The Silent Places by James Patrick Hunt

game. Yet … there was something else, too. And eventually she figured out what it was: Alan sometimes acted the same way when he talked to
her
, his own wife. Maybe he also told the aerospace manufacturer’s wife she was the kindest, most decent woman he had ever known.
    Was it all a performance? She wondered. Did he love her? Or did she simply fit the part he needed her to play? The good-looking, mentally stable, even-keeled wife. Their sex life was not especially active. They made love a couple of times a month, but it was perfunctory. She had never thought that Alan had any latent homosexual tendencies. She believed that sex just wasn’t that important to him. He was not a man of strong libido. Indeed, he may even have been asexual. That was why it irritated her when he pointed out he’d never been unfaithful to her. No, she thought, he hadn’t. But he was not the sort to be tempted by other women.
    Alan was smart and he knew how to argue. He was a man who always thought about what he said before he said it. What he had said tonight was …
perhaps
correct. But it was a little too clever, maybe even calculated. Had he communicated with her, or had he just said the things that he knew would placate her? Had he worked her? Was there a difference?
    At times, she felt sorry for herself and wondered if she should have had been more adventurous before she married. Had an affair with a lifeguard or maybe an airline pilot. But she knew that was silly, because she had never been a wild girl and she had always been vaguely repulsed by slutty women. She had behaved herself because it was what she wanted to do. She had played by the rules of polite society and married a proper, decent citizen, and now she was unhappy and empty. And at the same time, she was angry at herself for indulging in what she believed might be adolescent self-pity.
    Her mother had once told her, “You can’t expect much from a marriage. You can’t expect a husband to give you total happiness. That’s not realistic. The steady, stable ones will bore you. The exciting ones will always let you down. They’ll drink too much or gamble, or they’ll cheat on you. You can’t have it all.”
    Maybe her mother had been right. Maybe she just needed to grow up, not ask so much from life. Her mother liked Alan. She said he was a good man.
    Her father, though, had never warmed to him and had always kept him at arm’s length. Her father had died the previous year. Sylvia had not gotten the opportunity to ask him what he really thought of Alan. She knew that if she had asked him, it would have been a sort of betrayal of Alan. Yet she had respected her father more than any man she had ever known, and she knew he was no poor judge of character.
    Now she was forty-five years old. Her father was gone and her mother was unable to understand how she could feel any discontent. Now she was looking at her life and wondering if she was changing or if she was finally seeing her husband clearly. All this … mysterious behavior, this keeping of secrets. Alan considering a run at the White House while some escaped convict was out there making bizarre threats against him. Alan was scared and he was pretending not to be. She was his wife. Why couldn’t he just tell her things?
    Across the street, Hastings lowered the binoculars.
    The lights in the master bedroom had gone off a couple of minutes ago. Hastings had let his view drift to the upstairs window. There, he’d seen the senator’s wife walk by.
    She’d been dressed, wearing a bathrobe of some sort. Not undressed, but Hastings still felt sleazy. Peeper. Pervert.
    Klosterman would say it was her fault for not having drawn the shades. But they didn’t have shades over there. They had curtains. And this woman hadn’t drawn them shut. Besides, what difference did it make? She hadn’t been getting undressed in front of the window. She must have done it elsewhere. It was just by chance he had focused the binocs on the