I shuddered and reached for my glass. “Maybe we should think about going out to get something to eat,” I suggested, finishing my wine. “You hungry?”
Unexpectedly, Dylan laughed, as though we’d been talking of nothing more serious than the weather, then rolled over to slide his arms around my waist. “I could be,” he said, nuzzling my throat. “Maybe. If I had the chance to work up an appetite—”
Later, we went out to eat.
When we returned that night, Dylan tried calling Dr. Dvorkin, to see about picking up his things from the main house. But Robert was out, no doubt caught up in selecting the new regent, or else with the Aditi or the Mall’s Independence Day celebrations or any of the million other things that consumed his life. I finally gave Dylan my key, so he could get into the house and retrieve his things. He returned to the carriage house with a knapsack, a gym bag stuffed with clothes, a personal CD player, and a couple of paperbacks, Shampoo Planet and Pylon and a book about the Neanderthals.
“That’s it?” I stared at the overflowing gym bag. “That’s all you brought for the entire summer?”
Dylan shrugged. “My mom’s coming out for my birthday. She’ll get me some more clothes then.”
We called in sick the next day, and the day after that. We stayed in my bedroom in the carriage house, with the wisteria trailing through the open window and the old fan in the belfry humming like a hornet’s nest. At night we’d venture out onto the Hill, walking as in a trance through the blue-veined air, drunk on sex and heat and wine, both of us not a little stunned to find the city still around us, the sound of firecrackers and police cruisers crackling somewhere just out of sight. At twilight government workers filled the outdoor cafés, crowding the little round marble-topped tables. Street kids vied with each other along the southeast strip of Pennsylvania Avenue, kicking through spent blossoms and McDonald’s wrappers and the frayed blackened tails of firecracker strings. At 3:00 A.M. the streets filled with revelers leaving the bars, and their laughter became part of our sleep and our lovemaking, laughter and the crash of bottles breaking against the curb, like surf pounding a far-off shore.
“I love you, Sweeney,” Dylan would whisper, his hands warm against my breast. Before I could fall asleep again, I would wait to hear his heavy breathing. I would wait, to make sure that he didn’t disappear.
When I finally awoke, it was as though I had awakened to find myself in another city. The city I had first glimpsed years before, the city that Oliver had shown me, with its ghosts and transvestite hustlers and phantom cab drivers. Sometimes Dylan and I heard gunshots and far-off screams; more often the tired banter of lawyers and nannies, and college students walking home at 4:00 A.M. from tending bar and waiting tables on the Hill.
Best of all, early one evening, we saw a little family walking from Union Station: mother, small boy, father in military uniform, the exultant boy swinging between his parents and then suddenly bursting free, to run shouting into the empty traffic circle with its lines of American flags, arms raised as he yelled at the top of his lungs,
“ALREADY I LOVE IT!”
Dylan fell onto the sidewalk, laughing helplessly. I joined him, and we watched as the family raced gleefully toward the Capitol.
“Sweeney, this is a great place,” said Dylan, wiping his eyes and turning to drape his arm around my shoulder. “Already I love it.”
So that, too, he gave back to me: the city I had fallen in love with once, the city I thought I had lost forever—
When at last we went to work again we walked with arms linked down Pennsylvania Avenue, disentangling ourselves when we reached the Mall and putting on our best sober faces when we got inside the museum. No one seemed surprised that I’d taken time off. Whenever I passed Dylan in the hall, whenever he ducked into my office, I felt as though wisps of smoke must hover above our heads like Pentecostal flames. But no one else seemed to notice at all, or if they did, no one cared.
Still, we tried to be discreet; at least I did. Dylan seemed immensely pleased to be carrying on an affair, and I suspected he was just waiting for someone to ask him so he could spill the beans.
“Don’t,” I cautioned him, almost daily. “I could get in trouble for this.”
“How? We’re consenting adults.”
Well, one of us is, I thought. But I only said, “Dr. Dvorkin is very, very paranoid about this kind of thing, okay? This is government work, and there are big problems with sexual harassment in this city, and I just would rather we be discreet, all right?”
Dylan rolled his eyes and slung his hands into his pockets. “Of course. Discreet.”
Although I hadn’t seen much of Dr. Dvorkin since Dylan arrived. He had greeted Dylan when we finally made it back to the museum. He seemed pleased enough to see him, and didn’t appear to have taken note of the fact that neither of us had been in to work for some days, not to mention that Dylan was supposed to be staying in Dr. Dvorkin’s guest room, rather than my bed.
“Your mother is well?” Dr. Dyorkin asked absently. He was even more preoccupied than he normally was. The phone in his office kept ringing, and his comments to whoever was on the other line were unusually terse. “Please give her my best, will you? Now then—”
He sighed and touched his brow with a handkerchief, and we followed him down the hall. “Katherine, I’ll be out again all day. If you need me, talk to Laurie—”
“Has Dr. Dvorkin ever met your mother?” I asked, as Dylan and I stared after him.
“I don’t know. He and my grandfather were good friends, I know that.”
I glanced sideways at Dylan. He was wearing baggy khaki trousers and a white oxford cloth shirt, the sleeves rolled up loosely to expose smoothly muscled forearms and bony wrists, his tousled hair slipping from its ponytail. He leaned on the curved banister, staring rather mournfully down at Dr. Dvorkin’s retreating figure. I wondered if Dylan knew about the Benandanti—it struck me that he should be a legacy of theirs, if anyone was. The thought was dispiriting, almost frightening, and I pushed it aside.
“Hey,” I said, and turned away. “You got work to do.”
“See you at lunch?”
I nodded and smiled. “Yeah. Au revoir, kiddo.”
Summer was usually a slow time of year, despite the annual onslaught of tourists. While I’d been playing hooky with Dylan, only a few messages had come in on my machine—the usual inquiries for photos and videodiscs, a message from Jack Rogers, a few intelligently worded calls from Baby Joe in New York.
“Uh, yeah, hija, what the fuck you doing? Call me.”
“Jeez, hija, it’s Thursday. Where the fuck are you?”
There were several more variations on this theme. I played them back and grinned, wondering how Baby Joe would react when he learned I was fooling around with an intern. But the idea of telling him about Dylan himself, and Dylan’s parentage, was just a little too much to contemplate. So I didn’t call Baby Joe back right away. I figured I’d wait a couple of days, until I’d caught up with everything else.