George Higgins - A change of gravity

Mondays through Fridays those weeks he'd stayed in Boston in the small one-bedroom apartment that he kept on Lindall Street on the back slope of Beacon Hill (paying the rent out of campaign contributions while continuing to collect tax-exempt reimbursements for daily mileage), usually screwing Stacy three or four times until early 75, when she caught her network break and moved to New York.

He always fucked Stacy at her place. Mercy regularly came to Boston to see her friends from Emmanuel for Symphony, or to shop at Filene's Basement, staying over once or twice a month to make Dan take her to a play, or dinner with friends from the House whose wives she deemed acceptably smart and polished — she was pleasant to their 'somewhat-loutish' husbands.

Mercy'd never hidden her suspicion of his vulnerability to sexual temptation, or her apprehension that by leasing the apartment he was revealing his intention to surrender to it. Nights when he was staying in Boston he usually called her at home around ten, while she watched TV in bed; she often kept herself awake an extra hour in order to call him back after midnight, half an hour after Stacy would have finished her shift at the station, saying: "Just checking up on you, sweetie.

Making sure you're still there. Didn't suddenly decide to pop out for bread and milk right after we hung up. Also that I don't hear someone walking around barefoot on her tippy-tippy-toes, being very, very quiet, while we're talking now." She called in the morning, too, inserting long pauses in their conversations to see whether she could hear his shower running. She had sharp eyes that she used boldly, forthrightly inspecting his pad for traces of trespassing female occupancy every time she visited. "Ooh, and how is the FBI these days?" Stacy would coo sweetly, with wide eyes, when Mercy's name came up.

Saturdays and Sundays book-ending the family ski-vacations Hilliard had spent working Saturday forenoons at his Holyoke office, after 1978 luxuriating by himself in the ten-room home in Bell Woods, proprietorially watching basketball games on his forty-inch TV and snow accumulating on the field and in the pine woods behind the house where Emily rode her Morgan horse. Sunday evenings he pulled on a white wool turtleneck and a blazer before driving languidly over to Grey Hills to see who might be around for dinner.

That lazy and expansive attitude he'd had and imputed to his friends of purely optional self-indulgence had been dispelled in the days of depositions and preliminary hearings in Hilliard vs. Hilliard, Hampshire County Probate Court #82-268-D, the D denoting divorce proceedings. Living by himself in a condominium he'd sublet furnished at the splendidly refurbished Old Wisdom House overlooking Hampton Pond, he found the change of residence 'discombobulating," his mind thrown off-balance by the unfamiliarity of living in someone else's luxury. He told Merrion it was like waking up in a rented room on the road morning after morning; "It's a very nice hotel, but now I want to go home," he said. "I lie there as I'm waking up and I think: "This is really a beautiful place, but when do I get to go home?"

He had chosen to live there as abruptly as Mercy had decided she'd had enough of him. Merrion lived there, having purchased a two-bedroom unit during the rehabilitation and conversion phase of the old inn into condominiums six years before. Because he knew and liked the woman who managed the place, Glenda Rice, he could get the rental set up for Hilliard fast.

The hurry had been Mercy's creation; having taken eight years to make up her mind what she wanted done, she wanted it done at once. The day after Tax Day, Friday the 16th, she had come home from her afternoon seminar in statistics at UMass. later than usual, delayed by the unusual length of the conversation she'd had with Diane.

She'd been troubled for a week by something she had overheard in the Grey Hills pro shop the previous Saturday. She had been sitting behind the sweaters racked on the chrome trolley in the women's clothing section, trying on new Foot-Joy spikes. She was trying to decide well before the golf season started whether to order a new pair, which would be a fresh nuisance to break in, or continue to put up with the existing nuisance: her shoes occasionally gave her blisters. A man whose face she could not see and whose voice she didn't recognize came up to the counter where Bolo Cormier sat on his stool at the register, moving his lips as he read his paper and drinking coffee as he did most days between golf seasons. They had some brief conversation to which she paid no attention, but then as she hunched over to lace up the brown-and-white saddle-shoe on her right foot, dropping her head below the sweaters, she heard the man say: "Dan Hilliard been around today or's he with his new girlfriend down in Boston? I called his house and office didn't get an answer."

She had turned her head quickly to peer under the sweaters as Bolo said "Dunno, haven't seen him," but had not had the presence of mind to part them before the grey flannel slacks and the dark-brown tasseled loafers turned away from the register and left the store.

"Well, but did you really need to?" Diane said over the salt-rimmed conical glasses of margueritas in the Flower Room at Gino's, water splashing from the fountain into the low-sided kidney-shaped fire-brick pool with the Trader Vic's-type tropical-rain machine showering softly down over it. The sound system played an instrumental version of "Jamaica Farewell." "What difference would it've made if you had found out who it was? Or'd recognized the voice? The point is that it's common knowledge, out there at oh-aren't-we-elegant Grey Hills, that your husband's got a popsy on the side. It's not some chick who picked him up in a bar and he'd had a few too many drinks and he was lonely, so they had a one-night stand. This is an ongoing thing. He's having an affair, creating a new secret history with someone who lives in Boston. I mean, my God, Marcia, pardon me, but that's what I think should concern you. If you have any question here, it isn't who said he's got a girlfriend; it's: "Who is the little slut?" That's what you need to know, so you can find out where she lives, hunt her down and scratch her eyes out.

"Assuming of course, that's what you have in mind; otherwise you don't need to know anything more. Do you have any idea at all as to who it might be?"

Mercy shook her head and chewed her lip. "No," she said, 'not now, I don't. A few years ago I would've said Yes. I was sure he was having an affair with this TV reporter Stacy Hawkes. You may've seen her; I know I used to, a lot, by accident. It's very hard when your husband's honey's on network TV. You can't help it; every time you see her, even after it's over, you think: "There's the little tramp who stole my husband." I think she's still on NBC; I know I wont watch NBC news.

She got married a year or two ago; a former congressman, I think, retired to become head of some foundation. She must go for older political types. I don't know how she looks now, but back then she was very attractive. Looked a lot like me, as a matter of fact, which didn't surprise me — they say men often pick girlfriends who look like their wives. Does the fondness for lookalikes mean they have no imagination? Or because that way it doesn't seem so much like cheating?"

Diane laughed. "This's okay because it's the same, even though it's really different; and it's better because it's so different, but okay because it's the same." Maybe that is how it works."

"Assuming, of course," Mercy said, 'that didn't sound like boasting. I probably should've said she looked the way I like to think I used to look, when I was about twenty; before three pregnancies and about fifteen years. The only stretch marks this kid would've known about would've been the ones she left on the truth.