On the Loose

by Andrew Coburn

  "But there's a thrill to the game," she said.

  "French kissing gives me a thrill, gambling doesn't."

  "You could lick the chips."

  Harry glared. They were dinner guests of his brother and sister-in-law, the four of them seated in ameliorating candlelight. Belle Sawhill, who had soft engaging features and a richly intimate voice, said, "It's a joke, Harry."

  Trish was seated beside Ben Sawhill, which pleased her. She liked Ben's clipped correctness, admired his successes, and envied his wife. He wore a Rolex with the face under his wrist, which reminded her of a gunfighter sporting his sixshooter with the handle pointed out.

  He said to her, "Winter wouldn't be so bad for you if you skied."

  "I love the lodges, Ben, not the slopes."

  Harry complimented Belle for the second time on the superb taste of the seared swordfish, which was blackened with Cajun sauce. The wine, his brother's choice, was an expensive Graves, Belle said to him, "How's Bobby?"

  "He's all right. He's fine."

  "No, he's not," Trish said.

  Harry spoke low across the table. "Not your business."

  "He's never been right," Ben said gently. "Not since his mother died."

  "I do my best."

  Belle touched his arm. "We know you do."

  After dessert, they retired to the library, where a fire was going. Belle served coffee, a choice of decaf and regular. The twins, who had stayed up past their bedtime, came in to say good night. Sammantha and Jennifer were healthy nine-year-olds, the blood glistening through their skin. They had Belle's black hair, dark eyes, and full mouth. Trish gave hugs to each and said, "I still can't tell you two apart."

  Sammantha was independent, contrary, and Jen

  nifer was the darling. They competed for affection from their father, who adored them both, no apparent favorite. Belle said, "Say good night to your uncle."

  "I'm Jennifer," Sammantha said.

  "No, she's not," said Jennifer. "I am!"

  They kissed Harry's cheek and gave smackers to their father. Their nanny, who had been waiting in the doorway, took them off to bed. Ben and Harry slipped away to talk business, Harry's personal finances, the state of his investments. Belle and Trish remained by the fire with their coffee.

  "The twins are lovely," Trish said.

  "I don't know what I'd do without them."

  "Didn't you want another child or two?"

  "It wasn't possible."

  "I'm sorry, I didn't know. Still, you're very lucky."

  "Yes, I think so."

  "Is Ben a good lover?"

  For an instant Belle was taken aback. "I have no complaints."

  "Harry isn't. He drinks too much, and it stunts his performance. When he's at his best I pretend he's Ben."

  Belle looked into the fire. "I wish you hadn't told me that."

  "It's nothing serious, only fantasy. Besides, what would Ben want with a broad like me?"

  When the brothers returned, Harry was smiling, a celebratory drink in his hand. "Guess what," he said to Trish, "I'm richer than I thought."

  In the middle of January Trish Becker had had enough of winter. Waking early and unable to fall back to sleep, she rose from her king-sized bed, parted window drapes, and looked out at a fierce boreal dawn. The sun, a lump of white, looked frozen. "To hell with this," she said aloud and made plans. At noontime she phoned an old friend, Gloria Eisner, who lived in Connecticut and told her what she had in mind for the two of them.

  "For how long?" Gloria asked.

  "A month. How 'bout it?"

  Three days later she and Gloria were sunbathing on a Barbados beach. Gloria lay prone on a towel with her head cradled in her arms and her eyes gazing out over the curve of a well-oiled shoulder. Trish, her face wrapped in sunglasses, sat in a chaise and sipped rum punch. Ten feet away a man with protruding eyes, like push buttons, stood sour, sandy, touched by too much sun. He stared intently at them before moving on. Half under her breath, Trish said, "What are we, freaks?"

  "He was looking at your breasts," Gloria said. "They've always been a big deal."

  "He was looking at my belly scars."

  Best friends in high school, they had been the sort boys orbited. Inseparable, they had frequently slept over at each other's house. In bed they had compared their breasts and the maturity between their legs. Trish had the bigger bosom, Gloria the richer pubes. Each had married right out of college. Gloria had had three husbands, Trish only the one.

  "Seeing anyone special?" Trish asked.

  Gloria stretched a lengthy leg and dug her toe in the sand. "A few guys, no music in any of them. You still seeing that same man? What's his name?"

  "Harry. I'm thinking of breaking it off. No future."

  "Don't you know what the future is, Trish? It's today squeezed into tomorrow. My last husband told me that."

  Sipping her punch, Trish watched a wave flop in. The sea was full of wrinkles and smiles. "All I know is that as you grow older things become less solid. Houses, relationships, dreams."

  "Tell me about it."

  Trish put the punch glass aside and rose from the chaise. A bikini clung bravely to her full showy body. Hands on her hips, she looked down at Gloria. "Tell me the truth. Do I look ridiculous?"

  "You're big in the bust, you can't help that. No, you don't look ridiculous. You look beautiful."

  Wearing straw hats and open silk shirts, they strolled the beach. Waves were coming in green now. A fishing boat plowed a path toward deep waters. They passed a child whispering into a shell, a man slipping on a frog mask, young women scampering into the surf.

  "You ever scared, Gloria?"

  "Of what? Dying?"

  "Living, aging, all that stuff."

  Gloria tossed her a big smile. "Every minute of the day."

  Escaping the relentless sun, they browsed a seafront shop that sold scrimshaw, shells, driftwood, and watercolors of tropical storms. Tired, thirsty, they returned to the hotel and had drinks at the veranda bar, where a man who looked extremely clean, perhaps because he was bald and wore white, bought them a round.

  He had a British accent, a slight stammer, and a chin line no longer firm. When he placed a hand on Trish's knee, she said, "Give me a break!"

  He soon left.

  "You looking to get laid, Gloria?"

  "I could've stayed home for that."

  "Good. Because I'm not either."

  Gloria's drink was exotic, and she licked sugar from her lips. "Unless of course someone scrumptious comes along."

  "That's different."

  They napped for an hour in their room, then showered and dressed. Her chestnut hair tied with a ribbon, Gloria looked defiantly slender and poignantly attractive in a brief evening dress. In the same cut of garment, Trish appeared dewy, bouncy, spontaneous. She dabbed a touch of Gloria's perfume on her wrist. They dined in the smaller of the hotel's two restaurants, at a table marked by elegant linen and muted by candle glow. The offerings of a harpist made Trish think of tinkling water drops and Grecian rockscape.

  "You've been to Greece, haven't you, Gloria?"

  "Twice. Once on my honeymoon, I forget which husband."

  "Three failed marriages, Gloria. Does that ever depress you?"

  'I take it philosophically. Every song plays itself out.'

  Trish finished feasting on turtle steaks, which she had a taste for. Gloria consumed a fried fillet of grouper. Declining dessert and coffee, they ordered after-dinner drinks, which arrived promptly. Trish's was redolent of rose petals and cloves.

  "Don't let me get tight."

  "Why not?" Gloria said. "You can do what you want here."

  "I'll get maudlin. The holidays did a number on me. The kids spent them with their father, of course. He's the one broke up the marriage, but they still blame me for it."

  "Fathers do no wrong. Mothers are bitches."

  "Where's it written?"

  "God's male. He wrote it."

  They sippe
d their liqueurs slowly and then called for the check. Trish signed it and wrote in a generous gratuity. Gloria left a little something for the harpist. They wandered through the lobby and out into the soft night. The sky over the sea was immense and aggressively bright with stars. Gloria said, "Do you remember my second husband?"

  Trish tended to remember voices. She remembered his. Deep and authoritative.

  "He wore power suspenders, cardinal red," Gloria said. "Making money and making underlings jump was what he was all about. He thought he could make me jump."

  Trish remembered dining with them at LockeOber's. When a gold crown fell into his lobster pie, she thought it was a cuff link. "How did you do in the settlement?"

  "He had the better lawyer."

  Dropping her head back, Trish gazed up at the glittering immensity of the sky. Her voice had a tremor. "The eye deceives," she said. "The spaces between the stars look manageable."

  "But we know otherwise," Gloria said.

  When they returned to their room, Trish placed a call to Harry Sawhill. His son answered. Gloria slipped into the bathroom and used the john. At the sink, the tap running, she sniffed and then used a small oval of pastel green soap, which in her wet hands produced a plethora of rich and dainty suds. She brushed her teeth and with another brush, with softer bristles, massaged her gums. When she emerged from the bathroom, Trish was sitting on the edge of one of the beds.

  "What's wrong?"

  "Harry says he misses me."

  "That's wonderful."

  "His kid says he hates me."

  "You're going to hear from my mother," Claudia MacLeod warned Chief Morgan, and he soon did. On a January morning so cold it seemed inconceivable that it would ever be warm again, he drove to Mrs. Perrault's Spring Street house, where an abundance of utility lines raced from the street to an eave of the roof. Swiftly ushered in, he was seated in an armchair than seemed to remember him, though he had never sat in it before. The thermostat pushed to the limit, the room throbbed with and heat. Mrs. Perrault and her two older sisters, all swathed in heavy sweaters, shared the sofa.

  "Is she doing the right thing, James?"

  Mrs. Perrault had known him since he was a child. He had delivered her newspaper. He had slipped a valentine for Claudia through the mail slot. For a dollar he had mowed their lawn. He said, "I'm not sure."

  "Of course she isn't!" the elder sister snapped.

  "Her home is here," said the other sister.

  Both had ghost-white hair that revealed the fine pink of their scalps. The veiny tops of their hands looked inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The elder sister had the larger presence, the greater voice.

  "What does she want to live alone for?"

  "Please, Ida," Mrs. Perrault said. "Let James speak."

  "I think Claudia's doing what she wants to do," Morgan said gently. "She wants to be on her own."

  Mrs. Perrault gazed at him with mournful eyes. The dyes in her tightly permed hair were of conflicting hues. "But nobody wants to live alone."

  Morgan wanted to say that Claudia was tired of being answerable to their moods. He wanted to say that a woman in her forties deserves independence. He said nothing.

  "Isn't she happy here, James?"

  "That's not the point."

  A harsh voice said, "There is no point."

  "Ida, please."

  Ida's large painted mouth clenched into a red fist. The eyes of the other sister were rapid blinks. Mrs. Perrault, who had been the baby of the family, bore no resemblance to either of them, which years ago had given credence to gossip that their mother's passions had stretched beyond the marriage bed.

  "We didn't ask if you wanted coffee, James."

  "Well, ask him," said Ida.

  "I have to get back," Morgan said, rising.

  Accompanying him to the door, Mrs. Perrault seemed to move on tiptoe, on air. The hues in her hair sparkled, as if her head held explosives. At the door, as he zipped his parka and hiked the collar, she touched his arm.

  "You have to do something, James."

  "What should I do?"

  "Marry her."

  Morgan looked at her critically. "That's a switch, isn't it?"

  "Better she have someone than no one."

  Amy White accepted Claudia MacLeod's second offer for Mrs. Bullard's house, which included the furniture and all of the books. Eyes filling, Amy said, "I'm glad it's you, Claudia, and not some outof-towner buying the place. Auntie Eve would be pleased."

  A week later, the third day of a January thaw, Chief Morgan investigated a break-in at the unoccupied house. The intruder forced an entry through the bulkhead and tracked mud up the cellar steps and through the house. As far as Amy could determine, nothing had been taken or dis turbed, though it seemed to Morgan that someone had lain on Mrs. Bullard's bed, the same someone who probably had left the toilet seat up.

  Dining with Claudia at Rembrandt's that evening in Andover, Morgan said, "It's not too late to back out. I mean, if you have any doubts."

  "Now you sound like my mother."

  "She thinks we should get married."

  Claudia sipped her wine, her second refill. "Yes, she told me."

  "Maybe you should think about it."

  "I have, a great deal," she said softly. "I could never marry a policeman. It'd be like marrying a soldier again. I couldn't bear that."

  He was surprised. It was the first time in years that she had mentioned her husband. A Bennington boy. Among the first to enlist from their graduating class, his name now engraved on the war memorial outside the library and on the formidable one in Washington. Morgan said, "I was a soldier too."

  "But you came back."

  In Vietnam he had served with hillbillies from Kentucky and Tennessee, their bravery astonishing, foolhardy. So many had died. So many had volunteered for second tours.

  "All these years gone by, James, I still miss him."

  They were, he suspected, subject to the same sense of loss and emptiness, to the same attacks of loneliness, to the same surges of panic. "A day doesn't go by that I don't think of my wife."

  "Are they somewhere else, or are we just kidding ourselves?"

  "There's the mystery."

  "Yes, there's the rub."

  The waitress took away dishes and returned with coffee. Candlelight caught Claudia's glasses and wouldn't let go. Morgan gazed through the glare, his emotions warm. He was well aware that other men considered her plain, distant, bloodless, but they had never seen her in the round, never felt her tongue in their ear, never shared her moments of passion. Drinking his coffee, he enjoyed the silence between them.

  "Let me," she said when the check came.

  "Absolutely not," he said, producing a credit card. "This is a celebration. You're changing your life."

  "For the better, James?"

  "We'll see."

  Outside the cloakroom he held her coat, and she crippled her arms into the sleeves. Brushing aside her hair, he kissed the back of her neck.

  "I love you, Claudia."

  "I love you too, James."

  Trish Becker returned from the Caribbean in the final week of February. Harry Sawhill was waiting for her at Logan Airport and, bolting toward her, threw his arms around her. "Wow," she said, "I'll have to do this more often."

  "Don't ever go away that long again." He looked hangdog. "You don't know how much I missed YOU.

  "You can tell me later."

  Moving through the milling crowd to pick up her luggage, he said, "I don't know what I'd do if anything happened to you."

  "What could happen?"

  The drive to the cold stillness, shocked trees, and winter-bleached grass of Bensington took forty minutes. They drove to the Heights, her big brick house waiting for her, though she was not truly glad to be back. Had it been April or May, she might have been. Harry, who had kept an eye on the house for her, carried the luggage in.

  "Home sweet home," she said tightly.

  "What's the matter?"
<
br />   "Nothing," she said. "Absolutely nothing."

  In the oversized kitchen, the heels of her pumps clicking over octagonal tiles, she prepared to make coffee. Harry drew their favorite mugs from the cabinet. She had cleared out the refrigerator, but he had since stocked it with milk, cheese, eggs, and butter. A loaf of dark rye bread was on the counter.

  "Thanks, Harry."

  He took his coffee black. In a strained voice, he said, "You have a good time?"

  "So much sky down there, Harry, I couldn't help thinking God was keeping an eye on me."

  "Meet anyone?"

  "No one worth mentioning." She joined him at the table. Her face was deeply tanned, which made her hair blonder. "Gloria thought we might get in each other's way after a while, but we didn't.*

  He was quiet. She could tell by his eyes that he had something vital to reveal. On the brink of a smile he said, "I've been sober."

  'You're kidding. The whole time?"

  He nodded. "I did a lot of thinking while you were gone. I want us to be permanent, Trish."

  "Are you proposing?"

  "That's what I'm doing."

  She took a slow sip of coffee. "What if I say yes? Bobby won't like it."

  "I've already talked to him about it. You're right, he's not happy, but he'll come around."

  She sighed heavily, as if coping with one too many players in her life. "I've just gotten back, Harry. You're hitting me with too much."

  "Is that a no?"

  "Give me breathing time."

  His hand creeping across the table, he rolled his eyes at the ceiling. "It's been more than a month. What d'you say?"

  Together they climbed the wide stairway to the master bedroom, which was shadowy in the dying day. Trish switched on a lamp and stood in its brightness. For a moment she viewed herself in a triptych of mirrors, but then her eye shifted to footprints sullying the carpet.

  "Were you up here, Harry?"

  "No. Why do you ask?"

  "Were you lying on my bed?"

  He laughed. "Of course not."

  "Someone was," she said.