Brass Ring (20 page)

“Well, Jon and I lucked out,” she said. “Usually a man, if he can function sexually at all, still has problems with fertility. We weren’t able to have a second child, but we felt very lucky to have Susan.”

Randy gnawed his lip, not looking at her. “So, someone who is a paraplegic can still have sex?”

“Anyone can have sex,” she said. “It just might not be the kind of sex you’re thinking of. It all depends on the level of the injury— where the spinal cord was damaged—and whether the trauma was complete or not and a thousand other variables. In Jon’s case, it wasn’t complete. That doesn’t mean he’s home free, of course. It’s difficult for him to—” She stopped herself. Jon would have no problem talking about this, but she felt the sharp knife of betrayal as keenly as if she were cutting herself with it. He wouldn’t want her discussing his sexual limitations with Randy Donovan. “Well,” she smiled weakly. “This is Jon’s story to tell, not mine.”

Randy nodded. His face was very serious.

“Anyhow, what we tell the couples we counsel is that you have to let go of your long-held concept of what ‘having sex’ means. There are plenty of other ways to give and receive pleasure.”

Randy set the picture back on the shelf, shaking his head.

“What?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He bit into the apple, and it was a moment before he spoke again. “I guess I’m just amazed by you.”

“What do you mean?”

Randy studied the apple, running his thumb over the shiny red skin. “I think about you a lot,” he said, glancing at her. “About your life. About what it must have been like for you to be married to Jon all these years. Obviously you two are really good together. And you’ve done so much for other people, with the foundation and all the projects you’ve taken on.”

“And?” She didn’t know where he was going with this.

He studied her intently. “Are you really happy, Claire?”

“Of course.”

He laughed. “I wouldn’t expect you to say anything else. Glowing childhood, glowing marriage, right?”

She didn’t smile.

Randy pressed his lips together, studying the apple again as if the words he wanted to say were etched in the skin. “I admire you a great deal,” he said. “And I don’t know how to say this. It’s going to come out crass, and you don’t have to answer. But you’re so attractive. So

vibrant. And all your adult life, you’ve been with a man who…who’s in a wheelchair, and you deal with that, I guess, and that’s one thing, but then I think, you can never really hug or—”

“We hug.” She laughed.

“No. I mean, you’re saying he has problems sexually and—”

She drew in a sharp breath. “That’s not what I said. He does just fine sexually.”

“I don’t mean that in a blaming way. I know the problems are related to his injury, but how have you lived with that all your adult life? How do you keep yourself from wanting more, or from wondering what more there is, or—”

“Randy,” she said, “you’re out of line.” She spoke softly, with only enough force to put an end to the questioning but not so much that he would feel reprimanded. He was not the first person to ask her those questions. He wouldn’t be the last.

He sighed and nodded. “I guess I am.” He gave her a sheepish look. “Forgive me.”

“You’re forgiven.”

He walked into the kitchen, and she heard the thunk of his apple core as he tossed it into the trash can under the sink. Back in the family room, he sat down on one of the barstools. There was color in his cheeks, and she knew he regretted his probing.

“You know why my wife left me?” he asked.

“Because you were a workaholic?”

“Well, that was definitely part of it. That and the fact that she met someone she found more intriguing than me.”

Claire grimaced. “I’m sorry.”

“But the real reason, at least in my mind, was that I had a heart attack a few years ago.”

“You?” She leaned forward, stunned. Randy looked so fit.

“Yes.” He brushed a piece of lint, real or imagined, from the arm of his sweater. “I was thirty-two. A fluky sort of thing. I had surgery, and now I’m in pretty good shape. But to LuAnne, the writing was on the wall. She figured I would get sicker and sicker, that it was just a matter of time until the next heart attack, and the one after that. She even said as much. ‘I love you, Randy, but I can’t bear the thought of spending the best years of my life taking care of an invalid.’”

Claire shook her head. That sort of conditional love was beyond her comprehension. “What kind of mother is she?”

“Actually, she’s a good mother to Cary. I can’t fault her there. Cary’s a good-looking, perfect, healthy child, and as long as he stays that way, LuAnne will be a great mom for him.” He stretched his arms out with a sigh. “So, anyhow, you can see why I think you’re something special for sticking by Jon all these years. For your loyalty to him.”

“You make it sound like it’s a sacrifice on my part. It’s not. I love him.”

“I know, but I just can’t imagine how you deal with the…the physical limi—”

“Jon’s not a cross to bear.” She felt the stirrings of a familiar indignation. “He’s the sexiest man I know.”

Randy ran his hands through his thick hair. “I’m sorry, Claire,” he said, the red blotches on his cheeks again. “I can’t seem to shut myself up. We’ve talked about so much these past few weeks, and I guess I just kept talking without thinking I was going too far.” He stood up from the barstool and stretched. “I think I should go,” he said.

She wanted him to stop talking about Jon, but she didn’t want him to leave, as though her sense of security would walk out the door with him. Yet she could think of nothing to say to make him stay without sounding as though she needed him more than she should. So she stood as well and got his coat from the closet.

At the door, he drew her into a hug, but quickly let her go again. “Maybe Jon would have some idea of where those little flashbacks of yours are coming from,” he suggested. “Maybe it’s something you’ve forgotten that he would remember.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t tell Jon about them,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I just wouldn’t, that’s all.” She hadn’t thought to analyze that automatic decision. “It would worry him.”

Randy frowned. “He’s your husband, and this is a problem you’re having.”

She shook her head. “Jon’s had too many bad things happen in his life. I don’t see the point in laying something else on him when this is probably going to go away on its own.”

Her words sounded doltish to her ears, and she was not at all surprised by the mildly scornful look Randy gave her. But she was right. Jon had never been able to tolerate her suffering without suffering himself. He’d already shown his distress over her preoccupation with Margot. She couldn’t ask any more of him.

“I enjoyed the museum.” Randy slipped his pipe out of his coat pocket. “And I’m sorry if I upset you.”

“I’m not upset,” she said. But she was. Her chest was heavy with the sudden realization that she found it easier to talk about her problems with a near stranger than with her husband. She doubted Jon would be able to listen to her the way Randy had in the museum today. Or rather, she would never have given him the chance.

She watched Randy drive down the driveway, his car quickly disappearing in the trees, before closing the door against the cold air.

In the family room, she stood numbly for a moment before walking over to the bookshelf. She picked up the photograph of her family again. The three of them were smiling. Jon had his arm wrapped around Susan’s slender shoulders. His hair was darker then, with very little gray, and his smile was wide. The three of them looked rosy from the sun. Tired and happy. Jon was wearing shorts. His legs with their wasted muscles hung limply over the rock, and they were even slimmer, more shapeless, than Susan’s preadolescent legs.

She ran her finger lightly over the glass. No, that hadn’t been the first time she’d gotten those questions about Jon. She’d heard them from her girlfriends over the years, friends who should have known better. Girlfriends with supposedly whole husbands. They’d joke about sex in general, and occasionally about the limits they assumed Jon to have, and maybe because she laughed along with them, they never knew their words hurt. Sometimes, the conversations took a more serious turn. Intimate. Confidential. A caring friend—Amelia had often been guilty of this before Jake died— would try to elicit from her some dissatisfaction or tell her about something she was missing. Or they’d talk about their admiration for Claire. Always the admiration, as if Claire had sacrificed everything to devote her life to caring for a needy child. No matter how probing the questions, how condescending the advice, how great the insult, she would respond by defending Jon fiercely.

An idea began taking shape in her mind as she stood in the family room, staring at her husband’s picture. Setting the photograph back on the bookshelf, she turned and headed for the bedroom.

She changed into her gray angora skirt and sweater—her sex-kitten outfit, Jon called it, although she knew it was conservative enough for her to get away with. Just. She crammed a few things into her overnight bag and within twenty minutes of Randy’s departure left the house herself.

The drive to Baltimore took her just over an hour.

At the hotel, she let the valet park her car. Once inside the massive lobby, she studied the computerized sign to learn which meetings were in session, and she guessed that Jon would most likely be attending the wine-and-cheese reception in the Rosewood Ballroom. She stopped briefly in the restroom to freshen her makeup and comb her hair. Then she found the ballroom.

She studied the room from the doorway. It was large and high-ceilinged, loosely filled with men—and a few women—in austere business apparel. They milled between tables bearing hors d’oeuvres and punch bowls and bottles. Far across the room, she saw Jon, one of the few people in the crowd using a wheelchair. He was talking to a half-circle of men, and she started walking toward him.

Heads turned and conversations ceased as she walked through the ballroom, through the throng of businessmen, who seemed to be devouring her with their eyes. There was a sudden electric charge in the room, and she knew she was the cause of it. She fought her self- consciousness with a smile.

The eyes in the room followed her to the half-circle of men, where she tapped deliberately on Jon’s shoulder. Let them eat their lecherous little hearts out, she thought. Let them envy the hell out of that guy in the wheelchair.

Jon looked up at her almost blankly for a moment before breaking into a grin. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I missed you,” she said, bending low to kiss him, and she felt the snugness of her skirt on her hips, felt the eyes in the room. She stood up again, holding out her hand. “Room key?”

Still grinning, Jon pulled the plastic card from his pocket and dropped it into her palm. “I’ll be up very soon,” he said, and she knew that among the eyes watching her as she left the ballroom were those of her surprised and ego-boosted husband.

“WHAT’S THIS ALL ABOUT
, Harte?” he asked as he wheeled into the room half an hour later. She had taken a bath and now sat in the king-sized bed, wearing one of his shirts, half-buttoned.

“You’re the most incredible man in the world, and I was afraid you might forget it if I wasn’t here to tell you.”

He transferred to the bed with a quick flick of his hands on the wheels of the chair and pulled himself close to her. “Well, you can bet every man in that room is having his own personal fantasy about what’s going on up here right now,” he said.

She kissed him and felt a tenderness mixed with a sudden, unexpected urge to cry. She shifted on the bed so that she could straddle him, grinding her hips against his. “Well, they can imagine all they want, but they’ll never be able to get an accurate fix on how obscenely good this is going to be, Mathias.”

He reached up and drew her head down to his, kissing her fervently, but she caught his hands and held them down on his pillow as she began an unhurried, thorough, methodical tour of his eyes and ears and cheeks and mouth with her lips.

She knew his body nearly as well as he did. She knew where he could feel her touch, where to caress him with her fingers, where he would prefer her lips, her tongue. But after a few minutes she found herself kissing him, touching him, in places he would never feel a thing, as if she were unable to get enough of him tonight. And she didn’t dare stop, didn’t dare slow down, because her tears were so close to the surface, so close, and she was afraid that if she stopped touching him for an instant, they just might spring free.

JEREMY, PENNSYLVANIA

1960

THE FARMHOUSE SLEPT IN
the stormy darkness of the Pennsylvania countryside, and the rain beat a steady rhythm on the roof above the big upstairs bedroom. Tucker was hiding under Claire’s bed, and Vanessa lay next to her sister, calm now. When the thunder had started, Claire had let Vanessa get into bed with her. She and Vanessa were not afraid of much. They would pick up spiders with their bare hands and climb so high in the oak tree they wouldn’t be able to see the ground. But Vanessa claimed to fear lightning. Many six-year-olds were afraid of lightning. She didn’t want to be different.

Vanessa liked to sleep with Claire. It was a little ritual they went through when a thunderstorm hit at night. Vanessa would whimper under her comforter until Claire invited her into her own bed, which she always did, even though Vanessa would get so hot during the night that Claire would have to roll the blanket down to the foot of the bed. That little golden body burned like a furnace, and when she rolled over, her skin stuck to Claire’s like iron to a magnet.

The thunder seemed to have stopped, and Claire had almost drifted off to sleep when a sudden clap cracked outside the window. Vanessa jerked awake. She made a whimpering sound and pulled the sheet over her blond head as the lightning filled the room, illuminating the furniture and stuffed animals and the pictures on the wall. Then all was quiet again. Even the pattering of the rain had stopped, and it was so still that the sound of voices coming from downstairs was impossible to miss. It was Friday night, and Len had arrived at the farm around dinnertime. The room he shared with Mellie was directly below Claire and Vanessa’s room. Usually, the girls couldn’t hear their parents talking. Tonight, though, their voices were loud.