Chapter 13
It was on days like this, bright and sunny with a slight morning chill, that she felt happier than ever. With Matthew in New York on business, Greta had given the housekeeper the past three days off, letting her know that she could handle her own meals. But that was hardly the reason why it was better for Marie to be out of the house.
She gripped the handlebars firmly, admiring her own hands without ill feelings. The gears of her exercise cycle spun quietly, crisp air breezing in through the open balcony doors. Her breathing was heavy but controlled, just as he had taught her.
She heard the shower stop and checked the cycle's timer. Another quarter mile before she was through. That would work out almost perfectly, giving her a few minutes to cool down before he was all finished in the bathroom.
The cool winter air whispered across her face, and with each misty exhale puffing from her nostrils she imagined the sensual air of France, of Europe, so much there for them to see and do together, an afternoon ride in dewy green hills, pedaling along right behind him with his strong back in view, the bobbing of the red and white checkered tablecloth peeking out from the picnic basket strapped to his bicycle…
"Darling, are you going to pedal all the way to Alaska?" Jean-Pierre said, glancing at the accumulated mileage on the cycle's odometer.
Greta laughed heartily. "I stopped looking and…I guess…I just…kept…going."
"To the hospital is where I'll be going," Jean-Pierre said. Hitching his towel around his waist, he went to the balcony doors and closed them. "With pneumonia!"
"Oh, darling, I'm sorry," she said, lifting her feet from the pedals. She dropped her head into her crossed arms over the handlebars and regulated her breathing as she cooled down. The machine's flywheel slowed to a stop and she shook herself briskly. "I feel so good!" she shouted.
For the past four months, since the beginning of their affair, she had exercised every day. Though Jean-Pierre had been the one to suggest the calisthenics, she had become obsessed with her daily workout and needed no encouragement to get on her cycle and go every morning. With each strained breath she pictured herself becoming more slender, more youthful, more attractive and beautiful and sexy for him.
Clad in undershorts, Jean-Pierre stood combing his long hair before Matthew's bureau mirror. He swung his head back, collected his mane with both hands behind his head, and worked an elastic band over the ponytail.
Greta tugged off her headband and playfully pulled it over his head. "Now you look like an Indian."
He smiled and tugged the band off. As he reached for his shirt hanging on the bedpost, she grabbed his wrist and roughly pulled him beside her on the bed. She flattened his hand against her chest, his middle finger settled over the horseshoe charm he had given her. "Are you an Indian giver?" she said suggestively, moving his hand from the charm to her breast.
He leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead. When her grip loosened he stepped back and stood before her with his hands on her hips. "Greta," he warned her, "I must get ready. I have a nine o'clock lesson, and already I am going to be late."
She stretched, "Okay, okay, no pow-wow for now."
"Besides, darling," he said to her reflection in the mirror, "you too have a busy day ahead of you."
"Yes, yes, I know," she said with an unpleasant expression. "I'll call as soon as I get out of the shower."
He sat beside her, boots in hand. "Maybe you should call now," he said, "so I can be here with you."
"After the shower. I promise." She stood and unzipped her athletic top.
He tugged on his second boot. "It is just that they can be so pushy and overwhelming."
"He is a friend of ours, Jean-Pierre. Well, of Matthew's anyway. But I trust he'll be straight with me," she said, sounding not totally certain.
"I am just trying to help," Jean-Pierre said, tucking in his shirt.
She slid her little horseshoe charm back and forth on its chain. Should she call now? Perhaps with Jean-Pierre here it would be easier. And if she really was going to go through with this, she might as well do it with him here. He was, after all, the reason why she had made up her mind in the first place.
"Wait," she said, as he was zipping his suede jacket. "Pass me my little address book. It's over there next to my wallet." She flipped through the book and found the number she wanted and dialed the telephone.
Jean-Pierre stood with his arms crossed, broad shoulders pressed squarely against the wall. He gave her an encouraging look.
She turned her attention to her free hand, the left, which she had kept ungloved since she and Jean-Pierre had made love the first time. Somehow it seemed only fitting that she stare at where her finger once was while making this call. On the second ring a young woman's voice greeted her.
"This is Greta Locke," she said, and after a moment's hesitation, "Matthew Locke's wife." She met Jean-Pierre's intense stare. "I'd like to speak with Mitchell, please." A pause, then: "Mitchell, hello. Yes, he's fine, thank you." Her expression turned serious as she smiled through the last of the lawyer's greeting.
"Actually, Mitchell, things aren't exactly perfect," she said, twisting the phone cord in her hand. Her eyes went to Jean-Pierre for a moment, taking him in from head to toe, his boots. The ranch, she reminded herself, boosting her courage. This was all for their ranch. She took a deep breath and plunged on. "I'm calling you, Mitchell, because I want a divorce." Pinpoint dots of sweat had formed on her upper lip.
"I'm sorry?" she said, shaking her gaze from Jean-Pierre. "No, Matthew and I have not talked about it yet." Another pause. "No, I don't know if it's what Matthew wants. It's what I want." She swallowed a deluge of conflicting emotions, her eyes pleading with her lover for support.
Jean-Pierre dropped before her and rested his head in her lap.
"Yes, I will," she said, and placed her hand on Jean-Pierre's head. "Yes, as soon as he gets home from New York, yes."
Jean-Pierre lifted his face. He was silently mouthing a word, but she could not understand him.
"No, I can't think of anything. I'm sure by the time I call you back I'll have - oh, wait." She cupped her hand over the mouthpiece.
"Property," Jean-Pierre whispered.
"Oh yes, Mitchell, I do have one question." She held the phone with both hands and looked out the window. "Mitchell, I'm not clear on a few things in these matters. The property. The house. Assets. Those sorts of things."
Jean-Pierre held her around the waist with both arms. In the distance she could see his small cottage, the ranch, a few horses being led from the stable.
"It is half, then," she said softly. Her hand dropped to Jean-Pierre's head and slid down to his shoulder. She held on tight. "Half of everything," she uttered, feeling as if her lips were suddenly anesthetized.
"Okay," she said, her voice different now, smaller. "Thank you, Mitchell. I'll contact you soon." She placed the handset on its cradle and closed her eyes.
Jean-Pierre seated himself beside her and wrapped his arms around her and held her tight. He whispered to her soothingly, to breathe slowly, relax.
She opened her mouth, tried to form words, but they would not come. After a minute she regained some control. "My God, Jean-Pierre," she managed, hiding her face in her trembling hands. "That amounts to millions."
"Greta," he said, pulling her from him, "You have earned your share. You have worked for it."
"Yes," she said. "Yes," an emphatic whisper. "I have worked hard for it, haven't I?"
"Yes," Jean-Pierre assured her, petting her hair. He smiled. "You have indeed."
* * *
"That's right, as much of it as I can sell," Peter said into the telephone. With a disbelieving expression he shook his head at Byron, who crossed his arms and shot him a mildly disturbed look.
"Okay, Peggy, thanks," Peter said, then hung up the phone.
"You sure you want to do that?" Byron said carefully, turning his coffee cup in his palm.
"You bet I am! Byron, I can't believe this! I can't believe
Matthew has formed an alliance with them!" Peter said, batting
his hand at the "Wall Street Journal," whose headline announced,
"ICP, Wallaby Announce Strategic Venture."
"Petey, don't forget that 'them' is where this old timer comes from."
"I know, I know. I'm sorry. I don't mean to disparage you, or where you're from. I'm just astonished Matthew has actually done what he was trying to get me to agree to do. To sell out Wallaby to ICP."
"He's not selling out, boy. He's upping Wallaby's market. Probably triple it in a few years because of that two-step he pulled today."
Peter folded his arms. "All the more reason for me to sell my share in Wallaby and invest it in what we're working on. You know, I'm in the mood for a little shopping spree. I think my mind is made up about those couple of acquisitions we've been talking about. The net browser. The compression routines. And definitely that knock-out handwriting recognition kernel. Yes indeed, it's time to do a little spending."
The two men had turned the extra bedroom in Byron's Maine home into a lab and workroom. Scattered all around were diagrams of circuit boards, tools, and assorted computer and electronic parts. A flowchart of the software that Byron was engineering, based on the design the two men had come up with in the last four months, was spread out on the table before them.
"Well, that's settled then," Byron said. "Good. Now what do you say you wipe that little snarl off your face and we get back to work. Come on." He patted the stool beside him and Peter, still plainly agitated by the news, returned to his seat beside his partner.
"This is what I changed last night," Byron said, pointing at a series of boxes indicating the user interface portion of the code. "It's what's going to make this baby different from every other portable doohickey out there."
Peter leaned over the table, following Byron's finger. He shook his head. "No."
"No? No what?"
Peter roughly took Byron's hand in his. "This!" he said, encircling the entire drawing with the other man's finger and, in doing so, pulling Byron from his stool and practically stretching him across the table.
"Hey!" Byron yelled. "If you want to dance, just say so, but be careful, boy, I prefer the floor to tables!"
"I'm sorry," Peter said. He let go of Byron's hand, and gently patted it.
Byron tugged at his sweater sleeve and flexed his arm.
"But look at this," Peter said. "All of this!" he continued, gesturing in a frenzy now with both hands at the entire table, the scattered parts, the room.
Byron casually fished his tobacco pouch from his shirt pocket.
"Don't you see what's wrong with all this stuff you're talking about?"
"Why don't you tell me," Byron said. He crossed his legs and began packing his pipe.
"First, with all respect to your history," Peter started, "it's too complicated."
Byron took a few glowing tokes from his pipe than shook out the wooden match. His motions were slow, unruffled. He exhaled a plume of smoke, then strolled slowly around the table, eyeing the diagram from over the rim of his glasses. "Well, now that you mention it, she is kind of a little monster, ain't she?"
"Little? Hah! If we were to code this thing as it is we'd need an army of programmers. We need to break it down into smaller, smarter chunks. Objects. Maybe we should snap up that little object system those kids from Cal Poly showed us last week. Hell, looking at this, two million doesn't sound like that much anymore."
"Mmm, that would definitely let us break her down to a more manageable size. And adding features would be trivial. Okay, let's call them back and have another look, make sure it'll do what we want," Byron said.
"There's something else."
"Such as?" Byron said, squinting through the rising smoke trails.
"I'm not sure what it is, though. I mean, everything we've got worked out with the agent software is right on. All the cross-referencing between the applications, the net-savvy look-ups and updates and all. But when I step back and look at this, at how it's going to actually look and operate when it's done, I feel like it's missing something. Under the hood we're doing things no one has done before. But on the surface, as nice as it will look, it doesn't seem, well, new enough to me. Different enough. What can we do to make ours really different from the others that are cropping up out there. They've all got styluses now. And there's that Sony slate computer that came out last week with a track pad almost exactly like the Joey's, so that's caught on too. All of it has. The add-on keyboards. CD-ROMs. Modems. PC Cards. The whole works. I don't know. Other than the smart software agents we're putting in, what can we do to make ours the all-out winner. The really intelligent assistant."
"Mmm," Byron hummed.
"What we need is a new paradigm. A bigger-picture metaphor that goes beyond what's already out there, taking this whole business to not just the next possible step, but two or three steps ahead. Something that really get the juices flowing. I mean, this is all well and good, but is it good enough?" He knocked his fist gently on the flowchart and stared intently at Byron.
"I'm with you."
Staring intensely at the drawing, Peter let out an exasperated sigh. "I just don't know what it should be. And that's the frustrating part."
Grace appeared at the doorway with a tray in her hands, holding sandwiches, French fries, two glasses of milk. "Time for a break, boys."
"Ah, relief," Byron said, rubbing his hands together. "Honey, we got any vinegar for those fries?"
"Coming right up," Grace said, handing the tray to her husband.
"Now, while we eat," Byron said, blowing on a hot French fry, "you can give your head a rest for a few minutes, and I promise you, while your stomach is doing some work of its own, your brain'll be busy too."
"I'm not so sure," Peter said. He took a sip of his milk.
The telephone rang.
"I'll get it," Grace said, returning from the kitchen with a bottle of cider vinegar. Byron made a beckoning gesture for the bottle.
"I got it," Peter said. "Holmes residence," he said, wiping his lips on his sleeve. "Hi, Peggy. What's up? Wait, let me guess, a problem with my stock sale already," Peter said with a smirk and a roll of his eyes at Byron.
"His secretary," Byron said, identifying the caller to his wife.
"What?" Peter shouted, eyes suddenly wide with panic.
"What is it?" Byron asked, coming to Peter's side.
"Hello?" a voice called softly, from inside the house.
"All right, yes," Peter said. "I'll get there as soon as I can."
He hung up the phone and stared at the handset.
"Hi," Kate said, bounding cheerfully into the room. "I let myself in." She froze in place when she took in Peter's aghast expression as he turned away and faced the wall. He locked his hands behind his neck and looked up at the ceiling.
"What the hell's wrong?" Byron said.
"What's going on?" Kate asked Grace, who replied with upturned palms. "Peter?" Kate gripped his arm. "What is it?"
"Something back home," Peter said, avoiding every set of staring eyes.
"Is it the stock sale, boy?"
He shook his head.
"Then what?" Kate asked, tugging his arm to make him face her.
He turned around and took her hands. "Something happened. I have to go home." He studied their interlocked fingers. "I can't tell you about it right now." He looked her straight in the eye. It was the wine, he thought grimly.
He let go of her hands. "I need to get to the airport right away," he said to Byron.
"Okay," Kate said, "let's go," taking his arm.
Peter's feet remained planted.
"Peter?"
"I have to go alone," he said, leaving no room for disagreement.
Grace discreetly nudged her husband.
"Okay," Byron said, settling his hands on both Kate's and Peter's shoulders. "Put your coat on. I'll take you to the airport." He gave Kate a reassuring look and a wink.
"Don't you want to pack some things?" Kate said.
"There isn't time," Peter said. "I'll call," he said, unable to look her in the eye again, then turned and left the room.
"Be back in a bit," Byron said, kissing his wife on the cheek. "Keep those fries in the oven please, dearest." He turned to Kate and gently squeezed her arm. "It's going to be okay." Then he turned and went after Peter.
Hearing Byron's words of reassurance as he waited outside the workroom, Peter felt the thing in his heart come fully awake. It had been hibernating all through the winter and he had forgotten about it. But now it was time to for it to reemerge.
A knot of contradiction swelled in his throat when he remembered back to the premonition he'd had on that fateful night, more than half a year ago, that he was going to lose everything close to his heart, everything that ever mattered. It was starting, he reasoned, and by the looks of it, Kate would be the first piece to fall away.