"What does?" He was without a clue.
"Calling him by name. Repeatedly doing it, I mean." He stared at me.
"Well, I'm not trying to be critical," I went on, making matters worse.
"I'm just mentioning it as a friend because no -one else would, and you should know. A friend would be that honest, I'm saying. A true one would."
"Are you quite finished?" he asked.
"Quite." I forced a little smile.
"Now, then, do you want to tell me what's really bothering you, or should I just bravely hazard a guess?"
"There is absolutely nothing bothering me," I said as I began to cry.
"My God, Kay." He offered me his napkin.
"I have my own." I wiped my eyes.
"This is about the other night, isn't it?"
"Maybe you should tell me which other night you mean. Maybe you have other nights on a regular basis." Wesley tried to suppress his laughter, but he could not. For several minutes neither of us could talk because he was laughing and I was caught between crying and laughing. Stan the waiter returned with drinks, and I took several swallows of mine before speaking again.
"Listen," I finally said.
"I'm sorry. But I'm tired, this case is horrible to deal with, Marino and I aren't getting along, and Lucy's in trouble."
"That's enough to push anyone to tears," Wesley said, and I could tell it bothered him that I hadn't added him to my list of things wrong. It perversely pleased me that it bothered him.
"And yes, I'm concerned about what happened in North Carolina," I added.
"Do you regret it?"
"What good does it do to say that I do or I don't?"
"It would do me good for you to say that you don't."
"I can't say that," I said.
"Then you do regret it."
"No, I don't."
"Then you don't regret it."
"Dammit, Benton, leave it be."
"I'm not going to," he said.
"I was there, too."
"Excuse me?" I puzzled.
"The night it happened? Remember? Actually it was very early in the morning. What we did took two. I was there. You weren't the only person there who had to think about it for days. Why don't you ask me whether I regret it?"
"No," I said.
"You're the one who's married."
"If I committed adultery, so did you. It takes two," he said again.
"My plane leaves in an hour. I've got to go."
"You should have thought about that before starting this conversation. You can't just walk out in the middle of something like this."
"Certainly I can."
"Kay?" He looked into my eyes and lowered his voice. He reached across the table and took my hand.
I got a room in the Willard that night. Wesley and I talked a very long time and resolved matters sufficiently for us to rationalize our repeating the same sin. When we got off the elevator in the lobby early the next morning, we were very low key and polite with one another, as if we had only just met but had a lot in common. We shared a taxi to National Airport and got a flight to Charlotte, where I spent an hour with Lucy on the phone.
"Yes," I said.
"I am finding someone and have in fact already started on that," I told her in the US Air Club.
"I need to do something now," she said again.
"Please try to be patient."
"No. I know who's doing this to me and I'm going to do something about it."
"Who?" I asked, alarmed.
"When it's time, it will be known."
"Lucy, who did what to you? Please tell me what you're talking about."
"I can't right now. There's something I must do first. When are you coming home?"
"I don't know. I'll call you from Asheville as soon as I get a feel for what's going on."
"So it's okay for me to use your car?"
"Of course."
"You won't be using it for at least a couple days, right?"
"I don't think so. But what is it you're contemplating?" I was getting increasingly unsettled.
"I might need to go up to Quantico, and if I do and spend the night I wanted to make sure you wouldn't mind."
"No, I don't mind," I said.
"As long as you're careful, Lucy, that's what matters to me." Wesley and I boarded a prop plane that made too much noise for us to talk in the air. So he slept while I sat quietly with my eyes shut as sunlight filled the window and turned the inside of my eyelids red. I let my thoughts wander wherever they would, and many images came to me from corners I had forgotten. I saw my father and the white gold ring he wore on his left hand where a wedding band would have been, but he had lost his at the beach and could not afford another one. My father had never been to college, and I remembered his high school ring was set with a red stone that I wished were a ruby because we were so poor.
I thought we could sell it and have a better life, and I remembered my disappointment when my father finally told me that his ring wasn't worth the gasoline it would take to drive to South Miami. There was something about the way he said this that made me know he had never really lost his wedding ring. He had sold it when he did not know what else to do, but to tell Mother was to destroy her. It had been many years since I had thought about this, and I supposed my mother still had his ring somewhere, unless she had buried it with him, and maybe she had. I could not recall, since I was only twelve when he had died. As I drifted in and out of places, I saw silent scenes of people who simply appeared without invitation. It was very odd. I did not know why it mattered, for example, that Sister Martha, my third-grade teacher, was suddenly writing with chalk on the board or a girl named Jennifer was walking out a door as hail bounced on the churchyard like a million small white marbles. These people from my past slipped in and vanished as I almost slept, and a sorrow welled up that made me aware of Wesley's arm. We were touching slightly. When I focused on the exact point of contact between us, I could smell the wool of his jacket warming in the sun and imagine long fingers of elegant hands that brought to mind pianos and fountain pens and brandy snifters by the fire.
I think it was precisely then I knew I was in love with Benton Wesley. Because I had lost every man I had loved before him, I did not open my eyes until the flight attendant asked us to put our seats in the upright position because we were about to land.
"Is someone meeting us?" I asked him as if this were all that had been on my mind during our hour in the air.
He looked at me for a long moment. His eyes were the color of bottled beer when light hit them a certain way. Then the shadow of deep preoccupations returned them to hazel flecked with gold, and when his thoughts were more than even he could bear, he simply looked away.
"I suppose we're returning to the Travel-Eze," I next asked as he collected his briefcase and unbuckled his seat belt before we had been signaled that we could. The flight attendant pretended not to notice, because Wesley sent out his own signals that made most people slightly afraid.
"You talked to Lucy a long time in Charlotte," he said.
"Yes." We rolled past a wind sock having a deflated day.
"Well?" His eyes filled with light again as he turned toward the sun.
"Well, she thinks she knows who's behind what's happened to her."
"What do you mean, who's behind it?" He frowned.
"I think the meaning's apparent," I said.
"It's not apparent only if you assume nobody is behind anything because Lucy is guilty."
"Her thumb was scanned at three in the morning, Kay."
"That much is clear."
"And what is also clear is that her thumb couldn't have been scanned without her thumb being physically present, without her hand, arm, and the rest of her being physically present at the time the computer says she was."
"I'm very aware of how it looks," I said. He put on sunglasses and we got up.
"And I'm reminding you of how it looks," he said in my ear as he followed me down the aisle. We could have moved out of the Travel-Eze for more luxurious quarters in Asheville. But where we stayed did not seem important to anyone by the time we met Marino at the Coach House restaurant, which was famous for reasons that were not exactly clear.