WHEN THEIR GUESTS HAD DEPARTED, and the kids were soundly asleep, and the dishes washed, Lucas and Weather had had one of the snarly disagreements common to long-lasting marriages, and they had gone to bed a little angry with each other. The trouble came down to Henderson’s request and Lucas’s occasional political missions. The argument started there, compounded by Weather’s unease with the increasing levels of violence in Lucas’s job, and had moved to a more general political dispute.
Weather, a surgeon, was an unabashed liberal. Because they had much more money than they really needed, Weather had freed herself from the usual routine of plastic and micro surgeries. She no longer looked for clients, but spent much of her time going from one hospital to the next, doing necessary surgical repairs on indigent cases.
There was more work of that kind than she could handle and she was constantly exposed to a population that was unable to care for itself—including people literally driven into bankruptcy by medical costs, who’d had to choose between eating and medical care.
The American medical system was broken, she thought, and needed to be fixed. She’d gone to a convention of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons in Los Angeles, and had been traumatized by the sight of thousands of street people, including small children, living under bridges and viaducts.
“Worse than anything we had in the Great Depression,” she said.
Lucas was not so liberal. He believed that no matter how much money or time you spent on the poor, there’d always be people at the bottom unable to care for themselves, and that was simply a fact to be lived with. Also, some people reallyneededto be shot, and, if only wounded, shot again.
“Your mistake,” he’d told Weather, after one beer too many, and to his regret, “is that you characterize everything as a problem. A problem is something that can be solved. Some things aren’t problems—they’re situations. A situation can’t be solved, it just is. Medical care is a bottomless hole. We could spend every nickel everyone makes in the country on medical care, and it stillwouldn’t be enough. If a guy thinks he’s dying and somebody else is paying for all his care, why shouldn’t he ask for the very best for the very longest time possible, right into the grave? And they do. We can’t afford that, sweetheart.”
“We can afford a lot more than we do. You can’t possibly think...”
And so on. Snarling, just a bit.
—
SO THEY’D GONE TO BED GRUMPY. Lucas had packed that night, woke, groaning, at 6:55, and lay thinking about getting shot, and about the problems of the street people, until the alarm was ten seconds from erupting. He reached out and clicked it off, rolled over, and put his arm around Weather. “Love you, babe.”
Weather muttered into her pillow, “Thank you. Let me know when you’re out of the bathroom.”
“You still pissed off at me?”
“No. I got over it at three o’clock when I realized I was completely right.”
“God bless you, Weather. You’re a good person.”
—
LUCAS GOT CLEANED UP, dressed himself in a blue, lightweight wool suit from Figueroa & Prince, a tailor in Washington, with just a bit of extra room on the left-side hip to accommodate his gun. Black oxfords from George Cleverley, a Brioni shirt in pale blue stripes, and an Hermès tie completed the ensemble. He checked himself in a three-way mirror and thought that the softcolors of the suit, shirt, and tie did nothing but emphasize his grayness, putting colored threads on a scarecrow.
Weather, out of the bathroom and dressed in a T-shirt and underpants, turned him around and said, “You look great.”
“Not gray?”
“Lucas... you don’t have all the weight back yet, but you look good. Really good. Maybe a year or two younger, even...”
Weather rousted the kids from bed and they all had cereal together.
The kids ignored them, mostly, when Weather pushed him on the Washington job: “I think you’re dealing with the devil here. Yes, Henderson, he might not actually be the devil himself, but they’re Facebook friends. Lucas, he could make you do something crooked.”
“No, he couldn’t.”
“Yes, he could,” Weather insisted. “You wouldn’t realize it at the time. It’s like the old boiling frog story...”
“I know that story,” Lucas said.
Weather went on anyway. “You put a frog in a pot in cool water and slowly heat it up until it’s boiling,” she said. “The frog never feels the change in temperature and winds up boiling to death. That’s what happens with politicians like Henderson. Or Porter Smalls, for that matter. You get in the pot with them and when you try to get out, you find out you’ve got a dozen felonies around your neck.”
Their son Sam asked, “Can I get a frog?”
In the end, Lucas kissed each of them and was out the door at 7:40, at the fixed-base operator at 7:55, where the jet was ready to roll.
—
LUCAS HATED TO FLY; was frightened of it. He knew all the numbers, how much less likely you were to die in a plane crash than an auto accident or even on a train, but it made no difference. It made no difference because he was not in control of the plane. A friend who was also a shrink had explained that to him, and he’d thought,kiss my ass, but hadn’t said it aloud because the shrink was also a nun he’d known since childhood.
