Trust

by George V. Higgins

  Nora shifted away from him to lean against the door. The Mercedes hummed on through Connecticut. “So why me, then?” she said. “Why are we doing this, then?”

  “Why,” he said, “precisely because of those little disappointments. It only occurred to me recently, well, right after I found out that a man with a secure reputation for dullness can get away with quite a lot, if he’s careful, and discreet, but when it did occur to me, I was rather shocked. There’ve been quite a number of those little disappointments, when you sit down and add them up. A rather large number indeed. I don’t mean that she’s ceased to keep her end of the bargain. Not at all. But unfortunately she’s discovered, or thinks she has, at least, that she can keep me in a state that she perceives as contentment, with her left hand, as it were. Leaving her right hand free for more, shall we say, interesting matters.”

  “You think she’s having affairs,” Nora said. “I know she used to do that. Had quite a few of them.”

  “Did Barry tell you that?” he said. “That son of a bitch. What is it about being a Democrat that nullifies every gentlemanly instinct in a man?” She laughed. “I mean it,” he said. “I say what happened before two people met is just that: it’s the past. If they want to reveal it to each other, then that should be their business. It should not be the commerce of their earlier lovers to trade in their mistakes.”

  She put her left hand on his right forearm. “Neil,” she said, “calm down. Barry didn’t have any choice. I insisted, when we got serious, we had to be frank with each other. I’ve had friends who concealed things from their husbands, and whose husbands concealed things from them. And it’s like a smoking time bomb in the marriage. The most innocent gathering, it can be, and all of a sudden one of them, it can be husband, can be wife, it dawns on them quite suddenly that this charming person that they’ve just met used to be the other one’s lover. These great jealous rages. Drinks thrown in faces. Fistfights. Hair pulled and scratching. It’s awful. I’ve seen those explosions—I know. So I said to Barry, when we got together: ‘We’ve got to start with the truth, and we mustn’t leave anything out.’ So I told him my ‘mistakes,’ as you call them, and he told me all of his. No surprises in store, later on.” She paused. “Unless he finds out about us now, of course.” She returned to the center of the passenger seat and settled herself again. “So,” she said, “I’m only asking, but your reasoning’s kind of confusing. Do you think that Caroline’s fooling around? Up there all alone in Vermont?”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’d stake my life that she is not. Although she could, with impunity, at least as far as biological consequences are concerned.”

  “Because she can’t get pregnant?” Nora said. “I often wondered that, before Barry clued me in. How a woman that attractive, why she never did have children. I’m sure they’d be lovely babies.”

  “And then, of course, blabbermouth told you,” he said.

  “He said she had two abortions, he knew of,” she said. “One of them his fault.”

  Cooke slammed the rim of the wheel with the heel of his right hand. “Bastard,” he said. “He ought to be horsewhipped for that.”

  “Neil, Neil,” she said, “a lot of women had to go, to Puerto Rico, you know. It’s not that unusual. Those were the pre-Pill days and, of course, abortion was illegal. But sex is always part of the merry-go-round. Part of the big carousel. Power affects people that way, you know, power and money, then power. You shouldn’t resent her for that.”

  “Resent her?” he said. “I don’t ‘resent her’ for that. My beef is with Barry, goddamn the man. For telling his tales out of school. Well, it’s too late now, I suppose. No, she can’t have children. We tried. But apparently one of those pregnancies had partially blocked her tubes. So an ectopic pregnancy resulted, and surgery was required. And the surgeon said there was such scarring, the only sensible procedure would be to litigate those damaged tubes. Another episode like that and she might bleed to death. So that was the end of my hopes for an heir.”

  “And hers as well, I should think,” Nora said.

  “Oh, I doubt she really had any,” Cooke said. “By the time we got married, at least. I think that she might’ve liked to, but you women are different from men. You know, or you seem to, what’s going on, going on inside of your bodies. I think she knew, when she married me, that she could never have children. And figured as well, knowing me as she did, I’d stick with her nonetheless.” He laughed. “She was, of course, right. Caroline’s always right. I’m a very predictable man.”

  “And a very bitter one, as well,” Nora said. “I never saw this in you before.”

  “Bitter?” he said. “I’m not bitter. I just harbor few illusions. As the years’ve gone by—and it does take me awhile—it’s gradually dawned on me why I got that invitation. My friend, Porter Cass, whom I hardly knew, called my hotel when I was in town. In Washington, I mean, of course—my father’d sent me down there with some menial task to handle with the Treasury Department, and my ‘friend,’ Porter, had been one of Douglas Dillon’s protégés at Dillon, Read, New York. ‘I heard you were in the building, Neil. Join me for a drink?’ And it turned out to be a ‘function.’ One of those damned things. And the first thing Porter did, after we had gotten drinks, was introduce me to this woman, who just happened to be there.” He snorted.

  “I was being set up. I knew it—I like to think I knew it, at least—when it was happening. But I didn’t care. I was dazzled. She was so beautiful. She had to be damaged goods—she was interested in me. And I didn’t care, do you understand? I really didn’t care.” He paused. “Shows you what ego can do.”

  “But you’re not bitter,” Nora said.

  “No,” he said, “I’m not.”

  “She might not think so,” Nora said softly, “if she saw the two of us now.”

  “Well,” he said, “I wasn’t. Maybe I am bitter now. A little, perhaps. Aren’t you a little, yourself?”

  “Quite honestly? No,” she said, leaning back. “I think I’ve done pretty well. Not quite as well as I’d like to’ve, no, but still, all in all, pretty good. The children are gorgeous, all four of them, and children are what I most wanted. Barry’s considerate, generous, too. I don’t see him much, but he is. He does have this idea, I will stay happy, as long as I’ve got charge accounts. Well, maybe he’s right. Maybe that’s what I want. What he calls ‘Parity: Social.’ ”

  “What does that mean?” Cooke said.

  “That means,” she said, “that you live at your level. Whatever it happens to be. If you have inherited fifty-three million, you live like other rich people. If you don’t inherit, you make it yourself, and you make a million a year, then you live just like all the other folks do, that’re making a million a year. His theory is that if you don’t do that, if you don’t keep up the standards, well then, pretty soon, you start slipping down, and not just in social things either. If you look like you’re making half a million a year, that’s the way people will treat you. And that is the way they will look at your bills. They’ll think you’re trying to cheat them. ‘If they get a bill for two hundred K from a millionaire lawyer? It’s fine. But if they get a bill for one hundred K, from a lawyer who looks like five hundred, they think to themselves: “Hey, this guy’s moving up in grade here, or trying, at least, on my money.” They’ll pay that damned bill, and they’ll pay it right off, and you’ll never see them again.’ I don’t know if he’s right about that, but I live just as though I was sure. It isn’t a bad way to live.”

  “So then,” Cooke said, “reversing your question, what is it you’re doing here? If you’re so contented, I mean.”

  “Probably about the same thing you are,” she said. “I craved a little excitement. And one day I was out, shopping in Georgetown, and I saw one of my friends. Having lunch with a man in the ’Seventy-six House. I almost went up and said hi. And it hit me, just like a punch, that man was Catherine’s lover. Her husband’s name’s Jerry, and he work
s like Barry, and this is how Catherine gets by. She wasn’t, of course, the first one that I knew about, just the first one who made me think. And all the way home I was thinking about things, all the things Barry had said. That I should have everything, every last thing, that all of his colleagues’ wives have. Well, it seemed to me I was missing one thing. So I started looking around. And now my whole life’s nice and round.” She squeezed his arm again. “You’re right, I’m contented. You’re part of the reason. A very big part, I might add.”

  The view from the table at the window of the Prospect of Stonington restaurant looked southeasterly out over the harbor and the steeples of the town rising on the hill behind it. The waitress cleared away the remains of their greenhouse blueberries and cream, leaving them with their coffee and the remains of their Moulin-a-Vent in the big balloon glasses. “So,” she said, “I’ve got the nine fifty back to the city. What’ll you do, follow me?”

  “No,” he said. “I’ll stay at the house. I left word I wouldn’t be back. Not tonight. I’ll go to the boatyard tomorrow, instead of this afternoon, like I said, and then around noon I’ll go back to the city. After the traffic’s thinned out.”

  “And she’ll believe this,” Nora said.

  He laughed shortly. “I doubt it’ll cross her mind, whether it’s true. I don’t think she’ll think about it. She’ll pretend to believe it did take me more time, to make sure the house is all right. What she’s thinking about is Benjamin Chapman. That’s all she’s got on her mind.”

  “Who the hell is Benjamin Chapman?” Nora said. “Some guy she’s fooling around with?”

  “You could say that,” he said. “Benjamin Chapman’s the name Richard Nixon used when he signed into the motel in Nashua the morning before Groundhog Day.” He sighed. “She hates him. Hates him with a passion. I wish she gave as much thought to me as she does to Richard M. Nixon.

  “She’s a very strange and beautiful woman,” he said. “I don’t know whether she’s become amused at me, in the past few years, and is trying to conceal it, or if she’s always been amused, and has stopped trying to hide it. Either way, I know she is, and either way, I dislike it. I resent amusing people. Damn, I always have, always without meaning to. You know that’s the reason, the principal reason, why I’ve taken to Washington so? I always enjoyed the state politics, they’ve given me great satisfaction. But when I started taking those random off days, and spending them down there with Ferdie, well, all of a sudden, I was a player, you know? Just by getting on the Metroliner, I became one of the boys. You can say what you want about Richard M. Nixon, and I’m sure that Barry’s said plenty. But there’s a lot of us out there that know why Dick wants it, and by God, we’ll see that he gets it. No matter what Caroline thinks. Or wise guys like Barry think either. We’ll get it for him, and we’ll get it good. Because we want it ourselves.”

  Shortly before 7:00 P.M., Neil Cooke drove his car into the northerly abutment of the bridge at the tidal river next to the boatyard. He suffered head cuts. His companion declined medical treatment. Local police investigated.

  20

  There was little hard news to report on the evening of February 6. The powerful VHF television stations in Boston gleaned the Associated Press and the United Press International printers for every item of potential regional interest. All three of them gratefully made lavish use of tapes and film from their libraries to expand Russ Stanley’s stories into long reports of Henry Briggs’s planned transition from baseball to politics, running them during their news programs at 6:00 and 11:00. Channel 9 showed more enterprise than its competitors, calling Ed Cobb and Briggs at their homes in Vermont for fresh quotes.

  The master of the jail in Manchester allowed the inmates to watch television after they finished the evening meal, served at 4:30 P.M. Earl Beale sat in the recreation room with a morose middle-aged man who had been charged with beating up his estranged wife and limited his conversation to sullen declarations of his intent “to really beat her up this time, soon’s I get out, for telling all those lies.” Earl told him to be quiet when he saw Channel 9’s file tapes of Briggs pitching for the Red Sox. “Shut up,” he said. “I know this guy.” The other man said, “Bullshit. Everybody did. I seen him pitch a hundred times. Never trusted him. Men on base? He always fucked up.”

  Channel 9 showed a picture of Ed Cobb while the announcer quoted him expressing confidence that Briggs would beat Wainwright. “I know him, too,” Earl said.

  “More bullshit,” the other man said. “These fucking ball players and movie actors—who the fuck do they think they are, they should run the country?”

  “You know,” Earl said, “when I get out of here I’m gonna look up your wife and call her and say: ‘If they ever let that asshole husband of yours out, call me up and I will come and kick his slats out for him.’ Now shut the fuck up, all right?”

  “I could take you,” the other man said.

  “You could in here with the guards,” Earl said. “I said: ‘After we get out.’ When I’m out I can do things. I’m gonna do things, too.”

  Ed Cobb parked the maroon Chrysler in the Beale dealership lot early in the evening of February 7 and went directly upstairs. Donald Beale was in his office. Cobb went in and sat down. “I had two calls,” he said.

  “Only two,” Beale said. “That surprises me.”

  “Two is enough,” Cobb said.

  “I’m sure,” Beale said.

  “The first guy wants me to give him a good reason why he shouldn’t call somebody else,” Cobb said. “He said the guy that got that car that Earl swiped cracked it up in Connecticut, and now the cops’re after the guy that wanted it stolen.”

  “I know,” Beale said.

  “You know,” Cobb said.

  “The FBI was in here this afternoon,” Beale said. “Interstate transportation, stolen motor vehicle. They did not seem impressed that I had all the papers.”

  “Ah,” Cobb said.

  “Who was the second guy?” Beale said.

  “The first guy,” Cobb said. “He’s gonna have him killed, you know. He’s gonna make a call. The minute Earl’s first foot hits the pavement outside that jail down in Manchester, he’s living on borrowed time. And he also heard about the other fella.”

  “About Henry Briggs,” Beale said.

  “Uh huh,” Cobb said.

  “He saw it on television,” Beale said.

  “I guess so,” Cobb said.

  “And what’s he gonna do about Henry?” Beale said.

  “Well,” Cobb said, “I don’t know. I don’t think he really does either. He’s about beside himself. His kid did get to Vietnam.”

  “Uh huh,” Beale said.

  “And his kid did get killed,” Cobb said. “What he is is wild. He doesn’t think a whole lot of me about now. I wouldn’t predict what he’ll do. About Henry, I mean. About me, for that matter. Probably nothing. But I don’t know.”

  “We don’t ever learn, do we?” Beale said.

  “Well,” Cobb said, “we pick up a few things. Here and there.”

  “Leave him make the call,” Beale said. “Earl’s getting out in the morning. His girlfriend called me up and gave me a ration of shit. I’ve reached my quota. I’ve picked up enough things to suit me.”

  “Whatever doesn’t kill us, makes us strong,” Cobb said.

  “Fuck Nietzsche,” Beale said. “He’s never around when you need him.”