Hilliard, meddling in his business as usual, asked him one evening idly in the bar at Grey Hills showing off for other people standing around within earshot having drinks after a budget committee meeting if he was 'still at it, keeping company with the Widow Fox," knowing the answer.
When Merrion said that he was, adding that Hilliard damned right well knew it, he was vexed to feel his ears and cheeks getting hot. Thus rewarded, Hilliard prying further had asked him why he kept on seeing her. "An excellent cook," Hilliard said, 'but she can be a controlling woman."
Merrion said irritably that he guessed it was something that he did, not something he had thought about doing, so therefore he supposed the reason that he did it was because he wanted to. Hilliard had nodded and said grandly that his many years of extensive experience and close personal observation enabled him to state unequivocally and without fear of contradiction that that was indisputably the very best reason, bar none, that Amby Merrion had ever given for going out with a woman.
That brought a little polite applause and a 'hear, hear' or two.
Merrion thought about it for a moment and said that the reason he had tolerated Hilliard for so many years was that from time to time not very often, but still, now and then he showed absolutely brilliant insight into human nature, and this was one of those times.
Merrion in the course of helping Diane through her sorrow had found her opinions to be based upon good instincts, and he got into the habit of seeking them when confronting important decisions of his own. It was natural enough, he supposed; after all, she was used to considering other people's situations and giving her advice, that being the way she'd made her living and career for a good many years. And she was obviously pleased, quietly flattered, when he consulted her. Once, more or less in obedience to some shabby impulse learned in politics, he supposed no point in having an advantage if you're not going to try to use it he tried to subvert her good will and affection. One evening late in 1992, over dinner at the Tavern, he had asked her advice about what he ought to do with Polly's house.
By then eleven years had passed since Walter's death, so there had been no question that Diane had recovered from the loss. The shattering decline into silence that would necessitate Polly's admission to St.
Mary's on the Hilltop had set in, rendering progressively more irrelevant his extreme reluctance 'to put her in the home'; he had reached a sort of marker in his life. But depressing as it was, the event had nonetheless been predictable for a long time; he had seen it coming much as Dan and Mercy Hilliard had known despairingly long before the day arrived that sooner or later they would have to put their daughter Donna in an institution providing long-term care. So he did not have the excuse that he had been dazed in shock that evening when he said what he should not have, asking Diane what he should do.
"You should move right back into it," Diane said immediately. "That's a good house, just like my house is a good house. That place you're living in right now," a large garden court apartment in the Old Wisdom House overlooking Hampton Pond, 'may be where the swells all want to go when they retire, half the year playing golf and shuffleboard in Florida, the other half back here playing golf and lying about their grandchildren. But you'll never be one of those silly men in colored pants with white belts and shoes. Besides, you're not old enough."
"Well," he said, 'the golf I could handle with pleasure, but it looks like I probably wont have the grandchildren."
"Looking for sympathy?" she said. "Won't get it from me. Rachel's always apologizing for not bringing her two back here more often, "so they can get to know you." Uh huh. "Perfectly all right," I always say. "Time enough for us to become dear friends when they go to Harvard. Then they can drive out and see me."
"Nothing wrong with where you live now, it's a very stylish place. But no matter what you have somebody do to it, it'll never be a good house, the kind of place you hang onto and go back to, because it's where you live, and belong. What you need's the sort of place that hangs onto you; that's what I really mean. It keeps you, not you, it, and that's what keeps you going strong."
"And you think I'm going to need one of those of my own," he said. He had been ashamed of himself even as he said it. It was arguably excusable 'never any harm in asking' but just the same it had also been a cheap dodge to take advantage of her compassionate mood in order to wheedle something out of her, something that she didn't want to give him.
She'd raised both eyebrows and gazed at him over the big white plate of veal scallops in cream sauce, and then after a brief but unmistakably reproving silence, she had snickered. "Amby," she had said, 'really now, of course you will. Of course you'll need your place to live. Of course you need a house."
So the terms of their non-aggression pact, 'our treaty," she called it, after that little stutter had resumed evolution along the lines they had begun to take, arriving at it fairly soon after Walter's death.
"Look, Amby," she had said to him she was a practical woman making coffee in her kitchen, using her foot to steer her possessive grey-and-black striped tiger-cat along the mopboard under the sink so that she wouldn't step on it; she had called Merrion Saturday morning and asked him to come over two days after they had gone to bed together the first time because that seemed to her what should be done next.
"This sex business: we've got to talk about it. Come to some kind of agreement we both understand. Or else it's going to get out of control and cause all kinds of problems, maybe end up ruining us. I don't want that to happen. I don't think you do, either. Tell me you don't either, all right? Humor me, at least, and say it, even if you're not really sure yet. This is important to me. I'm surprised how important it is."
"It's important to me, too," he had said, sitting down at her kitchen table, and it was. Having left her very early Friday morning in the still darkness so as to spare her attentive early-rising neighbors the effort they surely would have made to deduce the implications of the presence of what she called his 'flashy car' in her driveway in the sunrise on his way home he had gradually begun to understand that he didn't know what he ought to do next, how to act or what to say the next time he saw her; arrive with an armload of roses or act as though nothing remarkable had taken place. He was slightly flustered to find that mattered to him. As it hadn't mattered, he realized, in the aftermath of what had become a fair number of other sexual friendships he had enjoyed over the course of what he was now somewhat startled to notice had somehow turned into quite a number of years.
"Thirty of 'em, in fact, give or take," he said to Hilliard. "And I have to say it's been quite a while since I can remember being actually concerned the next day about how the lady actually felt about the fun we had last night. Not since Sunny went and died on me, I guess. What was there to get all concerned about? All it was was just getting laid now and then. That's how the grown-ups have fun. And if we should run into each other again, or maybe call up and make sure we did that, well, maybe wed fuck again. Or then again, maybe not. If the time ever came then when we hadda new chance, wed see how we felt. "Inna meantime, many thanks, I hadda good time. Appreciate you lookin' out for me like that."
"That was the way that it worked. There was this one woman I got so I knew pretty well at the New England Regional Meetings one year, and she was just real hot to trot. So we connected, and for the whole three days of that conference there up at Wentworth-by-the-Sea, that is what we did: we fucked our brains out.