David Wiltse - The Edge of Sleep

“They’re a pretty chauvinist bunch,” Becker said. “I imagine they give you a lot of grief. At least behind your back.”

“Having a woman tell them what to do shrivels their gonads right up,” she said.

“It’s not the gonads that shrivel, but I take your point,” he said.

“I thought they did something like that.”

“They sort of recede into the body cavity,” Becker said. “If it’s cold-or dangerous. It’s the penis that shrivels.”

“That I know about,” she said, trying to keep the ridicule from her voice. It amazed her that her contempt for men had seemed to increase in direct proportion to the amount of time she had lived without one. She had expected it to work the other way around, absence making the heart grow fonder and so forth. Maybe her fellow agents were right in their muttered assessment of her, she thought. Maybe she really did need a good fuck.

“They call me dragon lady. I know that,” she said.

Becker dismissed it. “They call any woman in authority dragon lady. Don’t take it personally. Just think of all the things they call Hatcher.”

“They mean those things personally,” she pointed out.

“Only because Hatcher deserves them. You don’t.”

“You don’t know that. Maybe I do deserve them. Maybe I am a stony bitch. You wouldn’t know. You don’t know me at all anymore.”

“I’m starting to.”

“You’ve got no idea how hard it is. None of you men know. Just try it one time, just try being a hard-assed executive-but not too hard, don’t want to threaten anyone’s masculinity-and then turn into a loving mother every night at seven until you get him off to school the next morning. All those articles about single parents? They’re not kidding; it’s a bitch. Just try it for a month or two and see how sweet you are.”

“You seem to be managing awfully well,” he said dryly.

She laughed. “Yeah. I’m a whiz. I’m acting, acting all the time. I feel like the world’s biggest hypocrite.”

“Which role is the hardest to sustain?” Becker asked. “The hard-assed exec or the loving mother?”

Karen did not answer immediately. She maneuvered the car onto the exit ramp and stopped at the traffic light. When she spoke her voice was deliberately contained. “I am a loving mother.” she said.

Becker nodded.

“I am.”

“Okay,” he said. He held her eyes for a moment, watching her jaw tighten again. A horn honked behind them as the light changed to green.

“You don’t know anything about it at all,” she said. Her eyes glared angrily.

“About what?”

“About parents and children, what that’s all about.”

The car behind them honked again. Karen turned and very slowly lifted her middle finger at the driver.

“I know half of it,” Becker said.

Karen gunned her car through the intersection and followed the sign toward the mall. The driver behind her blared his horn in frustration.

“No you don’t,” Karen said. “You don’t know any of it! Your childhood was not normal. You can’t judge normal people by your experience. You have no frame of reference for me and my son, none. None!”

“Okay!” Becker said softly.

Karen could hear the pain in his voice. It only made her angrier. “Could we just dispense with the personal stuff? I won’t dig into your life if you leave mine alone, all right?”

“All right.”

She glanced at him. He looked so wounded. She wanted to comfort him but did not dare.

She said, “Let’s just do the fucking work, John, okay?”

This time he didn’t answer at all. Karen had not merely read his file, she had studied it. She knew in detail what he had done to other men, and how. How could he be so sensitive and still survive? she wondered. And if she found the combination of strength and vulnerability so dangerously attractive, why weren’t women chasing this man down the street, clutching at his clothes? His ex-wife must have been a moron to let him go, she thought. And then she remembered that she, too, had let him get away once. She had thought at the time that it was for her own good. It seemed instead that very little good had happened to her since, at least when it came to men.

She pulled into the vast parking lot and stopped the car next to a police car, slipping the FBI identification card under the windshield before the nearest cop could tell her to drive on. Flashing her badge, she led Becker past another huddle of cops and into the mall.

Just before they stepped into the elevator that would take them to the security office, Karen touched Becker’s arm lightly.

“John, I’m an asshole,” she said softly.

“I know,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“But you’re probably right about me,” he added.

They rode the elevator in silence.

When they reached the top she said. “Nobody taught me how to be a mother. My mother didn’t know.”

“I know,” he said. “You told me once.”

“And you remembered?”

He grinned at her with the kind of smile that could break hearts. “You told me a lot, one way or the other.”

“It was a very busy few days,” she said.

“Six,” he said. “Six days. And I remember every minute of every one of them.”

Karen found that she had to control her breathing on the short walk to the security office.

They had a sign burned into a chunk of maple on the counter in the motel office announcing them as “The Lamperts,” as if they were a pair of Siamese twins, not just an aging married couple, as if they were a team yoked to a common cause-but in fact only Reggie thought of herself as an indissoluble part of a unit. George considered himself a free agent, always had, intended to continue to until they carted him away. No matter that he had been married to her for forty years and had never yet strayed in any significantly threatening way. He still might, he had it in him. He might decide tomorrow to just chuck it all, including his nagging wife and this burden of a business that was supposed to have been their retirement heaven, and hike on out to Utah or somewhere with a lot of sky and plenty of women to treat him with respect. He just might do that little thing, because, no matter how bad Reggie looked these days, he wasn’t that old yet.

Reggie knew that George harbored these defiant little notions and she had purchased the “Lamperts” sign just to remind him that he was about as much a free agent as the back half of the jackass. The sign was on the counter to serve as a daily reminder-so she wouldn’t have to.

Like the back half of the jackass, however, George did need to swish his tail now and then, and Reggie was too smart by far to try to deny him that. She took his flirtations in stride, regarding them as old habits that no longer had much meaning but were too comforting for him to discard. He looked about as much like a lover as the WWI vet saluting the flag on Memorial Day looked like a warrior. George was not capable of saluting anything these days-and who would know better than she, who had tried, God knows, every trick she could think of to get some lead into his pencil. So she let him have his flirtations with the guests, confident that he had as much at stake in seeing to it they never took him up on it as she did. The humiliation would make him unbearable, and he was tough enough to get along with as it was. If she had believed in sainthood and all that Roman claptrap. Reggie would have figured someone should put her name on the Pope’s waiting list just for having tolerated George Lampert for all these years.

He was flirting now, the damned old fool. She watched him from the office window as he patrolled the motel “cabins,” supposedly checking to see that they all had fresh towels. He knew damned well they had fresh towels because Reggie had seen to it herself that very morning. It was just his flimsy excuse to talk to the woman in number six again. He didn’t show any concern for the guests’ towel situation earlier, she noticed. Only when he saw the woman’s car bring her back from work. Then he was all of a sudden concerned about the linens.