Betrayals (2 page)

D
umbarton was jammed, as it nearly always was, cars tight against each other: some were even pulled in off the road, between the trees and parked halfway into driveways, completely blocking the pavement. The thunderclaps of party noise came out above them through the open balcony windows.

Sheridan said: “Being a neighbor of Harriet Andrew could seriously damage your peace of mind.”

“She's a very good person,” said Janet, defensively.

“I'm sure,” he said. “You friends from England?”

“You're very observant.”

“The accent is pretty obvious,” said Sheridan.

“Yes,” said Janet, answering the question. “We read at Oxford together.” She hesitated, feeling as uncomfortable as she had back at the house. “I came by cab: there's a rank on Wisconsin.”

“My car's that way,” he said, falling into step beside her.

They had to maneuver around several obstructing vehicles. Always he politely stood back, deferring for her to go first, and never once reached for her hand or her arm on the pretense of helping her, not even when they had to go over a cross street. Wisconsin Avenue was brightly lit compared to the side roads and very busy, cars and people ebbing and flowing in both directions and with shops and bars and cafes open on either side. Sheridan turned towards M Street and announced: “No cabs.”

Jane looked towards the deserted rank and said: “They're along here all the time.”

She started down towards the intersection and again he went with her. At the junction they looked both ways along M Street: there wasn't anywhere a taxi showing a for hire light.

“Not really your night,” he said.

“It won't take long, really.”

“Would you like a drink?”

Janet had been expecting such an approach from the moment he began walking with her and had the polite refusal already rehearsed, work she had to do at home, which wasn't actually a lie because Monday's lecture—the slide of the Lebanon into utter anarchy—was still only half written. She saw from the clock in the bank window behind him that it wasn't yet eight. She said: “Thank you,” not knowing why she'd accepted.

“I don't know Georgetown particularly well,” he said.

“There's Nathan's,” she said, nodding across the road.

He stood away from her while they waited for the lights and made no move to cup her arm when they went over. As he held back for her to enter the bar Janet saw three cabs in convoy coming from the city, their flags lit. Nathan's was crowded, but as they entered two people got up from a table near the door, so they were seated immediately. She asked for scotch and he said he'd have the same. When he came back with the drinks he said: “Cheers.” Janet said “Cheers” back, unsure what would happen next.

“Where's your husband?” he asked, abruptly.

“How …?” she began and then stopped, following his look towards her hand. Janet steeled herself to utter the word. Gazing directly across the table she blurted: “Dead.” She paused and then said: “He's dead.” She'd confronted it before, of course: to herself at first, staring into mirrors in their empty apartment, needing to convince herself it was true and not a bad dream, saying: “Dead, dead, dead … Hank's dead,” but this was the first time to a complete stranger. Something else that did not hurt as much as she'd expected.

Janet waited for an insincere “I'm sorry,” but instead he said: “How long?”

This was going beyond anything for which Janet had prepared herself. Clip-voiced, gazing down into her untouched drink, she said: “Ten months … ten months and two weeks …” There was another pause. “… And four days. It was a Friday.”

“How did he die?”

Janet swallowed, deeply, and said: “I don't think I want to talk about it.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged, lost. She said: “I just don't.”

“You should,” he said.

Suddenly angry, Janet said: “Don't give me any of that ‘you'll feel better if you talk about it' amateur psychology …” She leveled her hand beneath her chin. “I've had that sort of crap up to here!”

“I wasn't going to give you any sort of amateur psychology crap.”

Deflated, Janet demanded: “What then?”

Now he shrugged. “It just seems odd that if you loved a guy that much you want to lock everything away. You might as well take the rings off and pretend it never happened.”

“It's not like that at all!” she said, still angry.

“If you say so.”

“What sort of remark is that!”

“A backing-off sort of remark,” he said. “I was out of order and now I'm embarrassed. Would you like another drink?”

“No!” she said. Then, quickly, “No, thank you.”

“You want me to say I'm sorry?”

“That's up to you.”

“I'm sorry.”

It sounded as if he meant it. She said: “What about you? Wife, I mean?”

“There isn't one.”

“Why not?” Janet said, trying to hit back with the unsettling sort of directness that he had shown earlier.

The shoulders rose and fell once more. “Never the right person in the right place at the right time.”

“For the moment I can't remember the movie that line came from,” said Janet.

Sheridan lowered and raised his head in acknowledgment. He said: “It just never happened, I guess. You sure about that drink?”

On the street outside the For Hire lights bobbed and dipped like leaves in a stream. Janet said: “Just one more.”

Janet watched as Sheridan made his way to the bar, properly studying him for the first time, deciding he was a difficult person about whom to form an instant impression. He was inconspicuous in stature and in demeanour and in the way he dressed—abruptly she realized he was wearing a collar and a tie and a muted suit while everyone else at the party had been laid-back casual—but he appeared in no way nervous or uncertain. Rather, the reverse. People parted at the bar and he was served almost at once, despite louder shouted demands, and people parted again for him when he turned away. Janet stayed intent upon him as he returned, concentrating upon detail now. He was a lean man, the skin almost taut over high cheekbones and a sharp, aquiline nose and there was some hint of discoloration to his face, as if he had spent a lot of time in the sun. She could not discern any beardline and wondered if he'd shaved a second time before going to the party. There was a slight sag of puffiness beneath his eyes, which had no positive color but seemed to her like a tweed, a mixture of browns and greens, and his brown hair was just lightening into gray at the sides and oddly at just one temple, the left. On the small finger of his left hand—the hand with which he proffered her drink—he wore a ruby-stoned ring and because his arm was extended she could see a thick, heavily calibrated Rolex watch. He repeated: “Cheers,” and she raised her glass back to him in response.

“You were leading the inquisition,” he said.

Janet was glad of the lightness. “So?” she asked.

“I work for the government.”

“Saying that in Washington is like declaring you're a coalminer in Pennsylvania or brew beer in Milwaukee,” said Janet. She allowed the pause. “Or maybe hinting at something sinister.”

Sheridan smiled, unevenly because he did not appear to have bothered with any dental correction, and said: “Nothing spooky about me …” He gestured vaguely over his shoulder, towards the city, and said: “State Department. You know Foggy Bottom?”

Janet nodded, thinking how close the State Department headquarters were to a Georgetown he'd earlier said he didn't know very well. Whether or not he visited Georgetown was hardly any business of hers, she thought. “Must be interesting,” she said, wishing as she spoke she had managed to avoid the cliche.

He shook his head. “Not at my lowly level,” he said. “General analysis. Long reports that take weeks to prepare and weeks to print for nobody to read.”

“Why bother in the first place?”

“Paperwork is the lifeblood of bureaucracy,” said Sheridan, self-mocking. “I'm just one of the billions of bureaucrats who write billions of unread reports that need huge forests of trees cut down to make the paper to print them on. It's people like me who make cities possible in the cleared spaces.”

“Thank you,” laughed Janet, trying to respond. She decided, guiltily, that she was enjoying herself and because of that guilt made an immediate qualification. Not actually enjoying herself: relaxing, she thought again. More than she had for a very long time. There was nothing wrong in that: nothing disrespectful to Hank's memory. Just coming out of seclusion.

“Your turn,” Sheridan said. And then at once, conscious of her slight stiffening, he said: “No! Forget it. Let's just drink our drinks … damned sight safer than that punch back there. By now they'll be swinging from the chandeliers.”

She said, “You're very considerate.”

“And you're very vulnerable.”

“Does it show that much?”

“Is the Grand Canyon a ditch?”

“It was just …” she set out, stopping almost at once because the words weren't there. “… So complete,” she started again. “I didn't want … didn't need anybody else. Neither did he. Which is what makes it worse because now he isn't here any more there's nothing. Just emptiness, like a hole I can't climb out of …”
Exactly
that, she thought: she had buried herself.

“Don't,” said Sheridan, gently. “Leave it.”

“Let me.”

“You sure?”

Janet nodded, jerkily, eyes down on her drink again. She started to tell him, stumbling again at the beginning until the surroundings receded, going right back to Oxford where they'd met, she reading Modern History and Hank—whom she called Henry now, as she had in those early days—was studying law. Strangely there was no embarrassment telling this calm, unmoving stranger how Hank had moved in with her after four months and how she'd followed him back to America after they'd both graduated. She talked of the luck they'd had in his getting a position with the downtown law firm on 13th Street and of her own matching good fortune in getting a place—low in the pecking order at first—in the Middle East division at Georgetown University where she was now a senior lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies.

“There was no warning,” she said, bitterly. “Nothing. And he'd always been so fit. He'd always worked out in England and he jogged when we came back here and we played tennis most weekends in the summer. It was just tiredness at first and we didn't think anything of it because he was working so hard, trying to prove himself in a new job. But it got worse and then he started to lose a lot of weight …” Janet gulped at her drink, needing a break in the narrative. “Did you know there isn't any pain, with cancer of the liver?”

Sheridan shook his head.

“That was another obscenity, along with so much else,” she said. “He just faded away. Literally. Every day he seemed to get smaller, like he was collapsing inside. Which he was, I guess. We tried everything, of course: went to all the experts about a transplant which they said wasn't possible because it had been discovered too late to prevent the spread. I said I still wanted it done and they said he was too weak by then: that he could not withstand the shock of surgery …” She drank again. “So we just waited. That was the worst part, the thing I couldn't take. The helplessness. Just having to wait and accept there was nothing I could do … nothing that anyone could do. My mother came across towards the end and we just sat around and watched … that was all we could do. Can you imagine what that was like …”

“No,” said the man. “I don't think I can.”

“Do you want to hear something ridiculous?” Janet stretched out both hands, palms upwards, and said: “When he was so wasted away that I could pick him up like this, like a baby, I decided it wasn't going to happen. I convinced myself that it was going to go away, as quickly as it had come, and that he was going to get better again and we were going to go on just like we were before. Have the baby we'd talked about and that he would start his own law firm, which was another plan: make a lot of money so we could move to Chevy Chase …” Janet laughed, bitterly. “Can you imagine that! On the day he died, the Friday, I couldn't cry because I was too angry: I told my mother there'd been a mistake …” She gave another humorless, head-shaking laugh, unable to believe it herself.

“But you didn't go back to England?”

Janet looked up at the man, caught by how quick he was, how direct. She nodded and said: “My family wanted me to. Wanted me to get a job at a university or an institute there; put America behind me. I almost went but then I thought about it and somehow it seemed like giving up. Does that sound funny?”

“Maybe,” Sheridan said. “Maybe not.”

“Anyway!” she said, with forced briskness. “I didn't go and here I am. And that's it, the story of Janet Stone.”

They looked at each other for several moments and then Sheridan said: “I can't think of anything to say that wouldn't sound trite.”

“Thanks for not trying,” said Janet. She was abruptly astonished at herself. She hadn't talked to anyone like this, not to Harriet and not even, she didn't think, to her mother. Was it
because
he was a stranger, someone completely uninvolved and unaffected? She felt embarrassed. But not, she realized in further surprise, anything else. No ache at the memories, no pain. The feeling of embarrassment worsened.

“Do you want another drink?” asked Sheridan.

“No, thank you,” she said at once. Was that why she'd talked so much, because of the whisky? Of course not. She said: “You go ahead, if you want one.”

“No,” he said. “I'm fine.” He looked around them and then out into the street. “Have you eaten? Georgetown seems to have cornered the market in restaurants.”