a promise to you and I intend to honor it. What’s it going to be? If I can’t get away, will you go alone?”
“Yes.”
“Good. That’s settled.” He leered at her as he stuffed the napkin in his shirt pocket. “C’mere.”
“This is nice, isn’t it?”
“It’s wonderful,” Ian said. “What are you going to do with all your free time, Emily?”
“Well, now that you don’t need me anymore…”
“Wait just a minute, Emily. Where did you get the idea I don’t need you anymore? No, no, that’s not what this is all about. You hung in there with me and now it’s your turn. All you have to do is put in an hour each day at each clinic. That doesn’t mean I don’t need you. I don’t ever want you to think that. You said you wanted to go to school. Just out of curiosity, what were you going to do?”
“I’ll read, sleep late for a little while, watch some television, garden a lot, study if I go to school, wait for you to come home. Ian, are we making a lot of money now?”
“I think it’s safe to say we’re making a kingly amount.”
“Can we start a baby, you know, can we start trying?”
“Don’t see why not.”
Everything suddenly felt flat. Ian didn’t need her anymore. He was agreeing to everything; he was being so nice it was now suspect. She felt like a tired, old workhorse being put out to pasture. She didn’t mean to say the words, but they tumbled out of her mouth.
Ian stared at her for a full minute, his jaw dropping. He cupped her face in his hands. “Emily, what do you want? What do you really want? I don’t know you anymore. No matter what I do or when I do it doesn’t make you happy. I thought you would be overjoyed, that all this was what you wanted for so very long. It’s my turn now to pay you back and suddenly you make me feel like I’m doing something dark and ugly. You’re spoiling things again. You, Emily, not me.”
“I’m too old to start college now. Look at me and tell me I’ll fit in. Go ahead, say it.”
“You might not be as young as the freshmen, but there are a lot of people older than you who go to college. You don’t want that degree very much, Emily. Either you want that degree or you don’t. It’s clear sailing for you, Emily. No loans to pay, you can buy your lunch or dinner, you can drive to class, come home and someone will be here to cook for you, to do all the chores. I never had it that good and neither did anyone else I know. I said three hours because I thought you wanted to keep your hand in the business. If you want to work all day, feel free. It’s your choice.”
“I don’t know how to choose. There I was working sixteen and sometimes seventeen hours a day, trying to do my best. Then instead of being weaned away from that killer load I’m suddenly out in the cold. At least that’s how I feel. I guess I just don’t know how to react. I didn’t expect this, wasn’t prepared. I appreciate it. All I’ve ever known is work and more work.”
“And now you don’t have to work anymore. Now you can have your legs taken care of. All the things you couldn’t do before, all the things you said you wanted to do. I think you need to finish this wine by yourself and think about things. I’m going to bed. By the way, I’m taking the green room at the top of the steps. Yours is the yellow one. This way I won’t wake you up with my middle-of-the-night departures and the phone ringing.”
“But Ian, I thought we…” Don’t beg, Emily, please don’t beg, she pleaded with herself. “Good night, Ian,” she said quietly.
Separate bedrooms. My God, she thought. So it’s come to this. She couldn’t help but wonder if the try for the baby would be a one-shot deal or if he’d back off from her all together. She looked around at her new house. There was no way in hell she was climbing those stairs and sleeping in a yellow bedroom someone else had decorated.
God, what was wrong with her? Maybe she needed a shrink. Well, she could certainly find the time now to visit one. In secret, of course. Ian would explode if he thought a colleague was hearing her troubles. Maybe she could go into New York and give a false name and pay in cash. Maybe she’d get pregnant right away and she wouldn’t have to do anything but take care of the baby. That would be blissful heaven.
She finished the wine before she curled into a tight ball and slept on the hard, new sofa that smelled of packing materials.
Emily woke to silence that was so total she shook her head to clear it. At first she felt disoriented, sluggish and then fearful. A faint amber glow from the streetlight outside gilded the middle of the room. Then she remembered where she was and why she’d fallen asleep on the scratchy new sofa. From somewhere in the house a clock chimed the hour. She counted one, two, three, four, five. Five o’clock in the morning.
The smelly pillows she’d been sleeping on caught her as she flopped backward. How could something beautiful and wonderful end so disastrously? Unless that was the way Ian had intended the evening to end. Separate bedrooms. Hers was yellow. She started to shake, was unable to stop, and there was no quilt, no afghan to cover herself with. She didn’t even know where the thermostat was. She wanted to feel anger, to go upstairs and demand Ian tell her exactly what was going on in their lives.
Well, she was going to find out and she was going to find out right now. Her trembling ceased and was replaced with ramrod stiffness as she mounted the steps to the second floor. She thrust open the door and peered into the darkness. The bed had been slept in, but was empty now. Ian must have gotten called out to one of the clinics during the night. She turned on the light, gathering one of Ian’s pillows to her chest. It smelled faintly of his after-shave, a potent concoction from a grateful patient. Tears dripped on the pillow. She brushed them away. Crying never helped. Crying gave her headaches. “Damn you, Ian.” She wanted a friend then more than she’d ever wanted anything. Someone to call up and talk to. Where was her old friend Aggie? For years they’d sent Christmas cards and then one year there was no card and she didn’t know where to send hers to so she’d scratched Aggie’s name off her list. Well, she was going to have a lot of spare time now. Maybe she could track Aggie down.
Ian had his own bathroom. She looked around carefully. If she remembered correctly, this was the largest of five bedrooms—the master bedroom. The yellow room, hers, wasn’t quite as large. Ian had huge double closets. The yellow room had an oversize closet with a mirror on the door. And why the hell not, Ian needed more room than three women with all his shirts and suits. Her own wardrobe was meager compared to his.
Who was going to clean this monstrous house? When was a housekeeper going to materialize? If that didn’t happen, she and she alone was going to have to do it. It would take her all day to dust and polish, to keep things the way Ian liked them. She’d need two vacuum cleaners, one for upstairs and one for downstairs. A set of cleaning supplies would have to go into the upstairs linen closet. Or would Ian expect her to lug things up and then down?
From long habit, Emily made the bed, but she did it with anger in her eyes and murder in her heart. The linen closet in the hall was full of towels and sheets. There was no vacuum cleaner, no cleaning supplies.
Emily opened the door to the yellow room. It was pretty enough in a frilly kind of way. She almost choked when she opened the closet door to see her clothes hanging neatly. She yanked at the dresser drawers to see her underwear, her stockings, her nightgowns neatly folded. She pawed through them. How dare Ian do this to her! Her personal things were no one else’s
