Disclosure_ A Novel - Michael Crichton [132]
Sanders shook his head. “I don’t know, Louise.”
“And she says she can’t stand him touching her . . . as if she has no choice. And she mentions his silly glasses.” She looked over at Meredith, who was eating quietly with Garvin. “Him?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Everybody says no. Everybody says Bob isn’t screwing her.”
“Everybody could be wrong.”
Sanders shook his head. “It’d be incest.”
“You’re probably right.”
The food came. Sanders poked at his pasta puttanesca, picking out the olives. He wasn’t feeling hungry. Beside him, Fernandez ate heartily. They had ordered the same thing.
Sanders looked over at the Conley-White people. Nichols was holding up a clear plastic sheet of 35-millimeter transparencies. Slides. Of what? he wondered. His half-frame glasses were perched on his nose. He seemed to be taking a long time. Beside him, Conley glanced at his watch and said something about the time. The others nodded. Conley glanced over at Johnson, then turned back to his papers.
Daly said something. “. . . have that figure?”
“It’s here,” Conley said, pointing to the sheet.
“This is really very good,” Fernandez said. “You shouldn’t let it get cold.”
“Okay.” He took a bite. It had no taste. He put the fork down.
She wiped her chin with her napkin. “You know, you never really told me why you stopped. At the end.”
“My friend Max Dorfman says I set it all up.”
“Uh-huh,” Fernandez said.
“Do you think that, too?”
“I don’t know. I was just asking what you were feeling, at the time. At the time you pulled away.”
He shrugged. “I just didn’t want to.”
“Uh-huh. Didn’t feel like it when you got there, huh?”
“No, I didn’t.” Then he said, “You really want to know what it was? She coughed.”
“She coughed?” Fernandez said.
Sanders saw himself again in the room, his trousers down around his knees, bent over Meredith on the office couch. He remembered thinking, What the hell am I doing? And she had her hands on his shoulders, tugging him toward her. “Oh please . . . No . . . No . . .”
And then she turned her head aside and coughed.
That cough was what did it. That was when he sat back, and said, “You’re right,” and got off the couch.
Fernandez frowned. “I have to say,” Fernandez said. “A cough doesn’t seem like a big deal.”
“It was.” He pushed his plate away. “I mean, you can’t cough at a time like that.”
“Why? Is this some etiquette I don’t know about?” Fernandez said. “No coughing in the clinch?”
“It’s not that at all,” Sanders said. “It’s just what it means.”
“I’m sorry, you’ve lost me. What does a cough mean?”
He hesitated. “You know, women always think that men don’t know what’s going on. There’s this whole idea that men can’t find the place, they don’t know what to do, all that stuff. How men are stupid about sex.”
“I don’t think you’re stupid. What does a cough mean?”
“A cough means you’re not involved.”
She raised her eyebrows. “That seems a little extreme.”
“It’s just a fact.”
“I don’t know. My husband has bronchitis. He coughs all the time.”
“Not at the last moment, he doesn’t.”
She paused, thinking about it. “Well, he certainly does right afterward. He breaks out in a fit of coughing. We always laugh about how he does that.”
“Right after is different. But at the moment, right in the intense moment, I’m telling you—nobody coughs.”
More images flashed through his mind. Her cheeks turn red. Her neck is blotchy, or her upper chest. Nipples no longer hard. They were hard at first, but not now. The eyes get dark, sometimes purple below. Lips swollen. Breathing changes. Sudden surging heat. Shift in the hips, shifting rhythm, tension but something else, something liquid. Forehead frowning. Wincing. Biting. So many different ways, but—
“Nobody coughs,” he said again.
And then he felt a kind of sudden embarrassment, and pulled his plate back, and took a bite of pasta. He wanted a reason not to say more, because he had the feeling that he had overstepped the rules, that