82 Desire

these days, and remained fairly long because that way she didn’t have to pay to have it cut as often. She generally wore it up, in artful disarray. To Ray, she looked like the prototypical Perfect Wife, but he knew in his heart she’d still look that way to him if she weighed three hundred pounds.
    “What’s wrong?”
    “Nothing. Why?”
    “Come on.” She moved closer. They were so perfectly in sync she always knew when something was wrong.
    He was sitting at the dining-room table—his makeshift desk—trying to think of something to do. She took another of the chairs. “What is it?” she said.
    “Oh, I don’t know. I just had a beer. I guess it got me depressed.”
    “Tell me.”
    “It’s all this shit.” He gestured impatiently at the pile of newspaper clippings that, for some masochistic reason, he was collecting. They were clips about the mini-oil boom out in the Gulf.
    “Uh-uh. I don’t buy that. It’s LaBarre’s wife, isn’t it?”
    He had already agonized about this at length—surely he ought to be over it. But Cille knew; she was uncanny that way. He took her hand. “Cille, what if she’d died?”
    His wife shrugged. “If she’d died, it was her time. You didn’t cut her wrists, she did. You didn’t have an affair with Bebe, Ernest LaBarre did.”
    “That sounds so cold.”
    She squeezed the hand she was holding. “I know, sweetheart. I know. But you want to see cold? Look at United Oil if you want to see cold.”
    “Mrs. LaBarre isn’t United Oil. Even Bebe isn’t. Hell, if it comes to that, even United Oil isn’t. The very brilliant Baroness de Pontalba proved that—I think.”
    “Bebe might have known.”
    “Oh, honey, maybe. Maybe not. The point is, maybe I’ve gone too far. How do I know I’m not out of control?”
    She gave his hand another squeeze, let it go, and got up. “Because your own sweet wife says so.”
    She really thought he could do no wrong.
    It was her money he’d used to start the company. That night when he met her, the night she wore lilac and he fell in love with her, he had no idea she had two nickels to rub together. All that talk about starting a foundation, it turned out, was something more than idle chatter. She could have if she’d wanted to.
    Her grandfather had been a doctor and her father had, too, but he had built on it with investments in the sort of places people went to die these days—extended-care facilities for the aged. Lucille’s brother was a doctor, and she’d become a nurse, the only one in her family, but it was what she wanted to do, and now she was a nurse-practitioner. To Ray’s mind, it seemed her own gentle form of rebellion. She didn’t like doctors and didn’t mind saying so—didn’t get along with her moneygrubbing father and had no use for her arrogant, smug brother. She could have been a schoolteacher and made them all a lot happier, but you had to rebel somehow or other and she was a nurturer by nature.
    She was probably the only nurse in New Orleans with several hundred thousand dollars in the bank—courtesy both of Granddad, whom she had liked (but who hadn’t been around for a while), and her mother, who came from a shipping family and who had died young, despite all the medical men in her life. In Cille’s head, the money was earmarked (after college was taken care of) for that foundation of hers, but it ended up going into Ray’s dream instead of hers. She knew people and she introduced him to them. She had every confidence, as she said at least once a day over his protests, that he’d make so much money she’d have twice as much for her foundation.
    She desperately wanted success for him, not because she needed it—she was fine being a nurse, it was her choice—but because he wanted it. She wanted what he did, but not in a clingy way. In that magical, mythical “supportive” way spouses, Ray thought, were supposed to have.
    He adored her with every cell of his body.
    He had had a beautiful little company—a lovely, profitable, splendid little company—Hyacinth Products, named for the water hyacinth, whose flower was exactly the color of the dress she wore the first time they met.
    And then the damn Three-D seismic came in. Actually, that was fine—what had happened certainly wasn’t the fault of the technology. He owed his demise unequivocally to Mr. Russell Fortier.
    Okay, that did it—changed his mood completely.
    Just thinking of Russell Fortier.
    Gone too far? How could he have