Cloudland (23 page)

Matthew slapped his hand against his forehead and lay back in bed looking defeated. “Oh no! So I’m the reason why they fired you.”

“Do you have any idea or theory of who might have sent all these letters?”

His face cracked in pure misery. “No! I have no clue who could be doing this. Maybe the letter writer wanted you to lose your job, but they also really want to come between us. And we can’t let them.”

I could think of nothing to say at that moment and thought it best to keep silent.

He bolted upright in bed. “Is there no way to turn this around? Can I go and see them, the administration, and tell them the person is obviously deranged?”

This is precisely where youth and inexperience get in the way, I told myself. “Matthew, I’m an adjunct. We basically have no rights. We’re drones, in essence. At the university’s beck and call. At the university’s mercy.”

“You’re not going to break up with me because of this, are you? I mean, you love me, don’t you?”

“Of course I love you, Matthew, that doesn’t change. But I won’t be in Burlington. I already gave notice on my apartment. So there is no other incentive for you to be there unless you
want
to be there.”

“I don’t want to live in New York,” he told me emphatically.

*   *   *

Matthew followed his own instincts. He found an apartment share in Burlington, a job as a bartender at a very popular bistro that paid excellent money but required a commitment of more than forty hours a week. So naturally we saw a lot less of each other—maybe one day each week during his time off. He’d drive down to Woodstock to visit me, often arriving very late at night, and exhausted by his late hours, would sleep long into the following day. Sometimes when I was dressed and drinking my morning coffee I’d steal into the bedroom and watch his slumber, which was always still and deep. I’d look at him and feel sad, knowing that I was in effect pushing him away from me. But then I’d hear a voice in my head saying, “At least you’ve awakened him in ways and maybe that will be enough.”

I had to go to Burlington one afternoon to finish gathering the rest of my belongings, mostly books, from the apartment I’d given up on Willard Street. I was standing at the bookcase, positioning volumes into moving boxes, when I heard knocking on the door. Knowing I was there, Matthew had arrived unannounced, smartly dressed in a white button-down oxford shirt, crisp khaki chinos, his face tanned from kayaking on Lake Champlain on a few days off, his shirtsleeves rolled up. I was holding Bulfinch’s weighty
Mythology
under one arm when I answered the door; he gallantly reached forward and relieved me of it. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” I carped, as I turned around and headed back into the apartment cluttered with moving crates.

Handing me the book back, he said, “I assumed you’d be happy. We haven’t seen each other in more than a week. I figured you missed me.”

Of course I missed him, missed making love to him, but I merely said, “You should’ve just called. I have so much to do here and today is my last day to do it.”

My words afflicted him, his face pinched up and he looked stung. I moved back to the bookcase and continued clearing it of books.

“I’ve seen so little of you lately,” he pointed out.

“You’ve been here and I’ve been there.”

“I’ve been waking up sick to my stomach,” he informed me. “Because I can feel you moving away from me.”

I would not even try to refute the truth. “How about something to drink?” I said, leaving the bookshelf and heading into my small kitchen, Matthew following close behind me.

I was thinking more along the lines of iced tea; however, with a peremptory gesture, Matthew fetched a flask of vodka from my liquor cabinet, took one of the remaining jelly glasses from a nearly empty cupboard, headed to the refrigerator, cadged a few ice cubes, and made himself an impressively stiff drink. He’d never done such a thing before. “Hey, don’t quaff that too fast,” I warned him. His eyes glittering with malice, he pounded the drink in two gulps.

“What’s wrong?” I said, resting my hand between his shoulder blades, loving him with great despair.

He pressed his hands against his head and now looked at me with reddened, tearful eyes. “When we’re not together, when I’m seeing you so much less, my faith,
my faith
in you falls apart. I feel like … I have nothing to hold on to. I keep waiting for everything to crash. I go to bed and wake up several times through the night sweating, thinking about you. I feel like I’ve been cut off from your body. I go through all the photos I took of you. And read your letters over and over. I’m just a mess.”

I told him I was suffering in my own way, that I’d been reviewing my decisions, the mistakes I’d made, both with my husband and Breck and the subsequent men I’d been involved with.

Reaching for his glass and draining dregs of vodka from the ice, he continued, his voice in tremolo, “That include me?”

“I don’t know, Matthew.”

“But my case is different from everybody else … because I’ve had this thing for you forever. And I’m so sick of people—like my parents—saying it’s not valid because of the difference in our ages. It
does
matter because it’s very real to me. You’re my first love, Catherine, and I don’t want to give you up.”

I looked at him, sadly nodded my head, and said, “I understand.”

“What about
your
first love, Catherine,” he said. “Who was it?”

“I guess I’d have to say my husband.”

I suddenly felt terribly conflicted: between wanting him with me and wanting him to leave. I wondered how many months it would take to recover from the druglike withdrawal for this lover. Beyond this, my relationship with Matthew had already harmed my professional life. That was no small thing. Then with great tenderness I saw that his hands were shivering, his beautiful strong hands that nevertheless were palsied due to the nerve damage of his childhood illness. I loved his hands. I loved them for their power and I also loved them for their obvious frailty.

“Why don’t we go for a walk,” he said at last. “Just stroll along Willard Street.”

I turned to him. “Okay, Matthew, we’ll go for a walk. But I want you to go back to your apartment … when we’re done.”

He looked baffled. “Why can’t I come back here with you?” I slowly shook my head. “Why can’t we make love?”

“I don’t have time to make love, Matthew. I have to get the place cleared out today.” I indicated the cartons and the duffel bags and the boxes for hauling books. “Surely you see how much more work there is to do.”

“Let me help you.”

“I want to do it on my own. This is my failure and I want to live through it without any company. So let’s go for that walk, shall we?”

Matthew turned to me with fervent eyes. “I just can’t do it,” he said.

“Can’t do it?” I echoed flatly, not knowing whether or not he was referring to going for a walk.

“Be the person you think I should be. Be the guy going off to make his life someplace and dating and eventually meeting somebody else and getting married. I just don’t want any of that, Catherine. I want to be with
you
.”

It was so simply and honestly said, and like a plaintive musical chord, struck surprisingly deep. In the resonance of it, I seriously considered giving in to him and, age difference notwithstanding, setting up the life of a couple, younger man, older woman, and just seeing how it went. But then I remembered my reservations, I remembered my husband’s betrayal and my inability to forgive him. How would I ever forgive Matthew for his inevitable betrayal of me? But I’d have to and I didn’t know if that would be possible.

“If we stay together, Matthew, I’ll always be afraid of your leaving me. I’ll be waiting for it, I’ll be expecting it. And as time goes on I’ll keep feeling older and older in comparison to you.”

“Don’t you think I know all this, Catherine?”

A change came over Matthew and he suddenly seemed almost calm. And then I admitted to myself how much I’d missed him during the last few weeks, his loping walk across my kitchen in a formless T-shirt, his hair all tousled, watching him sleep in my bed and the light creeping in from the edges of the shutters to fall in a muted cascade on his slack and unsuspecting face. He’d slept in my bed without a clue of how close to the end our affair really was.

“Let me stay here and help you,” he insisted once more, his face now inches from mine, his breath sour from nerves. “And then we can say good-bye.”

“I want to say good-bye now,” I heard myself say. “I really think we’ve reached the end of this.”

His expression changed once more and his eyes looked dulled and distant. And then slowly, almost gently, he put his damaged hands around my throat.

FIFTEEN

A
SUMMER DAY IN LATE JULY,
unseasonably chilly for Charlestown, New Hampshire, and Bellows Falls, Vermont. Goldenrod burgeoning in the fields, auguring the first frost, which could possibly come as soon as six weeks away. In these parts we can get the first twinges of autumn cold toward the beginning of August. There are those who will begin to dread perishing flowers, will dwell on the shorter lifespan of their domestic animals and, of course, their own mortality. At Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, some people will go for routine blood work that comes up abnormal, provoking a battery of tests, and bad news will arrive like a bullet shattering window glass while outside an unsuspecting world still exalts in warm-weather activities, knowing that before too long cold weather will invade and turn life inward. This momentary seasonal melancholy was particularly meaningful to the good townspeople of Vermont and New Hampshire who’d shown up to search the area around either side of the Connecticut River for the body of twenty-four-year-old Elena Mayaguez.

I volunteered for the search, too, my party led by a man, part Abenaki Indian, who tracked wilderness for the police, a man who knew how to recognize signs of disturbance in the forest, telltales of skirmishes and struggle that the rest of us would never notice. As I trekked along in his wake I felt strange and disembodied. It was as though the forest had swallowed me whole and I was wandering inside the cavity of some great beast, trees towering around me like the gargantuan ribs of a whale.

After we’d wandered around a designated area for an hour, our laconic guide sprang into motion and fell to his knees as though in prayer. He’d caught a glint of something in the dirt that had already been trampled by unobservant policemen. He bent down and, gingerly putting on a pair of latex gloves, extracted a small rectangle caked in mud. Without explaining what it was, he held it up to a fractured shaft of sunlight beaming into the forest. There was a moment where I thought I saw an iridescent flash, which turned out to be a small holographic emblem on a credit card. “Follow me,” he said to everyone, and we marched dutifully behind him. When we reached the clearing, he handed the card to one of the forensic people dressed in yellow and said, “I can even read the name. It’s Felice.”

The first name of the man who owned the abandoned car, the man who now stood fifty yards away waiting by the torrential river, the uncle of the missing Elena Mayaguez.

The specimen was taken into a trailer, prepared, and examined. Soon several officials, including Prozzo, swarmed out; the detective’s ear was pressed to his mobile phone as he was relaying the news to his New Hampshire counterparts. Then he began walking toward the small, wavy-haired sixtyish fellow overdressed for late summer in a battered ski jacket and tan slacks. Brought up from Maryland by the FBI for the purpose of identifying the body, once it was found, the uncle of Elena Mayaguez had been quietly watching the proceedings. What a burden this must be for him, I thought, just standing there waiting for the gruesome arrival of a niece’s body, no doubt battered and brutalized by the river, bearing the fatal assault wounds that took her life. And having to make a phone call to the Dominican Republic, reporting on the recovery of the body of a twenty-four-year-old girl whose parents must look upon America as some fearful, wild, lawless place. Prozzo spoke to the uncle in excellent Spanish. When there seemed to be a break in the questioning and the detective headed over, I said, “You sound like a native speaker.”

“I grew up with it. My mother was from Guatemala.” Prozzo shrugged off the compliment. And then resumed his train of thinking. “Poor guy is really undone. He lent his niece the credit card so she could make it up to Waterbury no problem, without running out of money; people don’t realize that Felice is a man’s name. He feels responsible for this. Guilty. The problem for New Hampshire…” He paused with a self-satisfied look. “Is that his English is crap.”

“Well, surely New Hampshire has somebody who can translate.”

Prozzo shook his head and grinned smugly. “Nope. This time they have to rely on me. That’s why they’re being so cooperative and nicey-nicey.” Then he said with a considerate tone, “You know … the thing I’ve never understood about a lot of these immigrants from Latin countries is why they don’t make more of an effort to learn English. This guy says he’s been here for twenty years. My mom was determined to master English so she went to language school. She spoke it near perfectly.” He turned to me full on and I saw the compassion in his face and warmed to him in a way that I hadn’t yet. “Could you do me a big favor, Catherine,” he said. “Take this poor soul to lunch when it’s time?”

“I’d be happy to.”

“Good. I appreciate it.” The detective turned his attention to the Connecticut. Crisscrossing it were several search-and-rescue boats that were open-ended and manned with divers, dog handlers, and trained Labrador retrievers who kept their noses close to the water, sniffing the air for that sharp molecular odor of decay traveling up a murky column of water to the surface. Several days of rains and runoff had bolstered the river’s volume, and the motor-powered boats added waves to the melee of its current. The water in the places where the sun struck it turned the verdigris color of a tarnished chalice.

Scanning the river I noticed that on several boats, the trained crew of rescuers were taking long metal poles and jabbing at the depths. I asked Prozzo why the searchers were using poles and he began by saying that a few of the dogs had detected something in the air.