Death of the Black-Haired Girl (3 page)

“Help,” she said.

“If you don’t mind,” he said, walking to the inlaid window to close the dusty curtains.
Lux in umbras procedet.
Then he kissed her and found himself in his Maud transport. He felt as if he could drain her, overwhelm and consume her, all her scents and silky turns, the firm athlete’s body. Or else that he was the one being consumed, confused and incapable of escape.

“Oh,” she said, “you’re hard.”

“Don’t be coarse,” he said. It had taken him a moment to get the reference. She didn’t care for this reproach.

“Coarse. What?” She demanded an answer of him in the agitated adolescent manner of the time. “You think that’s coarse? You’re such a middle-class prude.”

“Working-class prude.” He had been around the world at least once and had never thought of himself as a prude. “Maybe just lower class.”

Before long he was sitting at his desk and she was more or less under it, down on him, and he could only think of those long lips and those all-at-once—on a single day it seemed—suddenly knowing eyes. He bent to twist her long black silky hair into a coil and ran his fingers, wrapped in it, down the back of her neck.

He sat in a dazzled aftermath, watching her every move. She brazenly blew him a kiss, lips to fingers.

“Oh, baby” was all he could think of to say.

Not poetry. Perhaps inappropriate? Certainly not the older-brotherly chat he had had in mind for this particular visit.

“I love you,” she said. “I love your brains and cock and knees and eyes. I love your hokey dipshit tattoos. I don’t scare and you don’t scare, but I’m shit terrified that I so adore your bones, Professor Brookman. Aren’t you scared of loving me?”

“Maybe I don’t love you, Maud. Maybe I’m just obsessed with you, body and soul.”

“Now,” she said, “you’re scaring me.”

“What we have is fearsome. We’re both going to live in dread.” He saw that she was at the point of tears.

“But,” she said, “with your wife, with that shepherdess creature, the Albigensian or whatever—that’s all cozy sweetness and light, right?”

“That’s right. But you’re a little tart. A little Kerry gallows bird of an outlaw. Maybe we’ll swing on a rope in the rain for each other.”

She put a lock on him, held him as hard as she could. She was trembling.

“You’re scaring me, Steve.”

“Because I love you,” he said. Yet love was not really what he felt for her. In times to come he would long ponder what he had been trying to say.

“I thought what you said about Shakespeare and Marlowe was on the money,” Brookman told her when all was in order. “Faustus and hell and so on. Well observed.”

“Think I’m right?”

“I do.”

“Why?”

“You tell me why,” Brookman said.

“Because Shakespeare would never have said the world was hell. It would have been blasphemous.”

“Shakespeare made some defamatory statements about the world.”

“Yeah. But he wouldn’t have Mephisto be right. Not with hell right there. They both know a single drop of Christ’s blood could save him.”

“What a wicked creature you are,” Brookman said. “Get out. What are you doing here anyway?”

“I want to see you. Is your wife, like . . . ?”

Brookman’s wife and daughter were returning early to keep their Christmas at home with him. Ellie’s parents were of a Mennonite sect that more or less rejected Christmas, but they still expected a winter visit from their daughter and grandchild. Watching Maud, Brookman saw a cloud of resentment cross her brow. She did not like hearing about his domestic arrangements.

He cut her off.

“We don’t know yet when she can get back. There’s a storm in western Canada. Planes may not fly. On the other hand, they may.”

“But I want to see you.”

“We’ll see each other.”

“I’ll call you later, Steve,” she said. “Have to buy a pretzel and get to class.”

When she was out the door, he went to the window, drew the curtains open again and watched her walk across the quad. Frozen rain clung to the coats of students passing by. The man Brookman had seen earlier was standing by the street gate, staring at Maud as she passed.

He closed his heraldic curtains again and turned out the lights. Such domesticities served to bring Maud closer to him, because that was what he did when she came to his office outside of hours.

Brookman’s appointments were about to begin, and he wanted a break between the stream of Maud’s frantic consciousness and his first actual student of the day. He kicked his rolling chair back against the wall and put his feet up. The room was still scented with Maud’s perfume and the soapy schoolgirl odors of her body, and Brookman found it difficult to banish her from his mind.

C
ROSS INN, WHERE
Maud and Shell lived, afforded beautiful views of city and campus. In the twenties and thirties it had been the best hotel in town. Over time, like everything else downtown, it degenerated, eventually becoming a ratty dope-and-suicide hotel. In the end, the college acquired and renovated it for a dormitory, keeping some of the art nouveau pieces and paneling of the original. To Shell it still looked depressing. She liked to say that the place accommodated as much dope and nearly as many suicides as a dorm as it had as a welfare hotel. This was an exaggeration. But the dim-lit hallways, dusty mirrors and portraits of scholarly immortals were, Shell thought, a bringdown. She knew a cheapo hotel when she saw one. One tip-off was the smell of insecticide and garbage awaiting incineration. Shell and her mother had lived for a while in a welfare motel on the edge of a river running brown across from a stretch of woodland.

On her way back from her poetry class, Shell had gotten a call on her cell phone from her ex-husband, John Clammer. She promptly switched it off. Then he called her on the college’s automated service line. It seemed humiliating to go through the business of taking the phone off the hook and trying to ignore the cacophony and wanga-wanga that would ensue. And she would be goddamned if Crazy John Clammer would drive her into the cold weather.

Shell had a restraining order against her ex, but it seemed to provide no practical release from his phone calls. In any case, when he referred to it, he tended to laugh in a way she found unpleasant. To actualize the legal abstraction, Shell had purchased a Sauer Luftwaffe-style automatic pistol, which she kept on her knee during Crazy John’s phone calls to remind her of the syllogism that stated all men were mortal.

“Hello,” she said sweetly in one of the British accents she had been learning on tape for an audition piece.

“Ma’am,” said Crazy John, “may I please speak with Miss Shelby Magoffin?”

“That,” Shelby said, “is forbidden, I’m afraid.”

“Forbidden?”

“Hello, John. You ain’t supposed to telephone me. Send a e-mail.”

“Shelby? Honey?”

“How come you’re being affectionate? I thought you hated my poor guts. You said that.”

“I thought you wanted a real man. I wasn’t gonna hurt you.”

“Don’t you treat me like I’m your little girl punk, Johnny. Don’t think I can’t get you arrested from up here. When you gonna grow up?”

Shelby was subject to goofy telephone calls at the college, and not only from her ex. For the most part she slipped under the radar of C-list paparazzi, but the year before she had made a screamer called
The Harrowing of Hell,
and since then she got calls from admirers who told her they liked imagining her dead in various costumes and wanted a date. Her agent had provided her with a “personal-representative number” to dead-letter such calls, but no matter how often she changed numbers the bastards seemed to slip through, and Crazy John too. The calls weren’t frequent but, depending on her mood, they imposed a certain gloom.

“Remember when you said I was a good man?” John asked.

“Oh, you are a good man, Johnny. It’s just”—she thought of what it might be with Crazy John—“it’s just your ways are not my ways. And my ways are not your ways and the center will not hold and the past is forever past and . . . you know, man. Leave me alone, will ya?”

She had been warned about John Clammer back home. He had been older than she—as it turned out, older by nearly ten years. He was crazy too, inasmuch as he and his family struggled a lot with emotional illness. But he was gorgeous to look at, especially for sixteen-year-old Shell. He sang and looked like one of God’s personal sunbeam angels. He had curly black hair and rosy cheeks and a nose that turned up to show more of his nostrils than you regularly saw of someone’s, and—don’t ask why—she thought that was cute too. She believed, in her teenage years, that he looked and sang so like an angel he might actually be one. He played the guitar and sang in church and when he spoke regular words his voice was joyous and delightsome. In fact, some boys from Middleboro let him pay to make a prayer CD called
Worship for the Challenged in Vision.
He had his and Shell’s picture on it, showing them in prayer with their eyes closed, but when you tried to play it, it didn’t, and when he reached the boys in Middleboro, they told him only blind people could hear it. John had paid them $150. Still, never knew though, but that picture of her on the CD might have led to great subsequent success. For her, not for him.

Because as Shell grew older and John got crazier, Shell persuaded her mother, who had started as an online psychic and graduated as a psychiatric nurse, to get John Clammer confined. Then Shell’s life changed. She became an actress and went off to the college in Amesbury, which he called Hell House.

John’s hope was that she be saved and they perform Christian music together. Shell’s hope was that a stone be tied around John’s neck and he be cast into the depths of the sea. It was John’s equally crazy but well-spoken aunt Calla Lily who made them get married. A dreadful idea.

“You yourself told me I was a good man,” John whined to Shelby on the phone. “I can sing and we’ll pray together.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Shell. “Please, John.”

“Look, I’ll forgive you,” John said. “Just let me take you home.”

Best not to mention the restraining order, she thought. But she was losing patience.

“I forgive you too, Johnny. Just . . . let me have my life.”

Crazy John scorned her new life. When he began to tell her about his new job, she rather lost it. It was a damn good job too, in Boone National Forest, he said.

“Doin’ what, John? Cooking crank? Cutting up bear bladders? Poaching ginseng? Growing dope? Ain’t you too old for that shit?”

Not that he was capable of any of it. The methmeisters considered him a snitch and a thief. He couldn’t tell ginseng from poison ivy (you could trust her on that). He didn’t have the wherewithal to maintain a weed crop. And a bear would have
his
bladder for lunch before John found the safety on a Mossberg.

“You’re a damn bitch, ain’t you?” John asked. “Fuckin’ little bitch movie whore, ain’t you?”

“Now John,” she said, “that’s unfair. John, listen to me. Do you know what a Personal Threat Assessment Team is?”

“What is it?”

“A Personal Threat Assessment Team is a security force the industry provides. They’re monitoring our conversation now. If you persist, I’ll have to ask them to step in.”

She took advantage of the ensuing silence to hang up.

Thankfully he did not call back. While she was at the computer, she e-mailed her mother in Whitesville. Her mom didn’t care for her much but always wanted to go to the festival at Sundance when Shell was featured. Mom had become a nurse, raising herself in the world. She had never talked to Shell from one year to the next until the two films came out, the first one at Sundance.

MOM HOWARU JCLAMMER STILL LOCKED UP? KEEP ME INFORMED HEAR?

Shell did not like e-mail. She always felt there was someone listening, reading. She trusted the telephone more, even to buy weed. For all she knew John Clammer might somehow be out there. He was timid but clever and resourceful in a way.

Her mother got back to her in half an hour, as she had taken to doing of late.

HONEYBUNCH JC GOT TOOK TO THE ART SHOP TO PAINT PLATES THIS MORNING AND HE COME BACK WITH THE BUS. HE’S NOT SUPPOSED TO HAVE HIS CELL PHONE BUT THEY USE OTHER PEOPLE’S. FONDEST LOVE MOM.

Fondest love, Shell thought. Right, I’m fine, Mom. She made a mental note to ask John for one of his painted plates. A religious one might be nice. God Bless Our Happy Home, maybe. She might give it to Maud for Christmas.

L
EAVING BROOKMAN’S OFFICE,
Maud bought herself a pretzel with mustard and headed for her art history class in the Fefferman Museum. The figure that held her fast through the hour, although it was not the figure under discussion, was the sculpted waltz in which Rodin positioned himself and Camille Claudel. She knew nothing of the story. Whenever she looked at it—as she did often—she saw the two of them there, herself and Brookman.

The shortest route back to Cross led her past Whelan Hospital and the crowds that demonstrated in front of the women’s center at the obstetrics clinic there. Whelan performed the abortions that the town’s bigger hospital, religiously affiliated, declined to do.

When she was first a student at the college, Maud tried going to Mass at one of the local churches, Our Lady of Fátima. Maybe she appeared a little hippieish. Anyway, she had never felt warmly welcomed. Also the Fátima story, about the children and the prophecies, embarrassed her. She turned away from church, and as the years passed the Friday crowds in front of Whelan annoyed Maud more and more.

The demonstrators were elderly, mostly female Catholics, old-time Catholics. Maud told people that they reminded her of her mother, which was completely untrue because her mother had aspired to gentility, was not very religious and would never have demonstrated against anything. In Amesbury, the right-to-life issue was decidedly a class thing. Over in nearby Connecticut, the family-planning movement had been all but founded and funded because a hundred years ago the Bush family had felt there were too many Italians in Bridgeport.