Wilde Lake(79)
Her pleasure is dimmed. Still, she manages to finish. Bash notices that she is distracted, but he probably assumes she is making that inevitable transition into real life, the life that has no place for a healthy, harmless lust. Would Bash’s wife find this so harmless? As much as Lu wonders about her, she has no desire to know anything. This is civilized, she tells herself. I’m a forty-five-year-old woman, I need a sexual outlet, but I don’t need a boyfriend or a partner, and I definitely don’t need a husband. I am taking care of enough people. The term “high maintenance” always seems to be applied to women, but Lu has never known any woman who needs as much care as a man. Heck, her father has had an ersatz wife in Teensy all these years.
Lu drives home, wondering if it’s time to let go of Bash, but only because she wants to be the one who ends it. If he calls it quits, she fears it will arouse old feelings, that intense desire to win, no matter the cost. As a young woman, she got a little crazy in the face of rejection. She was only in her twenties. But she can still be embarrassed by some of the things she did. Lu, as a young woman, preferred being direct and confrontational. She could not believe that there were men who would simply walk away, cut off communication—and make you feel gauche for thinking the game should be played any other way. She was the opposite of cool, in those early love af fairs. Then she reconnected with Gabe, and his heart was so open, his sense of self forever informed by the short geeky boy he had been, that she felt she had, in fact, found her soul mate. “We were imprinted early on each other, like ducks,” she once told him.
She didn’t tell him that she had stolen that line from a book.
He was two hundred pounds . . . Why is Jonnie in her head, when Jonnie clearly had no desire to help Lu figure out why she was targeted by Rudy Drysdale? Maybe it’s not really Jonnie at all, but Blind Lady Justice, the omnipresent conscience that insists on what is right and wrong, a conscience whose voice sounds strangely like Lu’s father’s. Fuck him. There was Nita again. How can she not realize that Lu’s father was one of the few people who had her best interests at heart, all those years ago?
It’s a coincidence, Rudy going into the wrong apartment, Lu tells herself. She’ll go see Davey, ask him a few questions, and they’ll have a good laugh. He’ll tell her that he never knew Rudy Drysdale and he doesn’t fear his old girlfriend because he didn’t rape her. A grand jury made that determination thirty-five years ago. Davy’s alleged crime was not hidden or hushed up. Juanita Flood Forke’s complaint was heard—and rejected.
APRIL 21
When Lu pulls up in front of the Triadelphia Community Church, the first thing she notices is the long, graceful ramp that snakes up to its front doors. Of course, all churches—all public buildings—are obligated to be accessible in this day and age, but this particular ramp is clearly the aesthetic focus of an otherwise unremarkable beige rectangle. The ramp is centered, flanked by two staircases. Sheep to the right, goats to the left, Pastor Robinson front and center.
Inside, the accommodations continue. The center aisle seems particularly wide, and there are gently sloping ramps on either side of the nave. In contrast to the blah beige outside, the woodwork is dark, the lighting dim. This is Davey’s church in every sense. Davey’s fiefdom. Pastors are prohibited from endorsing candidates, but they are instrumental in getting out the vote and they have ways to indicate which candidates they favor. Lu did not ask to appear here during her campaign because she could not align herself with someone as conservative as Davey. But nor could she afford to alienate him. Davey may not have been able to stop marriage equality, but he was part of a coalition that helped derail the legislation the first time it came before the Maryland legislature a few years ago. Safe on the sidelines then, Lu was fascinated by the debate, the anger expressed over the idea that gay marriage was a civil rights issue. Davey, in particular, was one of those who framed race as a given, homosexuality a choice. He was never strident; that wasn’t his style. He still had that husky, resonant voice that made you want to lean in, lest you miss a single word.
Davey has been a public figure for almost a decade. Lu remembers when the church was built, not quite five years ago. Because it was a so-called megachurch—almost thirty-five hundred members—the community worried about the impact on traffic. There were contentious meetings, Davey presiding as the benign Buddha he has become in middle age. He managed to suggest, subtly, that it was not the number of people that had the residents worried, but the color of his congregants’ skin. The locals were horrified, of course. An agreement was reached quickly. Since then, as far as Lu knows, the church and the nearby residents have coexisted peacefully, except for an incident three years ago when a sixty-six-year-old man got on his riding mower and began ramming cars leaving the church after Sunday’s service. No charges were filed, and Lu supported that one bit of inaction on Fred’s part. The man was in the early stages of dementia, beyond any agenda other than his own confusion. Fred made it clear that his office would not bring charges if the man’s wife and adult children agreed to find care for him.
“May I help you?”
A woman has entered the church from behind the nave. She is young and shapely, dressed so stylishly that Lu can’t help feeling like a dowdy little bird. Would I dress in bright, tight clothing if I weren’t a public official? Lu has been a civil servant for so long—civil servant, her mind snags for a moment on that second word—that she no longer knows if she’s following the dictates of her taste or the dictates of the job. You lose a little bit of yourself in public life.