American Appetites (44 page)

“Meika,” Ian said, flinching. “Please don't.”

“—vagina, then. To maintain our elite vocabulary.”

Ian stared at her, really quite baffled. It was not the first time in recent weeks that Meika had become so suddenly, and, it seemed, so inexplicably, furious with him. And there was a nerved-up glow, even a sort of glare, to her skin, and to her pewter-colored eyes, that suggested her extreme pleasure in such fury.

“One of the Rockefellers died that way,” Meika said, resting her head back on the pillow and half closing her eyes, as if dreamy with memory's effort, “I forget which. Not Nelson. (Or
was
it Nelson?) And I knew a woman, an old pal,” she went on, regarding Ian with amusement, “—having a love affair with a man not unlike you, a straitlaced professional man, very distinguished in his field, very properly married—‘happily' as the saying invariably goes—and she adored him, and he claimed to adore her, and this went on for years, a sort of stalemate on both sides, both of them (did I say this?) married, of course. And one day, in a Manhattan hotel—I think it was the Plaza actually; the two of them took it all quite seriously and romantically, though, as I said, it had been dragging on for years—one day, the poor man had a heart attack . . . a coronary thrombosis . . . and
died
, actually
died
, right there in the hotel room, in the hotel bed, in the very act, I suppose, of making love. Jesus! Can you imagine! My friend panicked, she said; had a kind of blackout, or delirium; threw her clothes on and left the hotel and took the train back to Greenwich, where she and her husband lived, and their children,
she
was happily married too; and her lover was left behind—his body, I mean. And when she got home she telephoned the Plaza and said, ‘Something has happened to a man in room'—whatever. And she hung up the phone. And that was the end of
that
love affair.”

Ian, dressing, rather clumsily, a salmon sandwich stuffed in his mouth, laughed; and, thinking how intensely he hated this woman, said, “Meika, darling, you are impossible.” It seemed to him precisely what a lover of Meika Cassity's, dressing clumsily, a salmon sandwich stuffed in his mouth, under her bemused and critical scrutiny, would naturally say.

“Yes,” Meika said, “but you don't love me, do you.”

“Of course I love you. It's just that I must leave; I really must. Nick is—”

“Oh, the hell with Nick. And Bianca. And Vaughn. And—the rest. The fact is, you hate me.”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

“You hate us all.”

“Meika, for God's sake, please. This has been such a lovely day for me, such a—”

“Tell me: did you hate Glynnis when . . . when it happened?”

“When what happened?”

“The accident. That night. Did you hate her, then?”

Ian felt the pain, sharper now, between his eyes. He said, “I'm going. I'll call you tonight.”

“But
did
you? I can keep a secret; really I can.”

“I never hated Glynnis; please don't say such things,” Ian said, “and I don't hate you.”

“Oh, yes you do.”

Ian stooped to kiss her goodbye, as if nothing were wrong, for, for all he knew, his senses in such a tumult, his heart beating so alarmingly fast, nothing at all was wrong. Perhaps this was all play: love play of a kind to which he, in his straitlaced long-married propriety, was not accustomed.

Meika slipped her arms around his neck and said, her mouth swollen as if with hurt or desire, “Yet you want, don't you”—her eyes opened wide, yet dreamy and occluded—“so badly to hurt me. Right now. Don't you. Tell the
truth
.”

COMING UPON IAN
that night, sitting at his desk with his head cradled in his arms and his glasses beside him, upside down as if removed in haste, Bianca said softly, “Daddy?” and Ian stirred guiltily, hearing her voice: so familiar a voice, yet not one he seemed, in this strange new mood that had come upon him, to have expected. “Are you all right, Daddy? Are you”—and Bianca paused, unable to bring herself to lay a hand on his shoulder, as if in fear of overstepping the amorphous but seemingly irrefragable border between them—“all
right?
”

Ian looked up and groped for his glasses, saying, “Yes, yes of course,” smiling at her. “Of course. I was just resting my eyes.”

Bianca apologized for the fact that dinner was so delayed. She'd begun, she said, at seven o'clock, and it seemed, now, to be nearly ten. “You must be starving,” she said.

“Oh, yes,” Ian said, still smiling at her. “Yes, certainly.”

HE HAD MADE
up his mind that he would not, simply could not, see the woman again, let alone touch her, make love with her: grovel in her. For all that she'd said that day, or had taunted him with, was true; even as it was, of course, not true at all; in fact obscenely contrary to the truth.

So he telephoned her and said, “Meika? I don't think we should see each other again for a while.”

Meika said, “I was thinking the same thing, actually.”

There was an awkward pause. Ian could hear music in the background, a harsh calypso beat; could hear voices.

Meika said, as if apologetically, “Ian, dear, the problem is that you are so easily
hurt;
I suppose I'm not accustomed to a man quite like you. It's as if the outermost layer of your skin has been peeled off. Have you always been like this, or has it . . . does it have something to do, you know, with . . . the things that have happened to you?”

Ian said flatly that he didn't know. And that he had to hang up.

Next morning, in court, he did not see Meika and was able, for the duration of that day—a day that passed in a haze of pain, involving, as it did, Samuel S. Lederer's summary of his case against Ian McCullough—to forget about her; or, at any rate, not to think about her. But that night Meika called, merely, as she said, to say hello and to ask how the day had gone, and Ian broke down, and began to weep, and said, pleading, “Meika, I didn't mean it, I hope you know I didn't mean it, I love you, I want to see you again soon, tonight if I can, if we could”—while Meika, in a pretense of surprise, made comforting sounds over the telephone—“I'm not ready yet, I need you, I want to marry you, I love you, I love you more than
he
loves you; do you think, Meika, don't answer me now—not yet—we might be married? Someday, when all this is settled, when . . . when we are both free, when—”

When Ian's extraordinary outburst had run its course, Meika gently, it may have been pityingly, “Why of course, Ian, I love you too, and I'm not ready yet either; of course I want to see you again. But not tonight, darling: I'm afraid Vaughn is back from San Diego.”

6.

Ian thought, It is as if I am attached to a great machine, Death. A robot with no will, no volition, no intelligence of my own.

He was trying to urinate but could not. His muscles clenched in alarm . . . the muscles of his belly and groin. He was standing before a urinal in some place not known to him, of a clinical tiled white; but, badly as he wanted to urinate, his bladder bloated to the point of pain, nothing happened. And then—

He woke, in his bed, on the verge of having urinated in his sleep. But woke in time. I am becoming an infant, he thought. They are killing me.

THE TRIAL WAS
entering its fifth week.

After the prosecution completed its case, the defense duly filed a motion that the charge against Ian McCullough be dismissed and the trial itself ended. Ottinger's argument was that the prosecution had failed to prove that any crime had been committed, de facto; the death of Mrs. McCullough had followed from an accident for which no one could be held accountable. He argued too that the prosecution had presented insufficient and merely circumstantial evidence; that there were no eyewitnesses to the “crime”; that there had been no motive established. And that the “vendetta” against his client was politically motivated.

This, Judge Harmon seemed to seriously consider but in the end denied. So the trial continued, and, on the morning of March 24, Ottinger began his case, rising to remind the court (how diplomatic, Ian thought: “remind”) of the famous admonition of the fourteenth-century English philosopher William of Occam (i.e., Occam's Razor): we are warned “never to multiply entities beyond simplicity.”

For it was Ottinger's central argument that no crime had been committed; though he and his client knew why a crime had been hypothetized and publicized. “The prosecution has said that this is a simple case, motivated by lust, greed, and barbaric selfishness,” Ottinger said. “And so, in a way, it is. But the ‘lust, greed, and barbaric selfishness' are not attributes of my client; they are attributes of the authorities who have brought the outrageous charge of second-degree murder. . . .” And so it went.

The argument offered by the defense, or, as Ian thought it, the narrative, was, of course, the very obverse of the prosecution's. Where, previously, Dr. Ian McCullough had been a man of “deceptive civility,” a “passive-aggressive personality” of a kind prone to “repressed” violence, and susceptible, by way of alcohol or drugs, to an “explosive liberation” of said violence, Dr. Ian McCullough was now a man of “unfailing courtesy,” “kindness,” “generosity”: a model husband and father, a model citizen, a model of professional “brilliance” and “reliability”; admired by his colleagues, loved by his friends; “even-tempered,” “rational,” “reasonable”; even, in the passionate words of an Institute colleague (Denis Grinnell), “the most civilized man of my acquaintance.” Where, in previous weeks, he had been a “devious and systematic” adulterer, a “faithless” husband, sufficiently “coldhearted” not only to betray his wife but to lie to her and, as the evidence would seem to have shown, to commit an act of grievous physical harm against her, he was now an “unfailingly faithful and devoted” husband to his wife of twenty-six years, a man who “has always divided his time equally between his family and his profession,” with a reputation for . . . and so on and so forth. Ian recalled that the gods of antiquity observed a rule: none must cross the path of another's humor.

Yet he felt, with the passage of days, as the procession of defense witnesses came forward to take the stand in Ian McCullough's behalf, to swear to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help me God, a yet more profound sense of shame. For now others, these so innocent and well-intentioned others, were publicly involved in his fate.

FROM THE START
, Nicholas Ottinger had made an excellent impression on the court. He was articulate, yet not too articulate; forthright, yet not overbearing; inclined at times to irony, but never, like his older adversary, to sarcasm. He seemed to possess a photographic memory and knew many things Ian was astonished to discover he knew (the make and date of Ian's car, for instance), since Ian could not recall having told him. An attractive, well-dressed man of youthful middle age, with his dark tight-rippled hair and look of combative vigor; a sudden startling white smile; springy on his feet, yet dignified; and clearly very intelligent: a man, Ian thought, one would not wish for an enemy.

His strategy, he told Ian, was to establish Ian's “real” character in the jurors' minds. This being done, he then shifted to the circumstances of the accident, drawing testimony from, among others, a Manhattan forensic specialist who claimed that the fractures to Glynnis's skull “might easily have been caused by a fall.” (Again the X rays were evoked; the pointer brought into play. Again the jurors, so sedulously courted, looked on rapt with attention.) He re-called to the witness stand the chief paramedic; one of the young police officers who had entered the McCullough's house on the night of the accident; the admitting physician at Hazelton Medical Center; even Dr. Flax, who repeated much of his testimony verbatim but became, under Ottinger's persistent questioning of his medical career (i.e., the malpractice suits brought against Flax in 1983 and 1987, each settled out of court for an “undisclosed” sum), suddenly rather defensive. There was an entertaining sequence, taking up, in all, three full trial days, involving witnesses who had known Sigrid Hunt during the two-year tenure of her dance instructorship at Vassar and during the period of her engagement to Mr. Fermi Sabri: six young women and three young men, each of whom denied any knowledge of a “relationship” or, even, a “friendship” with Ian McCullough. (“I never heard of him, frankly.” “The name is unknown to me, except, y'know, from reading about the two of them in the papers.”)

The most articulate of these witnesses was a young woman friend of Sigrid Hunt's who had attended dance classes with her in Manhattan, years ago, and was now, like Hunt, an ex-dancer “on the fringes of the dance world”: living in SoHo and working as a waitress in a Seventh Avenue jazz club. Her name was Ichor Matthews—“Yes, sir, Ichor is my baptismal name”—and she had prematurely white hair, a high pale brow, a rapid, brittle, yet rather seductive voice. She wore a black jumpsuit with conspicuous silver buckles and zippers and high-heeled black boots.

Ottinger asked, “To your knowledge, Miss Matthews, did Sigrid Hunt ever speak of ‘Dr. Ian McCullough'?”

Ichor Matthews said, “Sigrid knew all sorts of people, she might have mentioned his name, or a name like that, but I truthfully don't remember. People go in and out of all of our lives. . . .”

“You don't remember the name ‘Ian McCullough'?”

“No, sir, I do not.”

“Did she mention other men's names, which you do remember?”

“Oh, yes, certainly. We had friends in common. And there was this man, this Egyptian engineer, from a millionaire family in Cairo I think; she'd talk about him all the time because she was afraid of him, I think. But she was in love with him too; they were supposed to get married.”