I stuck my head out the door and called to her and the sound of the blow-dryer stopped.
“Look what I found,” I said, holding up the necklace as she came back into the bathroom. “It’s not every day I get to fish a diamond out of a drain.”
She looked at the pendant without touching it. I couldn’t say I blamed her. There were still bits of rusty hair tangled in the chain, and the whole thing looked mousy and sad and wretched. She examined it and then she touched her own hair. Now that she had dried it, it was the pale gold color of a little girl’s. A very good dye job can do that. She ran her fingers through her hair and the smell of her hair gave way to the scent of her perfume — something with musk in it, the real kind.
“You found that pendant in my drain?” she asked.
I grinned. “I bet you didn’t even know it was missing.”
She took her bottom lip between her teeth for a moment. “I didn’t,” she said. “Especially since it isn’t mine.” And she turned and walked out of the room.
I’m not dumb but it took me the whole time I was putting away my tools and wiping down the sink and washing my hands with some of her very nice sandalwood soap before I figured it out. I don’t suppose there’s a good way to find out you’ve been cheated on, but if there is, the plumber fishing another woman’s diamond pendant out of your bathroom drain isn’t it.
I found her in the kitchen, writing a check.
“I left the necklace on top of the toilet,” I said. “Maybe you can flush it down — accidentally, of course.”
She looked up at me and by this time she’d got her smile back on. Not unlike diamond light, that smile.
“You’re a quick study,” she said. “Have you ever been married?”
“No.”
“Cheated on?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’ll have a drink with me.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t need to because it was a command, not an invitation.
“Bourbon all right?” she asked.
“Scotch, if you have it.”
“Of course I have it.” She opened a kitchen cabinet. “I knew,” she said with her back to me, “that there were others. One after the other. But what I didn’t know,” she turned back toward me and handed me my glass, “is that he’s been fucking this one in my bed.”
I took a pull of the Scotch. It was even better than Charlotte’s. Mrs. Lancaster knocked hers back in a gulp and poured another, then went to the refrigerator and held her glass under the ice maker.
“I’m divorcing him, you know,” she said.
“Did you just decide this?”
“No, no. It takes me forever to decide anything. But this time I’ve had it.”
I swirled more of the Scotch around in my mouth and inhaled. Wood smoke and leather, very smooth, and something sweet I couldn’t place yet.
“I should have done it years ago. It’s my house and my money. I don’t need him. And he doesn’t need me, clearly. Not when there are so many lovely young grad students running around.”
“He’s screwing his students?”
“Not his students. Richard’s too smart for that. Nothing quite against the rules, nothing to interfere with his endowed chair. Nothing except me, maybe. But he’s married to me, unfortunately, and that was perhaps not so brilliant on his part, but he’s a brilliant man, my husband. Oh, yes. A brilliant gentleman and a brilliant scholar. It’s too bad nobody listens to me — I’ve been saying things for years. But now I have evidence. Unless I’m just inventing the whole thing, of course. Out of spite. The whole thing.”
Maybe it was humiliation and anger that was making her voice slide all over the place. Or maybe she was getting sloshed. I didn’t say anything. I was just the plumber. She looked at me as if considering something, and then she leaned toward me and her hand came up and pulled gently at the collar of my shirt. I don’t blush easily, but when her fingers grazed my neck I did. It was the scent of her. Then her hand came away again, a bit of pink fluff between her thumb and forefinger.
“You have a piece of cotton candy on you,” she said.
“It’s insulation.” I held out my hand, and she laid it on my palm like a gift. Her hand was cleaner than mine would ever be.
“Being a plumber, you must get into some interesting places.” She looked me straight in the eye as she said it. She seemed calm again. And very, very focused.
“I do,” I responded evenly, but my cheeks flushed some more. She saw it. And she kept her eyes on mine.
“Tell me: what kind of places?”
“What kind of places?” I repeated.
It wasn’t the first time this had happened to me on a job. Maybe it’s because I’m a stranger in a person’s private space — their bedroom, their bathroom — yet I’m also invited. I’m anonymous, yet intimate. It’s a turn-on for some people, I guess. Including me.
“Places — places that can get very dirty,” I managed. My face was burning up. I put some more Scotch in my mouth and breathed in again and leaned toward her. Wood smoke and leather, and dried cherries, that was it, and Mrs. Lancaster’s musky perfume, and her burning sorrow, I could smell that too, and the smell of her mouth that would be a little smoky from the Scotch, and I leaned in toward her mouth and then I smelled something else, the faintest edge of sulfur, a smell that sent a little jolt of fear through me and knocked all the other jolts away.
I put down my glass. “You have a gas leak,” I said.
She looked at me blankly.
“I smell gas. You have a gas leak somewhere in your house.”
She sat back in her chair, affronted. “I don’t smell anything.”
“I have an excellent nose.” Talk about a buzzkill. Even the greenest apprentice has heard stories of houses blowing up, entire buildings exploding, because of a gas leak. Sometimes it’s equipment failure, sometimes a homeowner’s bad handiwork. Sometimes it’s the plumber’s fault, and then careers and lives get ruined. I’ve seen it happen.
I sniffed the stove burners, opened the oven. Nothing there. “Is that the basement door?”
She nodded, and as soon as I opened it, the smell hit me stronger. I grabbed my tool bag and went down the stairs without asking and began soaping the gas pipes with leak detector. Upstairs I heard a door close, but it wasn’t the basement door. Then I heard Mrs. Lancaster say something, though she wasn’t talking to me. Another door closing, another voice, distant. I kept soaping, and after a few minutes I found it: a leak at the union joint near the furnace.
There was a creak on the stairs behind me and a pair of shoes appeared. Not Mrs. Lancaster’s size. These were big leather dress shoes, followed by khaki slacks, followed by a blue oxford shirt and a paisley silk tie and, finally, the face of Richard Lancaster, the guy who drills grad students in his wife’s bedroom.
“Helene said you smelled gas,” he said by way of greeting.
“I found the leak,” I replied, since it seemed we were skipping introductions. Nicky Biglietti, the plumber who tries to kiss married women in their kitchens. “Look at this.” Big rainbow bubbles were popping up through the leak detector suds.
He got down on his haunches, stiffly, so that his silver head was level with mine. He looked like someone who had an endowed chair: handsome face in a WASPy sort of way, his nose a little too long and bony, but smart blue eyes, good chin, hair that was silvering nicely. Aging but aging well, just like his wife.
“What are all those bubbles?” he asked.
“Soapsuds. If there’s a leak, the escaping gas blows bubbles in it. If there’s no leak, the suds just sit there — watch.” I hoisted my wrenches, gave a turn of the union, and the bubbling stopped. “Now it’s tight. I turn it the other way, the bubbles come back, see? Now it’s tight again.”