The Things We Do For Love

Early Margot

It was now five years since Mary Anne had come to live with Nanna. The drawback was that Mary Anne could not bring a man to her grandmother’s house for the night or allow her grandmother to know that she would spend the night at a man’s house. Her grandmother did not want the world to be the kind of place where men and women who were not married to each other had sexual intercourse. So Mary Anne was due an Oscar for lifetime achievement, for pretending she would never consider sleeping with a man outside of marriage. The most difficult part of the pretense was that Mary Anne simply couldn’t lie to her grandmother.

So for five years she hadn’t spent the night with a man.

She’d had rare, brief sexual encounters with men at their homes and then said she needed to get home, citing newspaper deadlines. Because the world could not wait for her feature on the Logan Garden Tour.

Cameron had once asked her, “What’s Nanna going to do if you ever want to move in with someone? A man, I mean.”

“There’s no one I want to move in with,” Mary Anne had replied. “Anyhow, the same applies to you.”

“No, it doesn’t. Nanna knows I’ve lived with men.”

This was true. Nanna had simply said, “Oh, my,” and, “Darling, could you find this color of embroidery floss in my bag? My eyes are having trouble picking it out.”

Mary Anne wasn’t sure what she thought would happen if she let Nanna down by doing what Cameron had done with so little consequence. Nonetheless, she couldn’t bring herself to disillusion the older woman.

Well, it wasn’t going to be a problem anytime soon, Mary Anne reflected later that night as she curled up in her four-poster missing Flossy.

The wrong person had drunk the love-potion-that-would-not-work.

GRAHAM CORBETT LAY on a comfortable, if ugly couch in the master bedroom of his home, his feet on a tile-topped Craftsman encyclopedia table that had been a gift from his mother. The graceful two-story white house, with its wraparound porches and its upper balconies, was too big for one person. Nonetheless, he liked it.

Like Mary Anne Drew, he lived on the exclusive island of old homes known as Middleburg. Reached by a bridge that crossed the river, Middleburg was a charming spot. The hills rose behind his home, sometimes bringing nature closer than he wanted. For instance, there’d been a time last summer when he’d found an eight-foot-long black snake curled up under the swing on his back porch. Graham was not a snake lover and he really didn’t give a damn about the inroads they made on the rodent population. He’d headed to the garden shed, intending to grab a shovel and cut off the thing’s head, and there he had found a copperhead curled up in his watering can.

He’d gone back to the house and poured himself a whiskey. When he’d returned to the porch, the black snake was gone. He’d knocked back the glass of whiskey and considered what to do about the copperhead in the watering can. First, he must cover the opening in the top of the can so that the snake would not escape. Then, he needed to kill or dispose of the snake. But how?

He was on his second whiskey when his neighbor David Cureux popped over to invite Graham to join a committee to discuss health plans for city workers. Cureux, a former obstetrician, was a council member and had become a friend.

Graham told David about the copperhead. David went home for his shotgun, came back and killed the copperhead. To Graham’s astonishment, however, David first dumped the copperhead out of the watering can—explaining that he didn’t want to get holes in the can.

Two other neighbors, attracted by the sound of the shotgun, came over to see what was going on. One told Graham a story about a child carrying baby copperheads in a jar, thinking they were worms, holding his hand over the top of the jar, being bitten repeatedly and then dying from the venom. Subsequently, according to the neighbor, a policeman put the jar of copperheads in the trunk of his car, which then had to be impounded and fumigated to kill the reptiles. David Cureux challenged this story as nonsense, but for weeks Graham dreamed of finding snakes in his automobile, in his bed, in his bathtub, in his basement—virtually everywhere. The woman who recorded the astrology show at the radio station told him that dreams about snakes reflected the evolutionary ability to change, the urge to survive and how he dealt with the impulses of the most ancient part of his brain.

Jonathan Hale had argued that snakes in dreams were definitely about sex.

The astrologer had retorted, “Isn’t that what I said?”

Graham thought the dreams were about the basic terror of sitting down on the porch swing and discovering a black serpent of notoriously aggressive nature coiled beside his feet.

Hale. What had the station manager been doing getting touchy-feely with Mary Anne tonight? Wasn’t the man supposed to be celebrating his engagement?

Graham needed to stop thinking about the woman. What was this sudden obsession with her? He’d always found her attractive, yes, and he took great pleasure in baiting her, simply because of her worship of Jonathan Hale and her awe of his experiences in Rwanda and Afghanistan. But Graham wasn’t sure he wanted a relationship, and in any case Mary Anne had made it clear she wanted nothing to do with him.

Until the strange business of her trying to set him up with Cameron.

Cameron. Cameron did nothing for Graham. She was pretty, if you liked the type. But he thought she was hard, as well. It was her cousin who interested him.

Strange. She’d annoyed him at their very first meeting five years earlier. The former station manager had introduced him to Mary Anne as “a psychologist who hosts a talk show dealing with relationship problems.” It hadn’t been as slickly phrased as Jonathan Hale would have put it…and did express it after he replaced the former manager. But essentially it had been accurate.

The new kid on the block, fresh from her New York job covering Milan fashion shows or whatever the hell it was she had done, had said, “No doubt calling up a wealth of life experience. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Graham. I’ve heard your show.”

Innocuous enough.

But what had she meant about life experience? Puzzled, he’d stopped her at the water cooler a few minutes later and asked her what she meant.

Then, she’d dissembled. She’d shrugged and said, “I mean, we all work with what we’ve experienced. That’s all I meant.” And she’d turned away fast. Escaping.

She’d been nasty, and when challenged she’d denied having said anything offensive. Nor was the undercurrent of her words imaginary. Because a week later, she had introduced him to another woman as “the bachelor guru of female satisfaction.”

The bachelor guru.

Which was inaccurate and incomplete.

Graham Corbett was a widower.

THE PHONE AWOKE Mary Anne the next morning. She saw the numbers on her alarm clock—nine-thirty—and snatched the receiver from its cradle. How had she slept so long? “Hello?”