The Husband

silvery-green tongues, the tall eucalyptus trees whispered to one another.
    He looked up to the single window of the learning room. When he was eight years old, he had spent twenty consecutive days there, with an interior shutter locked across that window.
    Sensory deprivation focuses thought, clears the mind. That is the theory behind the dark, silent, empty learning room.
    Mitch's father, Daniel, answered the doorbell. At sixty-one, he remained a strikingly good-looking man, still in possession of all his hair, though it had turned white.
    Perhaps because his features were so pleasingly bold—perfect features if he had wished to be a stage actor—his teeth seemed too small. They were his natural teeth, everyone. He was a stickler for dental hygiene. Laser-whitened, they dazzled, but they looked small, like rows of white-corn kernels in a cob.
    Blinking with surprise that was a degree too theatrical, he said, "Mitch. Katherine never told me you called."
    Katherine was Mitch's mother.
    "I didn't," Mitch admitted. "I hoped it would be all right if I just stopped by."
    "More often than not, I'd be occupied with one damn obligation or another, and you'd be out of luck. But tonight I'm free."
    "Good."
    "Though I did expect to do a few hours of reading."
    "I can't stay long," Mitch assured him.
    The children of Daniel and Katherine Rafferty, all now adults, understood that, in respect for their parents' privacy, they were to schedule their visits and avoid impromptu drop-ins.
    Stepping back from the door, his father said, "Come in, then."
    In the foyer, with its white-marble floor, Mitch looked left and right at an infinity of Mitches, echo reflections in two large facing mirrors with stainless-steel frames.
    He asked, "Is Kathy here?"
    "Girls' night out," his father said. "She and Donna Watson and that Robinson woman are off to a show or something."
    "I'd hoped to see her."
    "They'll be late," his father said, closing the door. "They're always late. They chatter at each other all evening, and when they pull into the driveway, they're still chattering. Do you know the Robinson woman?"
    "No. This is the first I've heard of her."
    "She's annoying," his father said. "I don't understand why Katherine enjoys her company. She's a mathematician."
    "I didn't know mathematicians annoyed you."
    "This one does."
    Mitch's parents were both doctors of behavioral psychology, tenured professors at UCI. Those in their social circle were mostly from what academic types recently had begun to call the human sciences, largely to avoid the term soft sciences. Among that crowd, a mathematician might annoy like a stone in a shoe.
    "I just fixed a Scotch and soda," his father said. "Would you like something?"
    "No thank you, sir."
    "Did you just sir me?"
    "I'm sorry, Daniel."
    "Mere biological relationship—"
    "—should not confer social status," Mitch finished.
    The five Rafferty children, on their thirteenth birthdays, had been expected to stop calling their parents Mom and Dad, and to begin using first names. Mitch's mother, Katherine, preferred to be called Kathy, but his father would not abide Danny instead of Daniel.
    As a young man, Dr. Daniel Rafferty had held strong views about proper child-rearing. Kathy had no firm opinions on the subject, but she had been intrigued by Daniel's unconventional theories and curious to see if they would prove successful.
    For a moment, Mitch and Daniel stood in the foyer, and Daniel seemed unsure how to proceed, but then he said, "Come see what I just bought."
    They crossed a large living room furnished with stainless-steel-and-glass tables, gray leather sofas, and black chairs. The art works were black-and-white, some with a single line or block of color: here a rectangle of blue, here a square of teal, here two chevrons of mustard yellow.
    Daniel Rafferty's shoes struck hard sounds from the Santos-mahogany floor. Mitch followed as quietly as a haunting spirit.
    In the study, pointing to an object on the desk, Daniel said, "This is the nicest piece of shit in my collection."

Chapter 17

     
    The study decor matched the living room, with lighted display shelves that presented a collection of polished stone spheres.
    Alone on the desk, cupped in an ornamental bronze stand, the newest sphere had a diameter greater than a baseball. Scarlet veins speckled with yellow swirled through a rich coppery brown.
    To the uninformed it might have appeared to be a piece of exotic granite, ground and polished to