When Lyle Michaels called, Alexandra said: “It’s early your time.”
“Which is right on time for you,” he said.
“Seven, Friday the fourteenth?”
“Friday the fourteenth, seven,” he said. “My time.”
She placed the phone on the coffee table, returned to the laundry. This had been a choreographed call. Phone me at ten Sunday. I’ll be home. And of course, so would Jeremy.
From his place on the sofa, he put down the newspaper, looked at her.
“No interesting news in there?” she said, smoothing a shirt.
“Very interesting, but you are more attractive than the PM.”
She thought of something said by Shakespeare: “But love is blind, and lovers cannot see / The pretty follies that themselves commit.”
Kant: “We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.”
“The substance of my life,” Murdoch said, “is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction.”
So Alexandra kept, for preservation, her thoughts to herself, or at least from Jeremy. It would keep their life resolved as in fixed, not the chemical way that meant undoing into parts, becoming quotients. Out the window, the sun threw ballsy colors through the sky, and she said nothing of the Forrest or her brother, strange now and furtive but back, back, even if not here.
Jeremy edged toward her on the couch, upsetting a tower of folded clothes. “I’ve got to get to the crisis center,” he said. “I should leave soon.”
“Then who will leer at me?” Alexandra said, a pair of his underwear crumpled in a fist resting on her hip.
“You could at least pretend not to be pleased,” he said, passing a pair of argyle woolens.
“I’m not going to a crisis,” said Alexandra.
On television, people in the audience of The Jeremy Kyle Show gasped together. There was the leaving of chairs. Cameras down passageways backstage. Teary returns. A woman slashed a pointing finger.
“I could still buy a ticket to New York,” he said.
“It wouldn’t be fun for you,” she said. “It will be old college friends and inside jokes.”
“I could go to the galleries, walk around. It wouldn’t have to be every minute together.”
“Don’t you know the movies say, if you love them, let them go?” she said.
And of course, she did love him, but she had promised silence. It was the one thing she could give Shel.
Jeremy pulled his arm down off the back of the couch. “Want to get rid of me?”
“I’ve hired a hit man. You’d better watch your back. I’m in it for the life insurance.”
“You can only get life insurance if you’re married.”
“Lucky for you, then,” she said. “I have no reason to kill you.”