Bad Business

37

The next morning when I went into my office Hawk was sitting in my chair with his feet up on my desk, drinking my Volvic water from the bottle, and reading a book called The Teammates, by David Halberstam.

"Did I leave the door unlocked?" I said.

"No."

"At least you brought your own book," I said.

I checked my answering machine, which displayed no messages. I got a bottle of Volvic water from the office refrigerator, and sat down in the client chair. Hawk flapped his page and closed the book and put it down on the desk.

"Me 'n Cecile went and took the weekend seminar with Darrin O'Mara," Hawk said. "Now we feelin' sorry for you and Susan."

"Because we're hung up on monogamy."

"Exactly," Hawk said. "Darrin say we got to, ah, I believe he say, throw off our shackles, and experience our libidos unstructured and unconstricted."

"Wow," I said.

"Tha's what I thought," Hawk said.

He was deep into his feet-do-yo'-duty accent, which meant he was deeply scornful of his subject.

"Darrin say ... he always encourage us to call hisself Darrin ... Darrin say that if you fully unfettered your id, and experience passion without regard to convention or previous condition of servitude . . ."

"He didn't say previous condition of servitude," I said. Hawk grinned.

"I jess throwed that in," Hawk said. "If you do that, Darrin say, then you still feel love and passion for one person more than any other, that be how you know you in love."

"And I been walking around all this time thinking I loved Susan without really knowing."

"Maybe you learned it," Hawk said, "when we out chasing her around out west."

"I already knew it," I said. "That's why we were chasing."

"Oh yeah," Hawk said. "I got to check back with Darrin on that. I think he pretty sure you just think you in love and don't really know."

"So, say you buy into this," I said. "You supposed to go out and chase down enough people to test the theory, or does he have a placement service?"

"He say we explore this with the other members of the class. I be swamped, a course. And Cecile say she be sort of uncomfortable starting out, so to speak, with the folks in the seminar, and was there any other way. And he say, he can also help us meet other people."

"How exciting," I said. "O'Mara tell you, or Cecile, what he could arrange for her?"

"There be a party," Hawk said. "Friday night. Invitation only."

"You be there?"

"Cecile will," Hawk said.

"You didn't make the cut, huh?"

"They 'fraid of the competition," Hawk said.

"And what if Cecile is swept up in it all, and arranges to dash off with some guy to Quincy or Nyack?"

"She be free to follow her passion," Hawk said.

"And the guy?"

"He be dead."