Please let me up. All I did was take the test. I didn't say I was going to apply. "Look, there are the Carlisles up ahead of us. I guess we're not late after all."
Jared's voice broke through the nightmare. Dampened by a cold sweat, she pushed herself upright. The assault had taken place the day after the second anniversary of her previous marriage, and only an hour after her husband, a failure first in a pro football tryout, then in graduate school, and finally in business, had learned that she had taken the Medical College Admission Test, and worse, that she had scored in the top five percent. His need to control her, never pleasant, had turned ugly. By the evening of that day she had moved out. "Jared, " she pleaded quietly, "we'll talk. Okay?"
"Yeah, sure, " he answered. "We'll talk."
The ball rainbowed off Jared's racquet with deceptive speed. A perfect topspin lob. From her spot by the net, Kate watched Jim and Patsy Carlisle skid to simultaneous stops and, amidst flailing arms, legs, and racquets, dash backward toward the baseline. The shot bounced six inches inside the line and then accelerated toward the screen, the Carlisles in frantic pursuit. "You fox," Kate whispered as Jared moved forward for the Uling shot they both knew would not be necessary. "That was absolutely beautiful."
"Just keep looking sort of bland. Like we don't even know we're about to beat them for the first time ever."
Across the net, Patsy Carlisle made a fruitless lunge that sent her tumbling into the indoor court's green nylon backdrop. Kate watched the minidrama of the woman, still seated on the court, glaring at her husband as he stalked away from her without even the offer of a hand up.
Husbands and wives mixed doubles, she thought, games within games within games. "Three match points, " she said. "Maybe we should squabble more often before we play." A took at Jared's eyes told her she should have let the matter lie. "Finish 'em with the ol' high hard one, " she urged as he walked back to the service line. Her enthusiasm, she knew, now sounded forced-an attempt at some kind of expiation. Jared nodded at her and winked. Kate crouched by the net. Eighteen feet in front of her, Jim Carlisle shifted the weight of his compact, perfectly conditioned body from one foot to another. A successful real estate developer, a yachtsman, and club champion several years running, he had never been one to take any kind of loss lightly. "You know, " he had said to her on the only attempt he had ever made to start an affair between them,
"there are those like you-know-who, who are content to tiptoe along in Daddy's footsteps, and those who just grab life by the throat and do it. I'm a doer."
The reference to Jared, even though prodded forth by far too many martinis, had left an aftertaste of anger that Kate knew would never totally disappear. When Carlisle sent the Samuels for Congress Committee a check for five hundred dollars, she had almost sent it back with a note telling him to go grab somebody's life by the throat. Instead, out of deference to her husband, she had invited the Carlisles over for dinner. Her hypocrisy, however honorable its purpose, continued to rankle her from time to time, especially when Carlisle, wearing his smugness like aftershave, was about to inflict yet another defeat on team Samuels/Bennett. At last she was beating the man. Not even a disagreement with her husband could dull the luster of the moment.
Through the mirror of Jim Carlisle's stages of readiness to return serve, Kate pictured Jared's movements behind her. Feet planted, Jared had settled in at the line. Hunching over, knees bent, Jared was tapping ball against racquet, gaining his rhythm. Just before Carlisle began the quick bouncing which would signal the toss, she heard Jared's voice.
"The ol' high hard one, " he said. Kate tensed, awaiting the familiar, sharp pok of Jared's serve and Carlisle's almost simultaneous move to return. Instead, she heard virtually nothing, and watched in horror as Carlisle, with the glee of a tomcat discovering a wounded sparrow, advanced to pounce on a woefully soft hit. The serve was deliberate-vintage Jared Samuels, his way of announcing that by no means had he forgotten their argument. "Jared, you bastard, " Kate screamed just as Carlisle exploded a shot straight at her chest from less than a dozen feet away. An instant after the ball left Carlisle's racquet, it was on Kate's, then ricocheting into a totally unguarded corner of the court. The shot was absolute reflex, absolute luck, but perfect all the same. "Match, " Kate said simply. She shook hands with each of their opponents, giving Jim's hand an extra pump. Then, without a backward glance, she walked off the court to the locker room. The Oceanside Racquet Club, three quarters of an acre of corrugated aluminum box, squatted gracelessly on a small rise above the Atlantic. "Facing Wimbledon, " was the way the club's overstuffed director liked to describe it. Keeping her hair dry and moving quickly enough to ensure that Jared would have to work to catch up with her, Kate showered and left the building. The rules of their game demanded a reaction of some sort for his behavior, and she had decided on taking the MG, perhaps stopping a mile or so down the road. As she crossed the half-filled parking lot, she began searching the pockets of her parka for her keys.
Almost immediately, she remembered seeing them on the kitchen table.
"Damn! " The feeling was so familiar. She had, in the past, slept through several exams, required police assistance to locate her car in an airport parking garage, and forgotten where she had put the engagement ring Art had given her. Although she had come to accept the trait as a usually harmless annoyance, there was a time when visions of clamps left in abdomens concerned her enough to influence her decision to go into pathology rather than clinical medicine. This day, she felt no compassion whatsoever toward her shortcoming. Testily, she strode past their car and down the road. The move was a bluff. Jared would know that as well as she. It was an eight-mile walk to their home, and the temperature was near freezing. Still, some show of indignation was called for. But not this, she realized quickly. At the moment she accepted the absurdity of her gesture and decided to turn back, she heard the distinctive rev of the MG behind her. There could be no retreat now. It was a game between them, but not a game. Their scenarios were often carefully staged, but they were life all the same, actions and reactions, spontaneous or not, that provided the dynamics unique to their relationship. There had been no such dynamics in her first marriage. Put simply, Arthur Everett decreed and his dutiful wife Kathryn acquiesced. For two destructive years it had been that way. Her childhood programming offered no alternatives, and she had been too frightened, too insecure, to question. Even now there were times, though gradually fewer and farther between, when dreams of the farmhouse and the children, the well-stocked, sunlit kitchen and the pipe smoke wafting out from the study, dominated her thoughts. They were, she knew, nothing more than the vestiges-the reincarnations-of that childhood programming. Unfortunately, much of Jared's programming was continually being reinforced, thanks largely to a father who remained convinced that God's plan for women was quite different from His plan for men. "You have a wonderful behind, do you know that? " Jared's voice startled her.
He was driving alongside her, studying her anatomy through a pair of binoculars. "Yes, I know that." She stiffened enough to be sure he could notice and walked on. Please don't get hurt, she thought. Put those silly binoculars down and watch where you're going. "And your face. Have I told you lately about your face?"
"No, but go ahead if you must."
"It is the blue ribbon, gold medal, face-of-the-decade face, that's what."
"You tried to get me killed in there." Kate slowed, but did not stop.