“Do you think it’s safe?” she asked him. “To drive all that way in this?”
His jaw tightened. “Jesus, Claire. It’s her eightieth birthday. We can’t miss that.”
Claire waited, hoping he would say the next thing on his own. You stay, Claire.
But instead he said, “The car’s in tip-top shape. You packed?”
She nodded. The kitchen table was strewn with the remains of a roll of wrapping paper, dark red and white, and threads of silver ribbon. Claire picked up Birdy’s present, a collection of poems by Robert Frost. Birdy loved poetry. And Frost was reading a poem tomorrow at the inauguration.
“I’ll get Kathy,” she said, heaving herself to her feet.
At night, Claire put herself to sleep by doing the math to determine just how pregnant she was. At five months with Kathy, she’d only gained ten pounds; this time she’d gained more than double that. Did that mean she was more than five months pregnant? In which case this baby was indeed Peter’s. But no matter how she calculated, she always got the same answer. This baby was not her husband’s.
“Claire?” Peter was calling from down the hall. “Just the one suitcase?”
She stared down at the pretty wrapping paper, the mess of ribbon and scraps and tape.
“You fit everything in just the one?” he was saying.
“Yes,” Claire said, deciding to leave the mess until they got back.
Her lover’s name was Miles Sullivan, and he was not her type. Or what Claire had always thought was her type, which was tall and well-muscled with a face that seemed to be carved from marble. No, Miles—though tall, taller even than Peter—had the start of a paunch, his stomach pressing against his belt, and a fleshy ruddy face with almost a cartoonish nose. In his way, he was handsome, she supposed. Black Irish, he had described himself, which meant a head of thick dark hair that he wore slightly too shaggy and round bright blue eyes. His smile dazzled, but it was not those blue eyes or his imposing size or even that smile that attracted her to him from the start. It was the way he listened to her. He cocked his head, and turned his eyes on her as if she had something important to say. That very first night at Dot’s dinner party, Claire had noticed this and wondered if Peter had ever listened to her in quite this way. He had not, she decided. Not once.
Of course, there was desire too. A desire like Claire had never felt before. And she was embarrassed that somehow this desire was wrapped up in Dougie Daniels’ disappearance. Yet once that happened, something stirred in Claire for the first time. She remembered a night in Rome when she was an air hostess and she and her roommate Rose had met two men at a trattoria, gotten drunk with them, and then taken them back to the hotel. That night, Claire had done things she’d never before imagined doing with a man. It was the wine and the summer Roman air and all the Sambuca and the riding on the Vespa with the wind in her hair. But she’d never seen that man again. And she’d never spoken of that night, not even with Rose.
Now this thing, this stirring, could not be satisfied. Embarrassed after what happened with Peter, she’d tried to feed it in other ways: tennis and hot baths and even some of the diet pills Roberta’s doctor gave her (those only led her to do things like vacuum or polish the silver, and lose five pounds too many). At first, talking to Miles seemed to work. His head cocked like that, his questions, probing, asking what she thought and felt, what she wanted. But soon, her desire grew into something more, as if she wished he could actually climb inside her and fill her, fill this unnameable need she had. To both of their surprise, she had been the one to lean in for the first kiss, the one to unbuckle his belt and reach her hand inside. I’m suffocating, she had told him that first time. With him, she could breathe. She could say whatever was on her mind, wonder aloud about why a soufflé had failed to rise or what she would bring to a desert island or anything, really, that popped into her head. No matter what it was, Miles listened.
That was why she invited him into her home, a stupid idea. But with Peter at work in the city, and the neighborhood settled into its routines, she imagined a whole day with Miles. She’d made a pitcher of perfect Manhattans, carefully measuring the sweet and dry vermouths, dropping six neon-red cherries into the amber liquid. She put on a lace bra and matching panties in a color called champagne, bought at Hecht’s just for this day.
“A tryst,” Miles had said when he arrived, his hand slipping into her silk blouse to discover the lace waiting there.
It was a gray September morning, the kind of day that reminds you that summer is over and fall is on its way. Claire had dropped Kathy at the sitter’s, spurting lies about errands and appointments that would keep her out all day.
“Manhattans in the morning?” he’d said as he watched her place ice cubes into the heavy glasses, then pour the drinks.