"Well, well," Ronkers said.
"Raunch?" Kit asked. "Kesler didn't see the paper, did he? They put the picture right on the front page, you know. You don't think he saw it, do you?"
"For a fact, he did not see it," Ronkers said.
"Oh, good," she said. She seemed to want to stay on the phone, Ronkers thought, although she wasn't talking. He told her he was awfully busy and he had to go.
Ronkers was in a cynical mood when he sat down to lunch with Danfors in the hospital cafeteria. They were still on the soup course when the intercom pleasantly asked for Dr. Heart. Since he was a heart specialist, Danfors answered most of the Dr. Heart calls in the hospital whenever he was there, even if someone beat him to the elevator. He stood up and drank his milk down with a few swift guzzles.
"Noch ein Bier!" Ronkers said.
At home, Kit -- the receiver of messages, the composer of rooms -- had news for him. First, Margaret Brant had left word she was dropping the Harlan Booth assault because Booth had called and begged her forgiveness. Second, Booth had called and left Kit a list of names. "Real ones," he'd said. Third, something was up with Bardlong and the infernal tree. The tree surgeons had alarmed him about so
mething, and Bardlong and his wife had been poking about under the tree, along their side of the slatestone wall, as if inspecting some new damage -- as if plotting some new attack.
Wearily, Ronkers wandered to the yard to confront this new problem. Bardlong was down on the ground on all fours, peering deep into the caves of his slatestone wall. Looking for squirrels?
"After the men did such a neat job," Bardlong announced, "it came to their attention that they should really have taken the whole thing down. And they're professionals, of course. I'm afraid they're right. The whole thing's got to come down."
"Why?" Ronkers asked. He was trying to summon resistance, but he found his resistance was stale.
"The roots," Bardlong said. "The roots are going to topple the wall. The roots," he said again, as if he were saying, the armies! the tanks! the big guns! "The roots are crawling their way through my wall." He made it sound like a conspiracy, the roots engaged in strangling some stones, bribing others. They crept their way into revolutionary positions among the slate. On signal, they were ready to upheave the whole.
"That will surely take some time," Ronkers said, thinking, with a harshness that surprised him: That wall will outlive you, Bardlong!
"It's already happening," Bardlong said. "I hate to ask you to do this, of course, but the wall, if it crumbles, well
"We can build it up again," Ronkers said. Ah, the doctor in him!
As illogical as cancer, Bardlong shook his head. Not far away, Ronkers saw, would be the line about hoping not to get "legal." Ronkers felt too tired to resist anything.
"It's simple," said Bardlong. "I want to keep the wall, you want to keep the tree."
"Walls can be rebuilt," Ronkers said, utterly without conviction.
"I see," Bardlong said. Meaning what? It was like the 500 volts administered to Kesler. There was a real effect -- it was visible -- but it was not effective at all. On his gloomy way back inside his house Ronkers pondered the effect of 500 volts on Bardlong. With the current on for about five minutes.
He also fantasized this bizarre scene: Bardlong suddenly in Ronkers's office, looking at the floor and saying, "I have had certain ... relations, ah, with a lady who, ah, apparently was not in the best of... health."
"If it would, Mr. Bardlong, spare you any embarrassment," Ronkers imagined himself saying, "I could of course let the, ah, lady know that she should seek medical attention."
"You'd do that for me?" Bardlong would cry then, overcome. "Why, I mean, I would, ah ... pay you for that, anything you ask."
And Ronkers would have him then, of course. With a hunting cat's leer, he would spring the price: "How about half a walnut tree?"
But things like that, Ronkers knew, didn't happen. Things like that were in the nature of the stories about abandoned pets limping their way from Vermont to California, finding the family months later, arriving with bleeding pads and wagging tails. The reason such stories were so popular was that they went pleasantly against what everyone knew really happened. The pet was squashed by a Buick in Massachusetts -- or, worse, was perfectly happy to remain abandoned in Vermont.
And if Bardlong came to Ronkers's office, it would be for some perfectly respectable aspect of age finally lodging in his prostate.
"Kesler's dead, Kit," Ronkers told her. "His heart stopped, saved him a lot of trouble, really; he would have gotten quite uncomfortable."
He held her in the fabulous sleeping place she had invented. Outside their window the scrawny, pruned tree clicked against the rain gutter like light bones. The leaves were all gone; what few walnuts remained were small and shriveled -- even the squirrels ignored them, and if one had fallen on the roof it would have gone unnoticed. Winter-bare and offering nothing but its weird shadows on their bed and its alarming sounds throughout their night, the tree seemed hardly worth their struggle. Kesler, after all, was dead. And Bardlong was so very retired that he had more time and energy to give to trivia than anyone who was likely to oppose him. The wall between Ronkers and Bardlong seemed frail indeed.
It was then that Ronkers realized he had not made love to his wife in a very long time, and he made the sort of love to Kit that some therapist might have called "reassuring." And some lover, Ronkers thought later, might have called dull.
He watched her sleep. A lovely woman; her students, he suspected, cared for more than her architecture. And she, one day, might care more for them -- or for one of them. Why was he thinking that? he wondered; then he pondered his own recent sensations for the X-ray technician.
But those kinds of problems, for Kit and him, seemed years away -- well, months away, at least.