Pascal's Wager (18 page)

“Nothing like that.” I got back up out of the chair and opened the refrigerator and stood there looking sightlessly at Max's collection of Tupperware containers. “It took me twenty-four hours to figure out that I have no real friends. I don't call that ‘licking the earth.'”

“You already said you feel wretched and miserable and that the only passion you see in yourself is what you have for your work.”

“My little idol, as you called it.” I picked up a container of ravioli, opened it, then sealed it back up and returned it to the shelf.

“You're not going to find what you're looking for in there,” Sam said.

I closed the door and faced him. “Where are all these options you're supposed to be giving me?”

“That
is
your option. You either admit you're licking the earth—”

“Could you please choose another image?” I said.

“It's a riddle, or so Pascal says.” Sam got up and hoisted himself onto the counter, where he sat swinging his legs. “You can either try to unravel it using human reason…”

“Or?”

“Or not.”

“What do you mean, ‘or not'? What's the alternative?”

“Silence.”

“I tried that. Look where it got me.”

“Pretty far, from what I can tell.”

“Far?” My voice was rising to fever pitch, and no amount of hair-raking or furniture-clutching was bringing it down. I just stood there, hands gripping the back of a kitchen chair. “I'm in a worse mess than ever. I'm friendless, loveless, sarcastic—”

“And passionate. And real. And genuine.” Sam stopped bumping his heels against the cabinets and slid down to come to the chair next to mine and lean on it. He looked at me with soft eyes. “This woman I'm seeing now is the real thing.”

“If that's true, I'm not liking it.”

“I am.”

He tilted my chin up with the tips of his fingers. I didn't stop him, not until he had kissed me with a softness I didn't know a
man was capable of, a softness that ached down into the very hollow of myself.

I think he pulled away before I did, and he was already rubbing the back of his neck.

“I
knew
I should have brought that spiked belt,” he said. His grin was sheepish. “What were we talking about?”

“Me acting like there's a God,” I said.

“And already being more real.”

We were both talking too fast and avoiding each other's eyes.

“Believe that if you want to,” I said, eyes focused on a splotch of tomato sauce on the table. “But so far, I can't see what difference it makes.”

“Don't worry.” He tilted my chin up again. “It'll happen.”

I
called Dr. McDonald's office again on Monday and asked for another social worker's name. I didn't have time to wait for Paige Hill to come back from Maui or wherever she was. I needed options now, and I asked for a list of good assisted-living facilities. The secretary said she'd fax one over to me where I worked.

That gave me pause. I thought I should probably just go over and pick it up rather than run the risk of somebody in the math department seeing it and wondering why Jill McGavock needed assisted living. And then I stopped pausing.

Who cares what they wonder?
I thought.
The separation lines have gotten way too fuzzy to be worrying about that.

“Do you have access to a fax machine?” the secretary said.

“Yeah,” I said. And I gave her the number.

Of course, I hung around the math department office for the next twenty minutes waiting for it to come in, which caused a few puzzled looks among the secretaries, and I snatched it out of the machine almost before it was finished printing. Then I scurried to my office with it like I'd just staged a bank heist. I was poring over it—a thermos of coffee beside me—when my cell phone rang.

“Have I got a deal for you,” Sam's voice said.

“I'm sure,” I said. “So far your deals have done nothing but complicate my life.”

“I'm about to uncomplicate it,” he said. “You want to go to dinner tomorrow night?”

That didn't qualify as uncomplicating as far as I was concerned. Sam must have heard that in my silence, because he said, “You don't want to miss this. It promises to be upscale. My father is buying.”

His
father?
Meet a parent? Good grief.

“He's going to be breezing through the Bay Area and wants to take me to dinner.” It was Sam's turn to pause. “If you have any pity for me in your heart at all, you won't make me do this alone.”

“He's that bad, huh?” I said.

He chuckled. “I don't want to give you any preconceived notions.”

“If there's one thing I have for you, Blaze, it's pity. What time?”

“Hercules Bakalis always dines fashionably late. Will you be starved if we make it 7:30?”

“No way! Your father's first name is
not
Hercules.”

“It is. I swear it.”

“I'm going to want to see a driver's license.”

“You know what?” Sam said, laughter weaving itself in. “If you meet my father and ask for his driver's license, I will lick the earth.”

“That's really okay,” I said. “Where am I meeting you?”

“The Iberia Restaurant in Menlo Park, right across from the train station.”

“Swanky,” I said.

I had to admit that conjuring up images of what Sam's father was going to be like provided the best distraction yet. By the time I parked near the Iberia the next evening—after leaving Mother under Max's watchful eye—I was convinced he was either going to be a paragon of the church with a heavily hair-sprayed do and the Ten Commandments engraved on his cuff links, in which case he would embarrass Sam right under the table with his clichés, or he'd be a long-faced Latin scholar of the old school,
who would himself be driven under the table by his son's unseemly jocularity.

I was wrong on both counts.

In the first place, the man who stood up as I approached the table was the absolute spitting image of Sam, except that there were a few streaks of gray in his dark, curly hair, and he had a better haircut. In fact, his haircut probably cost him what I earned per quarter. Like Sam, he had thick eyebrows that were already expressing approval of the fact that I wasn't drop-dead ugly. His olive skin was only slightly lined with age, and a strong chin gave him a look of power, even though he had the Bakalis narrow shoulders and wiry build. He even wore glasses with frames similar to Sam's.

When Sam stood up, too, I was surprised to see that he was actually taller than his father. Hercules appeared bigger. It was probably the take-charge way he put out both hands, grabbed mine, and pulled me within inches of his face.

“She's incredible!” he said. “Marry her quick, son, before I take her for myself.”

I turned to stare at Sam. His facial expression was a mixture of utter mortification and extreme delight. It was obvious he was enjoying my current state of speechlessness more than he was suffering from embarrassment. I turned back to his father.

“You're both out of luck,” I said. “I'm not up for grabs.”

I knew it was a poor choice of words before the sentence was even out of my mouth, but I didn't expect the leer that formed itself on the man's face.

“Now, that's really too bad,” he said.

“So, uh, Jill—have a seat!” Sam said.

I practically dove for the one across the table from Hercules, but he was too fast for me and tucked me into the chair between himself and Sam with such deftness, I would have had to knock him, the table, and a nearby waiter down to avoid it.

“What does this gorgeous creature drink?” Hercules said.

Sam blinked at me. “I have no idea.”

“I can see your social prowess hasn't improved any. What will you have, honey?”

“Club soda,” I said.

“That's it? Are you a teetotaler like my son?”

“Something like that.”

He gave an exaggerated sigh. “It's a shame when a beautiful woman like yourself falls into the clutches of the church.”

“Dad—”

I put my hand up to Sam. “I have fallen into no one's clutches,” I said to his father. “Least of all the church's.”

A grin spread slowly across his face. “Well, then, this could turn out to be a very interesting evening after all.”

While he ordered Scotch on the rocks—at least his second from what I could smell—I exchanged glances with Sam. I think he would have been savoring my annoyance more if there hadn't been something else going on with him. I could see it in the way he was running his hand up and down his water glass.

Interesting
, I thought.
Sam in the hot seat instead of me
.

With drink orders taken and an appetizer both Sam and I had declined on the way, Hercules turned back to me and launched into a series of questions. They were the usual getting-to-know-you queries, but I had the sense that although I was grudgingly giving him information about the status of my dissertation and my plans for the future, he was reading my measurements into my answers. It was all I could do not to ask the waiter for a barf bag.

Sam only let that go on for a few minutes before he said, “So, Dad, what's on your plate these days?”

Hercules's eyebrows lifted. “You mean, besides trying to entice this woman away from you?”

“Yeah,” Sam said.

“I'm trying to sell off those condos down in West Palm Beach,” Hercules said. “Too much of a hassle. Interest rates are down right now—or did you notice?”

“I heard something about that, yeah,” Sam said.

“You heard something about it,” Hercules snickered. “You better get your head out of that ostrich hole, son. It's time for you to invest in a little real estate. You still living in a rented room?”

“I haven't changed my address, if that's what you mean,” Sam said.

I looked at him. He was grinning. There was no gritting of teeth, no tightening of the jaw. If that had been my mother and me having that conversation—and it could have been a year ago—I'd have been clawing the tablecloth.

“My son has more money than he knows what to do with,” Hercules said to me. “Did you know that?”

“I had no idea,” I said.

“Now you do. Does that change your mind about being up for grabs? Because if it does, let me tell you about
my
financial status!”

He winked and took a swallow of his Scotch. I kicked Sam under the table.

“Jill grew up on a college campus,” Sam said. “She knows non-tenured professors don't make a lot of money.”

Hercules pretended to choke on his drink. “You're still not tenured?”

“No, Dad.”

“What do you have to do to change that? Who do I have to call?”

Nobody if you
ever
want him to be tenured!
I thought.
One conversation with you and the poor guy will be blackballed from academia forever
.

“I'm not trying to change it,” Sam said.

“Yeah, well, that's no surprise.” Hercules gave Sam a long look over the top of his glass, shook his head as if he'd just seen something disgusting, and drained half his drink. When he spoke again, it was to me, in a voice embittered by liquor and whatever old baggage he'd just opened.

“You probably don't know this, Jill,” he said, “or maybe you do. You seem like a pretty sharp cookie yourself. My son is brilliant. Near genius, I'd say.”

“Hardly,” Sam said.

Hercules pointed his finger at Sam, though he was still talking to me. “But you see? You see what he does? He pretends not to recognize his own potential so he'll have an excuse not to live up to it. He's always been that way—incredibly intelligent and lazier than heck.” He gave his head another derisive shake on the way back to the Scotch. “What a waste.”

The only reason I didn't respond was that I was torn between anger
for
Sam that this man would humiliate him in front of someone he didn't know and anger
at
Sam for not reaching across the table and grabbing him by the chest hairs—which, I noticed, were peeking out of his too-far-unbuttoned shirt. I was growing more mentally nauseous by the minute.

“Sorry, Dad,” Sam said easily. “This is where we agree to disagree, remember?”

Hercules looked at him, grunted, and shook his head.

“If we're going to do that,” he said, “I'm going to need another drink.” He looked at me. “You sure you don't want anything stronger, honey?”

“It's Jill,” I said. “And no—thanks.”

At that point, Sam steered the conversation back to his father's business ventures, during which there was a great deal of name-dropping, geographically speaking. We stayed on that somewhat safer ground until Hercules had polished off three-quarters of his next Scotch and said to Sam, “So, have you heard from your mother?”

“Yeah. We talk at least once a week.”

“And? How is she?”

I assumed by this time that Sam's parents were divorced. I couldn't say I blamed his mother. Her husband had probably been running around on her for years—or maybe just trying to. I couldn't imagine any woman with an ounce of self-respect falling
for a man who virtually drooled over his prey. He made Jacoboni look like a prude.

“Has Sam told you that his mother left me for another man?” Hercules said.

“Uh, no,” I said.

“Nor does she want to hear it from you, Dad,” Sam said. There was still no clear annoyance in his voice, but he wasn't thrilled with this line of questioning either, I could tell that by the way he was toying with the silver napkin ring.

“Up and left me after twenty years of marriage,” Hercules said. “Is she seeing anybody now?”

“You'd have to ask her,” Sam said.

“Not possible. She hangs up on me every time I call her.” He looked at me. The whites of his eyes were turning into road maps. “Why would a woman you raised a family with do that to you? Why do you think?”

“What? Hang up when you call her?” I said.

“Yeah. You're a woman—and a beautiful woman. Have I told you that?”

“Several times, Dad,” Sam said.

“So you oughta know why a man's ex-wife won't give him the time of day.”

“I've never been an ex-wife,” I said. “So I couldn't even venture a guess.”
Besides, you don't
even
want to hear my theory on this
.

“How old are you?” Hercules said suddenly.

“Not that it's any of your business,” I said, “but I'm thirty.”

His eyes lit up. “I like this woman, Sam. Why have you been hiding her?” He looked back at me. “So, if you're thirty, why haven't you ever been married? I know it's a personal question. I'm just curious.”

No, you're just nosy. And obnoxious. And smarmy
. Sam must have gotten his personality genes from his mother.

The appetizer arrived—some kind of seafood concoction made with fish flown in from the Canary Islands. Max would
have been in ecstasy. The server's arrival at our table created enough commotion to divert attention from Hercules's question, and Sam again jumped in to redirect the conversation.

“So, Dad,” he said. “Have you been back to the cardiologist?”

“Are you kidding?” Hercules said. “I'm not going back to him. Why should I pay three hundred and fifty bucks to have him tell me to quit drinking and quit smoking and slow down, none of which I have any intention of doing?”

“Do you have any intention of living much longer?” Sam said.

I glanced at him. He was serious. He actually cared whether this man dropped dead or not. I had to give him the Compassion Award for that. If he'd been my father, I would have practically been
wishing
for a nice myocardial infarction.

“Don't start in on me with your lifestyle lecture,” Hercules said. “I'm going to live my life to the fullest, and I'm going to die doing it. End of discussion.” He shifted his focus to me, though by this point the word
focus
was an overstatement. “I had to end the discussion, because the next part is where he tries to convince me that I need to get religion before I keel over.”

“I have never tried to convince you to
get religion,”
Sam said.

It was the first hint of real tension I'd detected in Sam's voice all evening. In spite of the subject matter, I wanted to say,
Atta boy, Sam
.
That's
the spirit!