She had been sent out to interview Donald Johnson, the minister’s nephew, who was helping to organize the protest against the urban renewal plan. He had agreed to talk to her, because the paper had come out editorially against the current plan, and its influence, while not thought to be decisive, could certainly help.
She could see right away that this wasn’t going to be easy. He stretched out his hand to shake hers, but there was no give in his body. He stood stiffly, his eyes opaque, giving nothing away. She would have thought, Arrogant, and then perhaps, Arrogant black man, if everything about his body language were not so familiar. It was her own in places where she thought people felt she didn’t belong — in police headquarters and her first city council meeting. She could see it in their eyes. What’s a broad doing here? You kept your back straight and your eyes blank, made a fortress of your body and they couldn’t get at you, if you did everything just right.
“I’m glad to meet you,” she said, and he nodded, his body still stiff and his eyes wary. She couldn’t figure it out, at first, why he would be this way with her. She was hardly intimidating. Then she realized that, to him, she was not simply a pleasant looking young woman, she was the press. The white press. She had power. Often, she forgot this and was startled to see people react to her in a peculiar way. Sometimes she enjoyed it; at other times, like now, it made her edgy because it seemed so absurd. As a reporter you were supposed to be objective, you weren’t supposed to have feelings or to take any sides. Sometimes that didn’t work, because people didn’t trust robots. Sometimes you had to be human to get anything coming back at you.
“I think what you’re doing is very brave,” she said. “And necessary.”
She saw something stir in those opaque eyes. He was checking, to see if she was conning him or mocking him. Another familiar reaction. He apparently decided she was not, and his body relaxed, almost imperceptibly, but she caught it. She suggested they go to Art’s Diner for a cup of coffee, a less formal setting than the city room. They slid into a booth, and she asked him about his experiences. He told her of riding in the second of two buses into Alabama; they got word that the first bus had been stopped and burned by Klan members, and some of the riders hospitalized. When they pulled into the terminal, they intended to walk into the “whites only” lunch counter, because the Supreme Court had banned segregation at facilities serving people crossing state lines. A group of men bearing bricks and clubs refused to let them get off the bus and demanded that the Negroes riding in front go to the back of the bus. The whites stormed onto the bus and knocked one man unconscious, forced the Negroes to the back and stayed in the middle of the aisle, blocking the way, as the bus pulled out onto the highway again, heading for Birmingham. One Negro reporter for Jet magazine, trying to distract the whites on the bus to keep them from getting any more violent, gave them preview copies of the magazine’s next issue, with a cover story on the Freedom Rides.
“So there you were, riding on the bus with this bunch of thugs through Alabama, and they were reading about the rides all the while?”
He smiled, faintly. “Instant media.”
When the bus pulled into Birmingham and everybody stumbled off, there was a melee that involved Klansmen, cops, press and innocent bystanders. One white man emerged from the men’s room with a startled look on his face and was set upon by three Klansmen. A white photographer from a Birmingham paper was clubbed with an iron pipe, and a mob dragged a white radio reporter out of his car and smashed all the windows. Don was knocked into a pile of trash boxes and managed to get out to the street, where he was able to catch a cab to the home of one of the movement leaders.
As he talked, he turned, in her mind, from a Hero of the Civil Rights Movement to a man her own age, whose smile was easy and natural when he relaxed.
“Weren’t you terrified?” she asked.
He seemed to hesitate a minute, and then he said, “Yeah, I was scared shitless.” He laughed. “I saw some news photos of myself getting off the bus, and I looked so brave and resolute. Inside I was thinking, What in the hell am I doing here?”
“Like you were in a bad movie?”
He laughed again.
“Yeah, exactly. I kept thinking, When was the cavalry going to come charging in?”
“Except they’d be on the wrong side.”
“You got it. We were the Indians.”
“Some of those guys would have killed you.”
“Oh yeah. Once, people were beating on the sides of the bus with their fists, with boards, anything. If the driver hadn’t gunned the motor and driven out, they probably would have killed us.”
“I don’t understand that kind of crazy hatred.”
“I don’t either. But I’m learning. I grew up pretty sheltered, middle class, in D.C.”
“Are your parents pissed at you?”
“You bet. I guess I can’t blame them. They worked so hard to keep me safe, then I haul my butt down to Alabama.”
“I understand the way they feel. They wanted you to have it easier.”
“Yeah, but who’s going to do this? Some sharecropper, who can hardly keep body and soul together? We’re the ones who have to do it, the lucky ones. If we let Jim Crow live, then the Constitution is a farce, the Bill of Rights is a joke. Equal justice means equal, period.”
“Did it surprise you? The level of the violence?”
“Oh, we were warned. But nobody can really tell you what it’s like. I saw the faces, full of hate, and it’s funny, at first I sort of looked around to see who they were mad at. I mean, what could they have against me, Mrs. Johnson’s good little boy? I was a Boy Scout and I won the spelling bee.” He laughed again. “For a minute I had this crazy idea that I could get out of the bus and say, ‘Excuse me, but I have my Forest Safety badge and I won the spelling bee by getting the word extraterrestrial.’ And they would step back and drop their lead pipes and say, ‘Oh, we didn’t know it was you. It’s those other people we don’t like. The Niggers.”
“But it didn’t matter whether you could spell extraterrestrial. You were still a Nigger.”
“I could walk on water and I’d still be a Nigger.”
“They they’d really be pissed,” she said. “The first guy who did it was a Jew.”
He threw back his head and laughed, heartily. She was curious about something, so she asked.
“Do you ever feel,” she said, “that you see things that other people — white people — don’t see?”
He looked at her, curiously.
“I mean,” she continued, “it’s like there’s something there, and it’s huge, like a big rock, and you see it and the people around you just walk by it, and they don’t see it. And you think it’s you who must be crazy.”
“You feel like that?” he asked her.
She nodded.
“I never thought any white people did.”
“I don’t think men do. I do. It happens all the time.” She thought it odd that now they were sitting and talking so easily, almost as friend to friend. She had never asked anyone about the rock as she thought of it, but she thought he might know.
“I think,” he said, “that when you’re not in the group, when you’re an outsider, that gives you a third eye. You haven’t been taught all the same things, you don’t always react the same way or feel the same way, so you see things the group can’t see.”
“But that’s good, isn’t it? It gives you something extra.”
“But you pay a price for that something extra. A lot of times, people don’t want to see what you see.”
“And if you tell them, they get pissed.”
“To put it mildly,” he said.
“Belvedere’s role in the space program, do you believe this?” Sam was sitting at his desk, staring at a blank piece of paper.
Jay looked up “Charlie’s big on space. Every time NASA has a press conference, he lets me go.”
“Yeah, we don’t cover Frederick because it’s five miles outside our circulation area,” Mary said, “but if Mercury II passes 500 miles overhead, that’s a local story.”
“What the fuck are you going to write about Belvedere and the space program?” Jay asked.
“Well, there’s Alf G. Guttenheim, from Miller Avenue. He was a pastry chef on the USS Kearsarge. He made a big cake that said A-OK GORDO on it when Cooper came back.”
“Yuri Gagarin, eat your heart out.” Mary laughed.
“And then we have Harvey Millerburton. He works in the cafeteria at Cape Canaveral. Puts mashed potatoes on plates with ice cream scoops. Can man reach for the moon without mashed potatoes?”
Harvey Millerburton and Wernher von Braun,” Mary said. “Riders to the stars.”
“Yeah, but Harvey didn’t try to wipe out London on the way.”
“I guess Alf G. Guttenheim is my lead. How many fucking paragraphs can I get out of a vanilla cake with jelly filling and ‘A-OK’ out of spun sugar?” He sighed. “Maybe I’ll do it as an epic poem. ‘I sing of Alf G. Guttenheim and his spray can of whipped cream, who first from Belvedere’s streets did sail the wine dark sea.’”
“No astronauts even drove through Belvedere?”
“I’ll try Happy Hours Motel. Maybe one of them brought a floozie out there.” Sam picked up the phone. “Yeah, John Glenn. Tall fella, wears a white suit with a helmet. There’s twenty-five bucks in it for you.” He put the phone down. “A Good Humor man, that’s as close as they get.”
The upper half of Charlie’s body appeared, leaning Pisa-like from the door of his office.
“Mary. Sam. Jay.”
The summons was issued in the half note above normal tone that meant Charlie was excited about something. The three of them went into his office.
“Any of you hear about possible trouble at Reverend Johnson’s house?”
“I haven’t,” Mary said. “His nephew didn’t mention it.”
“Nothing, Charlie,” Sam said. Jay shook his head.
“He’s had a couple of crank calls this week,” Mary told the editor. “‘Nigger, stop making trouble,’ that sort of thing. He didn’t take them too seriously.”
“I just had a call from a guy who said there might be trouble over there tonight. Wouldn’t give his name. He sounded like he was calling from a bar.”
“Maybe it’s another crank,” Jay said.
Maybe. But I’ve notified the police, and they’re going to send a car by at regular intervals.” He looked at Mary. “You’re going to be there tonight?”
“Yes, there’s a meeting tonight. Jay’s going with me.”
“I’ll go too,” Sam chimed in. Charlie looked at him sternly. “Have you finished the story on Belvedere and the space program?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, keep on it. I want that story for tomorrow.”
“Charlie, you wouldn’t send me to Birmingham. Now we might have a real story, right here in Belvedere, and you want me to keep writing about fucking Alf G. Fucking Guttenheim.”
“Blade staffers do not use that kind of language, young man —”
“Charlie —” Sam pleaded.
“Oh, all right, you can go. But I want that space story. Our readers like space.
“I promise. You’ll have it tomorrow.”
“I’ve been working since noon,” Jay said. “Do I get overtime?”
“No overtime. But you can come in late tomorrow. Just think of all the experience you’re getting.”
“Experience,” Jay grumbled as they walked out to Sam’s car. “I make eighty-three fifty a week, and I work night and day. What am I, crazy?”
“You’re three-fifty a week ahead of me,” Mary said.
“You’re crazier than I am.”
When they reached the minister’s house, they found that twenty-five people were already there; the minister ushered them into the living room. James Washington was there, as well as Don, the young woman who had been with him at the church, and several students from Howard University. The minister’s nephew opened the meeting by outlining the details of the petition that would be delivered to the city council demanding rejection of the urban renewal plan, and its replacement with another plan that would involve the input of a citizens’ committee of Negro residents.
“We’ve put out feelers to the county commissioners, and they don’t want to get involved,” he said, “so we have to plan to go all the way with this.”
“What do you mean, all the way?” asked one of the women.
“Civil disobedience, if it comes to that. We have to be prepared to sit down on the street in front of City Hall, if need be.”
“Do you think it will come to that?” the minister asked. “I’m not sure the people here are prepared for that.”
“We can bring quite a few people up,” the young woman told him.
“Then they’ll say it’s outside agitators,” said a man who was sitting on the couch.
Don laughed. “Sure they will. That’s what they always say. ‘Our Nigras were happy until those agitators came in.’”
“This isn’t the South,” objected the man on the couch. “There’s no police dogs up here.”
“No,” said the young woman, “but you have papers in triplicate that do the same thing. Nice and polite and legal. Up here, they sic lawyers with briefcases on you.”
“And the bite they take out of your behind can make a German shepherd look like a pussycat,” Don added.
“Civil disobedience, I don’t know…” one of the women said.
“It may not come to that. But if it did, we’d get good coverage. The national media would be here, like they were in Cambridge, over on the Eastern Shore. We’ve got to get the media for this to work. We haven’t got the votes on the council and not a prayer of getting them unless we really put the pressure on.”
James Washington raised his hand. “I think we ought to do everything we have to do,” he said. “What can we lose? I’ve lived here all my life. I own a house here. I have as much right to live in this city as any white people do.”
“They’re not saying we can’t live in the city,” one of the women told him.
“Yes, they are. Who’s going to sell you a house? Or me? A decent one, anyway. Maybe they’ll sell us a dump at twice the rate we ought to pay.”
“Most of the white neighborhoods have real estate covenants that won’t let people sell to Negroes,” Don said. “Some of them won’t let Jews in either.”
“But there could be trouble,” one older man objected. “People could get hurt.”
“We’re not saying we’ll have to use civil disobedience,” Don told him, “just to let everybody know we’re willing to. If that’s what it takes.”
Mary was sitting in a chair by the window, taking notes. The window, on the street side of the house, was open, and despite her concentration, she gradually became aware that something was not quite right. What was it? Cars. There had been too many cars moving up and down the quiet side street. They slowed as they passed, then sped up again.
“See anything?” Jay asked, in a low voice.
“Not right now. But have you heard the cars?”
Jay nodded. He walked out the front door and stood on the porch. The street was quiet. He went back into the house again.
“Maybe we’re just jumpy,” he said.
At that moment a car drove down the street, slowed in front of the house, then sped up again.
“That’s what they’ve been doing. I think I’ve seen that car before.”
A car turned at the corner from the main road, and this time it slowed down, then stopped in front of the house. A minute later, another car pulled up behind it.
“Trouble,” Mary said.
“Looks like it.”
Sam moved up behind them. “Charlie’s tip was on the level.”
“Unless that’s the welcome wagon,” Jay said.
“Reverend Johnson, I think you’d better put the lights out,” Mary told the minister. There were gasps and cries from the people in the room.
“Everybody keep calm,” Don said, quietly. “Sit on the floor away from the windows. The police are being called. They’re just trying to scare us.”
The minister flicked the light switch, and the room went dark. Looking out the window, Mary could see men getting out of the cars. There was a tinkling sound, and the street light went out, leaving the front lawn in darkness. A dozen shapes drifted out of the shadows near the cars and formed an irregular knot on the lawn. The darkness hid their features, but Mary could tell by the shapes and the way they moved that they were young men.
“Hey, niggers!” one of the shapes yelled.
“Hey, niggers.” Another voice. “You in there?” There was a giggle from the lawn.
James moved towards the window. One of the older women was crying. “Little punks. I’d like to beat their faces in.”
“That’s just what they want,” Don said. “Just stay calm.”
“Listen, niggers, this is white man’s land. You better haul your ass off white man’s land.”
“Whhheeeee-haw!” came a voice.
Don laughed. “Nothing worse than a northern white man trying a rebel yell. Sounds like somebody goosed him.”
“Nigger, go home!”
Mary’s eyes had grown accustomed to the dark, and she could see, now, that the kid doing most of the yelling seemed to be the leader of the group. They were barely more than teenagers. There was laughter from the lawn, and the little knot of men moved across it. The lights in the houses on either side went out.
“Did you see a squad car go by, at all?” Jay asked Mary.
“No.”
“Hey, niggers, you hear me?”
“I bet the fucking cops are having coffee down at Art’s,” Jay said.
The boy on the lawn started to chant: “Niggers suck, kill Niggers. Niggers suck.”
Mary turned to Don. “Do you think they’ll try to get in?”
“No. When white people want to kill black people, they come fast and they come quiet. This is just scum, having a little fun.”
Mary looked out the window again. One of the dark shapes bent over, then straightened up, and she could see a throwing motion, which was followed by the trill of breaking glass. One of the windows facing the street had been shattered.
“God dammit, where are the cops!” Sam muttered.
Mary could feel her heart pounding; she was scared, but she was also, she realized, thrilled. This was real life. And she was right in the middle of it.
Jay was standing close to the wall, checking his electronic flash unit. “Can I get through the side door?” he asked the minister.
“Yes.”
“I’m gong to shoot a couple fast ones and then get the hell back in here.”
“I’ll go with you,” Sam said.
“No, they won’t spot me if I go alone.”
“Jay, be careful,” Mary whispered. “Those guys sound tanked up.”
“You want to see the four-minute mile, watch me.”
Jay ducked out the side door and crawled behind the bushes that grew in front of the house. He crouched low and moved quickly along the front wall until he was only about ten feet from where the leader of the group was moving drunkenly about in a parody of a tap dance and singing, “Way down upon the Swanee River.”
From the window, Mary could see Jay moving behind the bushes.
“He’s too close, Sam.”
From his vantage point behind the bushes, Jay could see the face of the boy who was doing the bizarre shuffle. It was an adolescent face, pocked with craters from recent acne, the lips twisted in a rubbery sneer. Jay straightened up, stepped out of the bushes and aimed.
“Work, you mother,” he said to the flash unit. He pressed the shutter, and a flash of light rolled across the lawn and then vanished. Jay took two more shots in rapid succession before the bewilderment on the boy’s face turned into comprehension.
From the window, Mary saw two of the young men move in Jay’s direction. He lowered his camera and pivoted for the sprint back to the door. He slithered past them, but another young man had moved up close to his right side.
“Jay! Look out! On your right,” Mary yelled. He heard her, saw the blurred motion of an arm coming towards him, and tried to duck. But he was too late, and there was a peculiar explosion in the side of his face. Then he felt the damp grass against his face and hands and wondered how the hell the grass got there.
When she saw Jay go down, Mary grabbed for the nearest thing she could find — the lamp on the table by the window. She yanked the cord out of the socket and, clutching the lamp like a club, ran out the front door to the lawn. Jay was curled up, fetuslike, and one of the young men was kicking him viciously in the ribs. She raised the lamp and brought it down on the man’s head and he fell like a dead weight. She raised the lamp again and hissed, “OK, you fuckers, who’s next?” Then there was the wail of a siren, and a boyish voice yelled, “Jeez, the cops!” and in a mass of confusion the boys ran for the cars. Two of them grabbed their stunned companion and half-dragged him across the lawn. Sam had bolted out the door behind Mary and tackled one of the boys, and he was pounding the kid’s head into the lawn when a cop came and pulled him off.
Mary knelt down beside Jay, who had struggled to a sitting position.
“Jay, oh my God!”
Don knelt beside her. “Hey, man, are you all right?”
Jay reached for his camera and ran his finger around the lens. There was no break in the glass.
“I’m OK,” he said. He looked up at Mary. “Did you hit one of those guys with something?”
“Yeah. A lamp. I broke it too. It was the Reverend’s lamp.”
“What the hell did that little fuck hit me with?”
“A rock, I think,” Don said.
Mary pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket and held it up to his face. “Hold still, you’re bleeding.”
At that instant a flash of light washed over them, and Jay looked up to see the grinning face of Bill McChesney, the other staff photographer, peering down at them over his Rolleiflex.
“Don’t look at me, Jay, look at Mary. How about a little more pain in the expression?”
“Oh, for Chrissake.”
“Come on, Jay, I’d do it for you.”
He did his best John Wayne-shot-by-a-Nazi expression.
“That’s great! Great!”
“Want me to bleed harder?”
“No, that’s OK. Jeez, you are sort of a bloody mess, though.”
“How the fuck did you get here so fast?”
“I was working a story on the cops on night patrol. Best stuff since the double murder in Niggertown.” He looked at Don. “Uh, sorry.”
“Bill, I got pictures of those motherfuckers.” Jay handed his Nikon to McChesney. “Print them for me. Hold it down a little, they may be light.”
“Will do.”
Jay climbed to his feet, helped by Don and Mary. “Is everybody OK in there?”
“Yes, one of the women was hysterical, but my uncle’s calming her down. We’ll see that everybody gets an escort home.”
A wave of nausea rolled through Jay, and he wobbled slightly. Don grabbed his arm.
“You’d better get him to a doctor,” Don said to Mary. She nodded.
“I’m all right.”
“No, come on, Sam will drop you off. We’ve got to write,” Mary said.
The doctor, the husband of the art editor, examined the gash on Jay’s cheek and cleaned and bandaged it. “That’s a nasty cut. You’re lucky. A few inches higher, you could have lost an eye. You’re going to have a hell of a shiner as it is.”
He gave Jay some liquid and a packet of pills. “Wash it out with the antiseptic three or four times for the next couple of days. Now go home and go to bed.”
“Doc, I got to get back to the paper.”
“I’ll call a cab. I don’t want you driving tonight.”
When Jay walked into the city room, Roger came up and looked at the bandage on his eye.
“Shit, you lived. We had a state funeral all planned. Mayor Swarman would give the eulogy, songs by the Rainbow Girls and burial under the birdbath in the park. The birds would piss on you for eternity.”
“Fuck you, Roger.”
Mary walked out of the back shop and waved to Jay. He followed her to the light table. “Page one,” she said. “Clear as a bell.”
Jay looked at the picture. The pock-faced boy stood, jaw agape, staring at the camera. The faces of two of the other men were clearly visible.
“Hey, look at the motherfucker. Not bad!”
“They’ve already picked him up. He has a record for drunk and disorderly. Look at this one.”
Jay saw himself sitting on the ground with his John Wayne grimace. Bill walked over. “I had to push it to get the blood.”
“Yeah, I got photogenic blood. Jesus, my mother is really going to shit when she sees this. I never should have given her a subscription.”
Charlie walked into the back shop and looked at Jay.
“You look like hell.”
“Do I get overtime?”
“Yeah, yeah, you get overtime. But for Christ’s sake be more careful, will you? Good job, though.”
Jay leaned over the light table to look at Mary’s story.
“Did you put in the part about where you hit the guy with the lamp?”
“What?” Charlie said.
“She cold-cocked one of those suckers. Hit him with a lamp, and he went down like a ton a bricks.
Charlie looked at her. “What the hell did you think you were doing?”
“He was kicking Jay. So I hit him with the lamp.”
“You should have seen her. She was waving the goddamn lamp around, yelling, ‘OK, you fuckers, who’s next?’”
“Sam was pounding one of their heads into the ground,” Mary said.
“Oh, my God, I send you people out to cover a story, and you act like it’s D day. Listen, this may get real mean. I want you people covering the news, not making it. Is that clear?”
“Right, Charlie.”
“OK, Charlie.”
Jay suddenly swayed on his feet, and Mary and Charlie steadied him.
“Mary, drive him home and make him go to bed.”
“I’m not an invalid,” Jay protested, but Charlie shook his head.
“I don’t want you smashing into something with your car. We’d have to pay for it.”
“You’re all heart, Charlie,” Jay muttered, and he got his jacket and walked with Mary out to the parking lot. She drove him home and followed him into the apartment.
“How do you feel?”
“My head’s pounding, but I’ll live.”
“Lie down on the couch. I’ll get you a drink. You better take off that shirt, it’s all bloody.”
She vanished into the kitchen, and Jay unbuttoned the shirt. “New one, too, dammit. Six ninety-five.”
He lay down on the couch and put his head against the pillow. She came in with a glass of Scotch, and he took it.
“You really are a tiger, you know. ‘OK, you fuckers, who’s next?’”
She shook her head in wonderment. “I don’t have any idea why I did it. All of a sudden, I was just there, waving the stupid lamp around. But you know, it felt so goddamn good to hit him.”
“Remind me never to get you pissed off.”
“Oh, look, your T-shirt is all bloody too. Don’t take it off, you’ll pull the bandage off.”
She went into the kitchen and came back with a large carving knife.
“Holy shit.”
“I’m not going to stab you. I couldn’t find scissors. I’m going to cut that shirt down the front.”
She sat on the couch beside him, pulled out the neck of the T-shirt and slid the knife under it.
“Jesus, be careful with that thing.”
“You wish to talk, Amelican soldier? We have ways of making you talk.”
“Name, rank and serial number — 123456 — that’s all you get, you dirty Nip.”
“You will talk, Amelican swine.”
“Never. I’m fighting for Betty Grable and Mom and apple pie. I’ll never talk.”
“We lock you in room with 500 Worthy Matrons of the Eastern Star.”
“The invasion is Monday night, at 7:00 P.M., and let me draw you this map of the beach.”
They laughed, and she took the split fibers of the shirt and ripped it down the front. Jay rolled it into a ball and tossed it onto a chair. They were quiet for a moment.
“Hey,” she said, “I was really scared tonight. I thought they were going to kill you.”
“Who’d miss me?” It was supposed to be flip. It wasn’t.
“I would.”
Somehow, she could not remember the mechanics of it, his lips were against hers, and they were soft and cool and she was lying against his chest and she felt his tongue, a warm invader, welcome. She felt her mouth open, to let more of him in. She wanted him everywhere, in every corner of her. She felt as if she were going to melt, as if bone and tissue and fiber had turned molten. They clung together, hungry, exploring, until they heard the sound of the key turning in the lock, and the front door opened. They jerked apart, blinking at each other in surprise.
Sam and Roger walked into the room. Mary sat up straight on the couch, hoping she looked relaxed and casual. She felt her heart pounding inside her. Sam and Roger walked to the couch and peered down at Jay.
“He was a comer, too. That’s how it goes in the fight game,” Sam said.
“I couddah been a contendah! Charlie, you was my brudder!”
“You suck as Brando.”
“Everybody’s a critic.”
He was kidding with Sam and Roger, not looking at her. It meant nothing to him. Why should it?
“Well,” she said, “I’d better get home. Jay, don’t forget to take those painkillers the doctor gave you.”
“OK, Florence Nightingale.”
His eyes were opaque, guarded. She felt something sink inside her. He was drawing away, shutting her out.
“We were supposed to do a story on the new wing of the hospital tomorrow at two. Why don’t I call and postpone it?”
“No, let’s see how I’m doing.”
“There’s no rush. We can do it later.”
“Sure.”
She started to leave, and he reached out and held her hand. He raised it to his lips and kissed her palm.
“Hot Shit,” he said.
Driving home, she could still feel the throbbing in her temples. Harry had once said there was a judge inside her, but she thought of it as an accountant. Shit, why couldn’t she be one of those women who could blot out the world with love? Elizabeth Taylor. Did she have a CPA behind those violet eyes?
The scent of Jay, the feel of him, surrounded her. She wanted to lose herself in the swirl of feeling inside her. Why was it she saw Harry’s face, tender in the darkness, the night she had gone to him on the lawn?
“I’m pregnant. You made me pregnant, Harry.”
She willed him away. She thought of Jay and shivered, thought of lying against his bare chest and kissing him, a kiss that had invaded her the way Harry’s body never had. She had never imagined wanting to be possessed; she had thought that inside she was safe, inviolate. No more. She thought of the things she would do for him, if he asked, and she knew there was nothing she would not do. She felt she would die if she could not have him.
But the accountant was still there, relentless. It would be there, adding and subtracting, forever. Mary Anderson Springer always knew what she was doing.
But she was twenty-five years old, and awakened to passion. There was a current running, and she was bound to follow it. Goddamn the costs. God-fucking-damn the costs.