Cheat and Charmer Read Free Page B

could see the ghostly white of the statue of the Virgin Mary on the front lawn of Marymount School. Aware of the tightness of his belt, he was looking forward to getting home, taking off his clothes, and putting on the pajama top and boxer shorts that constituted his sleep-wear. He also had very tightly fitting teeth, with no spaces in between, and as he waited for the light to change, not pressing Dinah to answer his query, he slid his thumbnail between two molars and tried to dislodge a piece of food.
    “I’m not pr-pr-pr-preggers, Jake.”
    “Oh, too bad, darling.”
    “But something did happen today.”
    “Oh?” he said distractedly.
    She opened her purse and took out the pink document. “A guy in a gray hat came to the front door today and served me.” She rustled the piece of paper. “It’s a subpoena.”
    “The Committee?”
    “Yeah.”
    He glanced over at her. “And?”
    “They want me to testify in Washington, in three weeks.”
    The light changed. Dinah put the document back in her purse and snapped it shut. Jake pressed down on the accelerator. “Well,” he said, “as your mother used to say, ‘Oh-shit-oh-dear.’ You waited all day and all night to the end of the party to tell me, didn’t you, honey?”
    He reached over and stroked her neck and shoulder.
    She felt tears welling up, but she didn’t want to cry.
    “Listen,” she said. “I’ll just go and do it. I don’t care. I don’t want anything to happen to you or the kids.”
    “Wait, honey. We’ve got to talk about it. You can’t just decide like that. You’d have to live with it for the rest of your life.”
    “So?”
    “You don’t mean that, honey.”
    “Sure I do. It’s s-s-s-simple, Jake. If I don’t …”
    “Sweetheart. Calm down. We’ll talk about it at home.”
    With his right hand still planted on the nape of her neck, he steeredwith his left hand, his elbow jutting out the window, weaving almost drunkenly from lane to lane, as if he were the only driver on the road.
    “We are not going to lose everything we’ve worked for just because I spent a f-f-f-few years trying to get a secondhand college education.”
    “Shh. When we get home we’ll sit down and have some hot chocolate and discuss this like two rational people.”
    “I don’t care about being rational, and there’s nothing to discuss!” She wanted the whole matter settled right then, at that instant. The thought of waiting, thinking it over, having discussions, weighing pros and cons, filled her with dread. “I’ll do it, and then we’ll go on just like before. I won’t let them ruin our life. Or your career,” she said.
    “What makes you think this has anything to do with me? There’s nothing on that subpoena that says anything about me, is there?”
    “Oh, Jake, come on.
I
don’t matter to them. Any idiot can f-f-f-figure that out. If
I
refuse to testify,
you’ll
be up shit creek. They’ll blacklist you. We’ll have to sell the house and move. Though God only knows where. To Mexico, maybe, like the Allens and the Salanders and the Gorkys.”
    “So? What’s so terrible about that? I can write anywhere.”
    “Where would you get work? We’d starve, have chronic turista, and live like holy fucking martyrs for the rest of our lives. Angry forever and grateful to friends for sending us secondhand cashmere sweaters, like the ones Evelyn Morocco and I sent Pat Gorky in Cuernavaca last week.”
    “Well, Mexico’s out. It’s gotta be someplace with a delicatessen.”
    He yawned, a loud, luxurious, full-bodied yawn, the yawn of a tired child who has had a long, good day and expects to have another one tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that—forever. The yawn was real, but in every other way he was performing. He had no intention of letting her know it, but the subpoena was a shock. He hadn’t been expecting it, but he had decided, in the instant following Dinah’s announcement, exactly what he would have to