindness. Rousseau's natural man, uncorrupted by society."
"In fact, it's not, though it may look that way"
Daniel smiled and said, "That's something else you never told me."
"It's been quite a day for revelations, hasn't it?" And for withholding them. I was thinking about Vicki's visit, Jesus's marriage proposal, and my confrontation with Lili, now all fused in my mind under the heading Today, Before. The elevator door opened, and with the suddenness of a movie clapper-board being snapped and released, my thoughts lurched to the other heading, Today, After, and that was all of this. As we crossed the lobby, I said to Daniel, "He died alone, even if the dog was there."
"I'm afraid so."
The doorman opened the door, tipping his head to me. "I'll be away for the next few days, if you could hold my packages."
The thick heat of the early evening landed on us like a gigantic fishnet. The city rose and shrieked in every direction. "Jesus," Daniel muttered to all of it and began walking toward Broadway, where it was easier to catch a cab.
"He sat with two different people when they died," I said. "He was afraid of a lot of things, but he wasn't afraid of people dying. I suppose I never told you that either." I knew I had passed into some realm of neediness and self-absorption, where, rather than making conversation, I was free-associating, drifting, and there wouldn't be much to say back. So I was surprised when Daniel perched on the curb and raised his arm to flag a cab, his eyes darting between the oncoming traffic and me, and said, with a psychological acumen he had never exhibited before, "You don't know it, but you're in shock now. It will last a few days, and when it wears off, everything will be much more difficult. When you're with your stepchildren and Will's other relatives-when the shock wears off-old resentments will surface. With a vengeance."