When Joan finally stirred in the quiet bedroom, he said, “Sweetheart, let’s go around the corner to the diner. Dress down.” It was time to talk to her. He needed to know what lies she had told Menachem Oz. Once he heard them, he would have a perfect excuse to tell her that their affair was over: he could display his anger to her, he would have a reason for leaving.
As he sat on a chair in the bedroom, he watched her through the open bathroom door. They were so familiar with each other that she made no effort to hide what she was doing. Naked, she sat on the toilet. She peed so intensely that from twenty feet away he heard the hiss from the toilet. Then she combed her hair and swept it up to the back of her head; strands fell to the nape of her neck. Just the sight of her luxurious hair alone, Rawls thought, could give him another hard-on. Did he really want to dump her?
At only four in the afternoon, the big Greek diner at 73rd Street and Madison Avenue, five blocks from Joan’s apartment, was empty except for the hairy, Greek-speaking waiters and two other customers-a blue-haired ancient woman in a wheelchair and the Jamaican-accented black woman who took care of her. Two reporters-one from the Times and another from the New York Observer-followed them into the diner and sat at the counter. Joan and Hank recognized and ignored them.
They sat in a booth with vinyl seats, the worn Formica table gleaming between them. “Joan,” he said after they ordered a Greek salad for her and a spinach omelet for him, “I had a bad day yesterday. A really, really bad day.”
She’d expected him to say this. She girded herself: she loved him and for that simple reason didn’t want to lose him.
“He’s an awful little man,” she said.
“Listen, Joan. I don’t want to talk about how ugly Menachem Oz is. Or how bad his suits are. Or what a cheap bitch Margaret Harding is. This is what’s important: Oz asked where I spent the day Brad was killed. I told him I was with you, here, in the city, at your apartment. Harding had come into the room at that point, as if on cue, eager to hear what I said. They obviously knew, I realized, that one of us is lying. What did you tell them?”
Hank waited as Joan’s blue eyes gazed at him. “I lied. I started lying on the night I drove out there. I have no idea why I did it. Probably to protect you.”
“To protect me?”
“I think so. I thought it would make a mess for you if they knew you were with me all day.”
“I didn’t need protection.”
She nodded. “I know that now, I probably knew that then.”
“You’re the one who needs protection, Joan. It’s serious business to lie to these people and more serious, of course, to get caught. I think you have to talk to your lawyer, admit to the lie, and beg forgiveness.”
She glanced at the reporters drinking coffee and talking to each other at the counter, acting as though they were casual customers who happened to meet in a diner. Joan, who had once welcomed reporters, now detested them. Lowering her voice, she said, “Yes, I need to do that. And I first need to tell you the truth.”
“Confession is good for the soul, Joan. What else did you tell Oz that you think I should know about?”
“He asked lots of questions, Hank. Too many. I’m smart. But even I got confused. And afraid.”
They didn’t speak during the time the Greek waiter with the big gold chain around his neck placed their food in front of them and asked, “Need anything else now?” He was gruff and unpleasant: there was that sibilance in his Greek accent that male waiters in Greek diners all seemed to have.
With a friendly gesture and his engaging smile-that demeanor that had led him to win every election campaign he’d ever run except the last one-Hank Rawls said, “No, thanks.” And, as soon as the waiter left, he said to Joan Richardson, “And what did you tell them about us?”
“That we have been lovers for months, long before Brad died.”
“I told them the same thing. They also asked the next obvious question because Menachem doesn’t start down a path until he gets to the end: Did Brad know about us?”
“What did you say?”
“That we were in plain view. That I had a history of appearing with women in plain view, particularly on beaches. I’m not sure Menachem knew what I was talking about.”
“Did anybody in the room know what you were talking about?”
“I’m sure some did. Most of them were certainly old enough to remember those pictures on the beach. But everybody was hard to read. It was, as the comedians say, a tough audience.” He smiled at her, a smile that always disarmed her. “And he asked me questions about you and Brad.”
“What questions?”
“For example, whether I knew Brad was gay.”
“And you said?”
“I said I didn’t know, but I’d been told he was, and I asked why it mattered. And, as I should’ve known, Menachem didn’t answer me. They live in a perfect world, Joan: they get to ask all the questions.”
She moved her fork over the surface of her salad, not touching it. “Did they ask you how you knew Brad was gay?”
“Simple, Joan: I said you told me, that this was one of those cases where the wife might have been the first, not the last, to know.” Hank sipped his Diet Coke. “And what did you tell them?”
“That it took two years into the marriage for me to find out that Brad had boyfriends, not girlfriends. That I had suspected it for a long time, because of Brad’s mannerisms, his glances at some of our male friends. I said that when I asked Brad years ago, point blank, he didn’t deny it.”
“Did they ask you about Trevor? That guy from last summer? The songwriter? The interior decorator? Whatever the hell he is?”
Joan glanced at the diner’s wallpaper: a beige scene of a hillside above a Greek village. Every Greek diner in the city appeared to have wallpaper that memorialized the Icarus myth. In the pastel air there was an image of a boy falling gracefully, wings extended, toward his death in the Aegean Sea. Icarus. She said, “Trevor had already talked to the Grand Jury. Thank God I volunteered his name before they asked too many questions, or they would have caught me lying again, denying I knew him.”
“How do you know Trevor was there?”
“He’s one of those gay nellies who loves to gossip. He calls everybody girl. ‘Girl, did you hear about this one?’ He despises anyone’s privacy. Brad was involved with him, and I was so used to this that I even had dinner with just the three of us, usually at Bobby Van’s in Bridgehampton, usually in the middle of the week. The world was there to see us. Brad liked having him around so much that I just gave in at a certain point and didn’t resist. I can’t stand the little pest.”
Hank Rawls, too, looked at the pastel wallpaper. That single scene of Icarus falling was repeated again and again through the diner’s interior between every seam in the wallpaper. “And they asked me about Juan Suarez and you.”
She pushed her food aside and reached for his hand. His fingers were closed and didn’t respond to her touch. She asked, “Did they ask what you knew about why Juan killed Brad?”
“No, Joan, they never asked that. They asked about what kind of relationship you had with Juan.”
“God, what’s going on?” she said. “This is too much. He worked for us. We paid him. We paid his wife, too, and sometimes we had his little kids over to play at the pool. What did you say?”