“Your wife is even younger than I am, Bash. What do you know about women at midlife?” She’s trying to make a joke, but an edge slips into her voice, a little pocketknife showing its blade.
“I’ve got a pharmaceutical client who’s trying to break ground in menopause, perimenopause. It’s promising stuff, if we can just get the FDA out of our way. I hope it gets online in time to help women your age.”
Okay, this is officially her least favorite conversation, ever. The last thing she wants to do is tell Bash she went through early menopause because of fibroids. Although Bash’s tone couldn’t be more impersonal, she feels as if-her mind searches for the source of her unease, finds it-as if she is being set up for a disappointing job evaluation, something that has happened to her exactly once. It was her first year in the city’s state’s attorney’s office and she was disheartened not to receive the highest evaluation. They claimed it was a policy not to give first-year employees top marks, but she later found out that the other newbie, a man, was given the best possible rating. Anyway, it feels like that. Is she about to be fired as-what is she? She’s not a mistress or a girlfriend. Her mind rejects the crude pop culture term that would seem to best describe what they do. She’s not Bash’s “buddy.” And although she calls him “lover,” she’s not fond of that word either, given its root. If she thought she were capable of loving Bash, she wouldn’t be with him. She would never claim to love another woman’s man. That’s the true betrayal.
Yet she remains curious about his other life, his “real” life. She senses that, say, should a truck mow down Mrs. Arnold “Bash” Bastrop on Capitol Hill tomorrow, Lu would not be a candidate for being his public companion, although Bash is clearly one of those men who cannot live without a mate. But he requires a decorous one, a woman who would be delighted to consider her husband and household her “job.” How interesting, Lu thinks, that Bash and her brother have chosen such retro wives. Because Lauranne, for all her blather about her “partnership” with AJ, is very much a junior partner, tolerated at AJ’s side because he insists on it. He’s the brand. And it’s a cinch Davey has a dutiful, passive wife.
Davey.
Lu has not been able to summon the-strength, moxie, chutzpah?-to go visit him. How do you show up in the life of someone you haven’t seen for almost thirty years and try to figure out if he ordered a hit on his old girlfriend? There’s no evidence that Davey even knew Rudy Drysdale. After all, her brother didn’t. A little Internet sleuthing quickly determined that Davey’s church does give out bag lunches every week, in a parking lot near North Laurel. Still, it’s hard to imagine Davey himself handing out lunch bags, looking for a killer to recruit. None of this makes sense.
Jesus, Rudy, why didn’t you just confess before you killed yourself? Would that have been so hard?
She sits up, stretches, and Bash pushes her back down, covers her with himself. She is starfished on the bed, arms pinned. Again, she thinks of those waking moments on the sofa, the sense that she is being weighed down by something she cannot see and cannot overcome. But she can see and feel what is holding her in place and she likes it. So Bash has pharmaceutical clients. She had always assumed his ability to go more than one round was simply the result of pent-up lust, but there probably is some sort of pill involved, come to think of it. Come to think of it. She is on the verge of doing just that when Nita Flood’s voice hisses in her ear: He weighed, what, almost two hundred pounds? And I was a hundred and ten, wore a size 3 jeans. How could anyone tell if I struggled?
Her pleasure is dimmed. Still, she manages to finish. Bash notices that she is distracted, but he probably assumes she is making that inevitable transition into real life, the life that has no place for a healthy, harmless lust. Would Bash’s wife find this so harmless? As much as Lu wonders about her, she has no desire to know anything. This is civilized, she tells herself. I’m a forty-five-year-old woman, I need a sexual outlet, but I don’t need a boyfriend or a partner, and I definitely don’t need a husband. I am taking care of enough people. The term “high maintenance” always seems to be applied to women, but Lu has never known any woman who needs as much care as a man. Heck, her father has had an ersatz wife in Teensy all these years.
Lu drives home, wondering if it’s time to let go of Bash, but only because she wants to be the one who ends it. If he calls it quits, she fears it will arouse old feelings, that intense desire to win, no matter the cost. As a young woman, she got a little crazy in the face of rejection. She was only in her twenties. But she can still be embarrassed by some of the things she did. Lu, as a young woman, preferred being direct and confrontational. She could not believe that there were men who would simply walk away, cut off communication-and make you feel gauche for thinking the game should be played any other way. She was the opposite of cool, in those early love affairs. Then she reconnected with Gabe, and his heart was so open, his sense of self forever informed by the short geeky boy he had been, that she felt she had, in fact, found her soul mate. “We were imprinted early on each other, like ducks,” she once told him.
She didn’t tell him that she had stolen that line from a book.
He was two hundred pounds… Why is Jonnie in her head, when Jonnie clearly had no desire to help Lu figure out why she was targeted by Rudy Drysdale? Maybe it’s not really Jonnie at all, but Blind Lady Justice, the omnipresent conscience that insists on what is right and wrong, a conscience whose voice sounds strangely like Lu’s father’s. Fuck him. There was Nita again. How can she not realize that Lu’s father was one of the few people who had her best interests at heart, all those years ago?
It’s a coincidence, Rudy going into the wrong apartment, Lu tells herself. She’ll go see Davey, ask him a few questions, and they’ll have a good laugh. He’ll tell her that he never knew Rudy Drysdale and he doesn’t fear his old girlfriend because he didn’t rape her. A grand jury made that determination thirty-five years ago. Davy’s alleged crime was not hidden or hushed up. Juanita Flood Forke’s complaint was heard-and rejected.
APRIL 21
When Lu pulls up in front of the Triadelphia Community Church, the first thing she notices is the long, graceful ramp that snakes up to its front doors. Of course, all churches-all public buildings-are obligated to be accessible in this day and age, but this particular ramp is clearly the aesthetic focus of an otherwise unremarkable beige rectangle. The ramp is centered, flanked by two staircases. Sheep to the right, goats to the left, Pastor Robinson front and center.
Inside, the accommodations continue. The center aisle seems particularly wide, and there are gently sloping ramps on either side of the nave. In contrast to the blah beige outside, the woodwork is dark, the lighting dim. This is Davey’s church in every sense. Davey’s fiefdom. Pastors are prohibited from endorsing candidates, but they are instrumental in getting out the vote and they have ways to indicate which candidates they favor. Lu did not ask to appear here during her campaign because she could not align herself with someone as conservative as Davey. But nor could she afford to alienate him. Davey may not have been able to stop marriage equality, but he was part of a coalition that helped derail the legislation the first time it came before the Maryland legislature a few years ago. Safe on the sidelines then, Lu was fascinated by the debate, the anger expressed over the idea that gay marriage was a civil rights issue. Davey, in particular, was one of those who framed race as a given, homosexuality a choice. He was never strident; that wasn’t his style. He still had that husky, resonant voice that made you want to lean in, lest you miss a single word.