Chapter 5: Discovery

Eric got back home while Madeleine was doing breakfast preparation. He went up to his own bath to shave. While Madeleine was dealing with Sparky, he recalled the night before. He had thoroughly enjoyed himself. Diane was responsive, beautifully responsive. Moreover, she was a good girl. That business of hiding behind the door when he had already seen all she had was distinctive. He could remember Laura acting that way sometimes even after they were married. And good girls who went to bed with you were already half way to marriage.

He certainly wanted marriage with her. It was less clear that she had any reason to marry him. She was a woman at the threshold of a career in which she would treat hundreds of children, saving some lives, reducing a great deal of pain. He was man with all of his accomplishments behind him. He came with a daughter, and marriage to him meant motherhood to his daughter.

On the other hand, Sparky was a delightful girl. He wasn’t sure that motherhood to her wasn’t a plus. After all, Diane would get her girlish confidences without going through the pregnancy. Then too, Madeleine was there for all the scut work.

And it wasn’t as though that closed Diane’s options of motherhood. There were two more rooms on this floor that were designed for children. They could take a child each from infancy through the teens. Hell, when they served as guest rooms, couples didn’t express any problems about being cramped. He could certainly afford it. He could afford to support a regiment of kids.

Maybe that was the answer. He wasn’t much, but he had much. Diane, he was clear, wasn’t for sale. Perhaps, though, she envisioned herself serving poor children in a free clinic. Well, she could have her own free clinic. He would find the poverty neighborhood unserved by doctors, buy a building there -- maybe buy a lot and build the clinic. Then she could have her dream as his wife.

For that matter, as his wife, she wouldn’t have to ask him. They would have joint property. She would have signature on his accounts. She couldn’t set up anything like a clinic with the amount of money in the checking account, of course. She would have to coordinate any purchase that big with the other person who might expect to spend that money. She wouldn’t, however, need his permission. Still, he would hope that she didn’t do it that way. He would much rather have it a gift to her from him. Maybe it should be a wedding gift. He would have to see, beforehand, whether that was what she wanted.

By now, Madeleine and Sparky were downstairs. He joined them in the kitchen. They had a western omelet. Sparky ate a bowl of cereal with it. Madeleine always thought that Sparky’s breakfast should include significant carbohydrates. He set off for the office in a very good humor.

Madeleine Grant took Val to school in her car. When she came back, she cleaned up the kitchen first thing. She had noticed the used frying pan that morning. The mister owned the house and was entitled to cook himself breakfast early, but he had never gone beyond coffee before. She was curious to see what the master suite would look like.

The bedroom had the bedspread on the floor instead of on the right side where Mr. Barnes usually left it. His suit and other clothes were dumped on a chair close to the clothes tree. The chair was out of place, belonging ten feet closer to the wall. Mrs. Barnes’s pillow, that usually only moved when Madeleine made the bed, was on the left side of the bed. It looked like it had been slept on.

She took the suit and shoes back to the mister’s dressing room and put them where they belonged. She emptied the money out of his front right-hand pocket and put it in the drawer where she kept the petty cash. Her curiosity got the better of her, and she went to the Missus’s dressing room.

The dressing room looked undisturbed. The bathroom had been used, and new towels were there. A bar of soap was on the soap dish beside the sink. She took the extra roll of toilet paper and the towels. She went back to the bedroom. Leaving the toilet paper on the chair where the clothes had been, she took the underwear and towels back to the supply room. This was too large for its purpose but lavishly furnished. She dumped the towels and dirty clothes in the white and colored to-be-washed bins.

She got a set of towels and a bar of soap from the appropriate cupboards, picked up her usual small garbage bag, and went back. She put the set of towels into the missus’s bathroom, one wrapped bar of soap in the soap dish beside the sink, leaving the other in the shower stall. She emptied the waste basket into the garbage bag and inspected the room. It passed muster.

So did the mister’s dressing room. The pajamas were still folded neatly. She made the bed in the master bedroom and moved the chair back where it belonged. She was tempted to move the clothes tree from the missus’s side of the bed to stand beside the one on the mister’s, but decided that the mister could make that decision for himself. When she emptied the waste basket into the garbage bag, she was surprised to see two rubbers and their wrappers. Who would have thought he had it in him? But, then, the mister was still a young man.

Madeleine was house proud, and that was one of her minor dissatisfactions with working for Mr. Barnes. She was quite conscious that he didn’t notice how well she kept the house. He appreciated her cooking, and he really cared that she took care of Val, but she could have left his bed unmade, and even his sheets unwashed for a month before he noticed. Mrs. Tennant, Mrs. Barnes sister, came to visit occasionally with her son, and she noticed good housekeeping just like her sister always had. The mister never did. Well, Madeleine Grant kept this house, and never again would Dr. Thibault have to eat the mister’s cooking. Even worse, what if she had cooked breakfast for herself? Madeleine checked the clock radio. The mister hadn’t reset it from this morning, and the alarm was set at 4:30. Well, that was a horrible hour, but she would set hers for 4:15 the next time that the mister told her that he was having dinner with Dr. Thibault.

Eric went through a morning of committee reports and a long, dull, rather wet business lunch. When he got a break in the afternoon, he mourned the change in his life. Once upon a time, he had been a programmer, a very bright programmer. Now, he spent all his time being an administrator. He was buckling down to a loaded in-basket when the revelation hit him.

He had planned to send the woman he loved into the same trap that was ruining his days. Diane wanted to be a doctor, but he was planning to make her the administrator of a charity clinic. Well, he hadn’t mentioned the idea to her, thank God. He could bury it quietly. If she wanted to work in a charity clinic, she could. The pay wouldn’t be a factor. But he wouldn’t mention her running a charity clinic for herself. If she did, she would sit in an office and never actually see a child. You couldn’t escape it. He was, supposedly, boss of DSI. His word was supposed to be law, but his word couldn’t get him out of this office long enough to actually write a program.

He forced himself to work through a chunk of administrative decisions until Murphy came in at 5:00.

“Need me, boss?” she asked.

“No. Go home to your darling. I’ll stay a bit, but only because I have a dinner date at the hospital.”

“Oh! Sparky’s not in again is she? Or is this just a check-up?”

“Neither,” he said. “I’m eating with Dr. Thibault, who was resident there when Sparky was in. She still is a resident, but Sparky is home.”

“Boss, you don’t play poker do you?”

“Not since college. I lost then.”

“You’d lose now. You don’t have a poker face.”

“I have no idea what you mean.” He did have an idea, though. Murphy thought he had an interest in Diane beyond simple gratitude for Sparky’s recovery. Well, Murphy knew him too well. He made one more decision for which a flipped coin might have been more reliable before he left for the hospital.

Diane saw Eric when she went down to the cafeteria a little after six p.m.

“Survive?” he asked.

“Look, I’ll call you later.” They could be overheard here. The fact that she had yet to decide what she wanted to tell him needn’t enter into it. “Much later.”

“Sure. You don’t want to talk. Even so, may I buy you dinner?” It was really supper, not the sort of elegant dinners he provided in the restaurants or even at his home. Still, she nodded yes. They went through the line together, and he paid. He used another twenty from his shirt pocket. Did he keep his money there? No, he put the change in his trouser pocket. She had said that they wouldn’t talk, and he was taking that literally. She should find a neutral subject.

“How is Valerie?” That was always a topic on which Eric had something to say.

“She’s doing great,” he said. “She was bored stiff at home. (Did I mention how clever it was of you to figure that she needed the company of the kids in the ward?) She was excited at first to get back to class. She’s caught up now, though, and bored in school again.”

They continued on Valerie and his church until she was finished. When she piled her plates on the tray, he got up to take it back. She went upstairs to think about him away from his disturbing presence. Once locked in her room and lying in her bed, she thought back over the previous night.

First of all, her body had been right, or, at least, consistent. From the first time he had touched her to the kisses, she had reacted to Eric more strongly than she had to anyone before. And that remained true all the way through intercourse. Both acts of intercourse. How many orgasms had she had that night, anyway?

Part of that had simply been Eric. Either he was the sexiest man north of Hollywood or he and she were somehow synchronized. Maybe both. Part of it, she suspected, was his being a formerly married man -- a formerly long-married man. Ted had come to her with experience, what had seemed a lot of experience back then. Ted had offered her cunnilingus more than once. He certainly hadn’t regarded it as standard foreplay.

Okay. Sex with Eric was the best in her experience. The first sex with Eric was the best in her experience, and the first sex with Ted had been finding their way. (The first sex with Vaughan, which had been clumsy on both their counts, couldn’t really be compared. It had been her first sex, ever, and she was lucky it hadn’t been painful.) Eric had other positives, too. The man was unfailingly courteous. He was a kind parent, and the people around him respected him.

There were negatives as well. Eric hadn’t said the L word until after they had had sex. She had heard of men following that rule -- a gentleman shouldn’t use pretenses of love to seduce. Which meant that Eric regarded her as a seduction. If so, he was right; she was thoroughly seduced.

She was used to another standard, but that was because her experience had been in college. She had told several guys that she loved them when she hadn’t been ready to have sex with them. Indeed, in the cases of both Vaughan and Ted, they had talked love before they had been ready for sex. Of course, they had made out for a number of dates before going to bed, and they had talked of love before they’d even done much making out.

Well, she knew what the difference meant. This was her first adult affair. They hadn’t made out. Foreplay, yes, but not making out. And she wasn’t dreaming of marriage either. She was having sex with a man because she enjoyed having sex with him. And she really enjoyed having sex with Eric. Their genitals were involved without their hearts needing to be. That, apparently, was how adults did it.

Her problem would be keeping her heart as uninvolved as his was. Yes, he’d told her that he loved her when he was inside her just after his first orgasm. Right after his orgasm, he almost certainly did love her. She could easily believe that he loved being in her. Didn’t every guy love being in any woman? And after her orgasm, after any one of her orgasms, it was only reasonable that she should love him, too. Even when she was dancing in his masterful arms, it wasn’t unreasonable to love him. The rest of the time, though, she should think of him as only a quite satisfactory sex partner.

The problem was that he was more than that. He was admirable as a parent, entertaining as a conversationalist, endearingly vulnerable when he blamed himself for the traffic accident which killed his wife. He was more in bed than a skilled lover. He was a fond man who held her afterwards. She had only slept one night in his arms, and damned little of the night at that, but she was missing those arms this night.

Well, she wasn’t going to experience them this night, nor the next night, either. She had told him that she had other things to do on other nights, and she certainly did tomorrow night, sleep probably. Anyway, she didn’t really love him. She just liked him. It was possible to like all his good qualities -- the good parent, apparently the good employer, too: ‘No man is a hero to his valet,’ but Eric appeared to be a hero to his housekeeper. He was bright. He was modest. He was, for heaven’s sake, a good dancer, and he was a great kisser.

She should learn from Eric. He certainly could date her and bed her without loving her. It was probably better, even, that he didn’t love her, she decided. He definitely loved Valerie, and she could see his struggle to let Valerie have even the freedom that a six-year-old needed. Diane was fighting too hard for her own freedom to be locked up in Eric Barnes’s love. He liked her, and that was better.

Only, as she prepared to call him, it didn’t feel better.

“This isn’t late,” was how he answered the phone.

“I meant it would be much later than right then. We were in a public place. I don’t think that there is a place in the hospital where we’re both permitted where we can’t be overheard. Well, I can’t be overheard now. Is anyone listening at your end?”

“Only the NSA.” Damn! He was right. Any phone conversation could be overheard. Well, those guys were looking for something else. Then, too, there were commercial phone-sex sites. If they listened in for their jollies, they would listen in there. Well, here goes nothing.

“I really loved going dancing with you,” she said. “I enjoyed what we did afterwards, too. With my schedule, though, I don’t think I should do both in the same night again. You’ll have to choose.”

“Isn’t it your choice, too?” He wasn’t going to get her to say that. She had enjoyed sex with him, but she was never going to ask for it.

“No,” she said. “The man invites the woman. The woman chooses whether to say yes or no.”

“Is it terribly selfish of me, then, to say that I’m inviting you to repeat what we did after the dance?”

“I’d have been seriously insulted if you hadn’t.”

“I’m assuming that tomorrow night isn’t possible,” he said.

“Correctly.”

“Then, Dr. Thibault, might I have the pleasure of your company for dinner three days from tonight, beginning a few minutes after six?”

“I think,” she said, “that we should begin at seven o’clock at the usual place.”

“Your choice.”

“Then, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll end this. I seem to have a great sleep deficit tonight.” She clicked end. Maybe because of the sleep deficit, maybe because she was still mellow from the previous night, she dropped instantly into a deep sleep. It was interrupted once, but she could handle that over the phone.

The next day was neither heaven nor hell as hospital-residency days go. She got home and hung up her dress. She had enough clean clothes that the laundry was in the far future -- defined as some time in the next week. The next time that she would be in the apartment, she would be going on a date with Eric. They had both said that this would end in his house. The statements were clear enough that she understood it, he understood it, and -- probably -- the NSA operative understood it, too. She should be prepared. She packed a full outfit for the hospital -- pantsuit, underwear, her second pair of white shoes. She tossed in some spares of clean underwear, a nightgown, and a robe. This wouldn’t be her only visit. She didn’t mention any of this to Eric on her call. Then she got some much-needed sleep.