Conspiracy Theory (2 page)

She was waiting for him to say something. Tony was aware of that. He was also aware of the fact that he would not say something. It wasn't to his advantage, and there wasn't any point. The privacy shield that cut them off from the driver was closed. The windows of the car were tinted darkly enough so that nobody on the outside would be able to see in unless they pressed their faces directly to the glass. Tony looked down at the copy of
Civitas Dei
he had in his hands and wished he'd brought a book light. It was rude to read in front of other people, but he never cared if he was rude to Charlotte.

“I'm not going to shut up and go away,” Charlotte said, the words coming out in that nasal Society whine that made his teeth grate. You'd think, after years of listening to Bill Buckley and Katharine Hepburn, that women like Charlotte would know better. “I'm not going to drop the subject,” she said. “This has gotten completely out of hand, Tony, and you know it.”

“I know no such thing. The only thing that seems to be out of hand is you.”

“You can't expect me to just sit still while you … well. While you make it plain to everybody we know—”

“It's been plain to everybody we know since the day we were married. More than plain. Nobody on earth was fooled, not even you.”

“You think it was plain to everybody we knew that from the day we were married you couldn't stand to fuck me?”

“Where do you get the language, Charlotte? Sometimes I listen to you and I think I'm hearing the boys at the YMCA.”

“You don't go to the YMCA.”

“I don't, no. What's your point?”

Charlotte shifted in her seat. Her fingers were long and thin, but not as long and thin as his own. Her nails were covered in clear polish. “It's one thing to have the sort of mistress they all do,” she said carefully. “Actresses. That sort of thing. I do understand that sort of thing. But that's not what you're up to, and you know it.”

“I'm not actually up to anything. There is no other woman. I am not having an affair. I'm too damned busy to do a mistress any good.”

“Maybe you just hate sex. All kinds of sex. That would be amusing.”

It was already dark outside. The car lit up every time they went under one of the tall arched lamps that lined this part of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Tony toyed with the idea of telling the driver to keep driving, to miss their exit, to head for the mountains and Lehigh and that long stretch of road with no exits at all.

“I don't think you heard me,” Charlotte said.

“I heard you. I don't consider this discussion worth having.”

“You didn't always hate sex, though. I should know.”

“Should you?”

“You've managed to father four children.”

“At least. I should think that would be enough. I should think that would be enough of me for you, to be precise. What is it you really want here, Charlotte?”

“I want you to give it up.”

“Give what up? You haven't discovered anything I'm doing that I could give up. There isn't anything to discover. And you can't want me to go back to sleeping with you. You barely stood it the first time.”

“I want you to give
him
up.”

“David?”

“Yes, David. I want you to give him up.”

“Why? Or do you now imagine that I'm sleeping with David? God only knows when he'd have the time, considering the fact that he's sleeping with half the debutantes in Philadelphia and three-quarters of the debutantes in New York. At last count. And he's completely in control of the Price Heaven mess, which is a mess, and which is likely to get messier very soon.”

“I don't see why you stick up for him,” Charlotte said. “He's not just in charge of Price Heaven now, he set that whole thing up to begin with. He's managed it from day one. And what did you get? There's going to be a bankruptcy any day now and you know it. I can't stand the sight of him. He makes my skin crawl.”

“Why?”

“How should I know why? He's insidious. And I don't care who his family is. He's not—right. I don't know how to put it.”

“You never did have much of a talent for words.”

“I don't need that kind of thing from you now, Tony. I really don't. I need him out of my life. At the very least you can stop inviting him to where I am.”

“David is my confidential assistant. We're in the middle of a major crisis. You're behaving like a spoiled brat.”

“You're always in the middle of a major crisis. To hear you tell it, there's nothing in life but major crises. The story of American banking.”

“Often, yes.”

“Get rid of him, or I'll get a very public divorce.”

“Nonsense.”

“Maybe I'll do something better. Maybe I'll leak it to the press. Not the press you own, the other kind. The tabloids. I'll say you are sleeping with David Alden. You know they'll believe it.”

“The tabloids aren't interested in me. Their readers don't know who I am, and wouldn't care if they did.”

“Maybe I'll leak it to that man. Michael Harridan. The one with the Web

site.”

“Michael Harridan is taken about as seriously as Bugs Bunny.”

“You don't take me seriously. And that's a mistake, Tony. I promise it is.”

“We're getting off the turnpike,” Tony said. “We'll be home in less than twenty minutes.”

Charlotte turned her face away, her long neck straining against the stiff white collar of her linen shirt. She was too thin, the way all these women were. The muscles in her neck looked like ropes. He was not afraid of her. There was nothing she could do to him, and nothing she would really want to do, once she thought about it. She made him tired, so that all he could think of was sleep, endless sleep, black sleep, the kind that was supposed to come over you when you drowned in the waters of Lethe.

Still, if he'd been somebody else, somebody poorer, somebody less hedged in by security and position—he would have wrapped his hands around her neck and ripped her windpipe out.

There was a single short moment, at almost exactly six o'clock, when Anne Ross Wyler considered staying home for the evening. She had that priest coming over, for one thing. Lucinda had printed his name in block letters on a three-by-five card and tucked the card in her mirror, so that she could practice pronouncing it:
Father Tibor Kasparian
. It seemed ironic as hell to her that she had managed to give up almost everything about her former life, but this. She still could not pronounce “foreign” names with anything at all like grace. Tony would probably tell her she was insane, that there was nothing about life with the family that could have made her tone-deaf to Eastern European ca-dences—or maybe he wouldn't have, because, in his own way, Tony was as odd and contrary a person as she was. Whatever it was, though, she couldn't do it. Even Italian names threw her, and by now it was practically an Old Philadelphia tradition to be Italian. Every once in a while, she would veer to her mirror and try the name out, stretching the syllables, worried that she was getting it more wrong every time she tried to say it. She was only grateful that she had so many other things tucked into the mirror's edges and hanging over its top and sides that she couldn't see herself at all. There was one thing she did miss about the way she had been when she had still been part of All That. She missed the fanatical discipline of the body. God only knew, she didn't do anything for herself when she was left to herself. She was fifty-five years old, and she looked it. “Stumpy,” one of the newspapers had called her once. One of the local television stations had described her as “the once elegant Mrs. Kendrick Wyler.” She ran her hands through her very thick grey hair and felt it stop abruptly in midair. This last time, she had cut it off herself with a pair of pinking shears one afternoon when she'd been busy and it had got in her way. Other women, millions of them, managed to live sane lives in the world without turning themselves into poster children for bag ladies, but with her it was like the “foreign” names. She couldn't seem to manage it.

The other reason she had considered not going out was that it was cold, as cold as she could ever remember it being in November in Philadelphia. Down on the first floor, there was ice along the edges of the windowsills. If they ever got enough money together, they would have to replace those windows. Surely it made sense that, in weather like this, the girls would not be out on the street where anybody could see them. That was what she would have thought, her first year at Adelphos House. Before that, she had never even wondered what whores did when it got cold. They could have gone to Florida for the winter, and it would have made sense to her. She hadn't ever wondered who the whores were, either, or where they came from, and if she had she had probably thought that they must be black. That was what you saw in the movies, when you went to that kind of movie. She couldn't have said what you saw on television, because at that point in her life, she had never owned one, and never watched one except on trips to Europe, in those five-star hotels where every mechanical convenience was provided for Americans who were assumed to be mad for technology. God, she had been such an incredible, unbelievable snot. Worse, she had been a happily ignorant snot, and there was nothing more evil on this planet than happy ignorance.

The whores would be out tonight, in the cold. They would stand together in tight little huddles near parking meters, wearing fake-fur jackets that shed when they walked, and too much makeup, and fishnet stockings that left huge patches of the skin on their legs bare to the cold. The johns would be out tonight too, but they would be in cars.

She got a black jersey turtleneck out of her wardrobe, to go with her black pants. She would find a black sweater to put over that. She considered pinning her
Freedom FROM Religion
button to her sweater, and decided against it. There was no point in antagonizing Father Kasparian, who was not representative of the kind of religion she wanted to be free of, at least as far as she could tell. She ran a brush through her hair and then ran her hands through it, ruining everything. It had been weeks since she had had a full day to herself, and she was exhausted.

The would be out, in their cars the way they always were. With the cold this bad, they'd sit well back in their seats. They wouldn't stick their heads out the windows. That would make it all the harder to get pictures of them, which meant she would have to rely on the pictures of the license plates, which was always problematic. Hell, even when she got a picture of money being passed with the john's face as clear as it would have been for a video dating service, it was nearly impossible to get the police to do anything. It didn't matter that the girls were mostly under sixteen or that there had just been a raid on a child porn ring on the other side of the city. She wondered what that meant, that the police jumped right in to protect boys, but looked the other way when it came to teenaged girls, and there were no other kinds of girls on the streets of Philadelphia. Whores might get old in New York and Los Angeles, but here, they seemed to disappear as soon as they hit eighteen. Maybe they just died.

She found the sweater she was looking for and pulled it over her head. She shoved her feet into good black leather sneakers. She felt like James Bond, sometimes, except that she either walked or took the bus. She'd long ago decided it was too expensive to keep a regular car. A couple of centuries ago, her family had come to this part of Pennsylvania as dissenting Quakers, pacifist and dour, with a streak of asceticism in them that some of their neighbors would have considered extreme in Puritans.
That
was a part of the family legacy she'd hung on to with both hands. “You'll never be really happy unless you start flagellating yourself,” Lucinda said, whenever she went on a streak of self-recrimination and self-denial—and it was true, but it was limited, because she would never allow it to interfere with her work. Maybe that explained what all those women were doing, like her mother, when they starved themselves into their size twos. Maybe it was just Puritanism come back to haunt them, disguising itself as snobbery.

She took twenty dollars and her driver's license out of her wallet. When she hit the street, she carried neither her purse nor any significant amount of money. She took the gold chain off her neck and left it on top of her vanity table. The table seemed badly named, since the mirror was unusable and there was no sign of makeup on it. She brushed the hair out of her eyes again and vowed, for the thousandth time in the last two years, to let it grow out long enough to be held back in a rubber band. The three-by-five cards stuck into the mirror's sides shuddered a little in the draft allowed by the fact that the windowpane here had a crack in it and three tiny pieces missing.
Freedom from Religion Foundation:
http://www.ffrf.org,
one of them said.
Lucinda's birthday, June 26th
, said another. Anne looked at the one with Father Kasparian's name on it, said the name three times in her head and once out loud, and then gave the whole thing up.

Out in the hall, the rest of the house felt deserted. It probably was. Six o'clock on a Friday night was not usually one of their busier times, although with the cold this bad it would get busy later. They'd start lining up outside the front door, looking for shelter, somewhere around ten. She looked at the drawings Lucinda had put up on the walls without really seeing any of them. They had a woman come in once a week who worked with the girls with what she called “art therapy.” Anne didn't think she was doing any good, but she didn't think she was doing any harm, and the girls seemed to like it. She got to the stairwell and went down. Nobody was in the foyer, and there was no sign of anybody on the porch. She checked her watch, a plain steel Timex she'd bought at Kmart for seventeen dollars. When she was seventeen, her mother had given her a gold dress watch from Tiffany's. It had cost 1,500 dollars and she had lost it one day playing tennis at the Coach and Racquet Club. She had had it for less than two months.