Rapture

"Oh, that's too bad," Burt said. "So this is just a pleasure trip for you then."

"A vacation, yes." Then Jeff added defensively, "My first in about five years."

In less than a minute he had taken a dislike to Burt Maddox. The man had a forced gregariousness that did nothing to hide the fact that he was sizing Jeff up. But the worst thing was his habit of referring to Georgianne as Georgie. Jeff hated it, and he could hardly keep from wincing whenever he heard it.

At the last minute, Georgianne had almost balked, and Jeff wished she had. A few of her friends had per suaded her to come to the Maddox house that evening. No party, no special occasion, just a handful of friends and neighbors getting together for a drink. Georgianne hadn't wanted to go, but she had finally given in, and Jeff had agreed to accompany her. Then, in the car on the way there, she had begun to worry about it again. It would look wrong. It was too soon. Sean had been dead less than three months. Jeff sympathized, but didn't want to argue the case one way or the other. He did point out to her that she had no reason to feel guilty. She would simply be stopping by a friend's house for a short visit. Georgianne looked pale and nervous when they arrived at the Maddox house, but she decided to go through with it, intending to stay for only an hour or so.

"I've been with them for nine years now," Burt was saying.

"Oh ... uh ... Union Carbide?"

Jeff could feel the blood leaving his face in a rush, and he bent over to take a hideous-looking hors d'oeuvre from a tray on a side table. It tasted awful, but the maneuver gained him a few seconds, and he hoped his cheeks had regained some color. His heart was pounding.

"That's right," Burt continued smoothly. "Didn't Georgie tell you? I'm a marketing manager." Then, with mock chagrin, "One of many."

"I see," Jeff said aimlessly. "It's quite an outfit."

Maddox would be a salesman, he thought contemptuously. He could tell the type: large, florid, incapable of tolerating two seconds of silence in a conversation, pursuing a rendezvous with a coronary-which in this case wouldn't come a day too soon, as far as Jeff was concerned.

Maddox tried to stick to the subject of Union Carbide, but Jeff killed it easily, and his host was too polite to persist. Jeff wished he had known ahead of time that he would be meeting someone from Union Carbide. It wasn't that he couldn't handle such an encounter, especially with someone as transparent as Maddox. But he didn't like surprises. For some time now, weeks, months, he'd felt as if he were walking a tightrope-a very long tightrope-to Georgianne. It had the effect of magnifying everything else in his daily life, and the most trivial vibrations could turn suddenly into tremors and quakes. How much easier it would be if he could simply whisk Georgianne away to some remote mountain cabin for a month or two, where he could win her over by sheer undistracted force of character and love. Instead, the tightrope stretched ahead indefinitely.

There were fewer than a dozen people scattered about the capacious, L-shaped Maddox living room. They all looked prosperous and satisfied, a little too much so for Jeff's liking. He wanted to see an edge in someone, but this crowd was round and soft. It was impossible to think of them as Georgianne's friends, even if, inexplicably, they were.

"Oh, I think Georgianne wants me," Jeff said, creating a flimsy opportunity to edge away from his host. "Excuse me."

"Catch you later," Maddox said, turning in the other direction to mingle.

Jeff drifted across the room and perched on the end of the sofa next to Georgianne. He lit a cigarette, acutely aware that all eyes were on him. Cool and professional, he told himself, that's the best stance to maintain.

"Georgie tells me you're doing some very exciting work with computers," Carole Richards said, leaning forward to rope Jeff into the conversation.

"Some of it is," Jeff allowed. He didn't like Carole Richards, because she had arranged the job for Georgianne. And because she called her Georgie too. It was appalling.

"And you two were in high school together?"

Everytime she spoke, Carole arranged her face in an expression of intense seriousness, which was utterly disproportionate to what she actually said. She was frizzy-haired and forty, Jeff figured, and trying to keep a young and intelligent look-and missing by a wide margin.

"'That's right."

"it's so nice that you got in touch again...."