The Lesson of Her Death

roommate.”
    Okun smiled. “Ah, ratiocination! Does this mean you’ve trapped me?”
    Corde fanned his cards like a Las Vegas blackjack player. “Now, Emily …” He looked up, frowning. “I thought you told me you never stayed overnight in Jennie’s room?”
    Okun, observing the interrogation from a different plane, sighed. He descended to say, “Emily has a big mouth.… I was being euphemistic when I mentioned spending the night.”
    “Euphemistic?”
    Okun said, “It means I was not being literal. I was being metaphoric.”
    “I know what euphemistic means,” said Corde, who did not.
    “I meant I didn’t have sexual relations with her. We stayed up late discussing literature. That was all. Officer, it seems to me like this is some kind of personal vendetta.”
    “I don’t believe you’re right about that.”
    Okun looked out of the small window as if he were stargazing then said, “I don’t know whether you went to college or not but I imagine you don’t have a lot of respect for what I do.”
    Corde didn’t say anything.
    “I may look like a, what would you call it? Hippie? That’s your era. I may look like a hippie. But it’s people like me who teach half this illiterate world to communicate. I think that’s a rather important thing to do. So I resent being treated like one of your local felons.”
    Corde asked, “Will you submit a blood sample?”
    “Blood?”
    “For a genetic marker test. To compare with the semen found in Jennie Gebben’s body?”
    Brian Okun said, “Fuck you.” Then he stood up and walked out of the room.
    Do You Drive Your Man Crazy?
    Diane Corde sat in the paneled office and flipped through a
Redbook
.
    Question 1. What is the wildest thing you and your mate are capable of doing?
    A. Taking skydiving lessons together
.
    B. Making love outdoors
.
    C. Going skinny-dipping
.
    D. Taking ballroom dancing classes
.
    Diane didn’t like the place. It reminded her too much of the office of the vet who spayed their puppies and dispensed worm drops. It was nothing but a cheap paneled waiting room and a sliding glass window, behind which was a gum-chewing receptionist, who seemed about to ask, “Time for Fluffy’s distemper shot, is it?”
    Diane swallowed, dry-mouthed, and returned to the magazine.
    Question 7. How surprised would your mate be if you called him up one afternoon and told him to meetyou after work in a ritzy hotel room, where you would have champagne and caviar waiting for him?
    A. Not surprised at all
.
    B. Somewhat surprised
.
    C. Very surprised
.
    D. Astonished
.
    Corde and Diane had met at a Methodist church singles supper sixteen years before, held in the boathouse on Seever Lake. Corde had shown up with only bags of potato chips, getting mileage out of a bad joke (“Sure I know it’s a pot luck supper—y’all’re lucky I didn’t bring a pot”). Corde then spotted Diane Claudia Willmot arranging pickles in a Tupperware bowl and asked her if she’d like to go for a walk. She said she would, only wait a minute she wanted to get her purse, which she did, and they wandered around in the park until, thank you Lord, a roaring cloudburst forced them into a little shack and while the other pot-luckers were eating beans and franks and making forty-days-and-forty-nights jokes, Corde and Diane kissed, wet and hot, and she decided she was going to marry him.
    She was four years older than Corde, which is a big difference between people at only one age—their mid-twenties, which is where the two of them happened to be. Crying, Diane asked him, “What are you going to do when I turn thirty? You’ll still be young.” And Bill Corde, who was in fact worried about the age difference (but because he thought
she
might leave him for an older man), told her something that turned out to be completely true: that he didn’t think she’d go too ripe before he himself went gray.
    One problem he hadn’t counted on, though. Diane was divorced, married two years to a salesman up in Fredericksberg. They’d split up before Corde met her and when she’d confessed the marriage, nervous about the response, he’d smeared on the nonchalance real thick. But later he got to thinking about Diane and Stuart together and he claimed it turned his stomach into a cloverleaf. Diane was tolerant at first but then Corde’sinsecurity began to wear on her. She didn’t know how to placate him. It didn’t even seem to make him feel better when she repeated over and over the