The Snare

6. MISTRESS AND WIFE

6. MISTRESS AND WIFE Martin Parham, Julia coollydecided, about a hundred times a week, was a mixed blessing. He had loved buying the house she lived in, in somebody else's name (a firm in Baton Rouge was said to own it), getting the entire arrangement worked out so that it was nontraceable to him in any form, shape, or fashion, but then one day up in Mississippi (for all she knew it was down at that lake house where they used to gobefore they would drive back to New Orleans) he decided his children were too wonderful for anything and that furthermore Julia had to meet them. This was of grave importance to him. He made careful arrangements. She was to come to the St. Charles Hotel lobby one Saturday afternoon, go to the mezzanine, walk along the balcony, look down on them while he kept them occupied on some excuse or other, then come down, look closer, mingle as closely as she could (but giving no sign of ever having seen Martin before), then quietly leave. She would never know what it would mean to him if she would just do that. Then his knowing that she had had this contact with them would fill his heart whenever he thought of it. And didn't she, really, want to see them too? Her heart would ache, said Julia, but she would do it for him. She dressed as carefully that Saturday as if the whole world was going to parade by and see her. It was a sort of role, she guessed, a part in Martin's charade. But he had touched, unbeknownst, a great unspoken desire of 201 2 O 2 T H E S N A R E Julia's: children someday. She consented, for one reason, because once she saw them, they might come, in her own private game, close to being her own, those two. Thus she came to the hotel and the heavy red carpets and the gilt and the great clocks in a lofty room. She climbed to the mezzanine and walked about casually, then stopped, leaned, and looked down. She saw Martin first, then the two small beings he had fathered. One at a time they wrote themselves on her permanent vision— boy and girl, one brownette, one tow-headed, and their daddy with them down there. She let the whole fill up her vision to the brim. . . . Then she saw the other one, the wife. She was right down there beside them. She was appropriately part of the group, a blond girl who belonged there, stocky-legged and rich and confident in a new expensive red coat. Martin stole a forlorn glance at the balcony. If Julia had brought her opera glasses, as she had intended, she would have thrown them at him. The total Parham power was down there, the addition of the wife in person was all that was needed to parade it in full before her helpless gaze. And if Martin couldn't help it, it was because finally he didn't want to help it. Mad as hell, she stormed out of there and decided, as she had often decided, to move. If he can't take a step without first consulting them why do I keep on letting him pay the rent? When she let herself into the apartment , the phone was ringing: it was Martin, imploring, but she hung up. He was there in fifteen minutes, ringing the bell. His wife had decided to come on her own hook. He'd had no intention of bringing her, but she had suddenly turned up with something she insisted she had to see the doctor about, so he couldn't stop her, could he? —and when she heard one of the children say something about the St. Charles, well, nothing would do her but to go there too, she'd been heading right up to the ladies' room when Julia left through the swinging doors of the entrance. It was just the barest coincidence, a kind of Elizabeth Spencer 203 synchronizing of a fatal five minutes, that Julia had seen her with him and the children at all. "It's all a mess, because you made a mess of it," Julia said, crying through the slit in the door, which was chain-bolted. "Oh, come on in, then." She lifted the bolt. Martin entered...