Area of Suspicion Read Free

you know.”
    “It’s so gay here, Midge. Who’d want to leave?”
    “Be serious! You know as well as I do what’s wrong. You’re going sour, Gev. You tried to get over her. You tried all the methods and now you’ve stopped trying and you’re going sour.”
    I looked at her dark, avid eyes, and saw the flick of tongue tip across her underlip. This was her meat.
    “Once upon a time, Midge, I told you too damn much about my life. I’m not a soap opera for your privatepleasure. Tune in tomorrow and find out if Gevan can find happiness.”
    She smiled. “I’m not going to let you make me angry, my friend,” she said firmly.
    I moved away and stood at the stern, watching the boil of the wake. There was little point in restating my position to Midge, or to myself. After my father died I had taken over the job of running Dean Products. I’d been too young for the job—too young and inexperienced. But sometimes, when you have to grow fast, you can do it. Two years at Harvard Business School had given me the theory. But practice is another animal. At Harvard they don’t have any course in how to react to men your father, and your grandfather, hired. To them you are a punk, and there can be great joy in tripping you up.
    It had scared me, but I stayed with it, and got up every time I was thrown, and one day I found out I was enjoying it. Maybe you enjoy any skill you acquire. You learn that the raw materials most important are not the special steels, that the production equipment most important is not the stolid rows of machine tools. Your material and your equipment are human beings, and you learn their strengths and their weaknesses, and how to make them part of a production team. Then the rest comes easier. The shoes had looked too big and the steps too long, but after a time I could match the stride and we showed a profit, and that was good because it was a measure of how well I was doing.
    Then Niki came along, fitting into my life in a way that made wonderful sense. Niki, who would inevitably be my wife and bear our children and live with me in a house that would be warm and good with love.
    Girl and Job. Work in itself cannot be both means and end. There must be some person to whom you can bring your small victories and be rewarded.
    But twelve hundred nights ago I walked down a rainy street toward her place, walked with the bumping heart the thought of seeing her always gave me. I walked in, not thinking to knock or call out, and that was neither guile norrudeness, but the same eagerness which had made me walk so quickly from my car.
    I walked in on her and saw my brother’s hands, strong against the sheen of her housecoat. I saw her on tiptoe in his arms, with upturned mouth and all the long ripe lines of her held by him in the instant before she turned to look at me with the drowsy, tousled look of a woman lost in kissings.
    We were to have been married that month.
    There are pictures you keep with a peculiar vividness in your mind, the very good ones and the very bad ones. There was the look of his hands on her, and the way she stumbled aside when I pushed her so I could get at him, and the look in his eyes as he stood there making no attempt to block or dodge the blow that broke his mouth. There was no memory of the things I said to the two of them before I walked back out into the rain. Nor any memory of the walk, or, much later, of driving the car back to my place.
    During that week I found out that I could not go on. I couldn’t adjust myself to the role of the betrayed, the strong silent type who contents himself with Job alone now that Girl is gone. I might have managed it if it had been someone else who had taken her from me. But Ken and I had been close. I had come to think of us as a good team, his practical, methodical steadiness compensating for my weakness of trying to move too fast, too soon. If it had been someone else who took her from me, hate would have been less complicated. I might have