Random Hearts

by Warren Adler

  When she came down in the morning, she looked bright and fresh. Her hair was clean and fluffy, and she moved in an aura of a sweet lovely scent. It felt good seeing her.

  "You smell good," he told her, feeling an odd thrill in the center of him.

  "Just Arpege."

  Peripherally, he felt her eyes probing him.

  "You know it?"

  "Not at all." It seemed curious for her to ask.

  "I was afraid it might be hers," she said, averting her gaze. It gave him an excuse to move closer, sniffing. It felt very good to be close to her.

  "Did you sleep well?"

  "The best since..." He hesitated and then felt no need to finish the sentence.

  "I'm glad."

  To show her his sense of purpose, he opened the maps, leaned toward her, and pointed to the area where they would look first. The idea had expanded in his mind, and he felt the need to repeat the plan he had outlined last night. They would take it piece by piece, he explained. First, they would check all the apartment houses within the area that used Yale locks. That would narrow down the search.

  "And then?"

  "Where we can, we'll try them apartment by apartment. At some we'll have to enlist the help of a resident manager or a janitor. Someone usually has a passkey where the teeth match up. We'll have to play it as it goes."

  If she had any doubts about the process, she said nothing.

  "You still agree there is nothing more important than this?" he asked tentatively. He had walked a very thin line of logic, outlining what seemed a monumental, almost impossible, task. He wondered if she thought the idea half-baked.

  "Of course."

  "It's a psychological necessity."

  "Absolutely."

  Was mere consent enough of a commitment? Mostly he feared that something would intervene to abort the idea, force them from the task. Did the goals need restating? Would she lose interest or confidence in the idea? He must, above all, not show her any doubt on his part.

  She drove his car. At each apartment within the area, he got out and checked the type of locks used. Where he was stopped at a reception desk, he would pose as a salesman from a key company. Since the information seemed innocuous, he managed to ferret it out quickly. Sometimes, when confronting an unmanned security system, he checked the lock with a copy of the key. Few were of the Yale variety, and those that he found did not fit, for which he was secretly thankful. It was still too soon. When he found an apartment house that used Yale locks, he went back to the car, and Vivien noted the address in a notebook they had purchased.

  During the first day he came to some inescapable conclusions. In keeping with Orson's and Lily's sense of cunning and secrecy, they would not have chosen an apartment with a reception desk. Or even a lobby with a doorman. What they required was a place with easy access and no prying eyes. They would also need available parking, preferably a parking lot. They were, after all, on a tight schedule. He explained his reasoning. She nodded thoughtfully.

  "Am I thinking like Orson?"

  "Yes. He would consider details like that."

  "He was methodical?"

  "Yes. Totally organized."

  "If he didn't think like this, this entire operation wouldn't wash." It was more a question than a statement, offered by way of reassurance.

  "Yes, I would say so."

  It had not occurred to him until they were heading home after the first day's excursion that his reasoning had narrowed the search.

  Over dinner, at a small Italian restaurant in McLean, he reviewed the addresses of apartments that had Yale locks. He was surprised how many used them.

  They ordered white pizza, pasta with clam sauce, and white wine. Edward noted that Vivien ate more heartily than Lily, who picked at her food. He observed, too, that her fingers were less languid in the way they moved, stronger. Physically, Lily was more wiry, more fragile looking, although on balance the comparison did not make Vivien seem less delicate.

  The texture of her hair was different as well: Lily's had a silky quality, Vivien's had a natural curl, an elasticity that made it bounce when she walked. Eating silently, head slightly lowered, he had the impression that she was welcoming the inspection. He wondered if she was enjoying it, as he was.

  Vivien's eyes were smaller, despite the difference in their size—Vivien was at least a head taller. Lily had large eyes, wide, dark pools set in well-defined bones, and an aquiline Mediterranean nose; Vivien's was smaller, fleshier. A tremor of rage bubbled up from his gut. Orson's women! When he lifted his wineglass, his hand trembled. A picture of Orson rose in his mind, a large floating face with ill-defined futures. He wondered suddenly how his voice had sounded.

  "What did he say?" he asked, his query oblique, as if he were ashamed to ask.

  "Say?"

  "I mean, what did you talk about?" Anger ebbed, although his curiosity hardened.

  "When?"

  Her eyebrows arched with confusion.

  "Like now. If he were here instead of me, what would you be talking about?"

  She shook her head, and her hair bounced.

  "Ben, I suppose. Yes. I would tell him about Ben. I always told him about Ben."

  "I mean talk. Between you. That's more like a report."

  "Household, matters, perhaps. He would tell me things about the office."

  "Things?"

  "Incidents." Her fingers tapped the table. "Actually, he never talked about the office much." She was looking down at her plate. "The food. We might have talked about the food. No—the wine. He was very interested in wine."

  "Nothing more meaningful?"

  "Like what?"

  "Aspirations? Ambitions? What you both felt inside? Plans? People? Did you talk about people?"

  "I did," she said brightly, as if she had found a hook on which to hang an adequate answer. Then she shook her head. "I'm sorry, Edward. We certainly talked, but I can't seem to remember what about."

  "Politics, books, art, movies, television?"

  "He seldom watched TV, and we rarely went to the movies."

  "All right, then, the newspapers. Topics that you might have come across."

  "I read the morning paper," she said pointedly. "Of course, he was already gone."

  "Health. Did he talk about health? He was a jogger."

  "On occasion," she said. "When he first started to jog, he talked about the cardiovascular system. He also took vitamins and talked about that sometimes. Not often. Sometimes when we were with other people, he talked about that."

  "Money, then? Did you talk about money?"

  "No. Not often. He simply deposited money into my account, and I took out what I needed. Like a household allowance. I saved nearly ten thousand dollars."

  "I'm running out of categories," Edward said, slightly exasperated. "You're teasing me?"

  "No, I'm not. Not all communication is based on talk, you know." It was a feeble defense, and he was sure she knew it.

  "I'm getting a picture of a rather quiet man."

  "He was quiet."

  "You didn't play games? Cards? Bridge? Scrabble?"

  "No. He hated games." She shrugged. "Sorry."

  "Then what in hell made him so damned interesting?" He had raised his voice. A couple at the next table looked at them.

  "To Lily or to me?"

  "To both of you."

  She sighed, sipped her wine, then motioned with her index finger, a kind of no-no gesture.

  "We were a married couple. We shared a present, a child. It was never a question of interesting. He was part of a shared life. He worked very hard and liked what he was doing." She looked into her wineglass, inspecting. "Mostly he read law briefs. I read novels, best-sellers. He was a rising young Washington lawyer."

  "All right. So he was successful."

  Was it a stab of jealousy? She looked up at him, waiting patiently for the next question. She had, he admitted, submitted gamely, like a patient undergoing medical tests. The level of anxiety seemed t
o be higher on his side.

  "I'm trying to be scrupulously accurate," she said.

  "It sounds boring."

  "But it wasn't." It was, he was sure, a protest to his conclusion, not a defense of Orson.

  "Where was the excitement?" He kept his voice controlled.

  "Excitement?"

  It had become an abstract interrogation, and for some reason he felt she was decoying him off the scent, deliberately protecting some inner part of herself.

  "Maybe I've used the wrong word," he corrected, his frustration rising. Again, she seemed to read his mind.

  "How about contentment?" she asked.

  "Sounds like something you do when you get old."

  "Put it another way, then, Edward. I was satisfied. I had my house and family. I know, measured against Lily it must sound deadly dull. It's all right.... "She looked up at him, her eyes wide with apology. "I've had to defend what I had become before. I'm used to it. I know, I'm running counter to the times. Nor am I rationalizing because I did not choose to go out and fight the world. I'm all for the equality of women, but the hard fact is that I liked being a housewife. I liked my persona as "wife of." I liked the idea of having a man. My man. I never felt boring or submissive. Not then." She lifted her wineglass. "I thought he liked his life, too. Shows you." She took a deep gulp of the wine. "Maybe I imagined him." She laughed suddenly, eyes narrowing.

  He paid the check, and they went back to her house. She was silent as they drove. When they came into the house, she straightened his couch bed, mumbled some perfunctory remarks about "being bushed," and went upstairs.

  He knew he had offended her, and it upset him.

  29

  Sometime in the middle of the night her anger erupted. She had not slept. Resentment gnawed at her. How dare he try to assign blame? His implication had been quite clear. She was a boring little housewife, and Orson was primed, conditioned by a dull life, to climb into the arms of the first strange woman he encountered. Well, it was his wife. What the hell was her life like? Maybe she, too, was bored. Bored by him.

  Putting a robe over her dressing gown and running a brush through her hair, she marched down the stairs. The lamp next to the couch flashed on as she reached the landing. Edward was squinting up at her, rubbing his eyes. He sat up. His torso was bare.

  "What is it?"

  "I couldn't sleep," she said, pacing, then alighting on the chair opposite the couch.

  "Now me," she said. "There are things I need to know."

  "Now?" Watching him, an odd note of comparison charged out at her. Orson always slept with pressed pajamas, which she had laid out neatly under his pillow.

  "What did Lily talk about ... with you?" It had come out more like an accusation, which she did not regret. "I'm expecting the same candor," she warned.

  "Of course.... "He paused thoughtfully. "I've been thinking a lot about our life together, Lily's and mine. She was very much involved with her work—fashion. She knew all the designers, and she was always asking my opinion. ‘What do you think of this Adolpho, that De La Renta, this Rykiel?' In retrospect, I evolved a whole series of automatic answers: A bit daring. Too overemphasized. No grace. Colors too primary. Comments like that. I wanted to look interested, but I really wasn't, you understand. I was proud of her, of course. But I didn't have a visceral interest in her work."

  "And you? What did you talk about?" she persisted.

  "My job. The Congressman. Snippets of office gossip. Again, in retrospect, her interest was probably as lukewarm about my work as mine was about fashion. Actually, she didn't really like politics. To her credit, she said so. I never told her how I felt about fashion."

  "So what did you share?" She felt pugnacious, aggressive.

  "We were absorbed in our individual work."

  He seemed discomfited, and it gave her some satisfaction.

  "We did go to the movies when we could," he said. "Ate in different restaurants. Twice we went to Europe—once we toured England, and we spent two weeks on the Riviera. That was fun. We did make plans for other vacations, and we read the travel folders."

  "Orson and I would sometimes go to France on one of his business trips. I liked that."

  "But it was outside ourselves, a diversion."

  "Did you argue?"

  "Not much." He shrugged. "Sometimes it would aggravate her that I wasn't more positive in my views—like when she decorated the apartment. I think she would have liked me to be more decisive."

  "Why weren't you?"

  "What mattered was that she was happy with what she got. I was satisfied with most of her decisions. What I mean is that much of what she did, well, it didn't matter as much to me. I was content..." He stopped short and looked at her, confused.

  "There," she said smugly.

  "Secure, then."

  "What about happy? What ever happened to happy?"

  "I suppose I was happy."

  "So was I. You weren't bored?"

  He stroked his chin, and the blanket slipped below his waist. She noted from the bit of haired flesh revealed that he was completely nude.

  "No, I wasn't."

  "You like being married?"

  "Yeah. I suppose I did. It was a lot better than being alone. Before I was married, I was alone a great deal."

  "What about friends?"

  "Oh, I had friends. But after we got married, we sort of narrowed the circle. Socially, things revolved around what each of us was doing. I guess the bottom line was that we had each other."

  She watched his Adam's apple bob as he swallowed with difficulty.

  "At least, I thought so. Yes," he said bitterly, "I thought so."

  "You had someone in the whole wide world that you could trust."

  He nodded.

  "Someone you could commit your life to."

  "Like the vows said: In sickness and in health. Till death do us part." His lip curled into a smile. As it formed, it became a snarl. "There's an irony for you."

  "You never once thought that you had made a mistake? That it wasn't the least bit what you had expected?"

  "No, I really didn't."

  "That you had made the wrong choice?"

  "No, I didn't. I liked coming home to Lily. I liked being with her. I liked looking at her." His voice lowered. He seemed to be forcing his eyes to stare at her. "Touching her. Sleeping side by side with her."

  "It didn't sound like it ... earlier"—she thought in graphic terms, but she couldn't bring herself to say it—"when you discussed making love."

  If he sensed her sudden inhibition, he gave no indication. She felt an odd tingle deep inside her, a growing need.

  "You adjust." He shrugged. "If you make too big a deal of it, you create problems. I lived with it. Not everything melts at the same heat." He looked toward her, started to say more, then pouted.

  "Am I embarrassing you?"

  "A little."

  "You never looked at another woman?"

  "Looked? Yes, I looked. That's human, isn't it? But I never went beyond that. It was an article of faith..."

  Inexplicably, she felt relentless.

  "Do you think she was frustrated? As a woman? A mass of unfulfilled inner needs?"

  "Maybe." He said it slowly, watching her. "All of us are frustrated, one way or another. Nobody gets everything he wants. Or needs." Inside, his older view of his marriage was in flux. Like hers. A battleground.

  Why did we marry who we did? she wondered. Had she overstepped, cast blame? By then her anger had dwindled, and she felt she owed him something.

  "Do you think Orson was?" she asked.

  His eyes widened. "How could I know that?"

  "You're a man. What is it that men want?"

  "I can't speak for all men," he muttered. "Only for myself."

  "Well, then..."

  He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "In retrospect, I can see all the missed possibilities." She felt his eyes bore through her. "You don't know what you've missed until you miss it. Right
?"

  She shrugged, then nodded.

  "What about you?" he asked. "Sounds like you were as content, fulfilled, and satisfied as a pig in swill."

  "Now that's an ugly way to put it."

  "Sorry."

  Had she been, as he put it, a pig in swill? She wasn't quite as sure as she had been. Perhaps in a clinical way, if one used as evidence what was written in popular magazines, designed to make women feel inadequate, she could classify herself as discontent. As they say, the earth didn't move. But then she never truly believed it was supposed to.

  "Can't we stop apologizing?"

  "All right. But something was obviously missing somewhere," Edward said. The remark rekindled her anger.

  "Maybe if they were alive, we could all sit down and discuss it—the four of us. Then we'd know why."

  "I've upset you."

  "Maybe something was missing in them. Ever look at it that way?"

  She stood up. Would it always be like this, the chronic uncertainty, the gnawing presumption of inadequacy? Even when they came to the end of the maze, found all the paths? That was the ultimate fear: never really knowing the truth of it. She felt the urge to strike out at Edward, confront him with his abysmal lack of perception, his appalling ignorance. He was a man, dammit. He should have known. Couldn't a man tell when his wife was cheating?

  "How could you not know?"

  "And you," he snapped.

  "I'm going up now," she said, sweeping her dressing gown around her.

  Lying in bed, frightened and inert, she listened to the sounds of her pumping heart. There had been some promise in the idea, a ray of hope. Now a dark curtain had come down, shutting out the light.

  "It's a question of finding out. Isn't that what we're doing?"

  His voice was in the room. Rising on her elbows, she saw his outline looming over her. He had wrapped the blanket around his waist.

  "Finding out what?"

  She did not reach for the light.

  "We agreed to be truthful," he stammered.

  "I was."

  "Too much so. It hurt me, too."

  She softened somewhat and stole a look at him; the bare chest, the bulking silhouette. In the darkness, his features were vague, but there was no mistaking the hurt.