Death Match

ELEVEN

Kevin Connelly walked across the broad blacktop lot of the Stoneham Corporate Center, making for his car. It was a Mercedes S-class, low-slung and silver, and Connelly was careful to park it far from other vehicles: it was worth the extra walk to avoid dings and scratches.

He unlocked the door, opened it, and slid onto the black leather. Connelly loved fine cars, and everything about the Mercedes — the solid thunk of the door, the cradling sensation of the seat, the low throb of the engine — gave him pleasure. The AMG performance package had been worth every penny of the twenty grand it added to the sticker price. There had been a time, not so long ago, when the drive home itself would have been the highlight of his evening.

That time was gone.

Connelly eased across the lot and slid onto the feeder road for Route 128, mentally plotting his route home. He’d stop by Burlington Wine Merchants for a bottle of Perrier-Jouet, then visit the adjoining florist for a bouquet. Fuchsias this week, he decided; she wouldn’t be expecting fuchsias. Flowers and champagne had become a staple of his Saturday evenings with Lynn: the only mystery, she liked to joke, was the color of roses he’d bring home.

If someone had told him, just a few years before, what a difference Lynn would make in his life, he would have scoffed. He had an exciting and challenging job as CIO for a software development company; he had plenty of friends and more than enough interests to occupy his free time; he made a lot of money and never had problems meeting women. And yet, on some almost subconscious level, he must have known something was missing. Otherwise he would never have visited Eden in the first place. But even after enduring the grueling evaluation, even after shelling out the $25,000 fee, he’d had no inkling of how Lynn would make his life complete. It was as if he’d been blind all his life, never understanding what he’d been missing until the gift of sight was suddenly granted.

He pulled onto the freeway and merged with the weekend traffic, enjoying the effortless acceleration of the big engine. The strange thing, he remembered, was how he’d felt that night of their first meeting. For the first fifteen minutes, maybe even more, he’d thought it was a huge mistake; that somehow Eden had blundered, maybe mixed up his name with somebody else’s. He’d been warned in his exit interview this was a common initial reaction, but that made no difference: he’d spent the first part of the date looking across the restaurant table at a woman who looked nothing like what he expected, wondering how quickly he could get back the twenty-five grand he’d dropped on the crazy scheme.

But then, something had happened. Even now, no matter how many times he and Lynn had joked about it in the months that followed, he couldn’t articulate just what it was. It had crept up on him. Over the course of the dinner he’d discovered — often in ways he could never have expected — interests, tastes, likes and dislikes they shared. Even more intriguing were areas where they differed. It was as if, somehow, each filled gaps in the other. He’d always been weak in foreign languages; she was fluent in French as well as Spanish, and explained to him why language immersion was more natural than memorizing a textbook. She’d spent the second half of the dinner speaking only in French, and by the time his crème brûlée arrived he marveled at how much he was managing to understand. On their second date, he learned Lynn was afraid to fly; as a private pilot, he explained how to cope with fear of flying and offered to take her up for desensitization flights in the Cessna he co-owned.

He shifted lanes, smiling to himself. These were crude examples, and he knew it. Truth was, the way their personalities complemented each other’s was probably too subtle and multifaceted to detail. He could only compare it to the other women he’d known. The real difference, the fundamental difference, was that he’d known her close to two years — and yet he was as excited now at the prospect of seeing her as he’d been in the first flush of new love.

He wasn’t perfect; far from it. Eden’s psychological screening had made his own faults all too clear. He tended to be impatient. He was rather arrogant. And so on. But somehow, Lynn canceled these things out. He’d learned from her quiet self-assurance, her patience. And she had learned from him, as well. When they’d first met, she was quiet, a little reserved. But she’d loosened up a lot. She was still quiet at times — the last couple of days, for example — but it had grown so subtle that nobody but he would have noticed.

Although he’d never have admitted it to anybody, the thing he’d been most worried about, going into Eden, was the sex. He was old enough, and he’d had enough relationships, for bedroom marathons to be less important to him than they once were. He was by no means a Viagra candidate, but he found he now had to feel deeply about a woman before he could really respond. This had been an issue in his prior relationship: the woman had been fifteen years his junior, and her sexual hunger, which as a young stud he would have found desirable, had been a little intimidating.

It proved a non-issue with Lynn. She’d been so patient and so loving — and her body was so wonderfully sensitive to his touch — that the sex was the best of his life. And, like everything else about the marriage, it only seemed to get better with time. He felt an electric tickle of lust as he thought about their upcoming anniversary. They were going to spend it at Niagara-on-the-Lake, in Canada, where their honeymoon had been. Just a few more days, Connelly thought as he slowed for his exit. If there was anything on Lynn’s mind, the spray of the Maid of the Mist would soon drive it far, far away.