Deadly Beloved Read online

  “You don’t have anything else to do for the next six weeks,” Evan pointed out. “You were the one who said you wanted to be calm for a while.”

  “I was thinking of taking a vacation in the south of Spain. I always take my vacations in the south of Spain.”

  “From what I can figure out looking through your records, you haven’t taken a vacation in twelve years. I got you a three-day visiting-artist thing at the University of Pennsylvania. Two lectures. Three seminars. One dinner.” Evan pawed through his shoulder bag and came up with a folded piece of paper. He handed it over to her and said, “I tried for Yale and I tried for Brown, but they’re going to have to wait. You’re going to have to let me work on your reputation for a while.”

  “My reputation is the best in the business,” Karla said automatically, but she was looking over the letter from the University of Pennsylvania, half mesmerized by the engraved college seal at the top of the page. “Ambitious,” like “successful,” was not a word she would have applied to herself. It evoked images of blue-suited armies marching out the door of the Harvard Business School, each of the women wearing two-and-a-half-inch stack-heeled pumps. What else was this, though, if not ambition? She could see herself, standing at the front of a classroom full of teenagers, talking about a slide she had projected high up on a classroom wall. She felt Evan’s eyes on her and looked up to find him staring. She blushed hot red and handed the letter back.

  “You’ll like doing it,” Evan said. “You’ll see. You’ll be a natural at this kind of thing.”

  “I expect to like doing it,” Karla said truthfully.

  “And I thought Philadelphia would be a good place.” Evan was going on as if he hadn’t heard her. “I thought you said you had friends there once, women you knew at college—”

  “Julianne Corbett and Liza Verity,” Karla said promptly. “They were in my class. I don’t know if they were exactly friends.”

  “It’s even better if they’re enemies,” Evan said. “You can come back the conquering hero. Heroine. You can come back and show them all what you’ve done with your life.”

  “Is that what I want to do?”

  “The problem with you is that you’ve never had any time to organize your life. You’ve been too busy working. You can’t leave things to chance like that these days. You have to go out and work for yourself.”

  “I work all the time.”

  “That’s different.”

  “I like what I do.”

  “I like to think I’m bringing you something nobody else could,” Evan said, sounding suddenly passionate, suddenly angry. “I like to think I have something unique to contribute to your life.”

  The bellhop had brought Karla’s backpack and Evan’s suitcase to the elevator bank. The main elevator was an ornate thing framed in curling brass, its doors patterned to look as if the metal on them had been quilted. Evan wasn’t looking at her. There were two young South American women in the lobby, their hair knotted into elaborate wreaths that ended in high swinging ponytails. The heels on their shoes were much too high. They wobbled and stumbled when they tried to walk. Their pocketbooks were too big and too heavy. They both looked like they were about to tip over.

  “Evan?” Karla said.

  Evan started walking toward the elevators. “We have to go upstairs,” he told her. “I booked us a two-bedroom suite.”

  “It must have cost a lot of money.”

  “It cost less than it would have. Because you’re the famous Karla Parrish. Because your name is in Paris-Match. Because it’s an asset to the hotel to have you staying here.”

  Karla was hurrying to keep up. Usually she thought of Evan as smaller than she was. What she really meant was that he was younger than she was, less experienced, with much less authority. In spite of the fact that he was slight, though, he was actually much taller than she was—at least six feet, while she was barely five five. He had stopped next to the bellhop at the elevator doors. Karla hurried a little faster and caught up with him.

  “Evan,” she said again.

  The elevator doors opened. An American couple came out, sounding very Texas and looking like an ad in GQ. The bellhop put their bags in the elevator cage and Evan followed them.

  “I’m just trying to be of use around here,” he said when Karla came to stand beside him. “Don’t you ever feel useless, doing what you do? All those people dying. All those people starving. And you just stand around and take pictures.”

  “You don’t want me to take pictures,” Karla said.

  “You can take all the pictures you want,” Evan said. “It’s not the pictures. That’s not the point. You’re a genius at pictures.”

  “What is the point?”

  “Look at all this scrollwork,” Evan said, staring at the ceiling of the elevator cab. “The French are really incredible. Less is more. More is more. More is less.”

  The elevator bounced to a stop. The doors opened and the bellhop got out, carrying their bags. They were in a long, carpeted hallway with ceilings a dozen feet high. Karla thought Evan was right about the scrollwork.

  “Did you always know that you wanted to take pictures?” Evan asked her, looking at the wall above her head. “Even when you were at Vassar?”

  “I never had a camera in my hands in my life until I was twenty-four years old,” Karla said. “Except for, you know, Brownies and that kind of thing.”

  “I thought a Brownie was a kind of Girl Scout.”

  The bellhop had opened the double doors at the end of the corridor. Karla walked through them and found herself in a living room larger than any she had ever been in. Evan shook through his trouser pockets and found a tip.

  “Merci,” the bellhop said. He was not smiling. In France, Karla had noticed, only the managerial class smiled.

  Evan threw himself into a mock Louis XVI chair and stared at the ceiling. Karla saw fat cherubs and even fatter grapes, molded in plaster, frozen in time.

  “Jesus,” Evan said. “The way this thing is going, I’m never going to get you into bed.”

  7.

  AS FAR BACK AS she could remember, even in junior high school, Julianne Corbett had used rouge and foundation and mascara to distract people from what she knew to be the truth about herself: that she was coarse-looking and plain; that she was as common and inessential as any of the other girls who had grown up with her on the outskirts of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, greaser girls, bimbos, Catholic virgins, and working-class sluts. It was funny the way life worked out, sometimes, for some people. It was possible to go on fooling the world for decades if you worked at it hard enough.

  The thing about using makeup to disguise yourself, though, was that nobody recognized you when you went without it. Julianne let herself through the back door of her office and looked around for some signs of life but saw none. It was one-thirty in the afternoon, past the lunch hour but still in the dullest part of the day. Tiffany Shattuck, Julianne’s secretary, was probably getting some backup typing done. Julianne went to the door of her office and locked it slowly, quietly, so that if Tiffany was standing right outside, she wouldn’t hear it. Then Julianne went to the back of her office again and into her own private powder room. The powder room had been the dealbreaker in her decision to rent these offices. If the management of the building hadn’t been willing to install it, Julianne would have found another building somewhere else.

  In the long mirror over the sink, a middle-aged woman with bags under her eyes and a wilted white blouse looked ready to collapse. Her skin was gray with dust and dirt. Her hair was matted and flat. Julianne washed her face with Dove and threw too much cold water on it in the process. She hated going out looking like this, but there were times it couldn’t be helped. Ever since she had been elected to represent the 28th Congressional District, she had become a public figure. When she had been asked by the Governor to run in the special election after old Congressman Herold had died, she had imagined that the public scrutiny would begin and end wit
h the campaign. It had been inconceivable to her that the Philadelphia newspapers would still be interested in her private life when all the speeches were over.

  Maybe it will be better when I get to Washington, Julianne thought now, painting over her eyebrows with thick black liner. It was maddening to have to sneak around like this every time she wanted to go and see a friend. She had a lot of friends of that kind too. She always had had. It was all part of growing up so plain, she might as well have been ugly. Julianne couldn’t count the number of years she had gone without any boys or men being interested in her at all. All of high school. Most of college. Most of the five or so years after that, when she and Patsy were traveling in India and the Far East and when she was at graduate school. Of course, boys and men were always interested in Patsy. That was part of the relationship Julianne and Patsy had built ever since they had been assigned to be roommates their freshman year at Vassar. Patsy was the kind of girl—thin, rich, tennis-athletic, pretty—who always got what she wanted when she wanted it, especially if she wanted it from men.

  Julianne leaned closer to the mirror. She had to be very careful with the eyeliner. She wore so much of it, put on such thick black lines on both her upper and lower eyelids, even a small slip was a disaster. It didn’t take much to make her look as if someone had given her a shiner. She put the eyeliner brush down and got out her blusher. She put streaks of red on each of her flat, undistinguished cheekbones until they began to look high and stuck out. She should be over all this by now, she knew she should. She was forty-eight years old and a highly visible and successful woman. She had a law degree from Penn. She had a doctorate from Penn too, in political science and government. She had just been elected to Congress, and as soon as the short congressional recess was over, in just about a month, she would be in Washington, where she had always wanted to be. The problem was that you never got over it all, not really. You carried what you had started out to be with you forever. It was what you really were instead of what you fooled other people into thinking you were. In the long run it was your destiny. Or maybe it wasn’t. Julianne thought about all those “friends” of hers, the afternoon hotel rooms, the need to be with somebody else for the trip over and the trip back, and the long lunch hours where nothing mattered but the fact that she had managed to find American flag condoms in a novelty store in Wilmington, Delaware. I’m too old for this, Julianne told herself—but she didn’t feel too old for it. She couldn’t stop thinking about what it would be like in Washington, who she would find to be with. She wanted to go back out right that minute and start all over again. Maybe when I finally get caught, I can go on Oprah and claim to be a sex addict, Julianne told herself. She drew a line around her lips that made them just a little bit thicker than they really were. She filled that in with bright scarlet lipstick on a brush.

  Somebody was trying to open the door to the outer office. Julianne shucked off her blouse and her skirt, grabbed her pink-and-white-striped terry-cloth bathrobe from the hook on the back of the powder room door, and hurried out to let Tiffany in. She hesitated only a moment, wondering if it might be somebody else, and then opened up without calling out. Tiffany was standing there, her hand raised to knock. Her hair hung to her waist and her skirt was cut up at least three quarters of the way to the cleft in her legs. She looked like the cover of the latest Playboy-goes-to-college edition, except that she was wearing a crucifix and a miraculous medal that hung into her cleavage from gold chains around her neck.

  “Oh, God,” she said, seeing Julianne in the bathrobe. “What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

  “I got splashed by a bus on my way back from the library,” Julianne said. “I got mud all over me. I thought it would take less time if I came back here.”

  “Do you need me to get you something? Clothes from your apartment?”

  “I’m fine. I’ve got everything. Don’t I have some kind of appointment at quarter after two?”

  “Right.” Tiffany scratched her head. “The people from the Steel Council. They gave us a lot of money for the campaign.”

  “I thought I had some health care people. Pennsylvanians for a Single Payer System. Something like that.”

  “Pennsylvanians for Health Care Reform,” Tiffany said. “That’s not until four. You have the Girls Club people before that. About the day-at-the-office thing. The role models.”

  Julianne went back to the powder room. The skirt and blouse she had shucked off were lying on the floor. She wadded them into a ball and stuffed them into her big canvas bag. Her canvas bags were like Bella Abzug’s hats. They had become a media trademark. Tiffany had followed her to the door. Julianne got the bright red dress with its big splotches of flowers off the hanger over the radiator and started to put it on.

  “One of the things about not having been particularly attractive as a teenager,” Julianne said judiciously, “is that you aren’t unduly worried about the depredations of middle age. Did anything exciting happen while I was out?”

  “Not exciting, exactly,” Tiffany said. “I did the clippings.”

  “And?”

  “There was a paragraph about you in a piece in The New Yorker about women being elected to Congress. There was a paragraph about you in a piece in Boston magazine too, but it was just a reference, because you did all that work with the Environmental Jobs Council last year. I think they’re trying to start the same kind of thing in Massachusetts.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “It was a slow day, really. Not like during the election, when you were in the papers every day. I think I kind of miss it.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Well, I suppose it must have been horrible for you,” Tiffany said, “being followed around like that. But for the rest of us, it was neat. It was like being connected to a celebrity. I mean, you are a celebrity.”

  “I’m a congresswoman. It’s not the same thing.”

  “During the election I could go into bars and if I said I worked for you, fifteen guys wanted to take me home. I’m not kidding. I never do that well usually. Most of the time, guys in bars go for the tall types. The model-actress types. They don’t want secretaries.”

  “You could try not going to bars.”

  “You can’t find men if you don’t go to bars,” Tiffany said. “You don’t know what it’s like out there. It’s terrible, really. There aren’t enough men to go around. And all the men there just want to get laid.”

  There was nothing she could do about her hair, Julianne decided. Usually she wore it up, teased and colored and wrapped until it looked half fake, but today it was limp and colorless and it was going to stay that way. Julianne went through the drawers of the vanity until she found a bright red scarf. She twirled it into a band and tied it around her head. She reminded herself of one of those sweater-girl publicity stills from the forties, except that her face was far too heavy and far too lined. She rummaged in her canvas bag again and came up with a pair of long, dangling earrings. They were turquoise and silver and constructed of hundreds of tiny pieces, each meant to swing and sound in the wind.

  “There,” Julianne said.

  “There was something else,” Tiffany told her. “In the clippings. Not about you.”

  “Not about me?”

  “It was about that friend of yours. At least, I think she’s a friend of yours. One of those women in that picture you keep on your desk.”

  “Oh? Which of those women?”

  “Karla Parrish.”

  Julianne left the powder room for the outer office. There was a picture of Karla Parrish on her desk, although Karla hadn’t been the point of it. The picture had been taken in one of the living rooms of Jewett House at Vassar College in 1967. All the women in the picture had been juniors then, and only one of them was in the least bit noticeable. That, of course, was Patsy MacLaren. Julianne picked up the picture and then put it down again. She hated looking at it. She had no idea why she still kept it.

  “So what about Karla Parrish,” she as
ked Tiffany. “Does she live in Philadelphia?”

  “I don’t know where she lives. The article didn’t say. She’s a famous photographer.”

  “Is she?”

  “She takes pictures of war zones and refugees and things like that. She has a photograph on the cover of the Sunday Times Magazine this week. New York. The New York Times, I mean.”

  “I’d heard she was taking photographs,” Julianne said. “I hadn’t realized she was that successful.”

  “The article made her sound like the greatest thing since Matt Brady. ‘Documenting the horrors of the twentieth century.’ ‘Bearing witness to the atrocities of our age.’ ‘Arguably responsible for more relief efforts than the UN.’ That kind of thing.”

  “I’m impressed,” Julianne said. Actually, she was more than impressed. She would not have expected Karla to get so far. She would have expected her to disappear back into the hinterlands somewhere, playing assistant to the president of the local savings and loan.

  Tiffany picked up the photograph and studied it. “Is she the pretty one?” she asked.

  “No,” Julianne said. “She’s the one in the turtleneck.”

  “Oh. You never can tell, can you? Did the pretty one get famous?”

  “No. No, she didn’t.”

  “Well, there you are. It’s never the people you expect to get successful that get successful, is it? I’d have thought the pretty one would end up as a movie star, but I don’t recognize her and you’re a congresswoman and Karla Parrish is a famous photographer. She’s coming to Philadelphia, by the way. Karla Parrish, I mean.”

  “I know you mean Karla Parrish. Why is she coming here?”

  “To give some kind of talk at Penn. On photography, you know. That was what the story was about. It was in the Inquirer today. Anyway, I thought it would be a good opportunity.”

  “A good opportunity for what?”

  “For a photo op or whatever. You know. You and Karla Parrish. You’re old friends. You’re both concerned with refugees and relief efforts and that kind of thing. I thought it would get us some good press. If the two of you met up again, you know, in public.”