Read The Boy Who Could Draw Tomorrow Online
Authors: Quinn Sinclair
***
She gave Sam some Benedryl to help him drift off to sleep. She puffed up his pillows, tidied the covers over his shoulders, then rubbed his back as he lay there restively tossing and gently, ever more gently, sobbing in the darkened room. At length she kissed him and went to get ready for bed, changing into her nightgown in the bathroom she
shared with Hal instead of in the bedroom where he could see her undress.
It was when she went to brush her teeth that she finally noticed his soap-written message on the mirror of the medicine chest.
Forgive? Forgive what? What was it that he
really
wished her forgiveness for?
She wet a wad of toilet paper and washed the mirror clean. But when she dried it off with a towel, the word came back, hovering stubbornly beneath the surface of the glass like an eternal ghostly image. She tried it again, repeating the procedure, this time pressing harder with the wet toilet paper and the towel. The word was fainter now, but demonstrably there, a dogged reminder of what she now dreaded might be his secret and unforgivable guilt.
She switched off the night light on her side of the bed, slipped herself gingerly between the covers and turned onto her side so that her back was to him.
"How much did you pay for it?" she said.
She heard him breathe out with annoyance.
"For what?"
"For the necklace."
"Don't you like it? It looks nice on you."
"I asked you how much you paid for it."
"I'll answer you when you face me," he said.
"Forget it." Peggy said. She pushed her knees free of the covers and got to her feet.
***
She stood listening at Sam's doorway. When she was certain he was asleep, she stepped softly into the room and went to his worktable.
The Jumbo pad was where he always kept it.
She lay down on the couch in the third bedroom and stretched out, reaching behind her to turn on the floor lamp. It wasn't there. She looked through every page, but nowhere could she find the drawing of the woman whose blank face was disfigured by the nose of a pig.
She checked again, pressing each sheet between her fingers to make sure no two were stuck together.
It was gone, torn out—but by whom? Sam always kept his pads intact, storing them under his bed when one was finished and he was ready to start on a fresh one.
Once again she riffled through the pages. Maybe this was a new pad, a different one. But no, this was the same one. She saw the moving van, the portrait of Val, the taxi cab going over the bridge, the pendant that hung from the slim chain encircling her own neck.
***
She turned off the light and replaced the pad on Sam's worktable, then went back to bed. She lay listening in the darkness—his breathing, the blood pumping in her ears, a car that now and then moved more noisily than most as it made its way along Lexington or Park.
She was willing to understand that she did not like this quiet anymore. Eight floors above the street, in a neighborhood that was predominantly residential, behind the thicker walls that came with a pre-war building, it all made for a strangled silence louder than the sirens that had screamed all night back on Thirty-third.
What the hell was happening to them, anyway? With their fancy new jobs and their fancy new co-op, their son miraculously enrolled in a snooty little prep school—why was it that she'd never felt more unhappy in her entire married life? She felt so alienated from Hal it terrified her—if it weren't for Sam, she realized, she could walk away from her marriage without a backward glance. The awful truth of it was enough to make her sob.
When had everything started to fall apart? Had they just gone through too many changes too quickly? Was it the move? Was that the dreadful, terrible mistake that had signaled an end to all their domestic contentment? Or was it that goddamned school? It seemed to mean too much to Hal—during the times they'd discussed their "St. Martin's boy," she'd had to fight a feeling that Hal seemed to place a life-and-death importance on Sam's being there, as if all the insecurities and self-doubts he felt about his own background would rise up and annihilate him if Sam were for some reason deprived entree to the magic sphere St. Martin's represented to him. It was unhealthy, really, the passionate significance Hal attached to it.
When she stopped to think about it, Peggy had to admit to herself that there was something deeply unnerving about
all
the events of the past several months. How
odd
it was, really, that she and Hal should have both received such fantastic promotions, after so many years, within weeks of each other. And she knew there were people at the store who couldn't really believe the Coopers had been accepted into this building, a building whose board normally demanded that applicants be able to pay for the apartment in cash and
still
show assets in excess of the purchase price. The Coopers would have been lucky to make it into a low-rent building on the Upper West Side—that they'd gotten into
this
building was almost inexplicable.
And finally, there was the matter of St. Martin's. Peggy had absolutely no doubt that had Sam applied through normal channels, he'd have stood as good a chance as the next guy of getting in. He was terrifically bright and engaging, and even the toniest prep schools were not the exclusive province of the "upper crust" anymore. The public school system was so rotten that by now the middle class had invaded the private schools in droves.
But Peggy was too well versed in the admissions procedures—God knows she'd heard enough about it from her frantic friends last year—not to realize that there was something—well, something
bizarre
—in the way Sam had just waltzed in practically on the same day the term began. She
knew
people were talking about it,
knew
that a lot of people were trying to figure out whom the Coopers knew, whom they'd managed to pay off, to get Sam in. Well, the hell with all that. She had far worse things to worry about than a bunch of nasty gossip. What she had to do was something to regain the feeling that she was in control of her life and that she lived within a comforting and sustaining domestic circle.
Almost as if he'd read her mind, Hal said in a voice that was little more than a croak, "You want to talk?"
"All right," she said, and turned onto her back.
"I don't like what's happening to us," he said.
"Me neither," Peggy said. "It's not good for Sam."
"I know," he said. "Let's fix it," he said, and she could feel his hand jerk up from the mattress, the palm flattening gently on her belly.
She nearly jumped at his touch, almost perceptibly recoiling.
"You said you wanted to talk," she said.
"Yes," he whispered, his lips touching her ear now, his hand traveling to the hem of her nightgown, pausing there as if awaiting permission.
She lifted herself and snapped on her night light. She got out of bed and went to the rocker.
"Is that how you want to talk?" he said, hoisting himself up onto his elbows and regarding her in the dim light.
"This is fine," Peggy said. She raised her knees to her chest and locked her arms around her legs, a motion that started the rocker listing to and fro. "Let's begin with Sam," she said. "I think we should take him out of that school."
"No," he said, instantly hostile and defensive. "That's out of the question."
"But he's upset. Can't you see how much he dislikes it?"
"He'll get over it. Besides, they don't refund tuition. It's right in the contract we signed—no refunds, and no exceptions."
"You'd sacrifice your son for money?"
He sat up higher and snapped on his light.
"That's a pretty lowdown crack."
"I'm sorry, Hal," she said, not sounding as if she meant it at all, "but I don't think you really have any idea what kind of a repressive environment that kid's being subjected to. You've never even been inside St. Martin's. I think you're acting like an uptight, social-climbing
arriviste,
willing to tolerate any indignity just for the sake of some hollow status symbol. There
are
other private schools you know—schools that would be much more appropriate for a creative kid like Sam. At least let me apply him to a few for next year."
"Peggy, I forbid it." He was icy cold now, talking to her in a tone of voice she'd never heard from him in all their years together. "I think you're making a very hasty and ill-considered snap judgement. If you think Sam's not being treated properly, for God's sake set up a conference with his teacher, talk to the headmaster, try to work things out. Don't just go off half-cocked and yank him out before you've even given the place a chance. Miss Putnam told me—"
Suddenly he broke off, a look of panic washing over him. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, and began searching nervously for his cigarettes.
"Miss Putnam told you," Peggy repeated, her bewilderment swamping the rage that had begun to flood her only a few moments before. "When did you talk to Miss Putnam? When I tried to get in to see her I was treated to the bum's rush by a goddamned secretary!"
"Oh, well, I didn't
see
her, Pegs. I just chatted with her briefly on the phone. Just this morning. I felt bad about not being home for Sam's first day of school, and I thought I'd check in with his teacher to see how things were going. I didn't find her at all unapproachable," he concluded smugly, his earlier discomfiture all but vanished.
He was lying. She felt it with the force of a blow. But some sixth sense told her that now was not the time to call him on it. Let him think he was fooling her—when the right time came to get to the bottom of all this, she'd know it. The thought filled her with disgust but she was even beginning to wonder if
Hal
had somehow bribed Sam's way into St. Martin's—although God only knew where he could have gotten the money. But then where was the money for any of their new lifestyle coming from?
"You're tense, Pegs," he was saying. "You're making a mountain out of a molehill. I'm telling you, Sam's fine. He'll adjust. Just give it a little time." She heard him chuckle to himself as if privately amused. "I don't know what's gotten into you lately—but, lady, you've sure been acting strange."
She teetered herself forward and held herself there so that the chair stayed poised on the front of the rockers.
"Did you take a page out of the pad Sam's working on?"
"Did I what?"
"You heard me."
He sat up again. She could see him staring at her, his eyes briefly darting to the seat of the chair. She let go of her legs and canted them to the floor.
"Too bad," he said. "Best view I've had all day."
"I asked you if you took a drawing out of Sam's pad."
"Now why should I do that?" he said.
She got up from the chair and moved across the floor, placing herself squarely in his line of vision.
"What did you whisper to Sam when you carried him out of the dining room? I want you to tell me what you whispered to him."
She could see him studying her, and she saw his hand swing up to the night light and his fingers feeling for the little burled knob that switched it on and off.
"Jesus," he said. "You're nuts."
And then she heard the tiny click as he rotated the knob and the circuit shut off.
She kept hearing it over and over in the silence, that click. It was like the period at the end of a sentence. Or a small pistol's hammer abruptly thumbed back.
Biting winds drove a steady drizzle of bone-chilling rain against hapless pedestrians; traffic snarled for miles in every direction; and it would have been worth Peggy's life to catch a cab. Rush hour was at its height, and since the subway was right outside Bloomingdale's anyway, she decided to make her way downtown underground.
Her estrangement from Hal had intensified over the past several weeks, and the affable, affectionate and amusing man she'd known and loved for so long had all but disappeared. In his place was a driven and remote careerist who seemed to her to be totally at the mercy of the demands of his job, and utterly indifferent to all they had formerly shared together.
As the Lexington Avenue train lurched to a halt at Thirty-third Street and Peggy struggled her way out of the car against the damp and urgent crowd that jostled and crushed her, she thought bitterly of the recent quarrels she and Hal had been having over St. Martin's. For reasons she couldn't put into words, but which she felt with the certainty of her entire being, Peggy was convinced that she should get Sam out of there as soon as she could make some alternate arrangement. She couldn't really stick him in a public school at this point—aside from the fact that she herself didn't really want that for him, Hal's burgeoning snobbery simply precluded such a move. It was crazy, really, the intensity of his investment in that school—crazy and frightening, because it just didn't make any sense.
Almost in desperation, Peggy had agreed to have dinner tonight with Sarah Goldenson, Sam's old nursery school teacher. The woman had called her the other day—out of the blue, it had seemed to Peggy—to see how Sam was doing, and Peggy had decided right then and there to get together with her and pour out all of her misgivings and miseries about St. Martin's. Maybe the teacher who had been so good to Sam, and who so obviously adored him, could help her. For some reason, she was almost certain that Sarah Goldenson would not find her growing distaste for St. Martin's at all surprising or uncomprehensible.
Peggy spotted Sarah Goldenson as soon as she entered the restaurant. She'd already taken a table, and her face brightened with a welcoming and somehow comforting smile as Peggy approached her.
After they'd ordered drinks and dispensed with some routine and perfunctory chit-chat, Sarah Goldenson came abruptly to the point. She didn't mean to pry or cause offense, she assured Peggy, but Sam was such a
special
child, and she'd always been so fond of him, that she just felt she had to let Peggy know that however ridiculous it might seem, she'd been worried about Sam for months. She felt she had to share these feelings with Peggy.
Peggy's vodka and tonic had arrived by this time, and she'd already drained it and signaled the waiter to bring another round. And even though she'd quit smoking years ago, and hadn't even thought about it in as long as she could remember, she now felt a craving for a cigarette that almost left her breathless.
"... didn't get to meet her when she observed at the nursery school," Sarah Goldenson was saying, "but it seemed to me a Miss Putnam from St. Martin's exhibited a rather inexplicable—unsavory, if you will—interest in your Sam, especially since at that point he wasn't even an applicant."
"I'm afraid I'm not following you," Peggy said weakly, as she reached gratefully for her second drink and decided to force herself to nurse it.
"Well, as you probably know, it's common practice for these private schools to send someone around to various nursery schools to observe applicants in their nursery school environment. Since Town and Country sends so many kids on to private schools, we're subjected to a constant round of observers in the fall. Their comments and judgments become a part of each kid's application file. Anyway, one day last October when I was out sick with one thing or another, a Miss Putnam came to observe my class, which was perfectly normal, since a number of the boys had applied to St. Martin's. But about a week later, she called me on the phone and started asking a lot of questions about Sam, particularly about his drawing, which she must have seen him working on while she was there. I just assumed there must be some mistake—I told her Sam Cooper hadn't even applied to St. Martin's. She said she knew that—she'd just been so taken by his talent she wanted to know more about him. At the time I guess I didn't find that all
that
peculiar—he is strikingly gifted as an artist—but then, when I found out he'd been admitted to that school on such an irregular basis and I thought back on my conversation with Putnam, it seemed to take on a—oh, I don't know—almost
sinister
quality. And the more I've thought about it, the more concerned I've become. So here I am. If you think I'm out of line—even if you think I'm nuts—just say so, and we'll just go ahead with dinner as if this conversation never took place. But I have to tell you that I know in my gut I'm on to something!"
Peggy was now in the grip of an anxiety so powerful she felt that it must surely be emanating from her body like some visible substance. But surely neither she nor Sarah Goldenson should allow themselves to disintegrate into infantile irrationality over this whole business. When you thought about it, their fears and suspicions not just about St. Martin's but about Sam's "gift" itself—for Peggy knew without having to be told that Sarah Goldenson felt as she did that there was a literally uncanny power to Sam's drawing—seemed both ludicrous and deranged. But no. It simply was no use to try to pretend that this was "all in her head." But what to do? Somehow she had to get Sam out of Putnam's clutches—he'd never set foot in that school again. And as for Hal's complicity in all this—if complicity there was—she'd get to the bottom of
that,
too. Her son's survival was at stake. She was convinced of that now. Nothing and no one could prevent her from doing everything in her power to safeguard him.
***
The next morning she walked right in. With Sam's hand in hers, his grip tightening when they came into view of the school, Peggy strode up the marble steps, through the doors, and into the large, domed space that functioned as an anteroom. It was empty of anyone who looked official, but it was crowded with boys moving in all directions, some of the older ones pausing to gape as if her presence contaminated the air.
When she bent down to speak to him, she could see Sam's eyes darting frantically to the side, real fear grabbing at the flesh of his face so that his cheeks seemed to sag.
"Now look, honey," Peggy said softly, "there's absolutely nothing to this. I'll have a little chat with Miss Putnam, and everything will be hunky-dory, I promise. You just show me the way, okay?"
He pulled her along to a hallway that gave off to their left. The light was weak in here, but even so Peggy could see large, brooding portraits of somber, white-haired men peering down at them from heavy gilt frames. A curious odor, like that of wood smoke mixed with a sweetish fragrance—lavender, perhaps, or frankincense—hung thick in the corridor like some meaty, sluggish mist. Small boys passed silently by in both directions, their well-shod feet stepping reverently as they negotiated the gleaming parquet floor.
Sam came to a halt before a wide, paneled door.
There was a white card fitted into a brass slot, the slot screwed into the door at a level where a small boy would have no trouble seeing it. Inked onto the card in flowery, embellished script there was the number One and the letter P.
Sam tugged at Peggy's hand as if to warn her, as if to say this was it.
She glanced at her watch. She had to hold her wrist closer to her face to read the time in the light that came foggily from overhead.
It was eight minutes to eight, exactly three minutes before the first bell.
Peggy knocked lightly, waited, and then she smiled confidently at Sam and pushed open the door.
***
Three rows of wide-eyed faces—their heads all turning on the stalks of their necks like standing birds shifting their attention in unison—gawked fiercely in Peggy's direction.
Gently she coaxed Sam forward, and then she took a step inside after him.
"Go to your seat," Peggy said, and again pushed at the door.
It swung all the way back on its well-oiled hinges, presenting a view of the head of the class—the portable blackboard, the massive oaken desk, the teacher as tall sitting as Peggy was standing, her blonde hair pulled back into a bun skewered by a sharpened pencil and her eyes rimmed by the perfectly round spectacles which rested ponderously on a nose that was a snout.
It was the same nose Sam had drawn, and it seemed to be sniffing the air for Peggy's scent.
"Why, you must be Mrs. Cooper!" the woman said evenly, as she pushed back her chair and stood up to her huge, raw-boned height. "How nice of you to visit us!"
The woman came forward and extended her hand. "I'm Miss Putnam. Class?" the woman said, slowly turning her face to the rows of staring boys. "This is Samuel's mother, Mrs. Cooper. Will you say good morning, please?"
It was like a choir of carefully rehearsed voices.
"
Good morning, Mrs. Cooper!
"
Peggy turned to face them, scanning the room for Sam's desk.
It was there, at the far end of the very last row. It was the same desk where the boy in the drawing . . .
She could not finish the thought.
"Thank you, class," Miss Putnam called out commandingly in reply. "Now you will please compose yourselves while Mrs. Cooper and I visit together before first bell."
When she turned to face Peggy again, Peggy saw the eyes—vapid, virtually colorless, like small balls of frosty ice.
"Shall we step outside?"
Peggy felt herself drowning in the woman's piercing gaze. The room seemed suddenly airless, a chamber that could not support life—as if everything, the elements themselves, had drowsily raced away from her and left her suspended in a dream that was now gliding irresistibly toward its bad part, hard surfaces melting into something soggy, vivid hues spilling into a gluey cataract of grey, deathly paste.
She was numb, and she thought she was going to faint. She said, "Of course," and when she spoke, the words were muffled and she heard them swiftly sucked away. She felt herself staggering slightly as she attempted to move her body in the right direction, nearly losing her footing entirely as she marched out the door in the wake of the tall, angular figure of the first-grade teacher.
***
"Now, then," Miss Putnam was saying, her voice pitched so low it was like a priest's intoning the sacrament, "was there something in particular you wished to see me about?"
Peggy looked up as if taken by surprise. She tried to meet the woman's eyes, not to flinch from their strangely fixed stare.
"I know I must be interfering," she began, striving to maintain some kind of control over herself and speak deliberately, precisely, decisively—but everything inside her seemed to wilt under the cold fire that came from those glaced eyes. "I mean, I know there's some kind of rule about parents bothering teachers near the beginning of school."
"Nonsense!" Miss Putnam exploded. "Perfect stuff-and-nonsense!" She smiled as if together they shared an amusing conspiracy. "My dear Mrs. Cooper," Miss Putnam said, lowering her face close to Peggy's, "if I may hazard to say it, I sometimes think the headmaster's rules are as stuffy and dated as he is. But let's let that be our little secret, shall we?"
Peggy tried to return the woman's smile, but her face was frozen stiff. She knew it was her turn to say something, and yet she wasn't quite sure what the words should be.
"Was it something regarding Samuel?" Miss Putnam was saying helpfully as Peggy was still trying to organize her thoughts. "He's such a charming young man, so well-conducted and eager. I daresay he's looking forward to a superbly constructive year."
Peggy swallowed and lurched ahead. "It's about his drawing, Miss Putnam, if you'll forgive me—because, you see, last night—well, last night he was very upset. What it was is that he somehow got the idea that here at St. Martin's he was going to be told what to draw."
"Told what to draw?" she repeated, as if Peggy were addressing her in some foreign language. "Really, Mrs. Cooper, what an extraordinarily curious complaint. I'm sure St. Martin's is as supportive of genuine creativity as any school in the city, but we do have a specific way of presenting
all
the disciplines—from art to arithmetic and everything in between."
"But Sam was so
upset
last night. I didn't get the impression he was rebelling against disciplined instruction. I got the impression he was being terrified by some form of coercion." Even as she said it, Peggy felt and heard the absurdity of her own words. Would she have backed Sam up if he'd wanted to use a comb instead of a bow during his Suzuki violin lessons?
But the old battle-axe seemed to be bending over backwards to make things easy for her. "Mrs. Cooper," she was saying earnestly, "believe me, it takes a lot of our finest pupils a bit of a while to adjust to the structure of St. Martin's. But in the end, most of them come around. Believe me, it's a very warm and supportive world here—but it's based on order. We
do
have very definite ideas about the way things should be done. The more students and their parents come to share our point-of-view, the better off everyone is all around."
Peggy struggled to say something, but she felt the words skidding back down her throat. Instead, she nodded and did her best to maintain some semblance of dignified composure.
Just then the school bell split the air. "I want to thank you for coming in," Miss Putnam said as she pushed open the door. "Please feel free to call on me at any time you have any questions or problems about Sam's situation here." Now that the harsh light flooding out from the classroom had thrown her face into sudden shadow, her eyes were hidden behind her glasses.
It was as if the woman had become invisible except for the huge silhouette her formidable body subtracted from the back-scattering light. But when Peggy's eyes adjusted, she saw it again, so shocking in its pig-like shape that it seemed like something added to the young woman's face, a false nose Miss Putnam wore as a harmless kind of joke.
"Yes, of course," Peggy managed to say before the glaring light disappeared behind the closed door and she stood all alone in the murky gloom of the corridor, the school bell still raging in her ears as if its terrible scream were a contagion the mind itself could catch.
***
She took the subway to Fifty-ninth Street—but as she stepped off the train, she understood that she was too distraught to work. She ducked into a phone booth on Lexington, called her assistant, and told him she was too sick to come in, realizing as she uttered the lie that it was now the truth. She dropped in another dime and telephoned Hal. When his secretary put him on, Peggy hurried through her speech as if reading from a script and then hung up before he could blurt out some excuse.
She said, "I'm coming right over and you've got to make time," hung up, jerked open the door, and started picking her way through the pedestrians that jammed the sidewalks in front of Bloomingdale's and Alexander's.
She headed south to Forty-seventh Street before turning west toward the Avenue of the Americas, scarcely noticing the deep layer of black overcast that was forcing the day from the skies. As she walked, her thoughts fluttered between spasms of rage and panic overlaid by a queer shrinking feeling, as if she herself were a child obliged to call out
Good morning!
in chorus and be subjected to the "discipline" of that unbelievably creepy woman.
Desperately, she sought to get a purchase on her emotions, to reduce fear and anger to something more manageable—appropriate concern, unspecific anxiety, a mother's normal range of unfocused worries. Vainly, she tried sifting through the little data she already had—but painstakingly as she proceeded, examining it item by item, in the end what she knew was like that screwy contraption her dad had contrived, all noise and flailing lights, a commotion whose chaos left you with nothing but a drink of sickeningly sweet, ruby-red water and the afterlight of a turbulent luminescence still shimmering in front of your eyes.
FORGIVE
There was no making any sense out of any of it. You either swallowed it or you didn't.
Forgive
what
? What had Hal done that called for forgiveness? Failing to come home before Sam went to bed? Or something unimaginably worse?
She heard the ugly distortion of city thunder now, and for an instant it diverted her attention. But as she cast her eyes down to the street again, it all came back to her, the inked facsimile of the first-grade teacher aloofly contemplating a roomful of boys, one of them—
Sam
!—lying dead.
***
Peggy hastened through the echoing lobby, nodding absently to the starter as she turned in at the bank of elevators that served Arista's floors. She got off at twenty-one, half-waved to the receptionist, and headed for the entryway that led to the Corporate Affairs section.
Hal's new office door was closed.
Peggy raised her fist to knock. But then she changed her mind.
He sat with his back turned, his feet propped up on the couch that stood behind his desk, the telephone receiver crooked between his shoulder and chin, one hand lifted to the top of his head, his fingertips combing back and forth through his curly, thatch-colored hair.
Instinct, suspicion, curiosity—Peggy couldn't say what made her do it. But she left the door ajar and stepped gingerly across the carpet, seating herself in the chair placed closest to his desk. She considered what she was doing, and it pierced her with shame. Yet she persuaded herself it really wasn't that she was trying to keep her presence unannounced—it was just that she was doing her best not to make any unnecessary noise. Wouldn't it be intrusive, an interference to his work if she called out, "Hal, I'm here"?
But she listened. She listened as if her ears were fingers that could reach out and snatch up his words. What she heard was his mild Midwestern voice murmuring clipped replies to whatever the other party was saying, and it maddened her not to hear that, too.
"Yes."
"Yes."
"Sure."
"You can count on it."
"I understand."
"Right."
"That's okay."
"Yes, it's for the best."
"She was?"
"Of course."
"I understand."
"I'm grateful—believe me, I am."
"Good-bye."
He replaced the receiver, sighed wearily, and then swiveled around in his chair, his face registering something more than surprise when he confronted Peggy sitting just feet away.
"You might have knocked."
"I'm your wife," she said. "Do you have something to hide?"
He brought his elbows forward onto the top of the desk and laced his fingers together.
"What has
hide
got to do with it? For Christ's sake, Pegs, it's a mere formality."
"Formalities between husbands and wives?"
Suddenly she had to urinate. It didn't seem possible to hold it. She crossed her legs and jammed the toe of her shoe under his desk. She squeezed her thighs together hard.
"All right." he said, dropping his hands from their pose. "A courtesy, then. For God's sake, let's not fight."
"Forget it," Peggy said.
She saw the rain hit, blow against his window. It splattered over the glass as if sprayed by a hose full-force. Like a cue to a child straining over the toilet, it made the pressure in her bladder worse.
"It doesn't matter," she said, trying to recapture her thoughts. "What matters is why I'm here, and it has nothing to do with what you choose to keep secret from me." As soon as she said it, she wondered if it was true. But then she shook off the thought like a dog breaking his muzzle free of cobwebs.