“You sure about that movie?”
“Positive.”
“Call me during the week?”
“You know I will.”
It took Janet little over an hour to complete the Lebanese lecture, and she was pleased with the way it went the following day. A teaching assistant named Barnett who’d come close to making a pass several times asked her to go over his master’s thesis, which she agreed to do although she knew it was a ploy giving them time together. The thesis was weak and badly argued—he actually predicted the Israelis might agree to surrender the occupied bank and the Gaza Strip, which Janet dismissed as ridiculously naive—and she told him so, hoping the rejection would go beyond the academic paper.
That week a letter arrived from her parents, who lived in Sussex, asking when she intended to visit. They planned to take a long tour through Egypt and the Sudan and Saudi Arabia, in each of which her father had served, and they did not want the dates to clash. She replied that she wasn’t sure yet so why didn’t they make their arrangements and she would fit in, whenever.
She had dinner with Harriet one night and brunch with her as usual the following Sunday, and the week after that went with Harriet to Garfinkels and to the Georgetown Mall, setting up for Harriet’s trip to Europe. Prompted by the shopping expedition, she thought about buying a winter coat in the sales but decided against it, because it was too soon in the year and she’d be gettting the previous autumn’s style anyway. Her cat, George, developed a dry cough and she had to take it to the vet, who said it was easily treated this time but warned her that it was six years old. Sundays were lonely, like all the other days in the week, with Harriet away. She got cards from Bonn (“dullsville”) and Berlin (“super”).
Janet was marking papers in the Rosslyn apartment on a Wednesday evening when the telephone rang and momentarily she frowned at it, curiously, because she got so few calls.
“I don’t know if you remember me,” the voice said. “It’s John Sheridan.”
“I remember,” Janet said.
4
Janet’s collapse into complete and abject despondency had come the day after the funeral, when she’d finally accepted Hank’s death. She’d refused to get out of bed or to bathe—wash, even—or to eat. Most of all she had refused to eat, and when her mother warned that unless she did she would cause herself harm the idea of committing suicide settled in Janet’s mind. For several days she lay curled beneath the covers, with her knees up under her chin, very calmly planning how to do it. She’d bought a lot of painkillers when Hank’s cancer had first been diagnosed, scouring magazines for every brand name and every formula to find the maximum strength she thought would be necessary, not realizing there would be no pain and stupidly imagining she might find something better than the doctors would prescribe if there were. And they were all still in the bathroom cabinet. She’d been very confident about how easy it would be. She planned to respond to her mother’s urging to take a bath, actually letting it run while she started swallowing the pills, slowly and carefully because she did not want to vomit and spoil everything. When the bath was ready she was going to get in with the bottles where she just had to reach out to go on, willing herself to fight against the initial sensation of unconsciousness and to continue swallowing to ensure she took enough to die and not just lapse into a drugged sleep from which she could be resuscitated if they got to her in time.
Her mother had smiled gratefully and helped her from her disheveled bed and Janet had forced herself not to think of the anguish she was going to cause the woman, sure her own anguish was greater. She said she felt a lot better and was going to take a long soak, to avoid her mother becoming alarmed and forcing her way in before the pills had time to work. Immediately inside the bathroom Janet had pressed back against the locked door, not frightened at all, her feeling rather one of impatience to get started, in a hurry to die. From outside her mother asked if she was all right and Janet called back that she was, turning the taps on in further reassurance.
And then she’d opened the bathroom cabinet to find every pill bottle gone. The frustration had whimpered through her as she scrabbled through what remained, thinking they might be hidden by something else, and then whimpered again at the awareness that her mother had cleared them out. Her mother called again and Janet made a sound back, slumping on the bath edge, emptied so completely she was unable even to think.
The bathroom was small and mirrored, to make it seem bigger, and when Janet had finally looked up, to turn off the water before it overflowed the bath edge, her instant and absurd reaction had been to wonder whose reflection she was seeing. The shock at realizing it was herself actually made her gasp.
Janet had always been fastidious, even at boarding school, before going up to Oxford: the girl whose dormitory place was never disarranged and whose drawers were always allocated, item for item, and whose shoes were always clean and whose hair was always neatly held and clipped and whose uniform was never stained or torn or borrowed or lost. She was—or had been until that moment—physically uncomfortable with untidiness and dirt and neglect.
Her first thought was that Hank would have been disgusted with her, because he had been as meticulous as she was: that she was letting him down. Her hair—which was naturally red and which she’d hated at boarding school, because it was so different from the other girls’, and which she’d only really come to like after Hank had told her it was beautiful—was matted and tangled, straggled around her face. Which looked appalling. She was gaunt from not eating and not sleeping, the sallow skin strained over her high cheekbones and her green but now blank eyes deeply sunk into blackened surrounds. It was already the face of a dead person. And then she thought again that she was letting Hank down and determined abruptly, at that moment, not to give up: not to die.
Inherent though it already was, taking care of herself became privately something she did for Hank, for his memory, like other private and secret things: like sometimes, when she was sure she was quite alone, talking aloud as if he could hear her, imagining what he would say back.
She did it now, when she was almost ready. “You don’t mind, do you?” she said, staring at her own reflection in the full length mirror, knowing what the answer would be. He hadn’t known how to be jealous, not from the moment they’d first met, and not because he didn’t care but because he trusted her, completely. “Only going out for the evening,” she said. “That’s all: just dinner. You know that, don’t you? Of course you do.”
The fuller, looser shirt with the jacket on top was better, Janet concluded: she’d matched a sweater with the checked skirt first but when she’d examined herself, half turning sideways, she thought it looked as if she was trying to make her breasts obvious and she didn’t want to do that. She considered wearing her hair loose, the way Hank had liked it best, but quickly corrected that, too, pulling it back away from her face and twisting it into a chignon. The style meant she had to wear earrings. She chose gold studs to accompany the single gold chain but no other jewelry. She wore her engagement and wedding rings, of course.
Promptly at six, the time they’d agreed, the security clerk buzzed to say Sheridan was in the foyer and Janet said she would be down at once. She’d considered inviting him up for a drink, remaining unsure even while she was dressing, before dismissing the idea as a mistake, like wearing the sweater.
Sheridan asked if there was any place she would like to go and Janet said no, she’d leave it up to him, expecting he’d choose somewhere in town. Instead he drove out into Virginia to a beamed and rough-stone inn proudly proclaiming its one hundred and twenty year history. There was a log fire in the open hearth and they ate oysters and fresh trout and drank a French-bottled Sancerre. Janet found it as easy to talk to him as she had the night of their escape from the party. When he said he had worked for a while out of the American embassy in Cairo she asked if he’d known her father, who had been Third Secretary at the British legation there, but the postings had not been con
temporary. Because it was her subject and from the talk of Egypt she thought he might have an interest she asked him what he thought about the Lebanon and he said it seemed a completely lost and collapsed country. About Iran, Sheridan said he didn’t have any positive idea, either, but he thought another sort of revolution was possible after the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini. She asked how it had been possible for America to have been so wrong-footed about the overthrow of the Shah and then so helpless after the seizure of the U.S. embassy hostages in Teheran and he said he didn’t know but agreed with her that it had been incredibly inept.
On the way back towards Washington Sheridan said he’d enjoyed the evening and Janet agreed that she had too, considering and once more dismissing the idea of inviting him in for a drink. When he stopped the car outside the apartment he asked if he could call her again and she said of course and he let her out as he had before but made no attempt to kiss her. When she looked down from her apartment window, he’d vanished again.
Sheridan called the same week to invite her to a performance of The Taming of the Shrew that the touring English Shakespearean Company was giving at the Kennedy Center. That evening she did suggest his coming in when they got back to Rosslyn. Sheridan drank coffee and brandy and looked at her bookshelves and said Paul Scott and Graham Greene were two of his favorite English authors, too. He enquired if she liked Updike and Janet said not much and asked him if he’d ever read anything by le Carré or Deighton. Sheridan replied that he didn’t enjoy espionage fiction. Again he left without trying to kiss her.
Janet confessed the outings to Harriet at that Sunday’s brunch and Harriet said why the hell not, and when they met later in the week Harriet admitted quizzing her friend on the senator’s staff who’d originally invited Sheridan to the party. The man knew nothing at all about Sheridan except that he was a higher than average squash player, generous without being stupid in the clubhouse afterwards, never made passes at other guys’ wives or girlfriends and never talked about himself. Janet remarked, unthinkingly, that Sheridan hadn’t made a pass at her either and Harriet suggested that maybe he was gay, to which Janet replied that was more Harriet’s problem than hers because she wasn’t interested anyway. Harriet said: “Oh yeah!”
Janet felt a jump of excitement in immediately recognizing Sheridan’s voice on the next call, which she answered hoping it would be him. That time they went to the National Theater, downtown. Afterwards they had drinks at the restored Willard where he recounted the names of the presidents who’d used it in the past and how the word “lobbying” had originated there to describe the favor-seekers waylaying President Grant, and later still they ate in Chinatown, Janet deferring to Sheridan’s obvious knowledge of a Sichuan menu. He seemed to expect to come up to the apartment that night and the conversation was almost stilted. There developed an odd difficulty—an unspoken anticipation—between them and Janet became apprehensive. Which she needn’t have been. When he got up to go after finishing the brandy he merely leaned forward and kissed her cheek, which she offered, and this time she watched from the window as he drove off in the Volkswagen.
Confidently alone in the apartment, she said: “Don’t think badly, darling. It’s just that I feel so very alone.”
Once-a-week meetings became twice a week, and when the weather got better he took her to the yacht basin on the Alexandria side of the Potomac and they went sailing in his boat, which was not white fiberglass and gleaming chrome like most of the others, but fat-bellied and clinker-built, in wood. Sheridan sailed as he appeared to do everything else, with quiet, undemonstrative competence. That first time Janet was uncertain, because sailing had never been something she did, but with Sheridan she immediately felt safe. They started sailing every weekend, he the patient instructor, Janet the eager student. She was apprehensive again when he suggested going away for an entire weekend, casting off on Saturday and tying up overnight somewhere on the Chesapeake Bay: he kissed her differently now but had not suggested—or attempted to do—anything more and Janet was unsure how she would feel if he did. Yet again her fears were unfounded. There was only one cabin, the bunks on either side and when she went below she saw there were single sleeping bags laid out on each. That night, without any discussion, he let her go in first to undress and get into bed before he followed.
The season was right, and so one Sunday Sheridan took her to a crab feast in a weathered, unprepossessing wooden restaurant, where the waitress tore brown paper from a roll to form a tablecloth and Sheridan warned her they were expected to eat with their fingers. They drank beer from a pitcher and Sheridan taught her how to dismember the small crabs. Her fingers and face became sticky from the flavoring salt and Janet realized, surprised, that she was thinking of nothing beyond what she was doing and the person with whom she was doing it. She couldn’t remember being so happy for a very long time.
Afterwards, after the disaster, when she reflected upon everything that had happened between them, Janet calculated that to be the precise moment she had fallen in love with John Sheridan, although of course that was not her awareness then.
It was a month after the crab feast that they made love. It was a Friday night and they had been out to the Virginia restaurant to which he had taken her on their first date. Afterwards he’d come up to the apartment for brandy, which had become the custom. He had one drink, which was all he ever allowed himself and then he said: “I suppose I should be going?” posing it as a question, which he never had before.
“I suppose you should,” Janet said, making it sound like a question too, not knowing whether she had intended it that way or not.
Sheridan remained sitting across from her, gazing at her, and Janet held his eyes, unmoving as well. Sheridan said: “I don’t want to.”
“No,” said Janet, as if she were agreeing to something they had already discussed. She waited for the nervousness that she expected but nothing came.
She tried not to be so stiff and awkward, embarrassed at herself, but he was gentle and kind, coaxing her to relax. And eventually she did relax although not, on that first occasion, as much as she was able to later. Sheridan was as competent as a lover as he appeared to be about everything else, despite her tenseness bringing her to a climax as he climaxed himself and then slowly leading her down from the peak of her excitement. They lay entwined for a long time afterwards, unspeaking, Sheridan soothing his hand along her face.
Eventually he said: “I don’t want this to spoil how it was before with us.”
“It won’t.”
“You sure?”
Janet wasn’t, not then. “I don’t think so.”
“Sorry?”
“I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “Not yet.”
Janet soon became sure.
There were nights when they did not see each other, but increasingly few. It was several weeks after that first occasion before they slept at his apartment, a conversion in an old building off Columbus Circle. Janet went curiously, unsure what to expect, immediately conscious of his extreme neatness. One wall of the main room and three of a spare room were lined with books, a lot in French and Italian, languages which she had not known until then that he could speak. There were some ornaments which she recognized to be Egyptian, and a lot of other foreign souvenirs. Sheridan identified some as Aztec, from a posting to Mexico, and there were some Inca figures from a period he’d spent in Peru and which he said obviously weren’t originals but copies about two hundred years old. Janet was intrigued by a crossbow and a heavily decorated knife which did not seem to fit. Sheridan told her they were Montagnard, and she learned for the first time that he had been attached to the American embassy in Saigon, “but before it really became the mess that it ended.”
It was on that initial visit to Columbus Circle that Janet discovered he could cook. Sheridan prepared Chinese food better than she had tasted in any Washington restaurant, even the Beijing-government supported one in midtown, and Janet said: “Don’t tell me you’ve worked
in China as well!”
Sheridan laughed and said: “No. And I don’t intend to. My days of overseas postings are over. I’m strictly a headquarters guy now.”
Janet told Harriet, of course, and was apprehensive of the first meal the three of them had together, but Sheridan made a particular effort, obviously charming Harriet, maintaining a stream of anecdotes some of which were amusing and others hilarious. That Sunday, when they brunched together, Harriet said: “Darling, I’m abject! I take back everything I ever said. He’s wonderful. When you get fed up with him, give him my number.”
“I’m not going to get fed up with him,” replied Janet.
Her parents’ letters to her outnumbered Janet’s to them. There were repeated assurances of how pleased they were and how much they wanted to meet “him” and demands to know all about him, which Janet tried to satisfy, but her answers always seemed to prompt fresh questions.
The Virginia inn became their favorite, their special place, and it was there, just over a year after their first meal, that Sheridan said: “I’ve got something to ask you.”
“What?”
“Will you marry me?”
Janet sat unmoving, unthinking, aware only of a bizarre sensation of hollowness, and Sheridan misunderstood her silence. He blurted “I’m sorry … I shouldn’t have asked …” but she spoke at last, cutting him off.
“Oh yes, darling,” she said. “Yes please.”
The following evening was one of the nights they did not spend together and abruptly, without consciously imagining Hank, Janet embarked on one of her lonely conversations with her dead husband, something she had not done for a long time.
“Don’t hate me, darling,” she said. “I’ll always love you, of course. But I so much need someone to care. To love: to be safe with.”
Betrayals Page 3
