“What’s something like that worth?”
Pandy looked at him, sipping one ancestor’s gin while leering at another, and snapped, “I don’t know. What’s your inspiration worth?” as she walked out of the room.
Jonny caught up with her in the gallery that she and Hellenor had dubbed “the Hall of Ghouls,” due to the hundreds of portraits and photographs of the Wallis clan dating back to the early 1700s. “Pandy,” he said, coming to stand beside her. “I didn’t mean it, okay?”
“Sure,” Pandy said, accepting his apology, as the shrink had advised, while noting that Jonny had brought the tumbler of bathtub gin along with him. “Forget it. It’s not a big deal.”
> “But it is. I said I’d do this for you, and I will. Just like the shrink said. So who are all these people?”
“Well,” she began, but Jonny wasn’t listening.
Leaning forward to peer at a photograph, he laughed like a frat boy and remarked cleverly, “Must be nice to have ancestors. I’ve only got assholes in my family.”
“Oh, Jonny.” She shook her head at his silliness. “Look,” she said, pointing to an ancient black-and-white photograph of two dozen people lined up in front of the house. “All those people. All those lives. And this is all that’s left of them.”
“So?” Jonny chortled, taking another swig.
“Henry says I should turn the place into a museum when I die.”
“Great,” Jonny exclaimed sarcastically. “Another one of Henry’s ‘brilliant’ ideas.”
Pandy did her best to ignore him as she considered what to show him next. The schoolroom with the window-seat nook where she had loved to read as a child? The conservatory, with its collection of rare butterflies? Old Jay’s bedroom, she thought suddenly; that always impressed men.
Indeed, you couldn’t get more manly than Old Jay’s bedroom. The entire suite—bathroom, dressing room, smoking room, and the bedroom itself—was paneled in dark mahogany. The enormous four-poster bed sat squarely in the middle of the room; Old Jay had apparently liked to sit in his bed in the mornings and watch the comings and goings from the French windows that faced out in three directions. Besides being somewhat of a busybody, Old Jay had also been a great traveler. His room was filled with astonishing souvenirs from his trips, like a Zulu spear and what was supposedly an actual shrunken head from a real, once-living human.
But Jonny wasn’t interested in any of that.
He strode into the room, took a spin around the bed, and then, as if he’d already decided to take possession of the space, went into the bathroom. He shut the door with a proprietary click; when it remained shut for several minutes, Pandy began to fret. That particular toilet hadn’t been flushed for years; it was highly likely to clog. No one, including Henry, had even stayed in Old Jay’s bedroom. No one slept in his bed, much less took advantage of the facilities.
Jonny using Old Jay’s bathroom? Pandy couldn’t even think about it. She reminded herself that she must never tell Henry, either.
Henry would be mortified.
When he came out of the bathroom, drying his hands on Old Jay’s black monogrammed hand towel and then dropping it to the floor, she’d had enough. She reached her hand out to take his. “Come on. I want to show you my room.”
Tugging him across the hall, she pushed open the door. And there it was: Her room! With its tall French windows and heavy lined drapes. And her bed! With the tattered pink silk canopy. It had been ages since she’d been there—not since before she’d married Jonny. She ran across the room and threw herself onto the bed, hitting the old feather mattress with a thump and rolling into the dip in the middle. The same dip that had held generations of little girls. You lay down, and the feathers embraced you. And you slept without tossing or turning, and woke up refreshed.
She suddenly remembered Jonny and sat straight up. She’d forgotten about him for a second, and, as with a baby, that probably wasn’t a good idea.
Sure enough, he was standing in front of her desk, tapping absentmindedly on one of the keys of the large metal Smith Corona typewriter.
Pandy cleared her throat, hoping to get his attention. Not only was that the desk where Monica was born, but scattered around the typewriter were more of her youthful “creative works.” There were drawings and bits of short stories, little-girl diaries with latches and tiny keys, and the black leather journals with unlined pages that she’d asked for every year at Christmas. But mostly, there were dozens and dozens of school notebooks—the type with that blank space on the front where you were supposed to write in the subject.
Jonny picked one up and read the label. “Monica?” he asked.
Pandy leaped off the bed and snatched it out of his hand. “That’s private.”
“If it’s private, why do you leave it lying around where everyone can see it?”
Jonny picked up another Monica book and pointedly put it back down. “Why do you keep these, anyway?”
Pandy shrugged, carefully straightening the notebooks. She laughed, trying to make a joke of it. “Henry always tells me I can put them in my museum—”
Pandy broke off, embarrassed again. She was being juvenile, and Jonny didn’t like it. “That little-girl stuff is not sexy,” he’d once said dismissively when she’d accidentally squealed about something she was excited about. This time, she needn’t have worried. Jonny had just finished off his gin and, carefully putting down the glass, he began swaying his hips slightly from side to side. Then he put his arms around her. He turned her around and ground his pelvis into her bottom. He lowered his head and began kissing her neck.
Pandy tried to stifle her instinct to swat him away, as one would an annoying insect.
“Jonny.” Smiling, she disentangled herself, knowing, nonetheless, that she was going to have to have sex with him. If only because she had promised herself she would, knowing it was the only way she and Jonny could ever truly get back together. Indeed, she’d even considered bringing a piece or two of the sexy lingerie she used to wear for him. But when she’d found the garments in the back of her drawer, they’d looked like something a cheap hooker would wear.