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She said, “You must be out of your mind, Evan.”
She said, “A wife and children and a house in the suburbs. A washer-dryer and a refrigerator-freezer and an aluminum storm. Evan, if you honestly think that’s what you want, then you’d better make an appointment with that brilliant doctor in Switzerland.”
She said, “You decided you needed all that because you were stuck there in the middle of the goddamn jungle and everything was going wrong. ‘I’ll go back and settle down with Kitty,’ you decided. ‘No more ru
She said, “For God’s sake, after a week of pulling crabgrass you’d run screaming back to New York. What would you even do out there? How would you make a living? Oh, sure, I can see you putting on a shirt and tie every morning and riding the train to New York and doing something creative in an ad agency. Writing soap commercials or something. You’d absolutely love that.”
“I-”
“And then you would take the train home, and read the paper and play with the kids and grill hamburgers in the yard, and then when we went to sleep you would sit around for eight hours counting your blessings, and then you could go back and write some deodorant commercials. Who are you kidding?”
“We wouldn’t have to live in the suburbs. We wouldn’t have to change our lives completely.”
“We could get married and stay here.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“And live the way we’ve always lived, except that we would be true to each other, and you would keep both feet on the ground, and we’d establish a sane living pattern and build a positive future together.”
“That’s exactly right, but the way you make it sound-”
“Evan, will you for Christ’s sake wake up?”
I looked at her.
“You I should marry yet. With your cockamamie organizations and your twenty languages and staying up all day and night. With your two sons in Macedonia and your crazy wife in Switzerland and your daughter who isn’t your daughter and your Welsh schwartzeh mistress young enough to be your daughter, and all your mishegahs, with all of this I should marry you? What kind of-”
“Why are you talking like that? You’re not Jewish.”
“What should I do in Armenian? Starve?”
“Kitty-”
“Oh, God, Evan, how could you be anybody’s husband? How? You’re all these different people all at once. You couldn’t be a husband, Evan. I couldn’t marry you.”
She ran out of words, and I started to say something but nothing came out. We sat there for awhile and looked now and then at each other and now and then at the walls. I had some wine. She had some wine. I opened another bottle. She opened the window. I went to see if Mi
I said, “I thought you wanted to get married.”
“So did I.”
“Are you going to marry him? That dishwasher?”
“He’s an assistant cook.”
“Whatever he is.”
“I said no. He asked me again, and I said no, that I couldn’t marry him. He wanted to know why. I almost told him. You’re a very boring person, you’re sweet but you’re boring. That is what I almost told him, but I thought, oh, why be cruel to him? It wasn’t his fault that he was boring. I told him I was sterile. You would have thought I told him I had syphilis or something. Do you remember Rima? You used to call her the Bird Girl?”
“I remember.”
“They’re seeing each other now. He’ll propose and I know she’ll say yes, she’s really desperate. And I’m sure they’ll have fifteen children all with their noses ru
“I don’t understand, Kitty.”
She looked at me, shrugged. “Oh,” she said, “I don’t know. I couldn’t marry him because he was too dull and I can’t marry you because you’re not dull enough. And I’m twenty-five years old, and that’s one of those dumb ages that seems as though something major is due to happen to you. Sometimes it seems young and sometimes late at night it seems very old, and, well, my mind does weird things.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Twenty-five isn’t so goddamned old, is it?”
“It’s a hell of a lot older than fourteen.”
“You crazy son of a bitch,” she said, and I laughed, and she laughed, and I reached for her and she only hesitated for a minute.
A little later she said, “Hey, you nut. You would make the worst husband in the world.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“I know I’m right. You’d get up in the middle of di
“What?”
“You make a pretty groovy lover.”
“And that’s just as good?”
“Well, it’s not as permanent. It isn’t what my mother has been wishing would turn up for me for the past twenty-five years. But there are times,” she said, burrowing close, “when it is very nice indeed.”
That about covers it. The Chief turned up within a week, and as usual he wasn’t wearing a plaid hat. I told him that Samuel Lonestar Bowman and Knanda Ndoro were both irretrievably dead. He was sorry to hear it, but said it was as he had anticipated.
“Never should have sent you in the first place,” he said. “Good money after bad. Damned foolishness. Wasting you on a mission like that one.”
He asked about Sheena, said he’d had reports that the terrorist band had been dispersed. I let him draw the facts out of me – that Bowman and Knanda Ndoro had died at Sheena’s hands, that I had been captured by the ca
“Capital,” he said finally. “Those terrorists were a threat, you know. To the stability of the present regime. So you might say that you’ve helped keep the Modonoland government in business.”
“Er,” I said.
“And Lord knows,” he said, refilling our glasses, “that they need all the help they can get. As a matter of fact they may be a lost cause. There’s been a heavy run of arms into the country in the last week or so. The liberal opposition is looking stronger than ever. A new influx of funds, it seems. From Moscow or Peking, you would think, but our so-called experts admit they don’t know the source.”
I did, though.
Oh.
I almost forgot.
Back in the cemetery, with me standing there like a dead tree and Knanda Ndoro ready to chop me down. With the shovel whistling through the air at me.
I ducked. Just barely, and with no room to spare, but this was one of those instances in which a miss and a mile are of equal value. The Glorious Retriever missed, and I guess he hadn’t expected to miss – humility, as he himself had attested, was not his long suit. Anyway, his momentum sent him stumbling, and perhaps the opium in his system had an effect and perhaps it didn’t, but in any case he took a series of shuffling steps and wound up in the grave.
The shovel landed on top of him.
More precisely, the business end of the shovel conked him on the top of the head. I don’t know if he was unconscious when he fell into the pit or no, but he was certainly out colder than a refrigerator-freezer after the shovel got him.
We couldn’t wake him up. Plum didn’t see why we ought to, and I could see her point, but oddly enough I couldn’t work up much of a hate for the Retriever. He had saved our lives, whether or not he had intended to do so permanently. I couldn’t completely shirk a feeling of obligation to him. And, on a more pragmatic level, his presence in Modonoland could only be awkward.