Another You (18 page)

“Why do you automatically believe Livan Baker?” Marshall said.

Once again, Freer opened his mouth, then closed it without speaking. After a pause, he said, “Marshall, have you spoken to your wife?”

Instantly, the hallway began to waver out of focus. What was Freer talking about? Where was Freer going? Why were the students clearing such a large path around them in the hallway, he having been about to teach “The Gulf” by Derek Walcott, Freer with his sneering attitude and his steam-pressed creases and his tie folded queerly in his pocket. The question was, had he spoken to his wife. He had not, but wouldn’t she have called if something had happened to Evie? If something was wrong?

“You don’t know what happened when you left your house,” Freer said. It was a statement, not a question.

“What happened?” Marshall said. He tried to catch up with Freer, but his legs were heavy. Something terrible had happened. Something terrible had happened to Sonja. Two policemen were walking toward them in the hallway.

“Is Sonja all right?” Marshall said.

“She is,” Freer said.

“Who are they?” Marshall asked, staring at the approaching policemen.

“Who do you think they are?”

“What’s happened?” Marshall said.

To the policemen, Freer said, “You doubted I could locate my colleague?”

“We’re new to the force. Rookies are known to be antsy,” the blond cop said. He had a gold incisor and an acne-spattered chin. He looked to Marshall the same age as most of his students. The other policeman was handsome, except for green eyes that narrowed to slits as he looked at Marshall. “How ya doin’?” he said, extending his hand.

“He doesn’t know what happened,” the blond cop said to his partner.

“You haven’t spoken to your wife?” the other cop said. His eyes were gone. The green all but disappeared. Marshall wanted to ask if Sonja was all right—or had he asked that before, had somebody said yes?—but he could only echo, “My wife.”

“She’s not hurt is she?” Marshall said. He had reached out to brace himself by putting his hand on Freer’s shoulder.

“Sonja’s okay,” Freer said. “McCallum’s wife went off the deep end this morning and went over to your house and attempted to stab him to death.”

The blond cop’s nod corroborated this.

“This is a terrible thing to find out,” Freer said to the cops, nodding in Marshall’s direction as if he couldn’t hear. He could hear, but the sound was wavery; trying to hear distinctly was like what could happen visually when you were driving on a hot day, seeing a mirage in front of your car, knowing it was only heat rising from asphalt. Freer had turned his back and was walking away. Freer was walking away: he’d been a mirage.

“He isn’t dead, is he?” Marshall said.

“If it was known, we’d know.”

What was this, some Zen riddle?

The other cop saw his confusion; he said, “He’s in surgery. Got knifed pretty bad.”

“He got knifed in my house?” Marshall said. It was beginning to register. McCallum had had a fight with his wife. She must have found out where they lived and gone there. What was he expected to do, try to remember the story about the bag lady near Boston Common? This was like one of those nightmares, one of those anxiety dreams in which he wasn’t prepared for class, all he could do was fill time, stand there making a fool of himself and suffering intensely as the students realized he didn’t know what he was talking about. A bag lady? What was that about? The class was to be on Derek Walcott’s “The Gulf.” Every thought he had ever had about Derek Walcott rushed out of his brain. Thank God he was not in the classroom.

“We’d like to take you down to headquarters and have you describe the previous twenty-four hours,” Green Eyes said.

“Twenty-four hours,” Marshall echoed. How could he begin to remember it all? And what was he to do if only irrelevant, inappropriate things continued to subsume his thoughts, such as the slightly minty smell of Cheryl Lanier’s shampoo, the now-vivid image of the pizza delivery boy, every detail of his face suddenly clear, the bruise-like bags under his eyes, the lock of hair curving over his forehead. He could hear the boy’s footsteps on the stairs, see the square silver pad from which the pizza was slipped—that familiar magic prop of our time, the sort of top hat from which a rabbit would be pulled—smell marijuana seeping from the apartment, from which Livan Baker and her boyfriend had suddenly materialized.

Both cops were looking at him, frowning, neither one speaking.

“How ya doin’? This comes as a shock, I know,” the green-eyed cop said. “You left for school this morning, next thing you know you’re walking down the hall with two cops, hearing about an attempted murder in your house.”

“Do you think he’s going to die?” Marshall said.

“Those surgeons try very hard. If he dies, it’s not because they didn’t try,” the narrow-eyed cop said. “I personally have a lot of respect for surgeons.”

“It’s not the greatest sign if we get beeped here,” the other cop said. “Though to tell you the truth, they’ve beeped us for nothing. You stop thinking it’s necessarily going to be something crucial after the first hundred or so stupid beeps.”

All right, then: McCallum’s wife had stabbed him, but he would be fine. McCallum was not by any stretch of the imagination a friend of his, except that when you didn’t really have any friends, it was difficult to disallow acquaintances. He had been thinking that, something like that, not too long ago, on a day when Cheryl Lanier came to his office to borrow a poetry anthology, and when she had left, he had looked out the window and seen her, seen a dog, as well, and he had reflected that there was every possibility he didn’t love anyone, although that was absurd. Absurd, but a thought he had had two or three times before, remembering that he’d thought it before only when the idea hit again. Now he concentrated on thinking otherwise. He loved his wife. He loved Evie. He loved his brother, Gordon.

“Freer wanted to tell me himself?” Marshall said.

“Yeah, but it was our obligation to proceed directly. We told him that and gave him five minutes,” the blond cop said. “I don’t know what this stuff was about his bringing you to the station. Delusions of grandeur, or something.”

“People don’t know how the law works,” the other cop said.

“Rest assured, there are no charges against you,” the blond cop said. “Nobody thinks you stabbed your friend, Professor.” Was this happening? “Mrs. McCallum walked into the post office and told the clerk she’d done it, blood all over her,” the blond cop said. “You know, gas station attendants are getting confessions all the time. People pull in and roll down their window and it’s like a drive-through confessional. Or they buy a candy bar inside and spill the beans, they just blurt it out while the guy’s giving them change. Go figure.”

At the station house, Marshall drank a cup of lukewarm coffee. He was simultaneously videotaped and tape-recorded, while the blond cop took notes in shorthand and his partner asked every third question. Marshall was tormented about how much to say, how much to tell them about Livan Baker and whatever McCallum’s involvement
had been with her. He was surprised to see how withholding he could become; he volunteered nothing, half out of sympathy with McCallum, who might be dying as he sat in the station house talking to the cops, half because he felt sure the cops would do nothing to clarify matters for him, and he thought now, deep down, that McCallum had been telling the truth, that Livan Baker’s involvement with McCallum had been far less than she claimed.

The questions they asked him were easy to answer, though they zigzagged backward and forward in time so that eventually he began to assume there must be some underlying logic to the way they pitched the questions that he didn’t understand—or were they trying to get him to reveal something besides his own genuine confusion?

McCallum appeared at the house while he was out on an errand?

Out getting milk
.

What year had he met McCallum?

Whatever year he was hired.…

How would he characterize his personal relationship with McCallum?

Oh, as a colleague. You know: bantering. He had trouble with his wife, trouble at home
.

Trouble at home.

The wife was pregnant and McCallum didn’t seem pleased by that
.

How well did he know McCallum’s wife?

Oh, not at all. Not … perhaps he’d seen her across a room
.

What time did he leave the house that morning?

Nine-thirty
.

And he had gone out on an errand the night before to get—

To get milk. Sonja was showing some prospective clients a house; I realized we were low on milk
, Marshall filled in, surprised that he felt slightly giddy, an odd mixture of pleasure at pleasing, filling in the spaces, saying something informative: the good student still. Yet he also feared that his nervousness was apparent. He felt himself shifting in the chair, shifting more than someone ordinarily would, when informing people he’d gone out for milk. Well: they didn’t need to know anything about Cheryl Lanier. He could forget Cheryl Lanier. Whom he had dropped off at that house, glowing in the darkness, after she had said that she wanted to spend the night with friends, after he had pulled her close to him in the car.
I’m sorry?

The question was repeated: his wife had been home, she said, for a couple of hours with McCallum.

Yes, Sonja got stuck with consoling him for quite a while.…
He saw the trap: he could not have been getting milk for two hours.
Maybe it seemed to her that she talked to him for two hours; probably she didn’t talk to him for two hours
.

“An hour,” the cop said, shrugging. Helping him along. But not believing him. He did not think the cop believed him any longer. He could remember the way his skin felt against the smooth skin of Cheryl Lanier’s cheek, smell Cheryl’s minty shampoo in the chicory-scented steam from the fresh cup of coffee he had just been handed. He was being asked if McCallum had ever stopped by his house before. This did not seem a good question to answer no to.

I think he meant to, but he never really …

To clarify: he left at nine-thirty a.m. and McCallum was sleeping?

Sonja said he was sleeping
. This was ridiculous; why were his words suddenly being spoken skeptically? It was true: Sonja had said he was sleeping, they had both gone off, leaving him there. Of course he had been there. What did they think, that his wife had crept in and stabbed him when they were still in the house and they’d heard nothing? McCallum was sleeping in the guest bedroom, he and Sonja went off to work. This was factually true, and a quite simple matter to understand. What was he supposed to do, rouse the man and make him leave, just because they were leaving? It wasn’t as if McCallum were going to loot the house. Not as if he didn’t know the man at all.

If he had met Mrs. McCallum, it might have been at some large social gathering? Something at the college?

This was difficult to focus on, because he had already said—hadn’t he?—that he had not met her, that there was a slight possibility he had seen her across a room, but truly: he had no recollection of McCallum’s wife, though the policemen’s questioning had made him suddenly imagine her in their house, and as he saw her, she was a tall, brown-haired woman—a woman who must be carrying a knife.

Quite frankly, I have no memory of ever having been introduced. Someone may have pointed her out at a department party, or something like that
.

His wife said she did not know Mrs. McCallum either. Therefore, they were only McCallum’s friends.

You know, I don’t mean to imply that my wife and I are close friends of McCallum. He must have felt close to us—or at least that we’d be sympathetic listeners. You know—to come to the house at all
.

Mrs. McCallum said you all knew one another.

You believe a crazy woman who just tried to stab her husband to death?

Two different viewpoints: two people saying they didn’t know her, she maintaining that she knows them rather well.

I don’t know how I can demonstrate that I, we, don’t know her, but the fact is, if I’ve ever met the woman, which I doubt, it would have been so unremarkable that I have absolutely no memory of that
.

Therefore, there would not be any possibility that either he or Sonja knew that she had murderous intentions toward her husband?

No
.

Also, in the one or two hours during which he was buying milk, he did not cross paths with Mrs. McCallum or in any way contact Mrs. McCallum?

Well, I … I spoke to her on the phone
.

She called?

I called
.

What time was this?

Oh, nine o’clock, probably. I called from a pay phone outside a convenience store. Because he’d been upset when last I saw him. Because of troubles in his marriage, as we now know. So …

So what?

Wanted to see if he was okay. Friendly concern
.

This was at what time?

Eight. Nine
.

Your wife thought that you returned home about ten-thirty.

What are you suggesting?

I’m trying to get an accurate time frame on everyone’s movements the night before the attempted murder. Let me ask: You thought to call from this convenience store instead of from your house?

I wondered how he was doing
.

Okay. This is at what time?

This is ridiculous. Am I under suspicion? I’ll need to call a lawyer. Are you saying I’m suspected of—what? McCallum’s wife confesses
to stabbing him, and you suspect me of stabbing him, or something?

I’m still back at the convenience store. You phone him at eight or nine p.m., speak to his wife, though you don’t really know his wife, then speak to him. Then time has to elapse before you find him in your living room, because your wife spends one or two hours talking to him, which would mean they sit down together at eight-thirty or nine-thirty, if we assume your wife is correct about your returning at ten-thirty. What I’m getting at is that McCallum isn’t Superman, this we know, so if you’re speaking to him at eight or nine, by your wife’s account, he would already be in your living room. You’ve gone out to buy … what was it?