Turn Loose the Dragons Page 5

  “No,” Alexandra replied distantly. “They are mature, and very gifted. We don’t give them anything they can’t handle, and they do enjoy helping. There’s no natural law that says Kara and Kristen have to act like simpering, brainless adolescents.”

  “You seem distracted,” John said carefully.

  “Do I?” Alexandra answered with what seemed to John feigned lightness, “I’m sorry, darling. I don’t mean to.”

  “Is something bothering you?”

  “No.”

  “Kara told me someone called just before you left the house. Did the phone call upset you?”

  “I’m not upset,” Alexandra said, bending over to stack the dishes that John handed her into the dishwasher. “As a matter of fact, the call was from the plumber. He wanted to apologize for not showing up last week when he was supposed to.”

  John studied his wife’s back as she rearranged the dishes in the washer. He could feel a demand for truth inexorably building inside him. He suddenly realized that he was glad Alexandra finally knew, and even more ashamed that he hadn’t been the one to tell her. “You looked like something was bothering you when you came in the house,” he said at last.

  “Not really. I didn’t realize how bad the roads were, and I thought I’d run out to the deli and get something special for dessert. I got stuck halfway to the shopping center. A couple of men pushed me out, and I came home.”

  John tentatively placed his hand in the small of Alexandra’s back and began to gently massage the muscles; he took the hand away when he realized it was shaking. “You must have known how bad the roads were; you’d been out running on them fifteen minutes before you left.” He paused, swallowed drily. “Are you sure the phone call didn’t have something to do with me?”

  Alexandra’s reply was sharp and terse, punctuated by the rattle of dishes. “John, the call had absolutely nothing to do with you.”

  John swallowed again. He had a sudden, desperate craving for a glass of ice water, but he knew that the few steps to the refrigerator would be nothing more than one more small, futile postponement. “You know, don’t you?”

  Alexandra turned her head. Her gaze darted up to her husband’s face. “Know what, John?”

  John quickly looked away and blinked back tears. “I’m in trouble, baby,” he said, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat, continued, “I’m falling apart.”

  Alexandra slowly pushed the dishwasher rack into the machine, closed the door, and straightened up. “Oh, that I know,” she said with an air of weary resignation. “Let’s see; I think I noticed the first little chunk of you fall off about a year ago. Is that about right?”

  John nodded. He rubbed his eyes clumsily with his knuckles, then blew his nose. “Christ, it’s insane,” he finally managed to say. “You remember that crazy little Nazi in the Bronx I was asked to defend?”

  “I remember,” Alexandra replied gently, as though touched by her husband’s pain. “You defended that creep when nobody else would. I was proud of you; three unlisted phone numbers later, I’m still proud of you.”

  John’s quick burst of laughter was tortured and self-mocking. “Well, clever old John Finway managed to get himself emotionally involved with the twenty-two-year-old wife of said Nazi. Christ, I almost wish he weren’t so stupid; if he found out about it, he’d shove a hand grenade up my ass and solve all our problems.”

  Alexandra abruptly turned her face away. She remained still and silent for a long time, and John had the eerie sensation that he could almost hear tumblers clicking inside her, walls shifting and doors closing, sealing off and containing all the terrible rage she must feel; and with the rage seemed to go all that was so remarkably warm and feeling in her. What was left was a psychic surface like cold, burnished steel.

  John had seen the peculiar and striking metamorphosis before, in the months between their first meeting and their marriage, but not since. At the time he had been impressed and intrigued by Alexandra’s remarkable ability to distance herself from the most outrageous pressures, almost as if she had been trained to do so. His reaction now was quite different; this was the second time that evening that Alexandra’s look had reminded him of the past, and it frightened him.

  “Please don’t drift away from me, Alexandra,” John continued softly. “Scream at me, hit me, but please don’t drift. I need to talk.”

  “What the hell did you think you were doing?” Alexandra said in a voice husky with hurt and anger. “What are you doing? This isn’t like you.”

  “Good night, Daddy.”

  John breathed deeply, then turned and picked up his son. He held the boy tightly, closing his eyes and pressing his face hard into Michael’s flannel pajamas. When he opened his eyes he found himself staring over Michael’s shoulder into the startled face of Kara. The girl quickly dropped her gaze, obviously embarrassed by the sight of her father’s red-rimmed eyes. John put Michael down and Kara quickly led the boy away.

  “Jesus,” John said. “I wish Kara hadn’t seen that.”

  There was a long silence during which John stared vacantly at the floor, slowly shaking his head like a wounded animal, struck dumb by the terrible force of the conflict inside him.

  “John,” Alexandra said quietly, turning back to face him, “I can see that you’re hurting. If it will help to talk about it, go ahead, I’m listening.”

  “I’m just goddamn ashamed of the way I’ve handled this, baby,” John murmured. “Or haven’t handled it. I don’t know what to do.”

  John groaned softly as he felt a steel fist of self-contempt strike him in the chest at the same time as insidious desire for the woman, Selma, rippled through his groin like warm oil. “I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck,” he said at last.

  The fleeting smile that rippled across Alexandra’s rigid features was tight and bitter. “Welcome to the scene of the accident.”

  John pressed his hands to his temples and tried desperately to focus his thoughts on the conflicting emotions raging inside him, groping blindly in a black vortex of primitive feeling for simple words that would describe the geography of the volcanic, heaving internal land to which he had been exiled.

  “It was an accident, Alexandra,” he said at last, puzzled by his inability to find any other words for what had happened to him. “That’s the only way I can explain it. Her name’s Selma, and she’s just about what you’d expect the wife of a Nazi creep to be; she doesn’t know much about anything.”

  “Oh, ho! Now I understand perfectly. This was a poor, misguided, ignorant waif for the noble and wise John Finway to take on as a protégée-mistress and introduce to his bright, shining world of intellect, brotherhood, and rationality. Watch out, darling, I think your ego is running out your ears, along with your brains.”

  “There was a tremendous physical attraction,” John murmured, stung by Alexandra’s sarcasm but preferring the heat of that to the cold, strange absence that was the alternative. He knew that what she said was true, and what startled him anew was an awareness of the gulf between truth and feeling, how little one had to do with the other. His lust was a brainless slug-thing that paid no attention, understood nothing. “I suppose I was being a wise-ass. I thought I could steal a little extramarital sexual excitement off the shelf and not have to pay for it. I didn’t see how a few lunches, a few walks, could hurt.” He laughed again, a quick, sad sound. “After all, her husband was in the slammer awaiting trial for getting drunk, dressing up in his Nazi togs and burning down a synagogue. I mean, you had to feel sorry for this woman, right?”

  Alexandra didn’t smile. “It’s your deceit that’s tearing you apart, John. We had a contract, written and unwritten; it’s called a marriage. You’ve broken it. You’ve been living a lie for a year, and it’s not the kind of work you have a stomach for. Some people, yes, but not you.”

  “I know that. I discovered it.”

  “It sounds to me like this poor, innocent woman made a shrewd decision to chuck her imbecile husband an
d try to latch onto a rich and famous lawyer. Doesn’t it occur to you that she’s been stroking your ego just as hard as she’s been stroking everything else of yours?”

  John flushed. “Of course it occurs to me,” he said, dropping his gaze. “It’s occurred to me from day one. What I’m saying—and it’s hard for me to admit this, but it’s the truth—is that it just doesn’t make any difference what I know. I can’t get her out of my mind, no matter what I do. I feel incredibly stupid and childish, Alexandra, but I’m obsessed with the goddam woman, and it’s driving me crazy.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before, John? We’ve always been honest with each other. Always. Didn’t you think I’d know there was something bothering you? The deceit is what I have trouble understanding and forgiving.”

  “I wanted to talk to you about it. I was afraid. I told myself that it was better to be less honest and more kind.”

  “How charmingly condescending of you,” Alexandra said through clenched teeth. The flesh over her chin, cheekbones, and forehead was blanched white by unreleased fury and tension.

  “I know,” John said softly. “I can’t stand dishonesty.”

  He took a glass and a bottle of Scotch from a kitchen cabinet, poured himself a stiff drink. He sipped at it, then set the glass down on the table and stared into the depths of the amber liquid. “I never believed in the relationship, Alexandra,” he continued woodenly. “Not for a second. One reason I didn’t tell you was because I didn’t want to risk losing my wife and children and home for a relationship I couldn’t believe in. I kept waiting for the urge to pass; it didn’t. It just kept on growing.”

  “Until it swallowed you up.”

  “All right, yes,” John said, slowly nodding. “I’ve tried to break it off a half-dozen times in the past year. One time I went for three months without seeing or talking to her. It didn’t work. The pressure just kept building up until I couldn’t think of anything else. I’d start feeling cheated and angry. I know it sounds banal, but I felt as if I weren’t being true to myself. I couldn’t—”

  John suddenly felt alone, as if Alexandra had left the kitchen. He glanced up and found his wife staring vacantly out the window. Her face was once again set in the contorted, anxious mask that had disturbed John earlier in the evening.

  “Alexandra?”

  Alexandra turned to him and shook her head slightly. She blinked, and her eyes slowly came into focus on his face. “I’m sorry, John,” she said distantly. “I was thinking of something else.”

  “You were thinking of something else?”

  Alexandra’s lids narrowed, and her eyes suddenly glinted like pieces of polished brown marble. “I apologize if I haven’t been paying sufficient attention to your confession, John. Frankly, it’s an old story and it’s getting boring. I’d be interested in what you plan to do now. Have you cooked up an ending yet?”

  John stared back at her. The terrible space and cold were back, not to be displaced again. Suddenly Alexandra seemed a stranger to him. That she should be hurt and angry was totally, agonizingly, understandable to him, but there was a dimension to her present coldness and distance that tolled a small, muffled warning bell deep inside him. But then, he thought wryly, he had not exactly brought her good news.

  “I told you I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck,” he said. His voice had grown steadier, and he had the not unpleasant sensation that he was floating up out of the cold fog of some deep valley, soaring from dark to light. He realized that what he felt was relief. For better or worse, he was finally on his way to the end of this confrontation; a measure of his torment was being drawn from him by the coarse but pure poultice of truth. In one way or another, he thought, his conflict would be resolved soon. “I know I’ve hurt you terribly, first by my betrayal and then by keeping it from you, but I’ve hurt myself too. I’m not being facetious when I say I feel like I’m having an emotional root-canal job. By tearing you, I’ve torn myself. I have to get myself straight, and I know that I have to go away in order to do that.”

  “You don’t have to leave if you think of leaving your home as some kind of self-inflicted punishment,” Alexandra said softly. She was again staring out the frosted kitchen window. “At least you’ve told me about it. Maybe now you can work it out here.”

  “I can’t, Alexandra. Talking to you makes me feel better, but it won’t resolve the conflicts I feel. I have to go away.”

  “When will you leave?”

  “Tonight. Now that it’s out in the open, I want to leave as soon as possible. They’ve plowed the roads. I’ll find a motel.”

  “Is she waiting for you?”

  “No,” John replied quickly, an edge to his voice. “I’m not running away, Alexandra, not to another woman and not from responsibility. I have to find some way to free my mind of all the crap that’s been building up in it for the past year; I have to find a way of working this out. I know it’s petty, self-serving, and absolutely useless to say I’m sorry, but I am. I hate the person I’ve become, and I have to find a way of living inside my own skin. I hope you’ll believe me when I tell you this stranger still loves you, very much.”

  Alexandra turned from the window and stared at him strangely. “Oh, I believe you, John,” she said at last. “I know you love me. I’m sorry for both of us that you got yourself into this mess.”

  John could not meet her gaze. The remote look in her eyes and the hollow tone of her voice made him feel even more uneasy. “I’ll figure out something to tell Michael and the girls,” he murmured, turning his attention back to the glass of liquor on the kitchen table.

  “Don’t tell the girls ‘something,’ John. Tell them the truth. We’ll both be sorry if you don’t. But wait until tomorrow to talk to them; at least let them get a good night’s sleep. I’ll think about how we should explain it to Michael.”

  John felt that he should say something else, but there were no words left inside him. The turbulent sea of feeling that had wracked him was finally gone, boiled down to a leaden residue of silence that had settled painfully in the pit of his stomach. He kept his head bowed as Alexandra walked past him, then sensed her pause at the kitchen door.

  “Good luck, John,” Alexandra said simply. And then she was gone.

  John picked up the glass in front of him and drained it.

  Friday, January 4; 6:30 A.M.

  Alexandra

  The effect of the previous day’s two emotional firestorms had been to leave Alexandra temporarily suspended in a strange, quiet place between them, supported for the moment in a kind of protective spiritual hammock comprised of pride and ingrained self-control. She might already have lost John to another woman, Alexandra thought, or she could lose him to the dark secrets of her past if she accepted the challenge presented to her by a man who had risen like thick, fetid mist from the bog of a nightmare time she had almost forgotten. Betrayal had been balanced by betrayal—almost; her betrayal of John was still hidden. In a way the two rending events had cancelled each other out, leaving Alexandra feeling physically numb and emotionally anesthetized.

  She perceived a certain irony in the fact that it was her harsh psychological conditioning and training as a dragon—a legacy of her betrayal of John—that enabled her to think in a reasonably clear manner, to compress the facts of the situation into a small, hermetic place in her mind which she could enter and explore with relative calm, sheltered from the tempest of feeling that screamed through the rest of her. Using this painfully acquired technique, she had been able to sleep through the night, even after she had heard the front door close behind John with a kind of resolute finality.

  She awoke at five, feeling resigned but curiously refreshed, prepared to analyze her situation. In this state of mind she lay staring at the dark ceiling, waiting for dawn, thinking. By six-thirty she had decided on the preliminary steps she would take to resolve the only conflict over which she had any control. To work was to escape.

  She rose, dressed in slacks and a sw
eater, and had a steaming breakfast of pancakes and sausages ready for her children when they came downstairs. School had been cancelled, and the girls immediately began planning for a “cross-country” skiing expedition to their friends’ homes around the snow-covered neighborhood.

  Alexandra allowed the children to assume that their father had left for work early. She waited until the girls were gone and Michael curled like a cat in front of the fireplace in the living room with a book before she went to the telephone in John’s study.

  The rich wood, the books, and the littered desk momentarily penetrated her emotional shield and brought tears to her eyes. However, despite her pain, Alexandra was resigned to the fact that there was nothing she could do about the situation with John. She knew her husband to be a brilliant, complex, and passionate man who, like most such individuals, suffered more than his share of private demons. For as long as she’d known him, John had suffered other people’s pain and indignities as his own, and, in his gentle way, taught her to do the same. In the 1960s, his keen sense of justice had, like a great righteous wind, swept him into countless demonstrations for civil rights and against the war in Southeast Asia, and then into courtrooms across the nation where he’d used his prodigious legal and oratorical skills to defend himself and his fellow radicals against the charges that were constantly being pressed by Federal, state, and local governments. He had won the vast majority of his cases with relentless efficiency, in the process frequently providing the intellectual foundations for new interpretations of Constitutional law.

  Alexandra recalled that the death of his sister in the Weatherman bomb factory explosion rigged by Rick Peters had only strengthened John’s resolve to fight within the framework of the laws he had done so much to help define. With the end of the Vietnam war, he had turned his full attention to the continuing legal battles for the rights of minorities.