Джон Макдональд - Area of Suspicion [= My Brother’s Widow]

Midge made a ceremony of inspecting the burning tip of her cigarette. I waited for her to speak, concealing my impatience.

“Sooner or later,” I said, “you’re going to have to tell me. I’ve got all day too.”

She made a face. “There’s a man waiting. He says it’s important. He’s a stuffy type. I think he disapproves of me. His name is Fitch.”

“Fitch!” It shocked me. I wondered what on earth Lester was doing in Florida. I couldn’t imagine him taking a vacation — or looking me up if he did. He belonged entirely to the world I had given up.

“He says it’s important, and whatever it is, I guess the phone call was about the same thing.”

“Maybe I should know about that too,” I said with forced patience.

“Oh, that was a long-distance from Arland yesterday. It came right after you sneaked off in the boat.”

“I didn’t sneak off. George loaned it to me. Who phoned?”

“I took it and explained we couldn’t get in touch with you and didn’t know when you’d be back.” She took her long dramatic pause and said, “It was your brother’s wife, Gevan.”

Maybe I could have successfully kept my expression blank and bland if I’d never told Midge about the whole mess. Perhaps not. Even after four years it was much too close, too vivid, too hurting. I had to turn my back and that, of course, told Midge precisely what she wanted to know, confirmed all the rest of it, and made me resent her.

The thought of Niki phoning me was like a knife. Niki phoning, and Lester Fitch coming to see me. Maybe it was just a new angle on the old game of trying to get me to go back into the firm, back to that life that had become impossible four years ago. But that didn’t fit. The method seemed implausible. Niki would never be a part of any such sales attempt — not if she wanted it to succeed. I felt the dread I’d had when I’d seen Jigger’s boat bearing down on me.

Midge came up beside me and put cold fingers on my arm. She is a woman with little warmth. Yet she needs warmth. She gets what she needs by becoming involved in the emotional problems of others. She knew my problem and I was sorry I had ever told her, because her interest is too avid.

“That man wouldn’t tell me what he wants. He just kept saying it’s important, Gevan. He didn’t want to ride with Jigger, so I said I’d bring you back. He got in on the plane this morning. So apparently he started right after they found out they couldn’t get you by phone.”

“Take over, Midge, and I’ll get the hook.”

The starters whined and the motors caught as I pulled in the wet line, hand over hand. I swashed the gunk off the anchor and laid it in place on the bow. Midge eased the “Vunderbar” around and headed toward the channel on the outgoing tide.

I went below and changed to a shirt and slacks. When I came back up she was just making the turn into the open Gulf.

“Do you think they want you to go back?” she asked.

“I don’t know. They stopped asking me a long time ago.”

“Maybe you should go back, you know.”

“It’s so gay here, Midge. Who’d want to leave?”

“Be serious! You know as well as I do what’s wrong. You’re going sour, Gev. You tried to get over her. You tried all the methods and now you’ve stopped trying and you’re going sour.”

I looked at her dark, avid eyes, and saw the flick of tongue tip across her underlip. This was her meat.

“Once upon a time, Midge, I told you too damn much about my life. I’m not a soap opera for your private pleasure. Tune in tomorrow and find out if Gevan can find happiness.”

She smiled. “I’m not going to let you make me angry, my friend,” she said firmly.

I moved away and stood at the stern, watching the boil of the wake. There was little point in restating my position to Midge, or to myself. After my father died I had taken over the job of running Dean Products. I’d been too young for the job — too young and inexperienced. But sometimes, when you have to grow fast, you can do it. Two years at Harvard Business School had given me the theory. But practice is another animal. At Harvard they don’t have any course in how to react to men your father, and your grandfather, hired. To them you are a punk, and there can be great joy in tripping you up.

It had scared me, but I stayed with it, and got up every time I was thrown, and one day I found out I was enjoying it. Maybe you enjoy any skill you acquire. You learn that the raw materials most important are not the special steels, that the production equipment most important is not the stolid rows of machine tools. Your material and your equipment are human beings, and you learn their strengths and their weaknesses, and how to make them part of a production team. Then the rest comes easier. The shoes had looked too big and the steps too long, but after a time I could match the stride and we showed a profit, and that was good because it was a measure of how well I was doing.

Then Niki came along, fitting into my life in a way that made wonderful sense. Niki, who would inevitably be my wife and bear our children and live with me in a house that would be warm and good with love.

Girl and Job. Work in itself cannot be both means and end. There must be some person to whom you can bring your small victories and be rewarded.

But twelve hundred nights ago I walked down a rainy street toward her place, walked with the bumping heart the thought of seeing her always gave me. I walked in, not thinking to knock or call out, and that was neither guile nor rudeness, but the same eagerness which had made me walk so quickly from my car.

I walked in on her and saw my brother’s hands, strong against the sheen of her housecoat. I saw her on tiptoe in his arms, with upturned mouth and all the long ripe lines of her held by him in the instant before she turned to look at me with the drowsy, tousled look of a woman lost in kissings.

We were to have been married that month.

There are pictures you keep with a peculiar vividness in your mind, the very good ones and the very bad ones. There was the look of his hands on her, and the way she stumbled aside when I pushed her so I could get at him, and the look in his eyes as he stood there making no attempt to block or dodge the blow that broke his mouth. There was no memory of the things I said to the two of them before I walked back out into the rain. Nor any memory of the walk, or, much later, of driving the car back to my place.

During that week I found out that I could not go on. I couldn’t adjust myself to the role of the betrayed, the strong silent type who contents himself with Job alone now that Girl is gone. I might have managed it if it had been someone else who had taken her from me. But Ken and I had been close. I had come to think of us as a good team, his practical, methodical steadiness compensating for my weakness of trying to move too fast, too soon. If it had been someone else who took her from me, hate would have been less complicated. I might have been able to recreate my interest in, and dedication to, Dean Products. But my brother had stolen the satisfactions of my work in the same moment he had stolen Niki Webb.

I walked out and the presidency went to Ken. He wrote often at first, asking me to come back. I read the first few letters, destroyed the rest unread. Later he did not write as often. The hand that signed the letter was a hand I had seen against the blue of her housecoat. And it was the hand which had put the ring on Niki’s finger.

The beach house at Indian Rocks was a new world and I tried to keep everything out of that world which could start me thinking of what-might-have-been. When I was least charitable with myself I would think of it as a four-year sulk. But when the sun was bright and the beach girls’ laughter was warm in their throats, and the portable radios were picking up the Latin rhythms of the Havana stations — then it all seemed desirable and good.