“Johnny,” she moaned.
He moved now, ready for her. And she was ready for him, and it was the way it always was with them, the way it had been with them every time they were together, the way it always was and the way it always would be.
It was perfect.
He worked at advertising with the same tenacity and perseverance with which he had attacked the business of being a gigolo. He followed a routine not too dissimilar from the routine he had followed during the days when he lived at the Ruskin and spent every morning at the 42nd Street Library.
They awoke together at eight — or earlier if they intended to spend part of the morning making love. Linda cooked breakfast, while he read the Times. Then they ate and he took the bus to the office where he worked like a dog. Then he came home, did some special studying, and they went to a coffee house in the Village to relax or stayed at home and listened to records.
Progress was slow at first, inevitably enough. There were days when he felt he was making no headway at all, days when he was sure everybody else in the business was doing much better than he was. On those days he got tough to live with. He hit moods of depression that were almost unbearable, as much so for Linda as for him.
He wasn’t used to failure. Thus far he had succeeded at everything he had tried. In addition, he was fundamentally an eighteen-year-old in a field of grown men. They didn’t know how young he was, and he tried not to think about it, but it was inevitable that he would lack the maturity of his co-workers in some areas. And this hurt him, and he knew it.
But, although progress was slow, it came to him. McClintock couldn’t help notice that he did his jobs well, displaying a rare combination of imagination and technical competence. He got no promotions and no raises, but he had the feeling that he was first in line when a vacancy opened up. And in the ad game vacancies could open with tremendous speed. He hung on, waiting for the break, and the time passed easily enough.
He worried about Linda. With him working she was left alone eight hours a day, five days a week; left completely alone in a neighborhood where she was a stranger. She knew a few people, friends they had met at one coffee house or another, but they were not that close to her and she spent most of her afternoons sitting in Washington Square or hanging around the apartment. He wasn’t worried that she would start an affair with anybody, since he was firmly convinced that she could no more be interested in another man than he could be interested in another woman. It was out of the question.
He only worried that she would be bored stiff, or that things would get on her nerves. But this didn’t seem to happen. She was satisfied to share his life and she did this tremendously well. He couldn’t complain.
So he worked and he kept going. Whenever things got tough the vision would come back into his mind — the vision of himself and Linda in that big old stone house overlooking the Hudson, with the long Caddy in the garage and maybe a little sports job for her, say a Mercedes-Benz 300SL, parked next to it. And children, he thought. A houseful of kids for her to take care of. It made a pretty picture.
A hell of a picture.
With that picture in his head they could shovel all the mud in the world at him and he could take it. With that picture he had enough drive to push all of them into the background. They couldn’t stop him.
Then the picture disappeared.
It happened all at once.
It was a Thursday, and he was on his way home from work, done with the bus ride and heading through the park. He crossed the park and started down Sullivan Street and then he saw the cops standing in front of his building. There were two of them and they were waiting for him.
His first reaction reflected his early years. He thought that he had done something illegal and that they were waiting to arrest him for it. He wanted to turn and run from them but he knew better. But what had he done? Who had complained about what? Would they be able to make it stick?
Relax, he told himself. He hadn’t done a thing, he was a solid citizen now, a copywriter with Craig, Harry and Bourke with money in the bank. Nothing was wrong, it was something else, they probably weren’t even waiting for him.
“You Mr. Wells?”
“Yes,” he said. “Something I can do for you?”
“Mr. John Wells?”
Something was wrong. He could see it in the face of the older cop. Something was very wrong.”
“Tell me,” he said. “What’s the matter?”
“You have a wife named Linda?”
“That’s right.”
Not really my wife, he almost added. We’re in love. We live together. We love each other. You can call it a common-law marriage if you want. You can call it—
The older cop was now looking at his feet. Johnny turned to the younger cop. He, too, was looking at his feet.
“Go ahead,” Johnny said. “Tell me.”
“It’s bad news.”
“Tell me!”
“Your wife went to a hospital today,” the older cop said. “She had had an abortion. God knows where she got it. Some chiropractor or something. It was a bad one.”
“She... she wasn’t pregnant.”
“I guess she didn’t tell you, Mr. Wells. Sometimes it happens that way. A wife gets pregnant and she doesn’t want to let her husband know about it. Probably figures you can’t afford the kid and the best out is to get rid of it.”
“How... how is she?”
The cop looked away.
“She isn’t dead,” Johnny said. “You’re not going to stand there and tell me she’s dead. You can’t tell me that. You just can’t tell me that.”
The cop didn’t look at him.
“All right,” Johnny said. “She’s... dead. Now tell me about it, damn you. Tell me!”
The cop took a long breath. “I don’t guess there’s a lot to tell,” he said. “She reported into St. Luke’s hospital the middle of the afternoon. Reported to emergency. They rushed to take care of her but she was hemorrhaging and they couldn’t stop... couldn’t stop the blood. She kept losing blood until she died.”
How had she gotten pregnant? They’d taken precautions constantly except for a few times when it was supposed to be safe. When had it happened?
Oh, who cared? Who cared about anything?
Linda was dead.
“Who did it? Did you catch the guy?”
“We don’t know who did it. Even if we did we couldn’t prove it, couldn’t make it stick. But one of these days we’ll get the bastard. They make a slip and it catches them.”
Did that bring back Linda?
“Mr. Wells—”
“How pregnant was she?”
The cop looked at him.
“How long?”
“The doc said three to four months. Anywhere between. It’s hard to tell to the day, but—”
He didn’t hear the rest. He didn’t hear anything, wasn’t aware of the formal police interrogation or anything else, because as soon as that single fact registered on his mind the rest of the screen went blank.
Three to four months.
Which meant it wasn’t his kid.
That made it add up. That was why she hadn’t wanted to have the kid, why she had gone so far as to chance an abortion without telling him a thing. It was a kid somebody had given her when she was earning a precarious living as a part-time prostitute, a kid she had conceived before they had started living together, before they had fallen in love.
She could have told him, he thought. She could have told him. And he would have made her have the kid. Hell, it didn’t matter a damn whose kid it was. It was her kid, wasn’t it? And it would be his kid, too, because he would be its father and take care of it and buy presents for it and be nice to it and take it for walks in the park and—