Page 121 of If Looks Could Kill
“Is that enough,” I repeated. “Liking talking with someone. Is that enough?”
“That’s everything,” he said quietly. “Everything to me.”
He seemed perplexed, worried, and, maybe, a bit hurt.
I hurried to explain. “I’ve lived with Pearl these last few months.”
He pulled back an inch or two.
“I see what men see,” I said, “when they look at us both.”
He frowned.
“It’s all the time, Mike,” I told him. “Every day. Everywhere.”
He watched me for a while. His eyes were kind, and sad.
Finally, he spoke. “There must be more to Pearl than meets the eye,” he said, “or she wouldn’t mean so much to you.”
This caught me completely off guard.
“There is,” I said. “There’s much more to Pearl than I first saw. Would let myself see.”
He nodded and waited.
“Pearl drives me to distraction,” I admitted.
He grinned.
“And I love her.” Here came the tears again, this time, like Niagara Falls. “I need her to be all right, Mike. I need her to come home and be all right.”
Mike wrapped his arms around me and held me close. “I know, sweetheart,” he whispered. “We’re going to find her.”
I sobbed onto his chest, leaving my tears in the scratchy wool of his coat.
“Come on,” Mike said. “Let’s go find your lost Pearl.”
Jack’s Night In(Monday, December 3, 1888)
Jack loves the theater. He attends every chance he gets. Night after night, in cities around the world. That performance ofDr. Jekyll and Mr. Hydethat he saw this fall, back in London, still sends shivers down his spine. The terror of the transformation from refined man of science to murderous beast absorbed Jack’s attention for many sleepless hours. The prior fall, in Pittsburgh, he’d seen his old friend, the celebrated Edwin Booth—greatest actor of the age and brother of Jack’s closer, now-deceased friend John Wilkes Booth—reprise the role of Brutus inJulius Caesarthat he had immortalized in New York. He can still hear Edwin, as Brutus, say:
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves
Or lose our ventures.
Jack paces the floor. Has such a tide as this carried his vessel to this moment, this place, this “full sea”? Is this the flood he must seize to claim his audacious prize, or live the rest of his curtailed life cursing his hesitation and wallowing in the shallow misery of regret?
It would be madness to act here, with reporters queueing at his very door. Utter madness.
