As soon as she was gone, John stared at Richie. “Did you check into a motel after I left the car this afternoon?”
Richie removed the glasses and rubbed his closed eyelids. “I really don’t know how people can wear these things all day, though maybe it’s different if you’ve got your own prescription. Ever wear glasses, John?”
“You took those from the man you killed at the motel, didn’t you? You took his clothes and car and glasses.”
Richie opened his eyes, which were now slightly pink from the rubbing. “Have you got one complaint about what I’ve been doing since I arrived at your house? I’ve been knocking myself out to do the right thing, but you won’t give me any credit at all.” He shook his head and changed his tone from the purely plaintive. “You just remember that if… You just realize, nobody could have tried harder.”
“Is that a threat of some kind, you dirty bastard?”
“You ought to know me better than that,” Richie said loftily. “I’m just concerned about you and yours if the cops throw the lead around. I don’t want you to blame me, because frankly I think you have a tendency to do that. You understand, I like and admire you a whole lot, but I can’t ignore your tendency to evade personal responsibility for your problems. You don’t use anything like your real potential. That’s the fault of the economy! It’s Joanie’s fault you got married so young and have kids to support, so you can’t afford a better way of life.” Richie showed his wry expression. “Sorry, John, but I finally had to give you a dose of your own medicine, show you what it feels like to be criticized by your best friend.”
“Which I am not,” said John. “You’re my worst enemy. I would like to know you were removed from the earth.” In saying this he realized he had lost control, but he got satisfaction in so doing. He was an amateur at murderous emotion. Just expressing it seemed to put him at an advantage, even though he was rationally aware that it would probably be considered a weakness by professionals in the field, among whom Richie was surely preeminent.
Richie was not offended. “That’s just an idea of yours, John. It might sound good at the moment, but it doesn’t really mean anything, because obviously you can’t press a button and make me disappear, and what you certainly don’t mean is murdering me in cold blood, even if you had a motive, and how would you get one? I’ve always been nice to you and yours, and that’s all you care about in all the world.”
Could he be right? But now Joanie was back.
“How are the kids?” Richie asked.
“Out cold.”
It had not occurred to John that that was what she had been doing during her absence. Now he found her choice of words disquieting. “They’re okay?”
She sighed. “Why wouldn’t they be? They drove me nuts all day. But they had a great time. Then Randy came and spoiled them rottener. Did I tell you he wanted to give Melanie a hundred-dollar bill?” Joan chided Richie. “I mean, really.”
“Such great kids,” Richie said, simpering at her.
“Hey,” Joan jokingly proposed, “you wouldn’t be interested in including them in the home deal? Take ‘em for free! Have an instant houseful.” She moued. “That’s the way I feel after a day like this one.”
John said anxiously, “It’s the same every day. You’ve got one coming. I’ll make it up to you. I’ll stay home tomorrow.”
“That reminds me,” Joan said. “Tess called a couple of hours ago and said something about vouching for you with the police? What was that all about?”
“I don’t know. Parking ticket, maybe.”
She smiled at Richie. “Excuse the personal stuff. Do you drink regular coffee?”
John seized the salad bowl and went to the kitchen, where anxiety kept him moving purposelessly about until Joan appeared with more dishes, stacked neatly atop the steak platter.
“I’ll just get the dessert,” Joan said.
“Dessert?”
“Of course. What’s wrong with you? Why are you so nervous? You didn’t even eat much.”
“I didn’t eat anything.”
“Aren’t you feeling well?” But she had turned to the refrigerator before giving him a chance to answer.
He lowered his voice and spoke to the back of her head. “It’s him. He’s—”
She turned around and said, indulgently, “A little drunk, I know. I guess that’s permissible, among friends.”
She was about to revolve again, but John restrained her with a hand to her wrist. “He’s not what he seems.”
“Is that some song?”
“I’m serious, Joan. I wish you wouldn’t encourage him to stay. I’ll explain later.”
The request irritated her. “Look, I’m the one who has been stuck at home all day. I can use the company, believe me!”
“He’s not drunk,” said John. “He’s crazy.”
“I’ve been talking to the man for hours now,” Joan said. “There’s nothing wrong with him. He wants to help us. Is that crazy? Are you drunk?” She peered closely at him for an instant. “Don’t tell me you’re jealous. Is that it? You think something was going on while we were here alone?” She was enjoying this.
“No,” John said humorlessly. “Of course not. Please, Joanie, I’m not kidding. He’s dangerous.” He had not wanted to go that far, but she was laughing at him.
“This is another of these jokes you’ve started to pull today, right? That’s what a sale does?” She spun around gleefully and opened the freezer compartment. “Enough ice cream left. What I forgot to do, though, was take it out earlier so it could soften some. Will you get those glass dishes for me?” She was acting as if he had not said a word.
Incredulous, he asked, “Do you think I’d just say something like that and let it go?”
Joan gestured with the gallon container of strawberry ice cream, which neither of them much liked, but Melanie would eat no other flavor. “Don’t ask me to explain your recent behavior. It’s all new to me. But if it continues to sell houses, I’m not criticizing.”
John was about to speak when Richie appeared with all the rest of the dinner dishes, including that bearing the untouched peas-and-carrots. He deposited them on the nearest clear portion of the counter. “Can I take something out?”
“Now, Randy,” Joan amiably reproached him. “You go and sit down and let yourself be served.”
Richie looked around, beaming. “I love a kitchen. It’s the heart of any home.”
John found the glass dishes in a seldom-opened section of the cabinets and delivered them to Joan. Then, using his wider body, he in effect forced Richie to leave the kitchen without actually touching him or speaking. Back in the dining room, he told him quietly, “I want you out of here right after dessert.”
He was surprised by Richie’s quick and submissive agreement: “All right.”
John decided not to press the advantage and ask whether the man really meant it. That would be a symptom of weakness, and he was suddenly strong. He had defended his home, employing only moral weapons. He had been sorely tried all day but had met the test. He sat down and briefly closed his eyes.
Richie said, “You haven’t even seen the children since you got home. You keep asking about them, but you don’t go in and even look at them.”
The triumph was short-lived. It was preposterous that a man like this could put John on the defensive. “God damn you,” he said. “I have to get rid of you first, don’t I?”
Richie lowered his eyes. “You hate me more than you love them? That’s unworthy of you, John. It really is.” In the next moment, however, he was bright again, for Joan had carried in three little glass bowls of ice cream and a plateful of Melanie’s favorite oatmeal-raisin cookies.
“Coffee in another couple of minutes,” said she, and having served the men, she sat down at her end of the table.
Richie had been emitting murmurs of pleasure since his first sight of the ice cream, and when he identified it as strawberry, he said, “My favorite! How’d you know?”
r /> “I told you, this is all potluck.” She smiled. “But it wouldn’t have been much different with longer notice. John can tell you I’m not much of a cook. He’s better! He cooks three or four times a week.”
Richie’s scowl came and went. “You do all right. Maybe you should be the one selling real estate.”
“And let John stay home with the little demons. I could handle that!” She included John in her throaty laugh.
“Tell him whose idea it is that you stay home,” John said, defensive again and despising himself for it.
“Pretty much yours, isn’t it?” She laughed again.
“The main reason I sell real estate is that I can be near home,” John said. “The alternative around here would be to commute to the city, a ten-hour day.”
“If you make good money, you can afford good child care,” Richie said solemnly, incising designs with the edges of his spoon in the smoothed but as yet untasted ice cream. He made his voice markedly sympathetic in addressing Joan. “I say ‘good’ because so many places can’t be trusted nowadays.”
Joan agreed, with energetic chin movements. “But it’s not a thing of just money! We had one in town here where the kids got food poisoning from the sour milk used for cocoa, and that place was the most expensive in this part of the state.”
“Too many of them are run by perverts,” Richie said, gesturing with his implement. “But then, what isn’t? That’s certainly true in the city. I was hoping it might be different out here.”
“Not on your life,” Joan said cynically. But then she caught herself and asked John in a jokey way, “Oops! Have you got Randy’s check yet? He might want to change his mind.”
“He and I have concluded our deal,” John said levelly. “It’s too late to change it now.”
Richie chuckled at him but spoke to Joan. “He’s quite the negotiator. He can talk the birds out of the trees.”
“I told you he was a good salesman.”
They were both beaming at John, teaming up on him again. He missed Sharon terribly. She had been Richie’s enemy from the start. He needed a partner with that sort of mettle. He simply could not do single-handedly what must be done.
He heard a distant cry. He reacted more quickly than Joan, whom he heard saying, as he ran from the room, “Melanie’s still the noisiest at night. Not the baby!”
This was true. Melanie had frequent nighttime alarms, whereas little Phil was unusually placid for an infant once the lights were out. Melanie was scared of the dark but could not sleep at all in the presence of the feeblest nightlight. Her father, himself an uncertain sleeper his life long, was the more sympathetic parent: Joanie had once slept through an early-morning seismic tremor that caused a bathroom tumbler to fall and break.
Whatever the state of the nursery door—wide-open, closed, or just ajar—Melanie soon enough demanded a change. At the moment it was two inches from full closure. John had to open it all the way, so that enough light came in from the hall fixture to see by. His daughter was sitting up in bed. He hugged her narrow body, with its fine groove of spine, her hair in his neck. This was as intimate as he had been with anybody all day, except for the repellent wrestling match with Richie.
After a moment he realized that though her eyes had been wide open, the child had probably been asleep from the first and was not aware of who he was. He lowered her head to the pillow and pulled up the blanket.
Phil’s crib was in the darkest corner, where the angled door cut off most of the reflected light from the hall. John could hardly see him and so probed very gently. A baby was there, all right: he found a tiny hand and heard a faint sigh. If he turned on the light, someone might awaken. Besides, Joanie had just returned from making her own bed check. The children were perfectly okay. All he had to do was get rid of Richie, and everything everywhere in his world would come back to normal. Once Melanie was safely grown up, he could kid her about voluntarily climbing into a murderer’s lap as a three-year-old.
But suddenly he felt superfluous at the bedsides of his own children. He had an urge to flee from them, from Joanie, from every responsibility. As he went into the living room, this perverted idea obsessed him so much that, to prove he was impervious to it, he quietly opened the door and slipped outside. The silver body of the car was conspicuous in the light of the streetlamp. John could see nothing else.
The car was unlocked, of course. Richie had no need for personal security: were someone else to drive the vehicle away, he would lose only that which had never belonged to him, and could simply steal another. If someone offended him, he killed the offender. His freedom of action was unconditional.
John climbed into the driver’s seat but did not yet close the door. He sat there looking at the building that his wife and kids currently shared with a homicidal maniac, but in fact they had done so, with impunity, for at least an hour before the master of the house came home. Richie was harmless when on those premises. To keep him there was to protect the rest of the world.
Richie had left the key in the ignition. John turned it far enough to empower the preliminary electrical system—numbers became visible on a digital dashboard clock—but not so far as to start the engine. He touched the knob of the gear selector. But it was a manual five-speed system. He was licensed only for automatic. He did not properly know how to operate a real gearshift, could certainly not still remember his father’s instruction when he was fourteen: you were supposed to do something with the left foot and the clutch. He could probably not have driven away had he wanted to. But then his only obligation was to look after his own family, and they were not in trouble. By means of a simulated thrust of pride, he rejected any feeling of relief as being unworthy of him. To be no hero was not shameful, but taking satisfaction in that state of affairs would be.
Should he subsequently change his mind, he put the ignition key in his pocket before stepping out of the car and noiselessly pressing the door shut.
When he reached the dining room, Joanie said, “Everything okay? We thought you left town.” This was jocular.
But Richie asked, as if seriously, “How’s the weather out there?”
So despite John’s care with all doors, coming and going, he knew. “Just took a breath of fresh air. It’s a nice night. You driving back to the city?”
“Oh,” Joan cried in dismay, “if we just had a guest room. This little house—”
John saw this as a personal attack. “Weren’t you the one who wanted this place originally?”
“I’m also the one who has wanted to move for at least a year!”
Richie grew agitated. “Please,” he said, raising his hands. “It’s an honest difference of opinion.”
“Well, not quite honest,” Joan said. “The idea, which I thought we agreed on, was that we were not supposed to stay here for the rest of our lives.”
“God,” said John, “it’s only three years, more or less. You were pregnant with Melanie.” Without thinking, he looked at Richie as if for confirmation, as one does when arguing in the presence of a third person, then remembered and suppressed his next point. Richie was scowling into the bowl of melted ice cream before him.
“The idea was,” Joan went on, “we couldn’t lose. Values were going up and up. You were the authority on real estate.” Now it was Joan who sought Richie’s moral support, smirking at him. “He talked himself into it.”
“The slump is only now,” John said. “Only temporary. Everybody knows that. Property can only go up: that’s a fact of human existence.”
Richie violently shook his head. “This isn’t right!”
“You bet!” said Joan. Was she drunk on so little wine? John noticed that her glass was now empty.
“Anyway,” John said, “would this be the time to move? With a baby?”
“That’s an excuse, anyway,” said Joan.
John happened to notice that Richie was trembling, but it seemed more important to address his own needs. Nothing could be more unfair than Joanie’s general
implication, which she had never previously been so bold as to make, even in front of Renee, though perhaps she did it in private with that mean bitch, who had always despised him. But this was far worse, even if she had no way of knowing what Richie was. “You’re wrong,” he said, and then he descended to pathos. “I’ve done the best I could.”
Richie slammed a fist against the table, just missing the glass bowl before him but causing it to jump and loose silverware to clatter everywhere. “How can this be?” He avoided looking at either of them.
“Good question,” Joan said wryly.
John now belatedly realized that she had been mostly kidding, making her point but not being angry about it, which in fact was often her style with him. He would not have been so touchy had he had another kind of day. “All right,” he said, “so I’ll try harder.”
She stood up, smoothing her dress at the hips, and said with vivacious irony, “I’m glad we got that settled! I’ll go get the coffee.” She went to the kitchen.
Richie’s teeth were clenched. “This is not going to work, John. I’ve only been holding back because of my friendship with you, but it’s not doing you any good. She’s your enemy.”
For an instant, preoccupied, John failed to understand the reference.
Richie elucidated. “This wife of yours.”
John leaped up and threw a fist at Richie’s face. At the last moment, with his animal reflexes, Richie evaded the blow. John had swung with such force that, missing his target, he was thrown off balance and would have fallen—had Richie not stabilized him with a quick hand.
“It’s only the truth,” Richie said calmly. “A guy like you could go anywhere and do anything. I know you better than you know yourself. You might think you want to be limited, but underneath it all, you can’t accept it.”
John stood there gasping for breath. He had said as much to himself from time to time but considered it an exercise of the imagination and thus permissible, like modest sexual fantasies—for example, thinking of Renee when making love with Joanie. But his attraction to Sharon was more a moral idea than a sexual urge and had to do with her standing up to Richie and, in a personal sense, defeating him, for she had escaped from his control.… But then she only had herself to save.