He could imagine the prospect on this clear sunny day: Calumet Harbor hundreds of feet below, with its stale landscape of ageing jetties full of cranes and towers and derricks, stretching out towards the vast fresh blue lake. Behind them, fifteen miles north, the skyline of the city downtown, the Sears Tower jutting up like an upended domino, in picture-postcard clarity. But he didn’t dare look.
He had first been afflicted in New York. He had kept it to himself as best he could, though during those years in Manhattan colleagues must have noticed his unease, seeing him sweating and shaky in some meeting on the thirty-seventh floor; they couldn’t have failed to notice how at its conclusion he’d rush for the elevator, wordless and tense until safe inside and descending.
So what a relief London had proved, where for twelve years he had rarely to venture above the tenth floor of any building. This was well below his fear line – which got triggered around the twentieth floor. From that height (and above) the view of the world below lost any sense of immediate dimension; the result was tremulous panic.
‘Why don’t you like heights, Dad?’ Sophie asked.
Anna answered. ‘Daddy gets dizzy up high, darling. Lots of people do. It’s called vertigo.’
Vertigo? No, it was a mental dizziness of plain fear, which now subsided – they were on the downwards slant of the bridge and he was breathing easier. In just two or three seconds, even if the whole thing collapsed, he would fall on dry land, an irrational but critical mollifier of his terror.
They travelled, insulated by toll road, past small bungalows with tar-paper roofs, and litter-strewn parks and slime-infested little lakes. Even the gold-leaf dome on the Gary courthouse looked shabby and decrepit.
‘Gary Indiana, Indiana,’ sang Sophie, who had loved The Music Man DVD he had brought home. Then she stopped and leaned forward, her face right behind the back of his driver’s seat. ‘What’s wrong with Indiana, Daddy?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Mom says you have a . . . what do you call it?’
‘Prejudice,’ said Anna firmly.
‘Prejudice. Against Indiana.’
He shrugged, unable to explain a lifelong bias, probably fostered by the drives like this he’d endured as a child on the way to Michigan – his father had called Indiana the New Jersey of the Middle West. Nor could he explain the odd American fixation with states, how it shaped a sense of identity only second to belonging to the country as a whole.
To Robert, Indiana meant not only the ineffably drear landscape he was progressing through now, but also a southern expanse of rattlesnake-infested flatlands, which were probably no different from those of Illinois but were, well, in a different state.
The concrete jungle gradually gave way to suburb, then farmland fields of young corn as they moved east towards the Michigan border. He glanced at Anna, whose sunglasses perched on her forehead like a headband. She was wearing a summery outfit of white jeans and flowery cotton shirt, and she turned her head to the window as they passed a Victorian farmhouse, a graceful rectangle of slim white pine boards topped by a high-pitched gable. Then he remembered. ‘What flowers?’ he asked.
‘Huh?’ she said, glancing back. ‘Oh, you know, the flowers I got at the office yesterday. A day early, but very nice.’
‘Was there a card with them?’
‘No, but I wasn’t going to tell you. The florist must have screwed up.’ She stretched an arm out and kneaded his shoulder. Increasingly, he found he got stiff while driving – his back, his shoulder, his knees. Not yet fifty, he feared his father’s arthritis, and the prospect of twenty, maybe thirty years of pain.
He exhaled, trying to keep his voice calm. ‘I didn’t send you flowers.’
‘Really?’
‘I guess you’ve got a secret admirer.’ Robert knew he could be hypersensitive, but figured who wouldn’t be, with an ex-wife who had already run off with a man twelve years her junior?
Anna took her hand away. ‘Well, it wasn’t Philip, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ she said sharply.
‘I didn’t say it was, honey. I just know it wasn’t me. Anyway, how do you know who it was or wasn’t?’
‘Because I rang the florist’s, to see if they’d left the card out by mistake. They couldn’t find any trace of the order. They said the flowers must have been bought and delivered by the customer himself. Philip’s in Washington, visiting the embassy, and why would he be sending me flowers anyway?