Betrayals (5 page)

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.”

5

I
t was inevitable, of course, that Janet should compare the preparations for her wedding to John Sheridan with those for her wedding to Hank, and she was secretly uncomfortable that this time there seemed to be more excitement and anticipation. Her memories of the first relationship and the first marriage were that everything had happened gradually, almost without planning or arrangement. Her recollection was that they paired up at university without any positive decision to go together, and that it had then seemed natural but not overly dramatic to move in with Hank in Oxford and natural again when he suggested she come over to America to visit his now-dead parents, by which time the eventual marriage was an obvious and unavoidable culmination of everything. Everyone—their friends and their families—would have been shocked if it hadn't happened, as they themselves would have been. Janet could not actually recall Hank
asking
her to be his wife. Without her being able to pinpoint the moment, their conversation had suddenly become about what they would do and how they would do it and where they would do it
when
they were married, almost as if the actual nuptial had been decided upon by other people who knew best, and all they had to do was comply.

This time was quite different.

Harriet was the first person she told—ahead of her parents—and Harriet whooped her instant agreement to be Janet's maid of honor and immediately bustled in to take over the arrangements. Together they bought every fashion book and wedding magazine they could find, to choose the absolutely right gown for Janet and the absolutely right gown for Harriet. Still undecided about either, they extended their reading to house publications after Sheridan said he wanted to sell both their apartments and buy a house whose location and furnishing and fittings were to be entirely her choice. The day after Sheridan told her that, Janet put her name on the mailing list of every agent in Washington and the immediate suburbs. Sheridan had laid the boat up for the winter, so every weekend they scurried around Maryland and Virginia in the Volkswagen, assessing distances and convenience and prices.

Her parents foreshortened their trip to the Middle East and flew directly from Cairo to Washington to meet Sheridan. Janet was more nervous of that encounter than she had been about the meeting with Harriet, but once again, as they always seemed to be, her fears were unfounded. Sheridan's effort was not so obvious to Janet as it had been with Harriet, but the impression upon her parents was the same, if not better.

Janet's mother was clearly surprised and delighted that until their marriage they were maintaining separate homes, a reaction which Janet found curious, since her openly living with Hank had brought no criticism. The fact meant, of course, that her parents could stay with her, and on the night of their arrival she introduced Sheridan simply over early evening drinks, to enable the elderly couple to recover from their jet lag. The following night Sheridan took them out to the Virginia inn. When they went to the restroom, Janet's mother said she thought he was an extremely pleasant man—which for Janet's mother was a high accolade—and much later, after Sheridan left the Rosslyn apartment after his usual solitary brandy, her mother said she was very happy that Janet was getting together with such a nice man, and her father admitted to being impressed with Sheridan in every way. He added that Sheridan appeared extremely knowledgeable about a wide spectrum of international affairs, including the Middle East. From his career her father regarded himself as something of a Middle East specialist. Janet remarked that it was hardly surprising, considering that Sheridan was a State Department analyst, and her father said he'd met dozens of State Department personnel, including supposed analysts, whose grasp was very weak. He'd tried hard to find people who knew Sheridan at various embassy postings but there hadn't been a single one, which the old man regretted. He told his daughter he intended asking around at the next reunion.

“They like you,” Janet reported to Sheridan, when they were by themselves.

“I like them,” Sheridan said.

“Mother's campaigning for the wedding to be in England.”

“Why not?”

“What about your friends? Won't it be difficult for them?”

Sheridan shrugged. “There are none close enough to worry about. And there's no family to ferry across.”

“You're sure?”

“Tell her it's fine.”

“I love you,” said Janet.

“I love you,” he said.

Her parents' visit lasted a week, and by the end Janet believed Sheridan and her father to be firm friends. Before they left they'd agreed on having the ceremony in England in March, which gave Janet and Sheridan five months to decide upon a house, dispose of their own apartments, and make the purchase.

Throughout Janet remained working at Georgetown University from which she called him most days because it was difficult for him to get her when she was in class. It was often a problem for her to reach him at the State Department, too: there was usually a connection delay. When she mentioned it to him, Sheridan agreed it was a nuisance but explained he spent more time in committee meetings, verbally analyzing situations and events, than at his desk, working on papers and reports.