Chaos

CHAPTER 5

THE ENTRANCE COULD BELONG to a private home, and that’s what the Faculty Club has become to my FBI-profiler husband, who didn’t graduate from Harvard. Benton went to Amherst just like his father and grandfather did.

A home away from home. A portal to another place where pain, fear and tragedy aren’t allowed. Benton can spirit himself away to his immaculate neo-Georgian escape in the heart of the campus and pretend for a brief spell that there’s no such thing as ignorance, bigotry, politics, and small-minded bureaucrats.

He can enjoy a cloistered retreat where everyone celebrates enlightened ideas and our differences, and there’s no such thing as violence or aggression. Benton feels safe here. It’s one of the few places where he does. But not so safe that he’s not carrying a gun. I can’t see a pistol but I have no doubt he has one in his briefcase, and his backup somewhere on his person. His Glock 27 or concealed-carry Smith & Wesson Model 19 that he won’t leave home without.

We’ve stopped in front of flanking pilasters that are painted white, and there’s a transom over the dark red door. I gaze up at the perfect symmetry of the brick facade, and my attention lingers on the multipaned bay windows of the upstairs guest rooms.

“Maybe another time.” Benton looks up too and knows what I’m thinking.

“Yes, I guess there will be no sleepover tonight, thanks to my sister. But if I had anything to change into I’d rent a room anyway right now and take a shower.” I can almost hear the creaking carpeted old wooden stairs leading up to the second floor.

I remember the sound and feel of the fabric-covered walls, the cozy elegance and most of all the narrow beds where Benton and I don’t get much sleep. Ours is a well-practiced ritual that we engage in regularly and don’t talk about with anyone but each other. It belongs exclusively to the two of us, and I wouldn’t call it a date but consider it more like therapy when we come here once a month, assuming the stars are properly aligned.

So often they’re not, but when they are we get a welcome reminder that decency and humanity still exist in the world. Not everybody lies, steals, rapes, abuses, neglects, tortures, kidnaps and kills. Not everybody wants to ruin us or take what’s ours, and we’re so lucky to have found each other.

We walk into the chilled quiet of formal antiques, fine paintings and Persian rugs. Benton closes the door behind us, and we’re surrounded by sconces and mahogany paneling, dark tufted leather furniture, and wide-board flooring. Fresh flowers are arranged on the entryway table, and tonight’s menu is displayed on a Victorian oak podium.

I detect the layers of familiar scents, the cut lilies and roses, and beeswax with a patina of musty staleness, that are reassuring and part of an old-world charm that makes me think of poetry, cigars and rare leather-bound tomes. I could close my eyes and know where I am. The energy is different in here. There’s a gravitas, a formality that should be expected in a place that’s hosted heads of state and some of the most accomplished people in the world.

I pause in the entryway, in front of an antique oval mirror, running my fingers through my limp blond hair. I stare into the pitted glass at the tall handsome man behind me in pale gray, hovering over me like a breathtaking apparition.

“Do I know you?” I ask Benton without turning around.

“I don’t think so. Are you waiting for someone?”

“Yes.”

“What a coincidence. I am too. I’ve always been waiting for someone.”

“So have I.”

“Well not just someone. The right person.” His reflection looks at me.

“Do you think there’s only one right person for each of us?” I ask the mirror on the wall.

“I can only speak for myself.”

We don’t have a name for our little game, and nobody is wise to our delightful choreography of meeting as if we’re strangers. It’s refreshing, sobering but also good psychology if one can handle the truth. What would happen if we really were meeting for the first time right now in the entryway of the Harvard Faculty Club?

Would we notice each other? Would he still find me as attractive as he did the first time we met? It’s not always the same for men when their wives get older, and some mates may say they’re just as in love when they’re not. It’s brave to ask such questions and face the truth unflinchingly. What might we feel were we to meet now instead of decades ago when Benton was married and I was divorced and we worked our first case together?

There’s no scientific method for answering such a question, and I don’t need one. I have no doubt we’d fall in love with each other all over again. I’m certain I would have an affair with him that would result in my being called a home wrecker. And I wouldn’t care because it’s worth it.

Benton places his warm graceful hands on my shoulders, and rests his chin on top of my head. I smell his earthy cologne as we look at our reflections in the convex mirror, our faces Picasso-like abstractions where the silvered glass is eroded.

“How about some dinner?” he says into my hair.

“Will you excuse me for a moment?”

I check my shopping bag in the coat closet, and step inside the ladies’ room with its formal wallpaper and vintage Victorian theater posters. I set my leather messenger-bag briefcase on the black granite countertop and dig out a cosmetic kit. I face the mirror over the sink, and the woman in khaki staring back at me is slightly shopworn and disheveled.

Actually there’s nothing slight about it, I decide. I look like hell, and I take off my damp suit jacket and drape it over a chair. My bra has soaked through my white blouse, and I turn on the hand dryer and blast hot air inside my collar, doing what I can so I don’t sit around in wet underwear. Then I dig out powder, lipstick, a toothbrush. I contemplate my appearance and what else I intend to do about it. Not much.

I can’t reverse the effects of lousy sleep, of running myself ragged and walking in the extreme heat. I feel a touch light-headed, and I’m weary and hopelessly clammy. I need food and drink badly. I need a shower most of all, and I take off my ruined panty hose and toss them in the trash. I douse a hand towel with cold water, cleaning up, but there’s no quick remedy for rumpled sweatiness.

It’s as if I were soaked and agitated in a washing machine, and I notice I’ve gotten a bit thinner in recent weeks. That usually happens when I neglect to exercise, and I haven’t been jogging for a while, certainly not during the heat wave. I haven’t touched my TRX bands, and Lucy’s been after me to go with her to the gym.

I powder my face, and shadows in the low light of a crystal chandelier accentuate my prominent cheekbones and nose, and the angle of my strong jaw. I’m reminded of what journalists say, almost none of it relevant or kind. I’m masculine and off-putting. Or my favorite unflattering line that’s been recycled excessively in stories: Dr. Kay Scarpetta is compelling in appearance with an inaccessible, secretive and domineering face.

I wet my fingers and muss my hair. I give it a once-over with a volumizing spray. I brush my teeth, and dust my forehead and cheeks with a mineral powder that blocks ultraviolet light and doesn’t cause cancer. I don’t care that it’s about to be pitch dark out. I do it anyway. Then I dab on an olive oil lip balm and find the Visine and a small tube of shea butter.

I feel much improved but as I survey my wilted suit and blouse, I can hear Dorothy’s voice in my head as clearly as if she’s inside the ladies’ room with me. She’d say the same thing she’ll probably say when Benton and I pick her up in a few hours. I have a terrible sense of style. I’m boring and sloppy. I get dirty and dress in stuffy suits like a frump or a man. She can’t understand why I don’t wear stilt-like heels, heavy makeup or acrylic nails and gaudy polish.

It’s lost on her why I wouldn’t emphasize my body parts, as she puts it, “especially since both of us were endowed with big knockers,” she likes to boast about what’s most important. I don’t dress or conduct myself anything like my sister. I never have and couldn’t possibly.

Ever since I can remember I’ve been incompatible with fragile female accoutrements and empty-headed attitudes. We simply don’t get along.

BENTON IS WAITING FOR me, chatting with the hostess Mrs. P at her station.

He grips his black leather briefcase with one hand, and in the other he holds his phone, typing on it with his thumb. He slips it back in a pocket as he notices my return from the ladies’ room, and I understand what’s meant by one’s heart leaping. Mine is happily jolted by the sight of him. It always is.

“A big improvement? Hmm?” He takes his glasses off, making a big production of appraising me, his eyes glinting with a playful light. “Do you agree, Mrs. P?” he asks her as he winks at me.

In her early eighties, she has a nimbus of wispy grayish-white hair, and round wire-rim glasses like a caricature of a prim and proper New England matron. Her face is doughy and wrinkled like dehydrated fruit, and her dress and matching jacquard jacket are a rose-trellis design in greens and reds that reminds me of a William Morris pattern.

Mrs. P tends to eye me curiously even when I don’t look overcooked and disheveled, as if there’s much she wonders about but isn’t going to verbalize. Several times now her eyes have dropped down to my bare legs, and then she looks up quickly as if she’s seen something she shouldn’t.

“What do you think?” Benton asks her.

“Well I’m not sure.” Her glasses wink as she turns her head back and forth like a tennis match, from him to me, looking at one, then the other, and the two of them have their shtick. “You know not to put me on the spot that way,” she affectionately reprimands him.

Mrs. P’s surname is Peabody, pronounced with an emphasis on the first syllable, a drawn-out PEE-b’dy, like the city near Salem. I’ve never addressed her by her first name, Maureen, and have no clue if those close to her call her that or Mo or something else. In the years we’ve been coming here she’s simply been Mrs. P, and Benton is Mr. Wesley. If she refers to me by name it’s Mrs. Wesley, although she’s well aware of my other life where most everyone else calls me Dr. Scarpetta or Chief.

It’s a sad secret that Mrs. P knows what I do and who I am even as she politely pretends otherwise. Not long after Benton and I moved to Cambridge, her husband was killed in a car accident literally in front of their house, and I took care of him. Now it’s as if that never happened, and what I remember most about her husband’s case is his widow Mrs. P’s refusal to talk to me. She insisted on going over her late husband’s autopsy report with one of my assistant chiefs, a man.

But then Mrs. P started at the Faculty Club in a day when things were very different for women. You could be on the faculty here and find yourself relegated to the ladies’ dining room or discover there’s no place in the dorm and you’re not welcome in the same libraries or housing as your male classmates. When one of the greatest legal minds of our time, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, arrived for her first year at Harvard Law School she was asked to justify her taking up a seat that could be occupied by a man.

“I think you need your head examined if you go outside in this,” Mrs. P is saying to Benton, and he widens his eyes, staring at her with mock disappointment. “You’ll melt like a candle,” meaning that’s what she thinks I look like.

Benton says to me with a shrug, “I guess that’s a no. Sorry, Kay. It would seem Mrs. P thinks you still look like something the cat dragged in.”

“I would never say such a thing!” Mrs. P laughs her soft self-conscious laugh, placing three fingers over her pink lips, shaking her head as if my husband is the naughtiest human being on the planet.

She’s quite fond of Benton, who of course is teasing both of us. If you don’t know him it would be difficult to recognize because his humor is as subtle as a cobweb you can’t find but keep brushing from your face. He knows damn well my appearance isn’t greatly improved. I don’t have hose on, and the leather insoles of my unstylish scuffed shoes feel as slimy as a raw oyster that’s been sitting out for hours.

“Let’s not rub it in,” I say to him as Mrs. P gathers two menus and the thick black notebook, the extensive carte des vins. “I realize it wasn’t your intention to have dinner tonight with something the cat dragged in.”

“Depends on the cat.” Benton opens his briefcase with bright springy snaps of the clasps.

He trades his sunglasses for bifocals, the kind you get in the drugstore. I shoulder my messenger bag again, and we follow Mrs. P into the north dining room with its tall arched windows and exposure to the front lawn, which is cloaked in darkness.

Our feet are quiet on deep red carpet as we pass beneath exposed dark beams in the white plaster ceiling, through a sea of white-cloth-covered tables beneath brass chandeliers with small red shades over their candlelike lights. We’re the only guests so far, and Benton and Mrs. P chat amicably as she shows us to our usual corner.

“Not until closer to eight tonight,” she’s telling Benton that the Faculty Club is going to be quite slow until then. “We have two private dinners upstairs but not much down here. It’s too hot, you know.”

“What about power outages?” Benton asks. “Have they affected you?”

“Now that’s trouble when it happens. The power goes out and stays out, and you can’t stay inside but can’t go outside either. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen again, especially not while you’re in here trying to enjoy a nice quiet dinner.”

Mrs. P then begins to update us on Felix the Cat. That’s his real name but she just calls him Felix for short, and apparently Felix hasn’t fared well during the heat wave.

“He did very poorly the last time the power went out, which was just yesterday at noon, at least that’s what I found out later because I was here at the time. Where I live is one of the worst areas on the grid map or something like that,” she explains to both of us. “And you know Felix is old with all the problems that go along with it. I don’t always know if the power’s out in the house, you see. I might be fine here and have no idea poor Felix is suffering with no air-conditioning.”

“Maybe there’s a neighbor or someone who can check on him?” I suggest.

“My neighbors are in the same boat if the power goes out,” she says. “And my children don’t live nearby. Now my grandson’s working part-time here while he tries to make it as a musician, and he helps out when he can. But he’s twenty-three and allergic to cats.”

“Could you bring Felix to work?” Benton asks, and Mrs. P just laughs.

“Why couldn’t you?” Benton is serious.

“Well I couldn’t.” She looks across the dining room, making sure no one else has come in.