Potboiler

“I do and I don’t,” she said.

He said nothing.

“It would be hard for me, I think, to see her all grown up.”

“I understand.”

She shook her head. “It’s not that it makes me feel old. I mean, yes, it makes me feel old. But that’s not what I’m afraid of.”

There was a silence.

“You make choices,” she said. “You can’t know how you’ll feel about them twenty years down the line.”

He nodded.

“It was my decision,” she said. “It always was. Bill tried to change my mind but I had it made up.”

She fell silent. He felt a wet tickle on his bare shoulder.

“Hey, now,” he said.

She apologized. He brushed the hair from her forehead and kissed her cheeks.

“You don’t suppose it’s not too late?” she said.

“Anything’s possible.”

She laughed and wiped her eyes. “Hooray for modern medical science.”

“You’d really want to start with that, now?”

“Probably not,” she said.

“It’s very tiring,” he said.

“So they say.”

“Trust me.”

“That’s another thing Bill always talked about. What a good father you were.”

“How would he know?”

“We admired how you managed it on your own.”

“I didn’t have a choice.”

“Take some credit, Arthur.”

He said nothing.

“You must wonder, sometimes,” she said. “If things had turned out differently.”

He did not answer her. He had spent thirty years fleeing that question, and only now, when it no longer mattered, had he come to some kind of peace.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s all right.”

They lay together without speaking. He had never been anywhere as silent as the de Vallée mansion. There was no settling of wooden joints, no sigh of air-conditioning. According to Carlotta, that had been the goal. Peace and quiet, privacy and solitude. The whole house had been insulated to the utmost degree, and Carlotta and Bill’s master suite especially. Pfefferkorn told himself that he had a right to stop thinking of it as “Carlotta and Bill’s.” He had a right to think of it as Carlotta’s alone, or possibly Carlotta’s and his. Then he told himself not to be bothered by technicalities.

She sat up. “Let’s do something fun today.”

“Seconded.”

She peeled back the duvet and headed to the bathroom. He heard the hiss of hot water. He bent over the side of the bed and picked up the paper. The headlines were uniformly depressing: terrorism, unemployment, global warming, performance-enhancing drugs, Zlabian unrest. He left the paper on the bed and went to join Carlotta in the shower.

32.

Every cost associated with the wedding ended up being triple what Pfefferkorn had been quoted. He didn’t care. He was set on giving his daughter everything she wanted. At her second fitting, she had spied, from across the store, a different gown, a thrilling one, the right one. Pfefferkorn did not blink. He wrote a check. The mother of the groom had insisted the caterer use premium organic ingredients. Pfefferkorn did not protest. He wrote a check. The bandleader had expressed the view that five pieces were insufficiently festive. Nine would be better, he said, and Pfefferkorn, taking out his checkbook, agreed. What began as a simple afternoon affair soon swelled into an entire hosted weekend, with meals and entertainment provided throughout. Pfefferkorn wrote one check after another, and when the appointed day arrived, and he saw his daughter’s joy, he knew he had chosen correctly.

The party was over. Pfefferkorn, his tuxedo wrinkled and damp, sat alone in the reception hall, listening to the clatter of chairs being stacked. One by one, the guests had come up to him to pump his hand and offer congratulations before stumbling off toward the complimentary valet. Pfefferkorn’s literary agent had been among the last to leave, and it was his parting words that Pfefferkorn was mulling over.

“Great party,” the agent had said. “Give me a call when your ears stop ringing.”

Pfefferkorn knew what was coming. In the wake of Blood Eyes’s success, he had allowed himself to be coaxed into signing a lucrative three-book deal. The deadline for the first draft of the next Harry Shagreen novel was fast approaching and nobody had seen a sample chapter. The publisher was getting nervous. Pfefferkorn sympathized. They were right to be nervous: he had yet to write a word. At the time of the signing, he had turned in a plot summary, but it was sketchy and improvised, and in the ensuing months it had proven worthless. He had not begun to panic, although he could see panic around the corner. He did not have a plan. He never did. Bill would have had a plan. He was not Bill.

“Don’t be sad.”

His daughter and her new husband were walking toward him, hand in hand. She was barefoot, slender, her radiant face framed by tendrils of hair that had come loose at her temples. The sheer beauty of her caused Pfefferkorn’s chest to tighten.

“I know,” she said. “Kind of an anticlimax.”

“I’m just depressed thinking about the bill,” Pfefferkorn said.

She stuck her tongue out at him.

Pfefferkorn addressed his new son-in-law. “I take it your folks are all settled.”