The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [36]
Annie had married Brad because she’d wanted to best Mrs. Hopper.
Annie had married Brad because he had none of her father’s quicksilver tempo, which she’d taken to mean that he would be like Clark, steadfast and trustworthy.
Annie had married Brad because he’d outflown her in three speed test competitions.
Interrupting this analysis, Annie asked her friend, “How about, I married Brad because I made a stupid mistake?”
“That too,” agreed Georgette.
When Annie phoned Mrs. Hopper to congratulate her on the separation—“You win”—Brad’s mother pretended not to know what she meant and offered sincere hopes that the young couple would reconcile someday because a marriage between a man and a woman was a sacred sacrament—
“Oh, shut the fuck up.” Annie slapped her phone shut.
Over the next few months, Brad confessed eagerly to anyone who would listen that “maybe” he’d done wrong by getting caught sleeping with his buddy Steve Wirsh’s wife.
He phoned Georgette to ask her to tell Annie he could do better.
“You can’t do better until you stop being scared of Annie because you’re scared of your mother.”
“Think so?” Brad loved to hear theories about himself, although he never assimilated them.
“Afraid” seemed at first an odd adjective for Georgette to apply to such a daredevil as Brad. After all, he would fly a plane in the worst weather with a kind of reckless glee. But interior weather did frighten him. Annie could scare him with a scream. “I don’t want to talk about it,” was his white flag.
The night Annie had flown home to California after a flight test at Ali Al Saleem and had found him naked in their bedroom on top of Melody Wirsh, he’d retreated without a struggle. “Aw, shit, this sucks,” was all he could think of to say. Annie could think of a lot of things but said none of them. She knew that if she opened her mouth, she would not be able to stop weeping.
On the night she left him, the wildness of her hair (a long unruly tangle) so exasperated her that when she saw herself in the mirror at the motel to which she’d driven in an exhausted rage of tears, she’d cut off her curls to her scalp and thrown the hair in the wastebasket along with her wedding ring.
“I hate him,” she told the mirror.
The Navy agreed to transfer her to Annapolis, far from the California desert where Brad and she had danced in jets together, and to give her an assignment teaching at the Academy. She cried from time to time as she drove across the country in the Porsche. On the seat beside her, the gray Persian cat Amy Johnson ignored these emotional displays and licked a paw.
***
In Annie’s condominium in Chesapeake Cove, on the top floor of a building called Harbor Lights, there was only room for herself and her cat. A few weeks after she settled there, she saw a young man, pleasant-looking in Brooks Brothers khakis, in the hall with a white dog, a West Highland terrier. The next night, the young man rang her apartment bell to ask if she were okay, explaining that he’d heard crying coming through her door. He pointed at his dog, who was furiously wagging his tail and tugging against the leash to leap on her. “My Westie, Elliot Ness. I’m Trevor Smithwall, 7C.”
Annie apologized, promising with her appealing smile that she would try to keep her sobbing down after eleven. When the Westie spotted the cat, he broke free, chasing Amy Johnson into the living room where he got himself clawed on the nose. Carefully Annie lured the dog from under a chair and handed him to her neighbor. “Would you keep holding him,” Trevor asked, “while I go get his eye drops?”
“I can do that,” she agreed. “I’m Annie Goode; I’m at the naval base.”
“Figured.” Trevor pointed at her white uniform, then at his ID, which was hanging from his blazer pocket. “FBI.”
“Figured.”
Over that first hard year for Annie, Trevor became a good friend. One night they even made a feint at sex but quit before they got there, accepting that they weren’t attracted to each other. Relieved, they began to see one another almost daily, sometimes for dinner, when they would talk over problems