Клайв Баркер – Galilee (страница 34)

As to Marietta, she would not be drawn out any further on the subject of the senator’s daughter. I can’t help wondering, however, if at some point down the line the fate of L’Enfant and the secret lives of Capitol Hill won’t again intersect. This is, after all, a house built by a president. I won’t argue that it’s his masterpiece—that’s surely the Declaration of Independence—but L’Enfant’s roots lie too close to the roots of democracy’s tree for the two not to be intertwined. And if, as Zelim the Prophet once claimed, the process of all things is like the Wheel of the Stars, and what has seemed to pass away will come back again sooner or later, is it unreasonable to suppose that L’Enfant’s demise may be caused or quickened by the order of power that brought it into being?

IX

So now you know how Rachel Pallenberg and Mitchell Geary became husband and wife—from their first meeting to the vows at the altar. You know how powerful a family she had entered, and how possessive it was; you know she was in love with Mitchell, passionately so, and that her feelings were reciprocated.

How then, you ask, does such a romance fall from grace? How is it that, a little over two years later, at the end of a rainy October, Rachel was driving around the benighted streets of Dansky, Ohio, cursing the day she’d heard the name of Mitchell Geary?

If this were a work of fiction I could invent some dramatic scenario to explain all this. She’d step into the house one day and find her husband in bed with another woman, or they’d have an argument that would escalate into violence, or he’d reveal to her in the heat of an angry exchange that he’d married her for a bet with his brother. But there was nothing like that in their lives: no adulteries, no violence, and certainly no raised voices. It just wasn’t the way Mitch dealt with things. He liked to be liked, even when being liked meant avoiding a confrontation that would be to everybody’s good. That meant turning a blind eye to Rachel’s discomfort if there was the least risk of stirring up something unpleasant. His former empathy, which had been so much a part of what had enchanted her about him, disappeared. If she was unhappy, he simply looked the other way. There was always plenty of Geary family business to justify his inattention; and of course the inevitable seductions of luxury to soften Rachel’s loneliness when he was gone.

It would be wrong to claim that she was not in some fashion complicit in all of this. It became apparent to her very quickly that her life as Mrs. Mitchell Geary was not going to be as emotionally fulfilling as she’d hoped. Mitchell was wholly devoted to the family business, and as she had no role in that business, nor wanted one, she found herself alone more often than she liked. Instead of sitting Mitch down and talking the problem through—telling him, in essence, that she wanted to be more than a public wife—she let his way of doing things carry the day, and that soon proved a self-fulfilling prophecy. The less she said the harder it became to say anything at all.

Anyway, how could she claim the marriage wasn’t working when to the outside world she’d been given paradise on a platter? Was there anywhere she couldn’t go if she wanted to? Any store she couldn’t shop in until she was tired of saying I’ll take it? They went to Aspen skiing, Vermont for a weekend in the autumn, to enjoy the turning of the leaves. She was in Los Angeles for the Oscar parties, in Paris to see the spring collections, in London for the theater, and Rio and Bali for spur-of-the-moment vacations. What did she have to complain about?

The only person in whom she could confide her growing unhappiness was Margie, who wasn’t so much sympathetic as fatalistic.

“It’s a trade-off,” she said. “And it’s been going on since the beginning of time. Or at least since the first rich man ever took himself a poor wife.”

Rachel flinched at this. “I am not—”

“Oh honey.”

“That’s not why I married Mitch.”

“No, of course it isn’t. You’d be with him if he was ugly and poor and I’d be with Garrison if he was tap-dancing on a street corner in Soho.”

“I love Mitch.”

“Right now?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, sitting here right now, having said all the things you’ve just said about how he’s neglectful, and doesn’t want to talk about feelings, and so on, sitting right here right now, you love him?”

“Oh Lord…”

“Is that a maybe?”

There was a pause while they thought about what she was feeling at that moment. “I don’t know what I feel,” she admitted. “It’s just that he’s not…”

“The man you married?” Rachel nodded. Margie refilled her whiskey glass and leaned forward as though to whisper something, though they were the only people in the room. “Sweetheart, he never was the man you married. He was just giving you the Mitch you wanted to see.” She leaned back, waving her free hand in the air as though to swat a swarm of phantom Gearys out of her sight. “They’re all the same. Christ knows.” She sipped her whiskey. “Believe it or not, Garrison can be charm personified when it suits him. They must get it from their grandfather.”

Rachel pictured Cadmus the way he’d been at the wedding; sitting in his high-backed chair dispensing charm like a benediction.

“If it’s all a performance,” she said, “where’s the real Mitch?”

“He doesn’t know any more. If he ever did, which I doubt. It’s sort of pitiful when you think about it. All that power, all that money, and there’s nobody home to use it.”

“They use it all the time,” Rachel said.

“No,” Margie replied. “It uses them. They’re not living. None of us Gearys are. We’re all just going through the motions.” She peered at her glass. “I know I drink too much. It’s rotting my liver and it’ll probably kill me. But at least when I’ve got a few whiskeys inside me I’m not stuck being Mrs. Garrison Geary. When I’m drunk I give up being his wife, I’m somebody he wishes he didn’t know. I like that.”

Rachel shook her head in despair. “If it’s so bad,” she said, “why don’t you just leave?”

“I’ve tried. I’ve left him three times. Once I stayed away for five months. But…you get into a certain way of being. You get comfortable.” Rachel looked uneasy. “It doesn’t take long. Look, I don’t like living in Garrison’s shadow, but I like living without his credit cards even less.”

“You could divorce him and get a very nice settlement, Margie. You could live anywhere you wanted, anyway you wanted.”

Now it was Margie who shook her head. “I know,” she said softly. “I’m just making excuses.” She picked up the whiskey bottle and poured herself another half tumbler. “The fact is, I’m not leaving because somewhere deep down I don’t want to. I guess maybe what’s left of my self-esteem’s wrapped up in being part of the dynasty. Isn’t that pathetic?” She sipped on her drink. “Don’t look so appalled, honey. Just because I’m too screwed up to leave, doesn’t mean you can’t. How old are you now?”

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