About the Author (22 page)

“Jan!” Les cried. “This is, like, a total surprise. Come in outa the rain, girl!”

“Thanks,” Janet said. The screen door twanged open on its spring, then banged shut. “I’m sorry for barging in on you like this. Is it a bad time?”

“Hell, no,” Les said. “No such thing at Les’s all-night crash pad. Take a load off.”

“The reason I came,” Janet said—the sofa’s old springs giving way with a creak as she sat—“is that you mentioned you had some of Stewart’s writing? I was wondering if maybe I could have a look at it.”

Somewhere, Stewart’s spirit cackled. I could practically hear his earth representative repressing a chuckle of wicked glee.

“Abso
lut
ely,” Les said. “You want something to drink, though? I was just gonna have my first one of the day.”

“Oh, uh—well. Maybe a soda water?”

Les snorted. “I was thinking whisky. Looks like
you
could use one, too.”

“I guess I could,” Janet said. Then, haltingly, she explained that she and her husband (that would be me) had just had their first fight. “It shook me up pretty badly,” she added.

“Whoa!” Les cried. “Trouble in paradise. Two scotches comin’ right up.” Her footsteps receded into the distant reaches of the house.

Janet was alone now in the room, or thought she was. I heard her readjust her seat on the sofa, then came a mysterious
pop pop pop
—and I suddenly realized that of course she was wearing her yellow rain slicker and had just pulled open its snaps. She coughed; I heard her rubber coat rustle. She was probably rearranging her hair, tousled from the wind and rain.

Then: silence. I held my breath, terrified that I would, through the simple action of breathing, jar loose one of the clattery badminton rackets that crowded against me in the darkness. The situation might have seemed absurd, like something out of a Restoration farce, if it hadn’t been so much like a nightmare.

Les’s footsteps returned. “All out of ice,” she said. “Neat, okay?”

“That’s fine,” Janet said—though I had known her to drink hard liquor only with a generous complement of ice cubes and plenty of seltzer.

“Bottoms up,” Les said. I heard the clink of glasses, then my wife purred, “Mmmm. Delicious.”

“A toast,” Les said. “To . . . let’s see. How about to your friend
Stewart
?” The girl practically shouted the name in my direction. Like a sadistic child who has trapped a terrified insect in a jar, she was clearly going to relish every moment of the torture.

“To Stewart,” my wife incredibly said.

They clinked glasses again. A pause as they drank.

“So,” Les said, “tell me about this fight with your old man.”

By now the solid blackness in front of my eyes had developed lighter mauve patches, a mottled backdrop against which I visualized their respective movements: Les slouched back in her wicker armchair, her legs crossed on the fender bench, periodically tossing her limp hair back from her face; Janet perched on the edge of the sofa, shyly playing with the end of the ponytail in her fingertips and sipping nervously, too quickly, at her drink.

“Actually,” Janet said, “the fight was over
you
.”

“Me?” Les said.

“I made the mistake of telling Cal that I had a coffee with you at the Snak Shak.” She paused. “He doesn’t approve of you.”

“Who does in this fucking town? Lemme guess: he thinks I’m gonna corrupt you.”

Janet laughed. “Actually, that’s not so far from the truth.”

“Well, that calls for a refill.”

Again the gurgle of scotch being poured. The clink of glasses.

“Down the hatch!” Les cried. “Ready? One, two, three!”

I tensed, unable to believe that Janet would join in such sophomoric antics. But then I listened, amazed, as they both whooped and hollered after tossing back the drinks.

“Listen,” Les said. “I hope you told him that I never laid a hand on you. Not that I didn’t
want
to. There was just too many people at the Snak Shak
. But now
,” she added, dropping her voice into an imitation of a man’s lecherous growl, “
I’ve got you all to myself
.”

“And you’re getting me drunk!” Janet cried. “
Help
!” They cracked up. Yet another festive clink of glasses.

“Seriously, though,” Janet continued, with the sudden sloppy intimacy of someone who was starting to feel her drinks, “he was really angry. But I think you were just an excuse, really. He was jealous because I told him about the conversation we had about Stewart.”

“Men,” Les said bitterly. “They think they fuckin’ own ya. My psycho boyfriend, Tommy—well, that’s another story. Tell me about your old man. Jealous about the past, huh? I know
that
shit.”

“But it isn’t like him,” Janet insisted. “I mean, we’ve talked about Stewart before. He never reacted like this. It’s got me thinking that maybe he’s got a guilty conscience himself.” She then proceeded to catalog the many ways in which I had been acting strangely since the spring: my outburst at the Halberts’ dinner party; my new habit of jumping whenever the peal of the phone ripped through the house; my way of rushing to collect the mail before she could get to it, then doling out each piece to her from the letters fanned out like a poker hand in my fist; my tendency to disappear at odd hours of the day and night on insufficiently explained missions.

I listened in amazement to all of this. Not once had I ever suspected that Janet had noted so many changes in my behavior. Never once had I thought it was so obvious.

“And then—then there’s something else,” Janet went on, in a hushed tone. “I’d almost forgotten about it, but then it came back to me the other day. Our neighbor Ned Bailey. He once told me that he’d seen Cal with a girl. Outside the Pleasant View. She was
in
his car. Ned thought she might be hiding. . . .”

“Well, there you go!” Les cried, slapping her armrest. “He’s probably fucking around on you!”

“I asked Cal about it at the time,” Janet said. “Well, I made a joke out of it, because—because I just couldn’t believe . . . But then it was after
that
when he started to act so strangely. Oh, God. Do you think he really could be having an affair?”

“Read his book. The guy’s into pussy. Unless,” she added darkly, “he has some other secret from you.”

“But what could it
be
?” Janet pleaded, as if she longed for some other explanation.

“Could be anything,” Les said. “I mean, how well do you really
know
the guy? How long did you know him before you got married?”

Janet told the story of how we had met, divulging our most personal, precious history to my blackmailer: how I had come up her hill to look at her house and then courted her, and how we had married after knowing each other for less than a year.

“So what you’re telling me,” Les said, “is that this guy was basically a stranger.”

“Well,” Janet protested, “I knew he was a writer.”

Les snorted. “So that made him okay?”

Janet mumbled a few unintelligible syllables. She sounded confused now, drunk and not at all happy.

“Our friend Stewart was a writer, too,” Les pressed. “Why didn’t you marry
him
?”

Janet sighed. “He never told you?”

“I think he couldn’t really talk about it,” Les said cagily. “But I think he wanted me to know. That’s why he gave me his diary to read.”

“His
diary
!” Janet said, as if suddenly recalling her mission. “Do you think I could look at it?”

“You wait right here, sugar,” Les said.

I heard the creak of wicker as Les stood, and then her feet pounded up the stairs just over my head, sending a rain of fine debris sprinkling onto my shoulders. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

A stealthy gurgle indicated that Janet had replenished her glass. Soon Les’s feet stormed back down the stairs. I heard the rustle of pages. Only later would I realize how careful Les had been in planning her tactical use of Janet in blackmailing me. She had to have taken the time to print out relevant passages of Stewart’s diary from his laptop, in advance—just in case they might come in handy. They were coming in handy now.

I heard the sound of Les’s sitting down again in her wicker chair. “Why don’t you read it out loud?” she said.

And sure enough, Janet’s voice began to speak against the sound of rain falling steadily against the house.

“
Until I met her
,” she read in a soft monotone, her thickened tongue stumbling a little over the longer words
, “I thought that writing was all there was to live for. Now I know that’s not true. I would give up everything for her if she asked. And yet, miraculously, she encourages my scribbling. And now everything I write is for her, and her alone
.” There was a pause, the sound of a page’s being turned. “
Janet called me last night on the phone. She’s visiting her parents in Boston. We talked for hours, saying nothing, saying everything
.” Suddenly Janet’s voice fell silent.

“Hey, girl,” Les said gently. I heard her rise from her armchair. Then came the sound of the sofa springs’ yielding, as Les sat. I heard a wet sniffle. “I’m just so confused,” Janet said on a stifled sob. Les murmured something below my hearing. A mysterious silence ensued, in which not a rustle of paper or a creak of furniture sounded against the susurration of the rain. I concentrated my hearing on the place where, in my blind universe, their seated figures seemed to hover, but I could discern nothing against the storm’s gray backdrop. Twenty, then twenty-five, then thirty seconds passed before finally I heard the sofa whimper and Janet’s voice say softly, yet firmly, “No. No more. Please. That’s just making it worse” (Les, I assumed, had tried to pour her another drink). Silence again fell. I strained forward in my closet, listening. A floorboard creaked under my foot. Suddenly the sofa’s springs twanged, then Janet’s familiar tread hurried in my direction. I reared back in the darkness. But no; she halted a few inches from my hiding place. “I have to go now,” Janet said with surprising urgency. Les, with an odd note of insinuation in her voice, asked if Janet did not want to see any more of Stewart’s writing. “I’ve seen
enough
,” my wife snapped. The atmosphere between them had changed utterly, in the wink of an eye. None of it made any sense.

I heard Les get up off the sofa and ask, “You gonna be able to drive, honey?” Janet must have nodded; I heard no answer. “Just be careful.” Another short silence, then Les muttered something gently coaxing. “Please,” Janet replied, “I’m drunk.” More silence. Then, without so much as a good-bye between them, the screen door twanged and banged. Janet’s feet moved at a rapid pace across the veranda.

I waited until I heard her engine catch before I dared to open the door of my tomb.

Light from the shaded floor lamps jabbed at my eyes.

The girl was sitting in her armchair, flashing me a grin of triumph, her hair oddly tousled. She had removed the gun from her waistband. The snub-nosed barrel was once again, aimed at my midsection.

“Now who’s got the wrong end of the stick?” she said.

Cowed, beaten, humiliated, I opened my mouth to warn her, again, to stay away from my wife. The words died in my throat. Because of course it was obvious to both of us that my wife had come to
her
. Or, as Les herself now hastened to point out, to
Stewart
.

“She still loves him, dude,” Les said. “You heard her. She’ll keep coming here. She’ll try
not
to, but she won’t be able to stay away. She’s real romantic. And so was Stewart. You should read what he wrote about her!” She pressed a fluttering hand to her breast and sighed, mimicking a swooning teenager. Then her expression hardened. “I don’t even
have
to show her the novel you stole from him. I can fuck your marriage with this shit alone.” She scooped the pages of Stewart’s diary from the fender bench and shook them at me. “So here’s the deal: you agree to help me out, and I . . .” She gestured as if to toss the papers into the fireplace. “Get it?”

I got it. The problem was that I could not smuggle drugs across the Canadian border with this girl. The chances of getting caught were simply too great, and the consequences of discovery too awful to contemplate. Everything would come out. Les would immediately reveal my theft of Stewart’s novel, in a bid to clear herself. She was offering me two alternatives. Both would lead to my doom.

“Look,” Les said. “You better get the fuck out of here. Janet’s going to be wondering where you are. Just remember: one week. Then it’s show time.”

I reached home a half hour later. Janet was passed out, fully clothed, on the livingroom sofa, one arm pinned awkwardly under her body, her head twisted against the padded armrest.

She had toasted Stewart. She had read his diary entries and wept. She had betrayed me to his agent on earth. And yet I could feel nothing for her but tenderness. I eased the shoes from her feet, placed a pillow under her head, covered her in a blanket, and placed a glass of water and four aspirins on the coffee table beside her. Then I hurried down the hall, stripped off my own clammy clothes, showered, and went, miserably, to bed.

Waking at around noon the next day, I was at first surprised to find that the space beside me in bed was empty, a flashback to that long-ago awakening in Washington Heights, when I opened my eyes to discover the blanket thrown back to reveal only the wrinkle pattern of a body, like the chalk outline that cops draw at the scene of a homicide. . . . Spooked, I bolted upright and called Janet’s name. No answer. I got up and hurried down the hall to the kitchen.

She was slouched at the table, still in her pathetically crumpled clothes from the day before, her hands around a mug of coffee. Even such a night as she had spent could not mar her beauty. Lips pale, dark hair tumbling in a tangled, pyramidal mass around her shoulders, lower eyelids shadowed with smudged mascara, she looked maddeningly, and quite unintentionally, desirable: a soiled Klimt decadent, a debauched flower girl, Eve after the expulsion.

I sat down across the table from her. With gentle fingers, I pried one of her hands loose from the mug and held it in mine. I began to apologize for my preposterous outburst of the day before. She murmured something about its “not being important.” I fell silent. She gazed at me. Her eyes seemed to contain a guilty secret, the puffy lower lids swollen not only with a hangover but with the pressure of everything she was holding back from me about her visit to Les’s house. For a moment, as I searched her sheepish, wounded-looking eyes, I imagined that she was about to confess to her escapade of the day before and ask
my
forgiveness, in turn. But when she spoke, her tone was accusing: