“I can’t do that. You know I can’t do that.”
“Yes, you can. Pack yourself a bag of clothes and leave. I can buy you whatever else you need.” This is Hoskins in a nutshell, she thinks. He wants to be the hero. If he lived in the Old West, he’d be wearing a white ten-gallon hat and she’d be hog-tied on the train track, screaming her fucking head off. “I’ll take care of you.”
She doesn’t think there’s another woman. There can’t be. Hoskins has spent every moment of the last few months wrapped up in Seever, and in her. He hasn’t had time to meet anyone else. He’s making this up, she thinks. So she’ll get jealous and leave Dean. Hoskins wants to settle down, he’s told her that before. And she wonders why she always meets men like this, her whole life it’s been this way—men who want more than she has to give. Where are all the men who want nothing but sex, to have some fun and move on?
“I need to go,” she says, yanking her napkin off her lap and cramming it right down on her salad, smush, so she hears the lettuce leaves crack under the pressure.
“Were you listening to anything I said?” Hoskins asks.
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?”
“I don’t know.”
“So that’s it?” he says. “You’re all done with me?”
“No.”
“Then leave him. Come home with me.”
“I can’t.”
“I don’t understand.” And he wouldn’t, she thinks. He doesn’t know what it’s like to be married to a nice man, a good man who makes her happy most days, and then have Hoskins, who she might love, but she can’t leave Dean, because that choice would be irreversible, and what if it turned out to be the wrong one? It’s not as if she could take it back. She’s right in the middle, and it’s safe there. She has her cake and she eats it too, like her mother would say if she knew all this was going on, but her mother would die if she did find out. Die of shame. She’d never be able to show her face in church again, that’s what she’d say. I have a whore daughter and I’m never getting into heaven. “You got what you wanted, I guess? You got the story, you’re getting the good assignments, and now you’re done?”
“No.” She shakes her head and bites on the pad of her thumb, but the truth is that she is getting the good assignments, that now Dan Corbin considers her a serious journalist. She gets calls from other reporters at other papers, hoping to squeeze information out of her, asking for her contacts, her sources, when it wasn’t all that long ago that she was the one making the calls. She owes it all to Hoskins, but there’s something inside her that hardens when she thinks about that. She’s a miser, loath to give up anything to pay her debt. Especially when she knows exactly what Hoskins wants—he wants her. “That’s not how it is.”
“You’d lie to get anything you want,” Hoskins says, and he stands up fast enough that his drink knocks over, spilling water all over everything, and a waiter rushes forward, wanting to help, to save the meal, but that seems as if it’s happening far away, completely separate from this moment. “God, you’re an ugly bitch.”
Later, at home, Sammie will cry over what Hoskins has said. It isn’t the part about being a liar that hurts, because she is a liar, she already knows that. But who isn’t? Mostly it’s the ugly thing that’ll bother her. Because she’s not ugly. Everyone, her entire life, has told her how pretty she is, how beautiful. It’s a part of who she is; it’s as much of her identity as her fingerprints or the freckle on her right hip. Her beauty has been the one thing she can count on, her fallback when everything else is going wrong. She has never had anyone call her ugly, and it hurts, although a part of her thinks that Hoskins is right, that she is ugly, that everyone sees it and tells her the opposite, she doesn’t know any better.
“This isn’t over,” Hoskins says, vaguely, not really looking at her but over her shoulder, and it scares her—if they weren’t in public, if the couple beside them wasn’t openly staring now, not even pretending to mind their own business, if the waiter wasn’t hovering over the table, patting down the wet spots he can reach, she might’ve screamed. Because those aren’t Hoskins’s words. They’re Seever’s, that’s what Hoskins had told her, that Seever had said that, it was his catchphrase, he repeated it every time they spoke. “This’ll never be over.”
Then he leaves, turns and walks off, out of the restaurant and into the warmth of the afternoon. The couple hurriedly go back to their meal and the waiter starts clearing the table, everyone is busy not looking at her, Move along folks, nothing to see here, and she feels like she’s been slapped, stunned, and she wishes someone would look at her, even if it is with pity, but no one does. It’s like she’s not even there at all.
GLORIA