Chapter Twenty-One

Later, Rachel lay in bed in the dark. Beside her Alan breathed evenly, sleeping the sleep of the just and the just made love to. She was wide-awake.

Edgar had been a white-collar criminal. Edgar! In the simplest language, unadorned by comfort, he had been a thief.

She hated crying when she was lying on her back. The tears trickled unnaturally toward her ears, and when she tried to sniffle up the excess mucus, it never worked; the thickness just moved slightly deeper inside her nostrils, blocking them even more. But if she sat up, Alan would wake—he always did when she made any big movement. So she lay, miserable and made more miserable by her miserable state.

Edgar the thief. She revised: Edgar the pilferer. That was worse; “pilfer” was such a silly word. She felt two tears begin their sideways journey from the corners of her eyes. Cat lover, book lover, gracious older lover, and that was the truth of him: he was a … pilferer. She snuffled softly. Had that been him all along, and she’d just missed it? Was her judgment that bad?

She reminded herself of her feelings as she walked around Edgar’s appartement, seeing the luxurious public and personal rooms and the sterile other spaces, the barren refrigerator. Maybe she was surprised by tonight’s revelations only because she had been too much of a coward to admit earlier what she already knew: that her first great love had become a shallow plutocrat. She sniffled.

But wait. She wiped her temples with the heels of her hands. That he had been a thief was the truth of this action, certainly, but was it the truth of him? He had been a cat lover; he had been a book lover; he had been a gracious older lover—and he had been a gracious man, period. He had loved her—she was sure of that—and when he left her, he did it tenderly, without any pleasure or glorying in the heart he’d broken. Maybe as his income had grown, so had his greed, but that didn’t mean he’d become only that greed. When Elisabeth had nearly cried in the library, it hadn’t been over the loss of Edgar’s monthly payments or over her sudden windfall: she had wanted to cry for the loss of the man who’d talked to her like a friend, who’d taken an interest in her life and her self. And while he might have left her money as a kind of postmortem payoff (might, Rachel stressed to herself), he’d left Mathilde money as a way of thanking her, acknowledging her value too. Even Catherine, with her terminal profligacy, had been cared for in his will, and what he had asked Rachel to do, she knew, sprung out of a real desire to give pleasure to another book lover. And his crime wasn’t really very large; it did seem outweighed by the love and thought behind these actions. She suddenly remembered the feel of his hand on her lower back, guiding her through a crowded room. That hand had shown care and caring, a warmth that wasn’t just physical. Yes, she knew criminals could be warm and caring—she remembered the cliché about every thief loving his mother—but that was surely proof that no criminal was purely criminal, that each one was also a person, multiple and human.

Oh, people! She thought. Why must they be so complicated? Why must it be that every relationship, every thorough knowing of another person, required readjustment? One had to learn that the unpleasant had their own troubles and possessed unexpected decencies, and one had to discover imperfections in the pleasant. There was never a place of rest, never complete knowledge. Why did personhood involve so many layers? And, given that it always did, why did that always come as a surprise?

But she was tired and had wrestled with enough weighty thoughts for one night. Tomorrow she would talk to Elisabeth and see what she could find out there. She turned on her side, gave a deep, nostril-freeing snuffle, and pressed herself against Alan’s warm back. She slipped her arm around him and drifted off to sleep.