Jones was used to having emotions that caused him to struggle. They darkened his mood when he opened his eyes in the morning, and they trudged through his brain at night, dream characters acting out dark tragedies in the ghost world behind his eyelids. But the emotions scraping in the center of his chest now were feelings he had never faced before.
He felt a rising sense that something far more than a business relationship was opening up between himself and Lara. He was already in the spiral of playing back their meeting in his mind and re-experiencing the emotions of each moment; he bounced between being sure she was intrigued by him to being just as certain that her interest was strictly professional. He knew that very game of emotional ping-pong was part of falling in love. And of course he had fallen in love before, when he had met Faith. Now she was gone, and for years, despite what his friends would tell him about time healing all wounds, he had been sure he would never again know anything that felt remotely like that kind of love.
Yet here he was, walking into this party, excited to see Lara and simultaneously telling himself that all that excitement was false, a dangerous delusion.
Still, he had told Lara about Faith; wasn’t that a healthy sign? Didn’t it mean that he could open up to Lara and therefore might find some sort of honest combination of his past with an unfolding present?
Then another thought hit him—a vicious, terrible thought, with the power to destroy every possibility of new love in his life: Jones wondered if he had used the tragedy of Faith’s death as a way to make himself appeal to Lara’s sympathies. He knew that thought was false—he knew it. And yet it made him resolve to say nothing more to Lara about Faith.
When he met Faith he knew the relationship was special—even in the initial stages of attraction and friendship, he sensed she was unique; she appealed to a place in his heart that no one else had ever touched, and even if their togetherness never went past that early connection he believed he was no more likely to forget her, ever, than he was to see a day when he could not recognize the melody to his favorite song.
And even when that connection continued to deepen, he did not find it easy to ask her to marry him. No, that was not quite true. Asking her was easy; it was deciding to ask her that was hard. There seemed to be so many ways to ruin a relationship. Even while in medical school, in his early twenties, he felt he had seen most of them already among his friends. The infidelities, the pride, the selfishness, the fear. And those were not just the failings of men; he knew as many stories of girlfriends and wives being unfaithful as of boyfriends and husbands cheating.
He had never betrayed a girlfriend. If he was in a relationship, he was in until he was out. Still it worried him: could he be faithful? He already believed that to betray Faith would be the worst thing he’d ever done. And what if he were to do the worst thing in the world? What if he were to fail at loving? So even after he knew he loved her, it had taken him a long time to propose.
And then she said yes.
And they had three months together before she died.
He had no sense of having in any way caused her death; his sense of guilt was not over that. Jones felt no temptation to indulge in the classic cliché of trying to make himself responsible for the fact that they were on the road that night. In every logical sense, Faith had led all those choices: she was the one who’d had the idea to found the clinic, she had made the plans to go that night, she was even driving when the accident happened. Jones felt responsible for many of the events in his life but he did not feel responsible for that.
The guilt, when it came, was about his heart—that he had not appreciated her enough, that he had been given a gift he failed to acknowledge, failed to respond to. And so it was taken back.
Lara, Jones already knew, might ask: God took it back? Or fate? Or chance?
Whatever gives gifts as big as she was, Jones thought.
Lara owned three black formal dresses and they all looked the same; she had bought them several years apart and did not realize how each was similar to the last until she had brought the new one home and hung it in the closet next to the previous dress she had purchased in an effort to stay current. The truth was that Lara did not care about dresses; at least she had not cared until she was preparing for this evening, when she tried on each gown, one after another, until she could not remember what she had liked and what she had hated about any of them. Now she stood with Brenda and Malcolm and smiled at each guest as best she could—she had met them all at other events in the charity circuit of Chicago and recalled the names of none of them—and she watched the doors through which she knew Jones would be coming. “Quit fidgeting,” Brenda hissed beside her.
“I’m not fidgeting,” Lara whispered through a fixed smile.
“If you were operating on Roscoe, all the alarms would be screaming,” Brenda said, speaking like a bad ventriloquist, through an even broader smile.
“Behave yourselves, ladies,” Malcolm said quietly, from Lara’s other shoulder. “Half of Chicago society is here.”
Then Jones stepped out onto the veranda and down the stairs toward the gardens. He and Lara spotted each other at almost the same moment. Lara could hear Brenda gasp. As Jones smiled and moved toward them, Brenda coughed and said behind her hand, “He looks like James Bond! Like James Bond ought to look!”
“He looks just like his pictures,” Malcolm said.
As Jones reached them, Lara shook his hand and said, “Brenda, Malcolm… meet Dr. Jones.”
Jones shook Brenda’s hand, and Malcolm’s—and Brenda, behind Jones’s back, gave Lara a bug-eyed look of joy.
Jones’s place card at dinner positioned him between Brenda and Malcolm. Lara sat opposite him; flanking her were two ladies that Lara introduced as officers of a group called Children’s Charities. During dinner Jones and Lara made eye contact several times but did not converse. She ate little and smiled often, nodding as the guests praised her for her graciousness in hosting the event. After dinner one of the women who had dined next to Lara rose and moved to a podium perched on a low platform beside the main table, where she delivered a speech that ended with: “… And for the generosity of the Blair Foundation, we at Children’s Charities extend a heartfelt thank-you to Dr. Lara Blair.”
Lara rose and moved to the podium and the microphone, while everyone applauded vigorously yet politely, as they would—or so Jones thought—for someone they did not really know.
At the podium Lara said, “On behalf of everyone at Blair Bio-Med and Foundation, thank you.” And that was it. She shook hands with the lady who had introduced her and handed her a check, as a group of photographers snapped pictures and everyone applauded again.
During the applause Lara looked at Jones, and this time she was not smiling at all.
An hour later the band was playing and the guests were dancing beneath the stars. Lara and Jones strolled the veranda, Lara greeting guests. “Senator, how are you?” she said to a man with waves of white hair.