There she was, climbing up the stairs to the end townhouse of the building right next to him. He could see her face clearly as she dug in her purse for her keys. No, she didn't look like Lizzy after all, not really, not as much as he had thought in the store. But her movement was the same, or very similar; he hadn't imagined that. And her hair, it was almost like Lizzy's, wasn't it? When Lizzy had worn it that way, or almost that way? Long, anyway.
Not Lizzy at all, really. But—and here's the thing that surprised him—she was still attractive. Still interesting. The way she stopped searching, stood up straight, rolled her eyes heavenward in exasperation, and then made one final dive of the hand into the purse, to have it emerge a moment later, clutching the keys on a big brass ring. How could she have missed something that size in her purse? She slipped it into the lock, went inside, and closed the door behind her. Lights went on. She was home.
But I'm not home. Not here, not anywhere.
More than anything else Quentin wanted to get out of his car and walk up to that door, knock on it, smile sheepishly when she opened the door and...
And what? Lie? I'm sorry, I seem to have locked my keys in my car, can I use your phone to call triple-A? Beg your pardon, but I noticed you in the grocery store and you look so much like my dead sister that I really want to spend some time with you, thinking about her and crying—do you have a few evenings free?
She probably had a husband in there waiting for her, or coming home soon afterward. But as he sat in the parking lot, nobody else walked up the front steps. There was no husband. Somehow there was no husband. And the certainty grew: I should be the one to walk those stairs, to open that door, to laughingly call out, "Hi, honey, I'm home." To tease her about a purse so cluttered she couldn't even find a two-pound eight-inch brass ring of keys.
Hello, I'm a multimillionaire who is pathologically lonely and so filled with pent-up longings that you have only to think of a desire and I'll satisfy it. Mind if I come in?
He restarted his engine and drove away. It was dark. He had sat there for nearly three hours. When he got back to his apartment the meat pies weren't even cold, let alone frozen. He spent a half hour slopping them out of their pieplates and grinding them down the disposal. Then he went to the Rio Grande and over a plate of pork tamales and a bottle of sangria-flavor Peñafiel at the bar he plotted how to find out who she was and, more to the point, how to arrange to meet her before the end of the week.
3. In the Garden
The first thing Quentin's lawyer found out about her was that she didn't own the townhouse—a property-management firm was renting it out for an investment group in Atlanta that owned twenty condos in the complex. So she was renting.
Only she wasn't. The condo was empty.
Then did she work for the property management company? Nobody from the firm had visited the property except the yard guys, and they had no employee who fit her description particularly well anyway.
A previous renter? A relative of a previous renter? An ex-spouse or former lover of a previous renter? A roommate or subletter of a previous renter?
The condos were fairly new. There had been only one renter before, a Pakistani family of four who had been waiting for their house to be built out in Oak Park. No roommates, no sublets, no ex-spouses or former lovers, and even if one of their relatives had looked like her, they'd never given anyone a key because the wife was home all day so who locked the doors?
The research had cost him about a thousand dollars in lawyer and private investigator fees and the result was zilch. She didn't exist. No woman could possibly have walked up to that door and turned a key in the lock and gone inside. He didn't see it, it didn't happen.
He sat in the parking lot for half an hour on Saturday, trying to figure out how he could have been wrong. And came at last to the obvious conclusion—he was one seriously lonely man. Conjuring hallucinatory images of a woman very much like his dead sister, just so he could imagine meeting her and talking to her and having somebody to build a life with. It was definitely time to start dating.
The trouble was he had no idea how to go about it. He'd been a witness of the singles scene at restaurant-bars like Rio Grande and Lone Star and T.G.I.Friday's, and it always looked so pathetic to him. Come here often? You look good, and I haven't even had a drink yet. Buy you a drink? Want to help me celebrate my promotion? I hope you just broke up with your boyfriend so I don't have to kill him. Did any of these lines actually work? And even if they did, what came of it? One-night stands? Quick torrid affairs? Did any of these deliberate encounters lead to something that cured loneliness instead of simply easing the symptoms for an hour or two? Quentin wasn't interested in meeting the kind of woman who would come to one of those places looking for the kind of man who hoped to meet women there.
But this was the DC area, wasn't it? There were serious parties going on every night; Quentin knew it because some of his new business partners moved in those circles—the guy who was trying to start up a serious fund-raising business, for instance. The lobbyist who was trying to get out of the lobbying business and into publishing. They had both invited Quentin to the kind of party where congressmen and generals and admirals and undersecretaries showed up. He had turned them down as he always did.
He drove home and called them both. Two parties on the same night, one in Georgetown at a second-tier embassy and one in Chevy Chase at the home of a once-famous hostess. "These are people on the make, Quentin," said the lobbyist. "They're going to figure out fast that you aren't power, so you must be money. I hope you won't mind that."
"Are you saying they're all cynically looking for people to exploit?"
"All the eager-looking ones are. If they're really vivacious or fervent or, you know, on—they're trying to get something out of the night. So if you want pleasant company, just look for somebody who's bored but not drunk and you'll probably do OK. Of course, that's usually a description of somebody's spouse who isn't, you know, inside the belt-way. So they're probably not just bored but boring. And devotedly married."
"I just want to see what these parties are like. Tell me what to wear."
The first party was cocktails before dinner; the would-be fundraiser didn't have the clout to get him a seat at the table, but that was fine with Quentin, he had the other party to go to. The first one was a bust—everybody was on the make or, worse, on the way down and desperately clinging to prestige. Quentin kept count of the snubs he got until he ran out of fingers and then he concentrated on eating the really fine hors d'oeuvres and avoiding the cocktail pushers.
The second party was much nicer. The hostess hadn't really faded, Quentin quickly concluded. It was Washington that had faded; she had an elegance that felt pre-war. Not World War II, either. More like World War I. Could that graceful era possibly have survived in this house? The age when undersecretaries were all men of good families with old money, serving their country as a civic duty and not as a rung on the ladder? That's how it felt, for the first hour at least. But then he began to see that his lobbyist partner had been right. Even in this old-fashioned gathering, there were those who tried just a little too hard and those who remained just a little bit too aloof. It was as much about status as the other party had been, except, of course, that the other one was more nakedly obvious about it.
I might have been like these people, Quentin thought. If I hadn't just stumbled into money by being a pretty good programmer at exactly the right time for that to bring millions of dollars down on the heads of unsuspecting geeks. I might have been on the outside looking in; at the bottom looking up. Now I'm on the outside, all right, but above, looking down. I don't need anything these people have to offer. What I need, they don't even care about. Some of them probably even have it, and are wasting it, losing it—an adoring wife or a husband who gets taken for granted, ignored, hurt, left behind on the upward climb. He spotted a couple of these—women who were clearly uncomfortable in their designerish or designeresque dresses, women who belonged at a PTA social like Quentin's mom, bringing cookies to the bake sale. There was nothing for them here. Not even their husbands. Their husbands were here, yes, but not for them.