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  He gave her a cryptic smile. “Now what’s the point of a surprise if I tell you what it’s going to be?”

  “Does this have anything to do with your wedding?”

  Rashid looked suddenly glum. He picked at his steering wheel cover.

  “There’s not going to be a wedding, is there?”

  He fell silent for a long, uncomfortable moment.

  “Have you told her?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “But I will. That was to be my surprise.”

  “That you’re breaking some girl’s heart? That’s your happy news?”

  “There is no heart to break, Sarah. She doesn’t love me. I don’t love her. We are complete strangers to each other. Why should we get married?”

  “You told me love would grow. You’d build a life, a family...”

  He answered sharply. “I don’t want to spend my life with a woman I don’t love when I can—” He fell back against the headrest. “Never mind,” he breathed. “It’s all wrong.”

  “It’s not wrong to want to be in love when you get married,” Sarah said.

  “It’s easy for you to say this. You were raised to believe in romantic love. But it’s not what I’m supposed to be doing. My family expects me to—”

  Without thinking, she whacked her hand on the seat and said, “Screw what you’re supposed to be doing. It’s your life. What do you want?”

  He looked like he was about to hyperventilate. “I want to get married!” He clamped a cold hand over the top of hers. “But I want to marry you.”

  * * * * *

  Emerson sat in front of his typewriter, staring at the white sheet of paper. He’d typed nothing more than “SISTERS OF MERCY,” which, if followed to its logical conclusion, would ban Emerson from half his magazines, promote him to mythic hero in the others, and at the very least, earn him eternal damnation and the worst accommodations in hell.

  Thank God for pseudonyms, he thought, fingers poised on the keys.

  But it wasn’t him.

  It wasn’t even Dirk.

  Not even he would sink that low.

  He ripped the paper out of the carriage, wadded it up and tossed it behind him. He typed a few more titles, with equal results, until a mob of paper balls piled up like a flock of evil ducklings, snapping at his heels. He paced around the room, kicking at them, raging.

  Stories used to flood out of him, like from Daisy. He’d never been at a loss when it came to Dirk. When everything else in his life was in the crapper, when he had no money and his job sucked and Sarah had another new boyfriend, he knew that he could sit at the typewriter and pound it out. It wasn’t literature but it was there, accessible to him, with beginnings, middles, and ends, and a check after the magazine went to press.

  And now, nothing.

  Just when everything had started to pick up, this part of his life was failing him.

  Dirk was failing him.

  * * * * *

  Sarah remembered joking with Emerson about marriage, the neurotic children they would make. And in the bowels of Jay’s worst hangovers, he had alluded to their future in the vaguest of terms, probably designed to keep her from leaving him. But never had a man out-and-out and with great seriousness said that he wanted to marry her.

  Sarah already knew the answer, and Rashid must have known it too. But she was in no hurry to say the words. She wanted to let the possibility dangle in front of her for a few moments to see what the concept of someone wanting her forever felt like.

  “You are not laughing at me, so I gather that what I’ve said is not totally ridiculous?”

  Rashid’s voice was as soft as fresh paneer over Sarah’s frothy reverie of a six-year-old’s princess dreams. Of the luminous seed pearls on her mother’s wedding gown, pawed with carefully washed fingers. She smiled at him through her sadness, mentally putting the wedding gown back in the moldering box she had no business opening, and touched his cheek.

  “It wasn’t ridiculous,” she said, nearly a whisper.

  Not for a glimmer did his eyes leave hers. His skin felt cool and smooth. She wished she could hold him, and kiss him, and offer the comfort of her body, to soften the blow from the pain she was about to inflict. She’d done it so many times, to Emerson, and others—offered herself as a kind of anesthesia, when words hadn’t seemed like enough.

  She let her hand fall onto the void between them and broke free from his liquid gaze. She drew in a deep breath, considering what should be said next.

  It had to be a sin of omission, of course. In the name of honesty, why hurt him more by saying she didn’t love him like she loved Emerson?

  “I’m really sorry,” she began. “You’ll probably make a great husband, I’m just not ready to get married. But it was so sweet of you to think of me that way.”

  He hid his face in his hands. “And it was very wrong that I did so,” he wailed. “I wish I’d never said what I said.”

  In her mind she saw the wedding dress fall to rags. Seed pearls broke off in her clumsy, six-year-old fingers. Her voice sounded small and weak to her ears. “No. Please don’t take it back. No one’s ever said that to me before.”

  He drew his fingers down his cheeks. His mouth had fallen open, his eyes disbelieving. “Never? Not even...” He pointed upward.

  Sarah tilted her head quizzically. For a second she wondered if he meant God and then realized he was referring to Emerson. Not even Rashid could think she was that saintly. She shook her head.

  “I’ve given you something no other man has given you?”

  She thought a moment. “I guess you have.”

  She’d never seen a man with a broken heart look so happy.

  * * * * *

  “I can’t do this anymore!” Emerson yelled to no one, shredding the latest aborted title out of the carriage. He wadded it up and hurled it at the window shade. The satisfying crash he required merely came out as an impotent “tink,” and the paper bounced, improbably, into the garbage can.

  “So don’t do it,” Sarah would say, as simply as that. He stopped in the middle of his rage, feeling a wave of warmth wash over him. Just her voice in his mind calmed him. He ached to see her, to talk to her, to close the distance between them.

  But he couldn’t do that to himself. He wouldn’t allow her to hurt him. Never again.

  She was probably still downstairs. They could talk. He’d tell her about the new story he planned to write. Not about Dirk or anything for the magazines. He didn’t want to do that anymore. He’d meet this deadline, because he’d made a promise and didn’t like to break promises. Then he would resign and hang up Dirk’s leather jacket forever. He’d write real stories. Stories he could give to his mother. Stories he could put his own name on. Sarah would be happy, because she’d wanted him to do this for so long, and she’d no longer look at him and wonder if he was co-opting their privacy.

  He’d been so absorbed that he hadn’t noticed the darkening sky. He wondered what kept Rashid, and poor Sarah, waiting for him for so long. He headed downstairs, ready to drive her home. Then he saw two figures on the porch, in silhouette through the window. One was Sarah; how well he knew her contours. The other he didn’t immediately recognize. He froze, watching, listening. He heard nothing but a softness of two different pitches, back and forth.

  Then the two figures merged into one. Something stabbed through Emerson’s gut.

  Slowly the two shapes drew apart. The doorknob turned and Emerson flattened himself against the wall. In walked Sarah, her cheeks flushed, her hair windblown.

  Rashid followed, a hand on her shoulder, looking disgustingly smug. “I’ll just get that book you loaned me,” he told Sarah. “Then we can go.”

  He saw Emerson and smiled, too hard. “Look, Sarah, here is Emerson. The writing has gone well?”

  Emerson thought of the wad of paper he’d hurled against the window and the typewriter that almost followed. But Rashid would do. “No. The writing has not gone well.”

  “That’s t
oo bad. Well. In just a moment I’m going to drive Sarah home. Perhaps when I return, we can go out for some dinner.”

  “Maybe it would be good for you to get out.” Sarah smiled at Emerson and touched his arm. He felt a weakening down to his toes but couldn’t erase the image of the embracing figures in the window. Or stop seeing the triumph on Rashid’s face. He could only imagine what it meant.

  “I have a deadline,” he said, and went upstairs to call Daisy.

  Chapter 36

  When Sarah’s boss normally asked her to type a focus-group transcript, she keyed the words into the computer and didn’t think much about the big picture, unless there was something particularly interesting about the group dynamic or something she wanted to save for Emerson. But this—a study for a new kind of instant iced tea—was the first focus group she’d been allowed to participate in, from start to finish, from planning the demographic to preparing the questions to helping interpret the data, so she had more invested in the results.

  The words weighed more heavily.

  “I would not serve this to my husband,” a woman said in Sarah’s earpiece. Her haughty voice, tinged with a slight British accent, came across clear and bold, even on the many-times-overwritten tape, and made Sarah crawly with guilt. She remembered the Indian woman sitting across the table, red bindi on her forehead, peacock blue sari wrapped around a short-sleeved white blouse, snug on her pudgy upper arms. She’d taken a sip of the stuff and then, disgust pickling her face, shoved the glass away.

  Sarah was glad to have the tape. Many times during the actual focus group her attention had drifted because she’d been watching this woman and thinking about Rashid. She wondered if the woman who was supposed to have been his fiancée was anything like the woman in the blue sari. If she would be so meticulous about what she served her husband. If she knew Sarah might be responsible for her husband’s not being Rashid.

  Sarah hadn’t heard from him in two weeks, which didn’t surprise her. She’d torn his heart out and hadn’t been expecting a follow-up call. Although he’d taken it so graciously, she suspected the brave face couldn’t last forever.

  She called him at the lab. He seemed pleased to hear from her, although there was hesitation in his voice, perhaps because she’d called him at work. Sarah forced some small talk about the Winter Olympics and Katarina Witt’s chances of winning gold for a second time, but then she felt a need to define a purpose for her call. She improvised.

  “I think I lost an earring in your car.”

  “What does it look like?”

  She tried to remember what she’d been wearing that day. That was the trouble with lies. You had to work harder to appear consistent. “Um, gold. With little hearts.” The pair had been a gift from Emerson for her twenty-fifth birthday. As she reached up to touch an earlobe, she realized she was currently wearing them. Both of them.

  “I will turn it inside out.”

  She pictured him taking his whole car apart. “No! It’s...well, not that important. Just if you happen to see it.”

  “Yes, I will do this. If I find it I will return it to you immediately.”

  A long stretch of silence followed. She’d never realized, until one was plunked on her desk a few weeks ago, how loudly computers hummed. The cursor blinked on the Indian woman’s name. She felt the piercing eyes as if the woman knew—one more Indian son seduced by American decadence.

  “I should let you get back to work,” Sarah said.

  “No, it’s all right, I’m taking a break. I’ve been thinking of calling you myself.” He lowered his voice. “I’ve been missing you.”

  “Rashid...”

  “I know you aren’t ready to be married,” he said. “I accept that. But because of this, must we not even remain friends?”

  She leaned back in her chair. Don’t say it. Bad idea. Very bad idea. But it came out anyway. She couldn’t crush him again so soon. “I don’t see why we can’t.”

  “Then you will let me make you dinner some night when I am less busy?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” She remembered what Emerson had said about a man who offered to cook for woman. “But I don’t want to make a big deal out of this.”

  “Two friends having dinner?” Rashid said. “What is a big deal about that?”

  Chapter 37

  Dirk Blade’s sudden retirement gave Emerson more time and mental space than he was accustomed to having. For the past three weeks, he’d been using this precious commodity not to write legitimate stories or to earn extra money at the infirmary, but to torture himself with introspection.

  Usually it was about Sarah and Rashid.

  But he grew weary of that brand of pain. He didn’t need Dirk’s one-track imagination to figure out what must have happened between them—what else made a man act so smugly possessive of a woman?—and didn’t want to know a single detail more.

  That night, Emerson tortured himself with what Sarah had said about his propensity toward youthful girlfriends. He’d never given her teasing much credence before. When he did take the odd moment to reflect on the issue, it was to convince himself that the reasons were proximity and convenience. If you lived in a college town, you met college girls; if you worked at an infirmary, you met nurses’ aides and patients’ granddaughters.

  And all, with few exceptions, had been under twenty-one.

  Lying awake in curtain-filtered street light hours after nineteen-year-old Daisy had gotten dressed and gone back to her dormitory, he considered the possibility that his choices might be deliberate. He thought about something he once wrote to Sarah when yet another rogue had broken her heart, and he was trying to make her see the error of her ways: one is an adventure, two is a coincidence, three is a pattern.

  He did a quick count and discovered he had a pattern three times over.

  His first impulse was to call Sarah, queen of relationship déja-vu, to get her take on this revelation of his and to offer some sort of backhanded apology for the abuse he’d heaped on her over the years concerning her own choices.

  But it was late. She had work in the morning. They’d moved on to other people, and he had to get over this compulsion to call her whenever he felt sorry for himself.

  He would just have to stuff it down further.

  The stairs complained in monstrous creaks as he headed down to the kitchen. He made cocoa and sat at the kitchen table for a long time, listening to the wind howl, the windows rattle, and the faint, happy rumblings of a party next door, which only made him feel lonelier, older, and more pathetic. He ran a hand through his hair and a disturbing number of strands came out. One of them was suspiciously whiter than the others.

  He grabbed the phone.

  “I’ve become a walking cliché,” he told Sarah’s startled greeting.

  “Em?”

  “Who else would call you at one thirty in the morning and tell you they’ve become a walking cliché?”

  “What’s wrong?” she sighed, a beautiful sleepy purr. He heard the rustle of sheets, the creak of bedsprings. He imagined her turning over, getting comfortable for a long conversation. It reminded him of their late-night talks when she lived in Boston, the blissful frustration of having her voice so close to his ear and her body never more inaccessible. Yet with no eyes staring back at him, he could easily tell her anything.

  Almost anything.

  “I’m losing my hair,” he said.

  “You’ve been losing your hair since you were twenty-five.”

  “I have not.” He examined his hairline in his reflection in the kitchen window. “Have I?”

  “Just a little,” she said. “But you can hardly notice it.”

  “Well, it’s even more now. I’m losing my hair and sleeping with teenagers.”

  Silence. Then she said, “Hence the walking cliché thing?”

  At this unfortunate moment, a pretty girl who looked no more than sixteen spilled out of the house next door, giggling, obviously drunk. She was wearing a short, low-cut dress and one
of the resident undergrads.

  It was exactly the kind of dress that women so often allowed Dirk to push out of his way.

  The boy backed the girl against a shed in direct view of Emerson’s window. His hands disappeared inside her dress. Emerson snapped the blinds closed, distressed that he’d become aroused. But he could still hear them, imagine them, and feel his own hands on the girl’s soft, white flesh.

  As if he’d become Dirk Blade.

  Sarah’s voice drifted back to him, small and a little odd.

  “Em...everything all right?”

  “Huh?” he breathed.

  “You want to talk about it?”

  He already had the car keys in his hand.

  * * * * *

  Sarah had been dreaming about diving for the third time in the past two weeks. Only this time, she didn’t know that the diving board was out the window of an eight-story building until she’d jumped. Halfway to the pavement, the telephone rang, waking her. Just from hearing the tone of Emerson’s voice and those awful silences, she’d been too scared to let him go on facing the night alone.

  Not when the diving board was pointing out the window.

  A few minutes later, Emerson stood at her door, silent and disheveled. She hugged him. His return embrace was tentative, unengaged. Daisy’s cloying young fragrance made Sarah sink with despair.

  He slipped free and without taking off his coat collapsed into her flowered armchair.

  She waited. Eventually he raised his eyes to hers. They were pale and a little desperate. “I’m turning into Dirk,” he said.

  The kettle boiled.

  * * * * *

  Sarah disappeared into the kitchen. Emerson felt guilty for waking her and ruining her night. He should have kept this whole Dirk thing to himself. Why tax her when it was no longer her job to put him back together?