even occur to him to wonder if her exuberant smile and starry expression was for anyone other than himself.
Pansy tried to appear unperturbed, but her mind had difficulty staying on what she was doing. Tom and his friends noticed this only so far as the inconvenience they felt that their sandwiches were all mixed up. Pansy merely laughed when they pointed out her mistakes. But in a sudden instant her laughter died and her face went slack. The men around her did not even notice the alteration in her, preoccupied as they were with getting their lunches in order.
Pansy’s gaze landed on a photo lying on Tom’s desk. Jack’s face stared up at her. A strange sense of unreality came over her. Random thoughts flitted through her mind as she struggled to achieve a blank expression. After several moments she attempted to speak.
“Who’s that?” she asked no one in particular, pointing at the picture of Jack.
“That’s him,” Tom replied with his mouth full of food. A clump of something greenish in color flew from his mouth and landed on Jack’s face. “That’s John Foreman, the wife killer.”
“Oh,” Pansy said. Of course it is, she thought. She had a strange urge to throw her head back and laugh hysterically.
“Tried to make it look like an accident, but I have no doubt he killed her,” her husband continued. As she looked at her husband she distracted herself by wondering why he always began a new sentence after taking a huge bite of food. She looked again at the picture of Jack. The green glob on his cheek made him seem rather pitiable. Thoughts raced through her mind. One carried the realization that it was not coincidence that brought her and Jack together. And yet, her heart rejected this.
Still, the more serious issue was that Jack was accused of murder. She wondered why this wasn’t her primary concern. If it were anyone else but Tom accusing Jack perhaps it would bother her more, but knowing Tom as she did, it was hard to give the accusation credence.
She was less than an hour away from her meeting with Jack. What if Tom was actually right for once? What if Jack really was a killer? Was it even safe for her to meet him alone in a hotel room? No one else in the world would know where she was. Thoughts kept pouring through her mind in frantic disarray. Always uppermost among them was the question of why Jack had pursued her to begin with. Had he approached her because she was the wife of his accuser? What did he ultimately want from her? This, more than anything else—even the potential danger she was in—filled her with an overwhelming sense of despair. She sat down in a nearby chair, suddenly weary. All of the energy and happiness of only moments before had vanished.
Tom and his companions had continued talking, oblivious of any change whatsoever in Pansy.
“He’s a clever one,” Tom was saying. “I’ll give him that. Always covers his tracks.”
“You’ll get the bastard,” one of the others chirped in.
Pansy only half listened, concentrating all her efforts on breathing evenly. It was a struggle to remain composed. She tried to soothe herself out of the overwhelming confusion. Why should she care what Jack’s motives were in seeing her anyway? What was he to her? But an all-consuming sense of hopelessness enveloped her. Nothing good ever came to her. Everything was suspect. She looked at Tom with perverse loathing. Everything associated with him brought her anguish, she thought unreasonably. She wished fervently that he was dead. As was her habit during these crucially unhappy moments of her life, she distracted herself by pondering her husband’s existence, finding comfort in conjuring up reasons why Tom might in all likelihood die an early death. It seemed not only probable, but inevitable. There were so many factors in favor of it, and it gave her hope to go over them, methodically and analytically. Why, his very position as a police officer was purported to put his life at risk, although Pansy could not imagine him ever being heroic or anything like that. More likely his arrogant disregard for the rights of others would eventually anger someone enough to provoke violence. But there were many other risks to Tom’s life that she had found to deliberate over. On this occasion, as she watched him practically inhale his sandwich, she found herself wondering how it was possible that Tom’s arteries, which by now had to be lined with numerous residual coagulations from years of habitual ingestion of every sort of saturated fat, never managed to halt the flow of blood and end his miserable life. How much longer could they hold out? Even as she thought these thoughts, she noticed all around his desk evidence of his slovenly eating habits, including several stale donuts and wrappers from fast-food restaurants. And yet, there he stood, ranting and raving like a healthy young toddler; pudgy and dimply and ruddy. His continued good health seemed a personal affront to her.
Pansy glanced at the clock and wondered what she should do. It seemed obvious now that Jack was only using her, but she still wanted to see him. Once again she blamed Tom, who had created in her such a desperate hunger for affection that she would crave the touch of any man who would have her. She couldn’t bring herself to listen to Tom and the other overstuffed peacocks of his precinct for another instant so she abruptly stood up and left the police station.
Although Pansy counted numerous reasons not to, she found herself hastening to get to the hotel room Jack had reserved for them, and when she arrived she was breathless and trembling with desire. In her present state of mind she wondered if she should even mention what she had discovered. She was terrified of losing whatever it was that brought Jack into her life, and suddenly it didn’t matter what it was. She was deeply troubled as she tapped lightly on the hotel-room door, and in the next moment, when she looked into Jack’s dark, troubled eyes she started to cry.
“I was at the police station before I came here,” she blurted out. “My husband is a cop. But you already knew that.” She sobbed miserably as the words spilled impulsively from her lips.
Jack didn’t move or speak. He only smiled. Pansy was taken aback by this at first, but then she felt relieved. She couldn’t have borne it if he had made up an obvious lie. She stopped crying and looked at him. Ruefully she succumbed to the slight pulling sensation at the corners of her mouth and dumbly returned his smile, but she said, “You have nothing to say?”
“What would you like me to say, Pansy?”
She would have liked him to say that he actually liked her in spite of everything else. She would have liked to hear that he had enjoyed being with her the day before and especially that he wanted to be with her again in the future. “Why?” she asked him. She was terribly afraid he would say the wrong thing.
Jack laughed at her. “Would you believe me if I told you that my dealings with your husband are purely coincidental and have nothing to do with us meeting each other?”
“No,” but she was pleased by the manner in which he asked her this.
He moved closer to her, approaching cautiously. “Would you believe that I saw you with him once and couldn’t get you out of my head?”
“Definitely not,” she replied with outright laughter this time.
He became serious all of a sudden, standing very close to her and looking down into her face. He reached out a hand and lifted a lock of her hair. He held it a moment, seemingly studying it. Pansy was absurdly flattered by the gesture. She waited breathlessly for what he would do or say next.
“Would you believe…” he continued contemplatively as he played with her hair, “that I thought you deserved a little happiness being married to a prick like him?”
“Well, maybe you thought that…but I find it hard to believe that was your reason for…being with me.”
“Does
