A Circle of Wives (19 page)

She says this casually, with a touch of scorn, as if everyone should know these things. But I’m determined not to be bullied.

“And what’s your vulnerability?” I ask.

“You can hardly expect me to reveal it to
you
,” she says, and appears amused. I curse my tendency to blush when embarrassed or angry.

Deborah, hands still crossed, is smiling, waiting for the next question. I get the impression that she’s playing a part; there is something about her affect that doesn’t feel quite genuine. Every once in a while around Palo Alto you see some poor rich woman who’s had too much plastic surgery and you pity her tight expressionless face. Deborah has that. I don’t mean that she’s had work done. Her face is as a fifty-four-year-old woman’s should be. She looks good for her age, but she does look her age. Still, there’s some immobility of features that suggests she is being guarded. I also feel that she’s not taking me seriously.

“But why do you want to hear all this? Surely my opinions are irrelevant.”

“Everything is relevant,” I say. I pick up my iced tea. It’s not like any tea I’ve ever had before. It’s bitter and aromatic at the same time. Although sweetly fragrant, the taste is sour and puckers my mouth. “If I understand John, and his relationships, perhaps I’ll understand his murderer.”

“That seems to be taking the long way around to your goal,” says Deborah. “As I’ve said before, a goal with an erroneous premise. No one killed John. He was in terrible shape, wouldn’t take care of himself. You know the phrase. ‘Doctor, heal thyself.’ John should have done so.”

What she says sparks a question I’d meant to ask.

“By the way, did John have life insurance?”

“Yes, of course. I insisted, from early on, John being our sole source of income.”

“How much was the policy worth?”

“Ten million dollars.”

I must have involuntarily made some sort of noise because she adds, “ I know that might sound like a lot to someone like you”—I keep my face frozen to avoid giving her a reaction—“but you have to understand John brought in quite a bit from his share of the clinic. And we’ve put away quite a bit over the years, invested it well. So actually, I’m financially secure enough without the insurance money.”

“I understand from MJ that you aren’t going to make any claims on equity in the Los Gatos house, although you’d certainly have a case.”

“Yes,” says Deborah, almost indifferently. “As I said, we invested wisely. I can spare a few hundred thousand for that poor creature.”

MJ. Poor creature.
I wonder how Deborah refers to me when I’m not here.

34
Deborah

WELL
,
THAT YOUNG DETECTIVE IS
gone. A relief. No, more than a relief. A liberation. Liberation from emotions I don’t wish to feel. She reminds me too vividly of a way of living, of a milieu I am very anxious not to be in contact with. I saw how hungrily she looked around. Although I’ll say to her credit that I don’t think she hungers for things, but rather for beauty. I don’t imagine her life has much of that in it. And when one has a taste for beauty, the lack of it is a deep hunger indeed. I doubt she fully understands this. To my mind, that must be even worse, to have such an acute ache and not enough self-knowledge to know what part of the body or mind is in distress.

I could sympathize, if I let myself. I won’t. I grew up in a world without beauty. My parents were failures.
Losers,
as the kids today would say. Forever changing jobs, changing houses, changing lives. Not exactly criminal, because they were never caught doing anything wrong, but my father always had schemes, always had partners with whom he was going to strike it rich. I never really understood how he earned a living, but when he talked on the phone, he spoke of “opportunities” and “prospects” and offers that “wouldn’t last.” For a while we’d have money to pay the rent, the electricity bill. Then the partners would disappear, the money would evaporate, and we’d move on. Once I came across an old passport of my father’s—but with a different name. I took it to my mother, who just shrugged and said he had his reasons to not be that person anymore. She said it as though it was of no importance.

My mother, she could find work wherever she went as a court stenographer. She was good, could type 150 words a minute without a single error. It was all about focus, she would say. And she was utterly focused on the present. Because the past was over, and the future yet to come.
Why worry?
she would say. Character by character, word by word, she eased through life, always disappointed but sanguine when my father’s latest scheme failed and it was time to move again.

I determined early on I would have nothing to do with that sort.

They’re long dead, of course. My mother first, of breast cancer, which wasn’t caught until late since they didn’t have insurance. Then my father killed himself about a year after that. I hadn’t talked to him for at least six months when I got the call. He blew his head off with a gun. Always the dramatic one. I’m not sure how they tracked me down to tell me the news. I’d pretty much erased the traces that connected me to them. I was into my twenties, already a wife, already a mother, a new name with a new life attached to it.

I met John at a church dance on the south side of Chicago. Not that either of us was religious. He was just finishing his final year of medical school at the University of Chicago, and I was still in high school in Franklin Park. Seven years difference between us. I went with a friend, as her church was sponsoring the dance, and John tagged along with some medical students to meet some “nice” girls. Funny, how they still thought that way then.

I was about to graduate high school. A year late at age 19, but even that was something of a miracle given I’d gone to eight schools in five years. College had never been in the cards for me. I never even considered it; higher education was out of my league. As was John, really. But I was a looker then, and caught his attention at that dance. My goodness, was he
attentive
. We were married within eight months, and the babies followed after that. I was 23 when I had Charles, 25 when I had Evan, and 28 when I had Cynthia. I told John that I’d had enough at that point although he wanted to keep going. My thought at the time was he loved the admiration of his tiny fan club. They were crazy about their father. Still are. Just because someone is dead doesn’t mean you stop having a relationship with them.

John and I were good together for many years, and tolerated each other for some years after that. John was always lively and idiosyncratic, although he slowed down and sobered up considerably as he aged. If I hadn’t seen it for myself I wouldn’t have believed he’d have the energy for three wives. I had been telling him for some time that he needed to cut back on work, get more rest, some exercise. In typical John fashion, he brushed me aside.

I don’t know why this sticks in my mind, but in his midtwenties, John imagined himself a bit of an artist. He had some rudimentary sketching talent that had served him well in medical school. I had seen his notebooks, filled with scribbled quick sketches of parts of the human body that had helped him get through anatomy classes. I often saw him surreptitiously sketching people, friends, neighbors, strangers at the coffee shop, on the El. He told me that if he could manage to capture even one human being on paper, he’d be satisfied.

We moved to San Francisco so he could complete a plastic surgery residency at UCSF, and we’d go to Golden Gate Park on the days they closed the road, sit there on the grass with the children—there were just two of them then—letting them run and crawl. They, and everyone around us, were our entertainment in those cash-strapped days. San Francisco in the eighties was a colorful place. Or perhaps it always is. John would sketch the people, sometimes quite adequately. Once he drew an elderly couple sitting on a bench outside the arboretum, and was so pleased with himself that he showed it to them. They were excited, and asked him if they could buy it, assuming he was a professional artist. He was flattered and simply gifted it to them, but not before they insisted on him signing it. This made him blissfully happy. But although drawing was a talent of his, it was a small talent, and I told him so, that day, as we walked home. I’ve never seen him so cut up. He stopped pushing the double stroller on the corner of 15th Avenue and Geary, and stood there, blinking tears from his eyes. He admitted then that he had registered to take drawing lessons at a night class over at San Francisco State. He’d been afraid to tell me. For good reason. I said absolutely not, that I could not have him fragmented in that way, I needed him to
focus
,
and he said, “Deborah, one day you will kill me.” We didn’t speak for three days. Unusual for us, as those were our good times. At least in my mind. Anyway, he never drew anything again, or if he did, never showed it to me.

Piano playing was another minor talent he had. Previously, before we moved to San Francisco, while still in medical school in Chicago, John played around town in jazz clubs, anywhere that needed an opening act for a headliner. He’d walk over his audition tapes, and got a surprising number of gigs. Leaving me home alone with Charles as a baby. John never slept, or hardly slept in those days, between his surgical residency and piano playing. God knows what was keeping him going. Sheer adrenaline. But his piano, like his sketching, was not his life’s work. Medicine was. And if he hoped to excel at it, he had to devote himself to the study of it. I told him. Repeatedly. He needed to be reminded, was easily distracted, and I kept him on track. I was not going to have an adult life that in any way resembled my early one.

John would have been happy as a general practitioner, would have stopped his education there. I insisted he proceed into surgery. And once we were there, I insisted he specialize. He was the one who chose plastic surgery over neurosurgery, which is what I wanted. He was surprisingly forceful about this. “You don’t think much of my artistic talent,” he told me, “but I could use it in reconstruction work.” From the beginning he was determined that he wouldn’t do cosmetic plastic surgery, only medically necessary procedures. He endured the six additional years of residency required to be board certified at UCSF, and then got a fellowship at Stanford, after which he was almost immediately hired.

About ten years ago, he opened the Taylor Center for Pediatric Reconstructive Surgery, as it was originally called. Against my wishes. His goal was to treat children only, victims of fire or birth defects or other traumas. He hoped that some insurance payments coupled with grants would be enough to allow him to see a substantial number of patients who couldn’t afford to pay, who didn’t have insurance. But, as I predicted, that was harebrained from a financial perspective. So about six years ago he took on a partner who specialized in cosmetic procedures, and changed the name of the clinic to the Taylor Institute of Plastic Surgery. Three years ago, they took on another partner due to the great demand for what John called vanity procedures. He would have nothing to do with that side of the business.

Whether John was happy or not in the later years is a difficult question to answer. He was a complicated man. He still smiled at me over breakfast. Still sang or talked to himself in the shower. In fact, that’s how I usually gauged his moods, by listening outside the bathroom. He gave away a lot in his discussions with himself, in his brief bursts of words and song. Once I heard him say, “Oh MJ, don’t be silly, that’s a zone 12 flower.” In fact, when MJ’s name came up it was usually in the form of a fond reprimand. Helen’s name appeared less frequently, but when it did, it was only her name.
Helen.
Spoken almost dreamily.

I think the three of us together added up to the perfect marriage, and he needed all of us in order to have a balanced life. Of course, he paid a high price for achieving that balance, for attempting to satisfy the needs of three women. I know I’m echoing the jokesters when I say I’m not surprised he had a heart attack.

Now that John is dead I have to admit that I was tired, too. Tired of being the puppet master. Tired of playing God of John Taylor’s world. Even God needed the seventh day to rest. Every once in a while, amidst the chaos, and grief, and guilt, I feel a deep sense of calm. I was—am—ready for the next phase of my life to begin. Without John.

35
Samantha

WE FINALLY HAVE A BREAKTHROUGH
.

All parking lots and street parking in downtown Palo Alto, near the Westin, have two-hour time limits. I’d instructed Mollie to dig up tickets given to cars that had exceeded the two-hour limit on the afternoon and evening of May 10. It was a long shot, but you never know.

Mollie found forty-three tickets from that Friday starting at 4
PM
and ending at 10
PM
for the streets surrounding the Westin. I go through the painstaking work of tracking each ticketed car to its owner, and calling each of them. Mostly I get voicemail, and leave messages. But one of the names sounds familiar: Thomas Johnston. A city address, in the Mission, in San Francisco. Then I realize: MJ Taylor has a brother named Thomas, and her maiden name was Johnston. We have a match.