American Appetites (27 page)

Ian glanced up. Dr. Max and three other men were passing by their table without acknowledging them; without, it seemed, seeing them. The director's ruddy face was crinkled in mirth; the men were laughing about something; it was remarkable, Ian thought, how much laughter one heard, in the Institute dining room, at such designated times. One of the men was Homer Taylor, the older colleague of Ian's who had called, the evening of Glynnis's accident, to invite him to lunch.

Of course, since Glynnis's death, all talk of Ian McCullough as the next director of the Institute had stopped. In that too he knew himself posthumous.

It was not yet twelve-thirty but Ian and his companions were finished with their lunches; men eating alone together, without women, eat notoriously fast. Let's have three more beers, Denis suggested. And Malcolm agreed, and Ian said yes, good, why not? Now that the anxious malaise of his life had settled over him like a low-lying mist, in which even familiar objects are obscured or given a malevolent cast, he set more store than he would have wished to acknowledge on precisely such occasions: casual, improvised, spontaneous.

As if he had only now thought of it, and brought the subject up with some reluctance, Malcolm asked Ian how “the case,” as he called it, was developing. So rarely was Ian asked this question, particularly in so point-blank a way, he hardly knew how to answer: the grand jury's hearings were closed, after all; it was primarily, for the defense, a matter of waiting.

Malcolm said, glancing at Denis, who indicated by his downward gaze that he was out of the conversation or wanted nothing of it, that he'd been hearing various things about the prosecution's approach: no more than rumors, of course, nothing substantial. “You know,” he said, with a twitch of a smile, “what Hazelton is like.”

Do I? Ian wondered. “What sorts of things have you heard? Or shouldn't I ask?”

“Well. About the girl, for one thing,” Malcolm said uncomfortably. “All this emphasis they intend to place on the girl.”

“The girl?”

“The young woman, I should say. Sigrid Hunt.”

Ian drank beer, stiffening: thinking—or rather, not thinking, for his response was sheerly physical, emotional—I will say nothing about her; I will not even deny her.

Malcolm said, “I met her, you know, just briefly, that evening at your house. That large party back in . . . I forget when. Last fall. And June seems to have met her at some sort of luncheon Glynnis arranged. My initial impression of her—that is, my only impression—was that there was something desperate about her, even then. In her face. Her eyes. But something certainly attractive. And, Christ, that man she was with, that ‘Egyptian fiancé,' as he's described in the papers: he was looking at me as if it wouldn't have taken much for him to attack me . . . and I wasn't doing anything but talking to her. I remember him as clearly as I remember her.”

Denis said, “Cut the crap, Mal. Did you ever call her?”

“Of course I never called her,” Malcolm said. He looked at Denis, smiling. “Did you?”

Denis laughed. “In fact, no.”

“Did you want to?”

“Did you?”

There was a sudden wild silence. Ian said quietly, “When one is happily married one doesn't do such things.”

“Exactly,” Denis said.

“That's the point,” Malcolm said, raising his bottle to his mouth. “The entire point. One
doesn't
.”

“And now, in any case, she seems to have vanished,” Denis said. His face was still flushed from their game, and his hair, parted low and combed conspicuously over the crown of his head, was still damp. He did not look at Ian, though he seemed to be addressing him. “As the media has it, ‘without a trace.'”

It was true, sadly, grotesquely true: in mimicry of Ian McCullough's dead wife the young woman with whom he was generally believed to have had “relations” had become, too, an absence.

Ian shrugged his shoulders, said carelessly, “I suppose, eventually, I will be blamed for her death too.”

“Don't talk like that,” Denis said, shocked. “For Christ's sake, Ian!”

“Why not?” Ian said. “Do you think I would mind?”

AS THEY LEFT
the dining room Malcolm reverted to the subject of the grand jury: the rumors he'd been hearing from his lawyer friends. He was acquainted with the county prosecutor, Lederer, Samuel S. Lederer: had had a nasty confrontation with the man five or six years ago, over a case taken up by the ACLU. “The bastard is shrewd, manipulative, opportunistic, yet—and this is the worst part of it—sincere. A Republican, and conservative, anxious to placate his constituency, so far undistinguished in office—this is his first term, I suppose you know—and casting about for something or someone to make a public issue of. To erect a mission around.” Malcolm looked at Ian frankly. “That makes him a dangerous adversary, given the power he has as prosecutor. But I suppose Nick Ottinger has filled you in on all this?”

“Yes,” Ian said, wanting to change the subject. “I suppose he has.”

“Lederer will probably stack his case against you with an undercurrent of populist sentiment, if he can get away with it,” Malcolm said. “Playing off the jurors' supposed resentment of people, in Hazelton, like us.”

“Like us?” Ian asked mildly.

“Playing off the notion that we are not indigenous to this part of the country but are intruders, of a kind . . . that we constitute, or even think of ourselves as, a sort of elite, a class of our own.” Malcolm made a gesture, at once extravagant and dismissive, that took in the Institute dining room with its high vaulted ceiling and tall leaded windows and gleaming parquet floor, the numerous tables at which their colleagues, most of them men, were sitting. His nostrils widened darkly in contempt: to Malcolm Oliver, the Hazelton faculty was hardly a homogeneous community, nor was it one with which he felt an identifying kinship. “That we live
in
Hazelton but aren't
of
Hazelton. That sort of thing. I don't really know who the jurors are on the grand jury but, God forbid, if there is to be an actual trial . . .”

Malcolm's voice trailed off in embarrassment; clearly, he had not meant to say all he'd said.

Denis said, “I'd let Ottinger worry about it; it's his job, after all.
I
wouldn't worry.” He laid a consoling hand on Ian's shoulder and said, in a kind, vague, falsely hearty voice, “
I
wouldn't.”

MALCOLM LEFT THE
building, and Ian and Denis climbed the stairway to the fourth floor. Instead of turning in the direction of his own office, however, Ian walked with Denis to his. He had not meant to do so, yet, evidently, he was doing so; the gesture took both men by surprise.

Denis asked if something were wrong, casting Ian a worried sidelong glance, and Ian said, no, of course nothing was wrong, but he'd like to speak with Denis for a moment, if he could. In private. Just for a moment.

“Of course,” Denis said.

As soon as Denis closed the door behind him and they were alone together in his office, Ian began to speak. Afterward, recollecting this strange scene, Ian would think it extraordinary that, until the moment of crossing the threshold into Denis's office—a long, narrow, crowded space the approximate size of Ian's own office—he had not known he meant to say such things: meant to speak so freely. Even his voice, higher-pitched than usual, was not one he might have recognized. “There is no one else I've told this, Denis,” he said, “but, that night, the night she died—I mean the night she injured herself—Glynnis told me something . . . unexpected. Something I haven't been able to forget.”

“Yes? Did she? What was that?”

“She said she'd been . . . that she had had . . . a lover. Lovers. That there was a man in Hazelton whom she loved . . . and had given up, she said, for me.”

Denis regarded Ian with a look of absolute and seemingly unfeigned astonishment. He said in a whisper, “Really! Really!” Then, “Are you sure you want to tell me this, Ian? Under the circumstances . . .”

Ian said quickly, “I must tell someone.”

“. . . considering that Glynnis is dead.”

“I
must
tell someone.”

It seemed to him that Denis was frightened of him; as, so very suddenly, he'd become frightened of Denis.

He was standing close by a window, in a humid patch of sunshine. Below was the Institute pond, its rippleless sky-mirroring surface, and, beyond, a spectacular stand of birch trees. They were the same trees Ian saw, at a slant, from his own office window, and he recalled having thought, as a boy, a city boy, that birch trees were too elegantly beautiful to be real. “Those trees,” he said.

“Yes? What?”

“They look artificial.”

“Artificial?”

“If you didn't know better, wouldn't you think they'd been painted? By hand?”

Denis stared at him as if he had said something incomprehensible.

“They look flat, too,” Ian continued. “But then, I suppose, if you look at objects hard enough, people as well, they begin to go flat. Into two dimensions.”

“Would you like to sit down, Ian? You're looking a little tired.”

“It's just that she was unfaithful to me, you know. And then she died. I mean, she was injured: there was the accident; she recovered consciousness only for a few minutes, without speaking to me; then she died. It happened,” Ian said, frowning, “so damned quickly. And irreversibly.”

“Please sit down, why don't you.”

“I'm not at all tired. I feel in fact as if I've just woken up. That last game of ours . . .”

Denis said, “If Glynnis was upset when she told you . . . what you say she told you . . . I don't really think you can take it seriously.” He chose his words carefully, as if they were being recorded. “We all know that Glynnis sometimes said things without thinking: things meant to surprise, or to wound. She was a passionate woman, and—”

Ian looked searchingly at him. “‘To surprise, or to wound,'” he repeated. “But that doesn't mean she wasn't telling the truth, does it.”

“Look, I don't care what she said, or what you remember her saying,” Denis said quickly, “the fact is she loved you. That was obvious. Everyone knows that. Whatever she said, whatever she wanted you to believe . . . I don't think you should believe. Or repeat: to me, or anyone. Under the circumstances.”

“Because it casts me in an unfortunate light?”

“An unfortunate light?”

“Because it suggests we were quarreling?”

Denis made an impatient gesture. It was clear to Ian that he was greatly agitated, yet making an effort to appear calm: as on the squash court, when the play was unexpectedly accelerated. In the jaunty V of his sport shirt, unbuttoned at the throat, some twists of chest hair—curly, kinky, gunmetal-gray—seemed to glisten with an electric, kinetic alarm.

Ian smiled, staring. “Because it suggests we were quarreling, before the accident?”

“Because we all know Glynnis,” Denis said. “We know how emotional she could be. Not that, to a degree, we all aren't emotional, even Roberta. To a degree. Saying things we don't mean, lashing out at people we love. And if she was, as you've said, drinking . . .”

“We were both drinking.”

“. . . all the more reason not to take it seriously. Any of it.”

“Wouldn't you take it seriously, if your wife told you what mine did? Or if Glynnis herself had told you?”

“I don't consider it any of my business,” Denis said. Though he spoke calmly enough, he'd begun to pace about his office, not quite meeting Ian's eye: all but pressing his hands, in desperation, against his ears. “As I said, I don't think you should be telling me this. I think our conversation should stop right here. Out of respect for poor Glynnis, and for . . .”

“. . . the cuckolded husband?”

“No matter what she said, Glynnis loved you. You must know that.”

“But she was unfaithful to me. Not once but, by her own account, numerous times.”

“I don't believe that,” Denis said. “Nor do I want to hear about it.”

“Don't you?”

Denis said, recklessly, “Look: I could believe it of a few women of our acquaintance, of Meika Cassity for instance, but in truth, Ian, and I mean this seriously, I can't believe it of Glynnis; she wasn't the type.”

Ian looked at him, considering. “You have such confidence in her!”

“I know Glynnis, and I know you.”

“You
knew
Glynnis. Glynnis is no longer living.”

“And I know you.”

“Really? Do you?” Ian removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes hard, stood motionless in the patch of sunshine: content, for the moment, simply to stand there, as if his friend's indignation were a kind of protection. “Such confidence! It's remarkable. It does you credit. I've lost that sort of feeling, myself: the luxury of it. Glynnis killed it in me. She has killed everything in me.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Denis said nervously. “You're upset. And I'm upset. This isn't the time or the place to talk about such things.”

“Where would be the place, and when would be the time?”

“It's all so close, so raw. . . . I'm still having trouble grasping the fact that she's dead.” Denis wiped at his face with a wadded tissue. His eyes brimmed with moisture, and his cheeks were reddened as if they'd been slapped. “And this thing that has happened, is happening, to you. . . .”

Ian said, “Were you the man?”

“Who? What?”

“Glynnis's lover? Her lover, here in Hazelton?”

Denis stared at him, appalled.

“Just tell me the truth, Denis,” Ian said. “Yes or no.”

Denis said, “I would think you knew me better than that, Ian. To even ask such a question.”