A change of gravity

NINETEEN

There was a fair amount of Sunday traffic westbound on the turnpike where it begins the gradual ascent from the valley of the Connecticut River into the foothills of the Berkshires, enough to keep all but the most intractable lane-weavers respectably in line, peaceably exceeding the posted speed limit by ten miles an hour, just under seventy-five.

The heavy coupe was quiet and cool, going fast in a reasonably straight line, as it had been engineered and built to do, and Merrion had Diane's listening preference, WFCR-FM, Five College Public Radio, audible but just below normal conversational level the announcer, displaying his erudition, was voluptuously saying "Bayed-rish Schmet-nah' to identify Bedrich Smetana as 'the Czech composer' of the selection just concluded, the overture to The Bartered Bride. Merrion frowned, repressing an urge to say "Shaper."

Diane misinterpreted both his expression and the reason for his silence. "Come on, Amby," she said, coaxing, 'tell me what's on your mind. That's what we do for each other."

It was the kind of unpressured relationship she meant to have with him, one in which she intended that he would feel free to behave pretty much as he would have if he had been 'off-duty' with his friends and she had not been present. So far as she knew, he did, but she didn't have it quite right.

He believed he was making more of an effort to please her than he had made for any woman except Sunny Keller. When he was with her he was always on his better if not his best behavior; or intended to be, anyway. His effort was apparent to people who had known him a long time and seen them together. Dan Hilliard warned him he was 'getting somewhat pussy-whipped, you know." He shrugged it off by saying that he supposed he was, 'a little, but Jesus, a man's gotta calm down some time, hasn't he? I mean, I may say that I'm not getting old here, but I have to admit I've been getting a little winded. Not tuckered out, no; a little tired. It hadda happen, sooner, later, I suppose; I been out raising hell a long time. Takes it out of a man.

"Plus which, even though you wont wanna, I think you gotta admit I could've made a much worse choice to slow down with, you know? I realize she's not your favorite person, and I can't say I blame you.

But what happened between you and Mercy, and how much Diane had to do with it; well, that's something that Diane and I leave strictly out of what goes on between the two of us. I try not to talk much about you when I'm around her not that she would mind because she's told me she likes you okay; she's got nothing against you."

"Well, for Christ sake," Hilliard said, 'how the hell could she, have something against me? I never did anything to her; she did something to me. I'm not saying she set out to do it, ruin my marriage, or that Mercy all by herself d never've decided she'd had enough of me, but Diane had a lot to do with what finally happened and when it happened, too, worst possible timing for me. Regardless of whether she meant to or not, everything she did had the result of turning my wife against me. I don't thank her for it."

"Yeah, I know," Merrion said. "But I still do it, just the same, leave your name out of what we talk about. I just think it's better. And I never bring up Mercy's name and Diane doesn't either, much, although I know they're still very thick, very good friends themselves. And as a result, I think Diane and I get along pretty well. She's a real good woman. I like her. She's funny; she makes me laugh, and then she doesn't get mad when I do it. And she's not always trying all the time to reform me, or corner me, either, into getting married. Measuring me all the time.

"I had that happen to me once or twice, Mary Pat would get like that sometimes, and it made me nervous. I didn't like it. And've you got any idea how hard it is to find a woman our age who wont treat a man like that? Who'll just leave him alone and enjoy life, have fun? No, of course you don't. How could you? Your idea of a woman the right age is a thirty-six-C Wonderbra on a setta jugs that haven't even been inside a polling place yet; they don't turn eighteen until next year.

"I dunno, Danny; you, runnin' a college, all that firm young flesh bouncin' around all over the place? All that scary stuff we're always hearing all the time now, sex harassment cases? I worry, something might happen. Yeah, I realize you're an old hand, you could say, been doin' it quite a while now, and so far as we know, at least, you haven't been in trouble yet. But it worries me, Danny; I worry 'bout you all the time."

He was right in his perception that Diane did not have matrimony in mind. She consciously tolerated more from him than she would have from a man she had been inspecting as a prospective husband. "Gentleman friends are different from husbands," she told Sally Davidson, a friend since their freshman year at Wisconsin. "They don't have to meet the same requirements. The standards're nowhere near high. Be honest: the first thing to look for in husbands is whether they can make sure there'll be a roof over your head and you'll have enough to eat, be taken care of financially, if the day ever comes when they can't continue to provide those things. Walter was a very good husband. He left me very well-off, much better off than I ever dreamed of being.

Even if something should happen to my practice, if I got sick and could no longer work, I'd be quite comfortable. So there's no pressure on me, no reason why I need to find another husband. Furthermore, I don't think I want one. Two weddings ought to be enough for a respectable woman. More'n that and you start to run the risk of looking showy, don't you think?"

"Always wanting to be the center of attention all the time," Sally said. She laughed.

That delighted Diane; she deliberately tried to say things that would make Sally laugh because the sound she made reminded Diane of the noise made by agitated poultry. "Uh huh, there they are again. I just heard a bunch of turkeys." Sally laughed again. Diane said: "You're not kidding me, you know. You've closed the gallery and started farming turkeys. Don't the neighbors complain?"

Sally laughed again. "Not a bunch of turkeys," she said.

"Well, what then?" Diane said. "What are lots of turkeys? "Flocks," like lots of chickens? Crows? Doesn't seem as though they should be, being so much bigger and all." '"Gaggle," Sally said, clucking away as she said it. "My father said a fair number of turkeys was a gaggle. Or was that for geese, and a "gobble," that was his collective noun for turkeys I forget."

Sally had stayed on to finish her degree in fine arts, marrying one of their classmates and supporting him by teaching drawing at Laydon Art School while he went to law school. Both becoming disappointed by the complete departure of excitement from their marriage, they had divorced after two years without rancor, thankful they had not had any children.

With her lump-sum cash settlement, reimbursing her for his keep while in law school, she had purchased a small dark-green wooden building near the campus in Madison and opened a small art gallery: "Atelier Sally."

Four years later, while working toward her MFA, she had met and married an industrial designer older than she, also divorced, who'd returned to Madison for a doctorate. They had divorced after eight years; he had been unable to reject an offer of an executive vice presidency with an internationally known firm in San Francisco; she could not bear to sell her business, by then thriving.

Now she was 'semi-living with' an oral surgeon named Tony who was thirteen years younger than she was and did as he was told. She spent almost every night at his house except when he went to conventions, and during school vacations when his two daughters came to stay for visitation. During those periods she lived in her three-room apartment on the third floor of her gallery. "Yes, I hadn't thought of it that way, but I think you're right. Tony's been after me again lately to get married. For the sake of his daughters, he says. He says even though I move out while they're here, they still know we're having sex.

"I'm sure they do. It doesn't seem to bother them. I don't really think it'd bother them if I didn't move out when they come here; it's his ex-wife who'd be bothered. Might haul him back into divorce court again it's what she does instead of jogging. Six years they've been divorced, and still she's got her hooks in him. "So why get married?"

I say. "What's the percentage?" '"Well, but on that same reasoning, why not?" he says. "Then you wouldn't have to move out, even if she still was disturbed by the idea of us screwing. Then how she felt about it wouldn't make any difference."

"Well of course what I've wanted to say to that is that how his ex' wife feels about our activities doesn't make any difference now, but that wouldn't be true. I don't care how she feels but it does matter to Tony. So I haven't known what to tell him, but now I think I do.

He's at a convention in Chicago this weekend. Wall-to-wall Porsches, I'm sure. You're the shrink; you explain it: what is it about dentists and Porsches? Suppose they feel safer and more comfortable driving if they're enclosed in small spaces, 'cause that's what they work in all day?"

"I don't know," Diane said. "Do we know what the gynecologists drive?

That might give us some help here."

She was rewarded with the gobbling sound again. Sally said: "When he gets back I'm going to tell him what you said. If he starts in on me again, I'll tell him we can't because Diane says it's showy to get married three times, and I agree with her. Diane isn't getting married a third time; until she changes her mind, I'm not going to either. So there."

"And if things should ever change," Diane said, 'if I ever did decide I was looking for another husband, I don't honestly think Amby'd be someone I'd consider. I'm not sure, though, which seems to be a hallmark of the way I am with this guy not being really sure. Now I know at first-hand what "ambivalence" is.

"I like him. I spend time with him. I don't mean we're always very sweet and kind, and loving, kitchy-koo. We disagree about things. We argue a lot. We quarrel. We're both adults. Sometimes you could say we even have fights. But they don't stop us from liking each other.

He's caring and I find him interesting. I think he finds me interesting too.

"I like the things he likes to do movies and going out to dinner. He takes me to Tanglewood in the summer, even though he'd probably rather go to a ballgame. He really does his best to be agreeable. I wouldn't think of asking him to take me dancing, but I'm sure he would if I did. He probably wouldn't be very good at it I doubt he had lessons when he was a kid. But he is good about doing things he isn't really all that keen about because they're things that I want to do. He's considerate of me when we're in bed, too, very gentle. He knows how to show a girl a good time, so that part's all taken care of. I tell myself I don't know how lucky I am; a lot of women'd kill for this guy.

"But he's oh, I don't know; he's still sort of a lout. I'm not sure how to describe him to you. He isn't like any of the boyfriends either of us had, when we saw each other all the time.

"He's a court clerk. Clerk magistrate. It sounds like less than it is. He's got three assistants under him, and there're over thirty people in the office where they work. It's really a medium-sized legal business. File clerks, bookkeepers; and about a dozen or so more who work out of it, constables, deputy sheriffs and so forth. So what it amounts to is that he's sort of a cross between the CEO and CFO of the Canterbury District Court, and he reports to the presiding judge, who's the chairman of the board of this little company.

"But what he really is, is a pol. That's how he thinks of himself and how he got his official title, when he was still in his twenties. He's never changed. I suppose that's to his credit. He doesn't pretend to be anything he isn't. Or not to be anything he is. Been a pol all his life and makes no bones about it. He's good at it. The proof is that he got this prize. He isn't a pol because he's the boss; he's the boss because he's a good politician. He's proud of it.

"If you met him he'd remind you of those men you used to tell me that your uncles hung out with all the time down in Chicago. Smoking cigars and drinking whiskey; telling dirty jokes and laughing all the time, except when they were snarling; talking about all the mean and nasty, awful things that they were going to do to people. Or'd just finished doing, croaked someone good. Probably not people that you'd want to spend all of your time with; every so often you'd hear that one of them'd gone to jail. But still and all, fun to be around them; they were raffish. You could tell yourself you didn't have much choice. It was your family duty. "Crude as they are, they're also entertaining."

That meant you could let yourself go and have a good time without feeling guilty about it. They made you laugh that made them pretty nice guys, all in all, if you could overlook their rougher edges.

"Rough but good-hearted." Amby's like that.

"He's certainly not someone you'd expect to find me consorting with now, at my age, and in my widow's weeds. Nor would I. When Walter was alive I thought he was rather vulgar. Poor dear Walter just adored him, so it seemed as though we had to have him every time we had a dinner party, and I used to have to remind myself I had some friends I always asked that Walter wasn't fond of, and he never complained. So if he wanted to have Amby, and the guy that Amby worked for, with, he would say, Dan Hilliard, well, grin and bear it.

"You would not believe this Hilliard. He's a college president now. It sounds like more than it is: just a dinky little community college. But that's what he does in retirement. He used to be chairman of Ways and Means in the state legislature. A very powerful man, and that's what he still looks like now. The way he moves, how he dresses and talks; he shows you he's used to power. He would've become Speaker one day, if he'd been able to control his sex drive. I'm best friends with his ex-wife, Marcy Hilliard. I'm as close to her now as I was to you. He thinks I'm the reason she's his ex-wife. All those chesty young bimbos that he ran around with had nothing to do with it. But the memory of power's still there; if you tried to imagine what the president of a tin-pot community college would look like; what he'd act like; what he'd be like; well, you would not imagine him.

"So anyway, there I would be, having the three of them over for dinner;

Amby and Danny and Marcy; being the dutiful wife. Plus one or two other couples we know. I really don't know how I did it. I'd tell Walter to invite them, and sometimes they'd show up and Amby'd have a date with him, some woman who they'd both met in politics either their husbands weren't interested in politics, or they didn't have husbands; they weren't really old enough yet. That was the explanation anyway; one didn't ask too many questions. And Marcy would be with Dan, and wed all act like of course this new woman was with Amby. When it looked to me at least a couple times as though she could've been with either of them and most likely had been, too, one time or another. We were never completely sure.

"I never knew what to expect from Dan or Amby, what either one of them would do or say, so I sort of just learned that the best thing to do where they were concerned was just go with the flow. Whatever they did was all right. And keep telling myself all the time they were there:

"This's for Walter, this's for him. Walter's my husband and Walter's okay, and Walter likes these two guys. Walter thinks these two guys're neat. My dear husband is probably nuts."

"Then Walter died. And both of them were so kind, and so good to me, so, well, sweet, to me, really. I couldn't get over it. The last people I would've expected. And then, Amby, he knew all about this complicated investment trust that Walter had, that I didn't really know anything about: he was a big help to me there. And so, well, what can I tell you? One thing just led to another, as it usually does. You know how it can be. Suddenly there you are in bed with some man and you're not really certain who he is, or if you were sure that you wanted to be naked in bed with him. But then figured: Oh, what the heck, kinda late now. Might as well see what he's like."

"That's how it was between David and me," Sally said. "That's just how I felt the first time I slept with him: "I'm very uncertain about this.

Not sure at all that I want to be with him, I even like him enough."

And then he turned out to be good in bed. Not that I had that much to compare him with, only two or three guys, but I certainly wasn't a virgin. He made my lights blink on and off. He said I was the best that he'd ever had I think he was telling the truth. But we were healthy young horny kids; what the hell did we know? We thought great sex was all it took. Trouble was that it isn't, and that was all we had."

"I think that's a good part of what I've got with Amby," Diane said.

"But at my age, that may be enough. It's sort of like finding this great big dog around, when all I've ever been used to is cats; never had any interest in dogs. Never asked for a big friendly, clumsy dog, but now suddenly I seem to have one. And he gets into things all the time."

She heard Sally laughing.

"Yes," she said, 'well, all right. But that's what I'm saying: that may be why I keep him around. Sometimes I get impatient with him.

Sometimes I'd like to kick him, give him a good swift kick in the pants and see if that might shape him up. But I don't, or I haven't so far, at least. And I must say most of the time I do like having him around.

Even though I'm never really sure, from one moment to the next, what he's going to do, and sometimes it turns out to be something I don't like."

"Amby," she said, in the car again, 'come on now, let it out. That's what friends're for."

"Okay," Merrion said, exhaling heavily, 'sorry that I brought it up and it's against my better judgment, but okay, here we go. Yesterday morning, my day off, I start off by going to the office. This's because the judge and I, as I think I may've already told you, we've got one of our projects going on, only it's not going on exactly the way we had in mind when we started it, all right? So we've been getting a little concerned about it lately, some of the reports we've been getting."

"This would be one of those jazz improvisations with the law you two enjoy so much?" Diane said. "With absolutely no authority to do them?"

"Yeah," Merrion said, 'a diversion. What we had in mind when we decide to do this one and having in mind like you just said: we don't have to do them was to see if maybe we can save this woman. She's basically retarded. Mildly, but retarded. If somebody doesn't at least try to do something for her, she's going to get so deeply involved in the criminal justice system where we're both convinced she does not belong that she's going to get hurt. And Lenny and I just decided we don't want that to happen."

"Yes," Diane said. "This would be the woman that got involved with the evil gypsy. And I told you at the time I didn't see how you had any power to do this, and I thought it was a rotten idea. The woman who worked at the pizza parlor and she got herself mixed up in the swindle with the shrewd old lady and the bank account."

"Well, the Burger Quik onna pike, but yeah," Merrion said, 'that's the one I mean. And the judge and I know very well, going into this, what people would think of what we're trying to do here. We're not under the impression that the vast majority of people would necessarily approve, wholly if they knew what we were doing, completely on our own.

If someone was to tell them what it is we're doing and then ask them what they thought of it, a lot of them would then say: No. We're under no illusions here. We know what we're doing goes totally against the grain, completely against the grain, of the attitude that the majority of people today have toward the criminal justice system. What it should be doing and what direction it should be taking. What it ought to be accomplishing; the kind of results it should be getting, what we've got a right to expect.

"That's what they think, and that's the end of it. No matter what you tell them, you're not gonna change their mind. Inna popular mind now, the purpose of the justice system is punishment. "No, no more talkin' here. Get 'em off a the streets; we're afraid of them. Lock'em up an' then get rid of the key."

"We know this. People who're involved inna system like Judge Cavanaugh and I, who actually know how it works and what it does to people, we're not supposed to say: "Well, yeah, we hear what you're saying. But we still think what may be called for here, in this particular case, involving this particular person, is something slightly different.

Instead of assuming that the best thing we can hope for is what you know you'll get, if we just let the system work the way it normally does, let's see if maybe we can adapt the system a little.

'"See, the system assumes that offenders're fungible; every one is the same. What works for one'll work for all the others. That's why the system doesn't always work very well. Offenders're people, and people aren't fungible. And Judge Cavanaugh and I think when you get a case like this one, what you oughta do is individualize the approach. See if something a little different might not work a little better."

"You mean you've aborted another prosecution," Diane said. "That's what it amounts to, isn't it? Just sort of noodged it off to one side where the two of you can play with it for a while. With no idea at all what the outcome of this little game will be. That's why you're so bothered; something's gone wrong: just like I told you it would when you were so excited telling me a year ago about it. I knew right off it was dangerous. I told you. You wouldn't listen. You reacted the way you always do when you've asked me what I think about something you propose to do and I tell you "Not much." You got hurry and said: "Well, I'm the expert. You don't know what you're talking about."

"You did it today, not fifteen minutes ago, when I asked you a harmless question about how much hope some young kid has of ever getting help. I can't imagine why you're telling me about this poor woman again, this case that you've been screwing up, when we're trying to have a nice day."

"Well, if that's what you want to call it," he said, 'you could call it "screwing up," yeah. But if you're asking me for the term that I would use, I would say her case has been continued. Looks like just every other continuance we got, and there're dozens of 'em, literally, more'n you could shake a stick at. Technically that's what it is.

"But I would call it more of a suspension. We've continued the case, but we really don't expect… it isn't like we think there's going to come a day when this case's called for trial. No witnesses, for one thing; the old lady who's the victim was sharp but she wasn't in good health back when the incident occurred. And my understanding even then was that if much more'n another month went by before the matter came to trial, it'd be touch-and-go whether she could testify. And that was a year ago. So no, a trial in this case isn't out of the question; it's not very likely, is all. But we haven't screwed anything up."

"You're gambling," she said. "She doesn't know it, but this woman that you're trying to control… what was her name again? I can almost see it in my mind."

"LeClerc," he said. "Janet LeClerc' "Yes," Diane said, "Janet. Poor little Janet LeClerc, getting bossed around by you, who've got absolutely no authority to make her do anything, no case against her at all. But she doesn't know this, and wouldn't know what to do about it if she did she isn't bright enough.

The only reason that she's trying to do what you tell her is because you've tricked her, you and Cavanaugh. Lied to her, deceived her, conned her just like the gypsy who was conning her and the other woman to cheat the sick old lady. The sheer moral arrogance: breathtaking."

"Well, Jesus Christ, Diane," he said, 'this's for her own good. It isn't like we're doing this because we want to hurt the woman, here, you know. That's what I'm trying to tell you. That this's something that we decided we would try to do, thought it would be a good thing for us to try to do, and now it turns out, like I said, that there was a catch."

She overrode what he was saying before he could finish. "No," she said, shaking her head. "Don't make it what it isn't. You're taking an awful chance here, and a stupid one to boot. The papers get ahold of this, they'll ruin both of you, you and the judge both. And you'll deserve it. You have no authority to do what you're doing and you know it. You've told me that yourself. Place the case on file, as you put it, and then make the defendant accountable to you. Set yourself up over this unfortunate creature as though you were her keeper. Rule her life.

"It's okay. The two of you've decided in your wisdom that what's legally available, the agencies and so forth, aren't effective enough for you. They don't do things the way you'd like to see them done. So the hell with the legislature and the laws and all of that stuff. You and Danny Hilliard; that's where this got started. The two of you spent so much time thinking up ways to manipulate people to get him elected, and then when he was elected, using every bit of power he could get, any way that he could get it, to do what you two wanted done, you lost sight of everything else.

"Something happened to you. You've got this disdain for the whole process. For you it's become a charade. Everything official's a show you put on for the dummies out front, to distract them while you do what was best for them. What the law says is not important; what matters is who's got the fix in. The law's what you want the law to be, and never mind what it says; you'll decide what matters.

"Who the hell do you think you are? Barging into her life, like you own it? Who on earth gave you that right?

"No one did. You've got no right. And in the second place, just what are you going to do, to punish her, if she doesn't do what you tell her, or does what you tell her not to do? Have you given that any thought? What are you going to do to her if she decides to call your bluff, get into trouble knowing you will help her? You create a dependency when you inveigle a person into reposing her trust entirely in you, knowing she's not bright or strong-willed — that's what enabled you to do it. A low-affect personality you've compelled to abdicate responsibility that for all you know she might've been able to handle for what happens in her life. Instead you make all her decisions.

Amby, this is a dangerous game. Therapists who play it often find themselves wishing they hadn't."

"I know it," he said. "That's what I've been trying to tell you. I really wish now that the judge and I hadn't taken this thing on.

Basically what I had on my mind when I told her to come in and see me yesterday was what Sam Paradisio told me. I told you about him, my friend in federal Probation. He called me last week, said he's got information Janet's shacking up with this bank robber — most likely a stone killer, too, 'cept nobody's proved that yet. And his concern in my place would be that this vicious bastard'll decide it's time for Janet to disappear.

"Sammy thinks he's the type of guy who solves problems that way. When someone complicates his life, homicide is a thing he can do to simplify it. Sammy's afraid his guy'll kill this woman we've been trying to help."

"Marvelous," Diane said. "Perfectly wonderful. He kills her and then of course there's an investigation, and that's when it comes out that she shouldn't even've been in the situation where someone could get at her to kill her. When she got in trouble, a year ago, she should've been sent to an institution, a supervised, structured, protected environment. Either getting punished or else getting some help. And that's where she would've been, if the judge and his clerk had enforced the laws. But instead they decided to take the law into their own hands. "Cause they knew better."

"Well, naturally this worries me," Mernon said.

"I should think it would," she said. "It would certainly worry me.

"But I talk to her," Merrion said. "I have a heart-to-heart talk with her, and I tell her to stay away from this guy, have nothing more to do with him, and she assures me she will not. She'll stay away from him."

"Amby, you're a dear man," Diane said, 'but how is she going to do that? How on earth… if the reason you don't want her seeing this man is that someone who knows him thinks that he might kill her, how do you think your Sad Sack of a woman's going to make him leave her alone?

Isn't it more likely she'll set him off completely if she tries to do that? Provoke him into doing the very thing that you're afraid he'll do?"

"I don't think so," he said. "Or at least this morning, down at the station, I didn't think so. From what Sammy told me and you understand this's confidential stuff that he's only telling it to me because he has to, do his job and I need him to, to do mine, so I shouldn't really be telling it to you this's all very hush-hush and so forth."

"Right," she said. "At least 'til they find the body. But once that happens, I think you'll find it becoming general knowledge fairly quickly."

"Yeah," he said. "Well, I'm sorry I brought it up. But this squatter-lady last night, Linda Shepard, with her three kids named after movie stars and her dog-ass boyfriend, of course, to go with her and the kids: I had no idea at all what the hell to do with the five of them.

"So I say to Ev Whalen, I said: "Ev, 've you by any chance got any ideas here, what I can do with these folks? Assuming as I am of course that you don't want to keep 'em here, locked up in the jail overnight and tomorrow until Social Services opens up again Monday? I never run into anything like this before, where I couldn't release somebody when there wasn't any reason why they should be locked up, because they didn't have a place to go when they got out. Something you can do to just get these people under cover for a while, a day or two. You know?" And he just looks at me. Then he says: "No, not really, no.

They don't pay me here to have ideas." '"Well, you're a big help," I say to him. He gets kind of pissed off at me. "Hey," he says, "don't look at me. You've got these people here charged with a crime and you don't know what to do with them. I'm not in charge of homeless."

"Well, he's right, isn't he?" Diane said. "It isn't a crime to be homeless. The police aren't supposed to do anything except call the proper authorities when it looks like otherwise they might freeze to death, starve, or die without immediate medical care. Back when we were building the new station, I don't recall making any provision for that kind of problem, facilities for short-term family shelter."

"We didn't," Merrion said. "There aren't any."

"Well, doesn't that tell you something?" she said. "The sergeant was right."

"Well, that's what I'm trying to tell you, for Christ sake," Merrion said. "If you'd just… you know what it is about you people all the time, that gets on people's nerves? It's that it's always so important to you, matter what the situation is, to never get excited. Act like anything ever really mattered to you. You've always got to be completely in control. Always superior, cool, calm and collected, never upset about anything. That and the fact that you just will not listen. When somebody tries to tell you something that you may not understand, maybe don't know all the facts about even though you always think you do; always sure of that well, you got no time to hear it.

"You're always sort of lookin' down your nose all the time, at people like me who look to you as though we're getting' so riled up and everything, like I guess I am right now; doing things you look at, and then sit back and say: "Well, that's a stupid idea." The reason you can do that and the reason we can't, and that we do what we do, is because we're in the situation. We don't have your luxury, being able to stand back and shake our heads and say: "No, I don't like the looks of that one. I wont take that case. That problem don't appeal to me.

Not my specialty at all. Take it away. Find someone else. Don't leave it for me to get rid of."

"We're the people running the places where those people and problems you don't want get taken away to. We are the last fuckin' stop. After us there ain't nobody else. Every day we're in situations where it's pretty clear someone'd better do something, someone's got to do something, and fast, or something bad is gonna happen and we'll all be in the shit. The wheels'll come off a the world.

"To deal with this kind of problem day after day, we have to have passion. You can't do the hopeless work that we have to do every day without taking risks, and you can't take those risks without passion.

Without believing… not that you're better'n anybody else, or that someone else couldn't do it better… just believing that you can do something that will make things better, because you know that you are it: there is nobody else. Behind you is the edge; people who get past you fall off. There is nobody behind you. Better, worse, almost as good: doesn't matter, they're not there there is nobody else.

"I know I'm not saying this's right. I can't help it. I'm doing it like I always try to do everything else: the best way I can in the time that I got. That is the best I can do. Me and Danny're the kind of people who believe that people have to be taken care of; the work has to get done, any which way you can do it. And if this means you have to get excited, and take some risks, that's what you do: you get excited and you take them. So you can get something done. Because that is a damned sight more important than just making sure that you're not losing your cool all the time, and that's why we're doing what we are doing to poor little Janet LeClerc'

She did not reply but reached her left hand forward and turned up the volume of the music. The traffic remained heavy but well-behaved all the way to the Route 20 exit in Lee and he took that west to Route 7 north up to West Street in Lenox. They talked about a movie that had cost more than 100 million dollars to produce and was doing almost no business, and how long it had been since there had been any new movie that either of them or anyone they knew had been eager to see.

The seats that Rachel had given to Diane for the concert were in the center of the shed twenty-two rows back from the stage, close enough so that they could see that the musicians in their shirt-sleeves in the orchestra were sweating at their work, and that both the piano soloist and the guest conductor had put on even more weight than their newspaper pictures and preview stories had suggested. The conductor had evidently taken no pains to moderate the volume and the tone of the orchestra so that the pianist's work on Brahms's second concerto would be presented to best advantage, but the soloist's work was perfunctory so that no real harm was done when the orchestra submerged it by playing too loudly.

At dinner at the Red Lion they were seated next to a table of six hosted by a red-faced man in his seventies who provided the entertainment for everyone at their end of the dining room by indignantly relating how he had lost a great deal of money at Saratoga the preceding day, more than he cared to say, betting on horses he had carefully selected from records he had spent many winter-evening hours systematically compiling and analyzing on his computer.

He said he believed the horses had 'lost on purpose. I'm convinced of it. It wasn't the jockeys it was the goddamned horses. They were doing it deliberately. Stumbling, bearing out. All sorts of stupid mistakes. Any fool could've seen it. It was a conspiracy, a conspiracy of horses. They'd gotten together in the barns or in the paddock or someplace or other and cooked it up. Just to make me lose all my money and feel bad and look like a damned fool in front of my friends."

Then leaving the track, chagrined and downhearted, 'what did I do but run into Dorothy," one of his ex-wives, 'just what I needed." She had insulted him loudly in front of a great many strangers. "She disparaged my sexual prowess, can you believe it? Asked me if I could get it up "even once a year now." The nerve of the damned stupid cow.

When the reason she gave all the papers when she left me eighteen years ago was that I wouldn't leave her alone for a minute. I couldn't deny it, it was true. But I should've anyway. I must've been out of my mind." Diane and Merrion listened and then laughed along with all the other eavesdroppers, and the red-faced man beamed at all of them.

When they got back to the grey house with the yellow door on Pynchon Hill a little before 10:00, Diane invited him to come in for coffee, which in their code was her way of informing him that she would make love if he really wanted to, but he said he had a full day ahead of him and thought he better head home, and she was not displeased when they lightly kissed good-night.