Act of Darkness (7 page)

Chronicles of Zed and Zedalia
changed all that—and worse, it managed to change it in less than a day. A day was how long it took for the 10,000 copies of the first printing to disappear from library shelves, bookstores, wholesalers, and warehouses and for the reorders to start coming in, thousands of reorders, every one of them delivered (according to Bennis’s editor) in tones of breathless, incredulous panic.

Her publishers managed to get her book back into the stores in six weeks. The stores managed to sell out the second printing of 50,000 copies in three. All of a sudden, she was doing the kind of business most writers only dream of, and she was scared to death.

Maybe she would have been less scared if things at home had been less bad than they were, but the publication of
Chronicles
coincided with what she ever afterward thought of as the hellfire period of her family’s history. Her father, already crippled by an automobile accident, had nearly been killed by another while on a winter-thaw picnic on the family estate. Her sister Emma had been all but accused of causing that accident deliberately. Her father had responded by setting up a living trust that disinherited all four of his daughters irrevocably. Then he had begun to call them up in the middle of the night, to tell them what he thought of them.

Bennis had never had any question whatsoever about what her father thought of her. She had been hearing it, in words of four to seven letters, all her life. Still, those phone calls were nightmarish, brutal, crazy—coming out of nowhere, cutting into her sleep, leaving her sitting bolt upright in bed with the phone gone to dial tone in her hand and her teeth chattering, night after night after night.

It was nuts, and she knew it. She couldn’t do anything about it. Every day or two, her editor sent her more reviews. Every night, her father rang up and cursed, swore, needled, screamed. It got to the point where she was afraid to answer the phone, even in the daytime, and didn’t collect the mail at all. She would have gone to Tanzania if she could have, but she couldn’t. She was in a very strange situation that began to seem stranger to her every day. She didn’t have any money.

Since
Chronicles
had never been expected to be a success, she had received a very small advance for it, under $5,000. Because her father was in no mood to support her and her mother in no physical condition to hear about her problems, she couldn’t get money from home. It would be at least a year before she saw royalty money from
Chronicles,
and in the meantime she had $450 in her checking account, no job, and only one way to get hold of any cash: she could borrow it from the Author’s Guild. Since Bennis had a tutored horror of borrowing money, she didn’t.

She might have been stuck forever in Boston, and driven slowly to suicide, except that a very curious thing began to happen. She began to hear from people who had probably never read a fantasy novel before, but had read this one, because at one time or another they had known
her.
She got letters from former classmates at Agnes Irwin, former campmates from summers on Lake Winnamachee, former fellow sufferers of the dancing classes that were the terror of every Main Line upper-class childhood life. She got letters from former teachers, former nannies, former riding instructors, former chaperones. Finally, she got a letter from a former somebody she actually remembered, and remembered that she had liked.

This former somebody was named Rosamund Baird, and she had been Bennis’s roommate in Lawrence House their mutual freshman year at Smith College. Freshman year was as long as Rosamund had lasted, and she almost hadn’t gotten to the end of that. The only child of the richest rancher in the state of Texas, Rosamund was very well supplied with money, very wild, and very indiscreet. Smith College was a tolerant place even then, but there were limits. Taking a Jackson Pollock off the walls of the college museum and replacing it with five framed Little Orphan Annie comic strips from the Wetherford, Texas,
Gazette
was definitely outside those limits.

The return address on Rosamund’s letter was Washington, D.C.—not one of those small towns in Maryland and Virginia that Bennis could never keep straight, but the capital itself. The address was embossed at the top of the first page in curling black script. Under it, in the same purple ink used to draw the bats on the borders, was Rosamund’s private phone number. Bennis looked at it, then looked around her apartment. Small to begin with, it now looked minuscule, diminished by the accumulation of the debris of a life on the point of breaking down beyond repair. Bennis rescued the phone from under the blankets she had dropped on the floor beside her bed that morning and dialed the District of Columbia.

On most days it would have been next to impossible to get hold of Rosamund in the middle of the afternoon, because she would have been out at the hairdresser’s getting ready for a night out. On this day, however, she was just back from her lawyers’. Her third divorce was final, her datebook said she was twenty-five years old, and she was depressed.

“The truth is,” she told Bennis, “I’d love to have you down here for a couple of weeks. It could be a couple of months. Hell, honey, it could be a couple of years. Maybe you could talk me out of getting married the next time it occurs to me.”

“I just hope you marry rich,” Bennis said.

“I always marry rich. I’m not attracted to fortune hunters, Bennis, just lunatics. This last one tried to dress all my Greek statues in green underwear.”

“Right,” Bennis said.

“Take the plane,” Rosamund said. “I know my way to the airport. I haven’t the foggiest notion if a train station even exists in this place.”

Then started a three-month stretch that Bennis was never able to remember in detail, but was unfortunately unable to forget completely. It had a lot of alcohol in it, and a lot of cigarettes, and the only marijuana Bennis ever smoked in her life. It also—inevitably, since Rosamund had a hand in it—had a lot of men. Bennis was fairly sure she hadn’t slept with all of these men, or even most of them, but she had slept with enough of them so that their faces blurred for her into an impressionistic pudding made up of arrogance, stupidity, and lust for power. At least, she supposed what she was seeing was lust for power. It certainly wasn’t lust for sex. To a man, these idiots had been more capable of being aroused by the sight of the presidential seal on a souvenir postcard than they ever would be by her.

The exception showed up in the middle of January, at one of those parties Rosamund threw in a halfhearted attempt to turn herself into a Washington hostess, if Rosamund had really wanted to be a Washington hostess, she would have been one. Instead, she only thought she ought to want to be one. Rosamund had never been much good at doing what she ought to do. The party in January, populated by half the House of Representatives and most of the Senate, was a combination of embarrassment and farce. The embarrassment came from the decor, which Rosamund had dragged out of her attic for the occasion and which consisted of oversize posters from the sixties, each featuring a large muddy pig standing over a sign identifying it as one or another public official: senator, congressman, president. The farce came from Rosamund’s behavior, which was calculated to ruin her forever. She kept jumping on top of tables and doing the cancan.

It was too much. Bennis soon wanted to escape from that party almost as much as she had once wanted to escape from Boston. Because she didn’t have any place private to go—Rosamund’s house was one of those contemporary concoctions with the bedrooms off a balcony overlooking the main living room; with a party going on there would be as much noise in Bennis’s room as there was around the bar—she headed for the relative quiet of the garden.

She was contemplating the rump of a marble Aphrodite that rose from a patch of wilting bougainvillea when her exception appeared. She had had just a little too much noise and just a little too much to drink. She was feeling all floaty and discontented, as if she’d been promised a special Christmas present and gotten a pair of socks instead. He stepped out of a tangle of wisteria with a champagne glass in his hand and said, “That’s what I like to see. A woman with a little meat on her bones.”

Bennis didn’t know if he was talking about Aphrodite or her, but she wasn’t sure she cared. Here in front of her, she thought, was a man who was good-looking and well-turned-out and sophisticated. He was friendly. He was coming on to her. He was even blessedly free of a wedding ring, meaning he might not be just one more power junkie on the sexual make. He could, she thought, in her alcoholic party haze, be the answer to all her problems.

Of course, Bennis thought now, brushing off the scattering of ash that had fallen from her cigarette to her skirt when the Rolls went over a pothole at seventy miles an hour, he was nothing of the sort. None of the answers-to-all-her-problems she had spent her time discovering in those days ever had been. It was hard to put your life in order when you were never entirely sober and even less frequently sane.

Still, she thought, looking back at Gregor, still sleeping, the one thing she hadn’t expected was that this idiot would cause her problems, more than ten years after the fact. She accepted the long-term consequences of her youthful stupidities with equanimity, by and large: the smoking she now seemed incapable of giving up, the headaches she always got from drinking as little as a single glass of wine, the boredom she had developed with the whole subject of sex unconnected to the promise of a commitment at least as strong as that which cemented her parents’ marriage. It was just that love affairs were supposed to be over when they were over. They weren’t supposed to come back from the dead and kick you in the ass.

She didn’t want to tell Gregor about the drinking. She didn’t want to tell Gregor about the marijuana. She didn’t want to tell Gregor about the men.

Most of all, she didn’t want to tell Gregor that she had once spent four months having an affair with Stephen Whistler Fox.

I
N A WAY, GREGOR
Demarkian’s first sight of Great Expectations was a shock. It wasn’t that the house was bizarre. He had expected that. Great Expectations was infamous for being one of the most flagrant examples of modernist architectural abuse ever constructed, and Victoria Harte was even more infamous for the way she had rammed its plans through the stiff-lipped, tradition-bound snobbery of Oyster Bay’s notorious zoning board. People said she must have blackmailed half the North Shore just to get permission to break ground. In an enclave of nineteenth century buildings and buildings made to look nineteenth century, Great Expectations looked not so much out of place as impossible. Ostentatiously impossible. Most of the big properties on the North Shore were landscaped for concealment, but Great Expectations was not. If anything, more trees had been cleared than necessary, so that the house seemed to be framed in grass and posed for exhibition. Its more striking particulars were visible from as far away as the highway: rooflines that soared to unpredictable heights at unpredictable angles in unpredictable places; windows that had been cut into lopsided trapezoids and asymmetrical triangles; extensions and porticos that reminded Gregor vaguely of the last New York World’s Fair. It was as if a UFO had landed on the lawn of Buckingham Palace during the reign of Queen Victoria.

Actually, Gregor thought, backtracking, it was more as if the men from Mars had come to give aid and succor to the American Revolution. He’d been so involved in private speculations on the character of Stephen Whistler Fox, and the p
olitical
character of the coming weekend, he’d almost forgotten which weekend it was. He’d certainly failed to register the determinedly patriotic decoration of the landscape around him, the American flags hanging from almost every house and store, the papier-mâché Minutemen statues on the lawns of empty-for-summer-vacation schools, the red-white-and-blue banners strung across the main streets of one small town after the other. He had been peripherally bothered by the fact that their driver had gotten off and on the highway to no apparent purpose, taking them down two-lane blacktops and through half a dozen tiny hamlets. Wouldn’t staying on the interstate have been quicker? Now he realized it would have been anything but quicker. There was a yacht parade in Long Island Sound this weekend, and four days of fireworks displays that had been advertised as “more spectacular than the bicentennial.” The island was filling up with tourists, and the interstate was probably filling up with cars. Gregor wondered if their driver was using a CB to keep them out of trouble. The thought of a CB in a Rolls limousine made him want to laugh.

By now, they were off the interstate for good, on the flat winding road that led to Great Expectations’ front gate. The gate, in fact, was right in front of them, not quite blocking off the world at the end of 300 feet of lawn and asphalt. Even at this distance, Gregor could see that there were polished metal hearts dotted across the cedar shingle roof shakes. There were polished metal hearts linked together to make that gate. Just beyond the gate, Gregor was sure he saw even more polished metal hearts, studded into the drive.

He turned to Bennis, who seemed to have put her manuscript away for good and taken up smoking as an avocation, and said, “You won’t believe this, but I feel like an absolute ass.”

Bennis tapped ashes into the tray beside her and said, “What for?”

“For the way I’ve been thinking about these people,” Gregor said, gesturing at the gate in front of them, coming closer by the minute, but not at any great speed. The road was narrow and pocked, and the driver was more interested in protecting the Rolls than in getting them anyplace in a hurry. “I’ve been so—fixated—by Senator Fox and his problems, I’ve been thinking of this house as his.”

“You’ve been thinking of
Victoria Harte’s
house as his?”

“I know whose house it is, Bennis. I always did. I just meant—”

“I know what you meant.” Bennis’s cigarette was out. She lit another one. “It’s just funny, that’s all. Under the circumstances.”