I Regret Everything (19 page)

M
r. Best guided the Tesla into the garage and turned the engine off. I sat there desperately hoping he would try to seduce me but he jumped out of the car like the seat had suddenly caught fire. He was waiting for me on the driveway.

—Are you going to be okay?

—Sure, I said. Do you want to come in for a while?

—I need to get back to the city.

Usually I would have made some kind of bantering remark but I had totally put my foot in it with the cancer thing. He had humored me by taking this drive so it was time to admit defeat.

—Do you want me to call you a cab?

He asked how far the train station was and I told him it was a couple of miles. He said, it's a pleasant night, I think I'll walk and asked for directions. Then he waved over his shoulder and departed like a guy in an action movie who had just saved civilization.

Empty houses have strange personalities and it always creeped me out to come back to one. I was an apartment kid. If it wasn't for my mother and Dodd I would have been in the city now. But it was only until dorms opened in the fall so I needed to deal. The old wood groaned. Despite the heat, I shivered.

I stuck a frozen mac and cheese in the microwave. Waiting for the carbs to defrost, I went into Edward P's first-floor study to lose myself in
Middlemarch
. The room looked like something from a hundred years ago if you ignored the computer on the desk. The worn rug made it feel like an old slipper. There was dark wood paneling, an upholstered easy chair the size of a bear, and volume after volume of big hardback books on the stained wood shelves. Only some of them, ones with embossed gold lettering, were law books. When Edward P was younger, maybe he read a lot. Or maybe he just bought the books so he could sit among them and bask in their glow. On one wall was a painting of a tall ship in full sail and on another was a nautical map of the New England coast.

When I was a kid, Edward P used to take me sailing. Cruising along, I'd be enjoying myself as much as I was capable but then a chop would rise and without fail I would get seasick. He would try to pretend he wasn't annoyed with me, his lame daughter, but it was pretty easy to tell he wanted to toss me overboard. It had been years since we were on the water. Gully had invited me to visit Seattle and go sailing with him. A sentence from one of his emails read,

You can tack and come about and let a fresh wind fill your sails.

It's cheesy, sure, but I knew what he meant. He loved me absent all judgment, the only kind of real love.

In his senior year Edward P's sailing team won the Ivy League title. He had a bunch of sports trophies in the house but this one, a schooner the size of a hubcap made out of cast iron and mounted on a marble plinth, rested on his desk. I lifted it. The thing must have weighed at least twenty pounds. It seemed to contain the weight of his existence, the two wives, the four children, the law career, and the knowledge that more than half his life had passed. Jesus, Spaulding, I thought, it's a sailing trophy. Lighten up. I cracked
Middlemarch
.

Tight-assed and deluded Mr. Casaubon was saying something patronizing to the unbelievably patient Dorothea Brooke when I looked up and saw hulking in the doorway the man who had chased me home from the train station.

The hobo was standing less than fifteen feet from me. Beneath his tangled hair were the most pained eyes. There was no point screaming because the house was empty. Then an odd thought cropped up. Can reducing prescribed doses of medication cause disturbing cognitive side effects? Maybe this was a hallucination. I rose from the chair.

—My Dad's upstairs. You'd better leave.

He just stared, like he knew it wasn't true.

—And he's got a gun, I said, also a lie. What do you want?

There was no answer to that question either. Was he even real?

—I can give you some food, but then you have to go.

He lurched toward me. French doors opened to the backyard but fear nailed me to the floor. When he got close enough for me to notice his stink I knew I was going to be murdered. I regained control of my muscles and tried to run past him toward the entrance hall but sticky hands grabbed me. His bedraggled face flushed and the pupils of those pinwheels swirled. The mangy fur of his eyebrows flew off in weird directions, fluid leaked from one nostril giving sheen to the skin just above his chewed-up mustache. There was a two-inch scar along his jawline that looked like a souvenir from a knife fight. I hoped he wasn't going to use a knife. I didn't want to get stabbed to death. He smelled horrid, like urine and spoiled lunchmeat. His foul breath contaminated my neck as he twisted my arm and forced me to the floor. I was on my side and he was trying to roll me onto my back. He was holding his forearm against my shoulder and when he forced one of his legs through mine he had the leverage to force my shoulders against the floor and I was thinking please don't rape me, please don't rape me just kill me when I felt his hands around my throat and his dirty fingernails dug into my flesh and his thumbs pressed and I closed my eyes so I wouldn't have to look into the hideous face when I heard a loud whack like a rock striking pavement and his body went slack.

I was afraid to look.

But when I did, Mr. Best was standing over me holding my father's sailing trophy, panting, red-faced. The hobo was still. Mr. Best kicked him off me with a feral look that trashed any memory of the lawyer who constructed graceful conversational sentences and wrote poetry. I scrambled up and tried to suck air into my lungs. The stink was worse than before. I collapsed in a chair. My hands, my legs, everything shook. I closed my eyes and tried to calm down. When I opened them Mr. Best was breathing heavily. He started to cough and his face colored. But the spasm receded as quickly as it arrived. He squatted next to the guy and pressed two fingers to his neck.

—He's dead.

Those were the first words Mr. Best had spoken since he had arrived. Then he asked if I was all right.

—I think so.

—Are you really here with me in this room?

Mr. Best gave me the strangest look. —Yes, yes, I'm here, he said.

I
n one place was an aspiring poet with an inflated view of Jeremy Best. In the other, an empty Brooklyn apartment next door to a Croatian sociopath. It was still relatively early. How pleasant, to have a nonalcoholic beverage and share some conversation. Why had I refused Spaulding's invitation? When I passed the haggard man on the street I thought of her alone in the house and the story she had told me about being pursued. Now there was a cadaver on the floor and I towered above it, the unlikeliest of champions. Perhaps the universe was not devoid of patterns. I dreamed a version of this the night before we met. Attacked on a beach, I beat the Minotaur to death with a club. Had this been prophesied like an ancient Greek myth? In this story, I was Theseus.

Spaulding was seated in a chair, lungs heaving. Without looking up, she said, “Do you want me to say I did it?” She was brave—it was one of many qualities that drew me to her—but on first blush the offer seemed outlandish. If the man was dead she could suffer the, the, what exactly? There wasn't a lot that could happen from a legal perspective. This creature had attacked, the story would go, and she vanquished him. It was inspirational. But I couldn't let her take responsibility. The cowardice inherent in that act would reflect remarkably badly on me and Spaulding's good opinion meant a lot.

“I can't allow that. Your father's going to be on the warpath if he finds out you . . .”

She interrupted, “What about when he finds out
you
? You're not supposed to be here. Let me do this, please.” She rose from the chair, took my hand. Her irises shone. In them I saw my reflection. It didn't matter that Spaulding Simonson was nineteen. Her soul was as old as the elements.

A shot of energy surged through me and I kissed her. She maneuvered her body against mine, her pelvis pressing into my thigh. The smell of her hair wired to the blood in my groin. The night air crackled. My unsettling, unhelpful, and until now successfully suppressed attraction to Spaulding broke from its subterranean holding pen and jack-in-the-boxed to the surface. Her lips parted and my tongue darted into her mouth.

If there hadn't been a dead man nearby I could have gone further, despite the seismic ramifications. Here is a terrible thing to admit: I wanted to take her right there on the rug, throw her down, rip her panties off, and thrust myself into her as if an act of brutish rutting would somehow in its completeness narcotize me into a state of blissful purity. Please understand, I'm not saying this was a good plan. Even though my nervous system was in a state of hyperstimulation, I was not insane. Having sex in her father's den next to a corpse would have been an extremely bad decision under any circumstances but these are the things that go through an honest person's head.

When I released Spaulding from my grip she clung a moment longer. “This is so totally wrong.” While it was impossible to know whether she was referring to the kiss or the corpse, both qualified and it was hard to disagree either way. Spaulding looked at the prostrate homeless man and asked if I was certain he was dead. The body had not twitched. I nodded. Spaulding sniffled, touched two fingertips to her forehead, and then began to sob, which endeared her to me even more. This went on for about thirty seconds, at which point the weeping subsided and she wiped her tears away with the heels of her hands. “Maybe we did him a favor. His life was awful. We should call the police.”

Together we sat in the large reading chair, our thighs touching, the corpse still splayed in front of us.

“How are we going to explain my presence?”

Spaulding thought about this. Her eyes moved from me toward the body then to the dark yard. After a deep inhale of breath followed by a long slow release she said, “You should go.”

“I'm not going to leave you by yourself.”

In law school one learns about contracts, torts, and the Constitution, but nothing about dealing with a dead body. So to say I was out of my depth would be to considerably understate the situation. The first option was to put the corpse in the car and deposit it in a wooded area. The problems: a) we could be discovered driving with a dead body in the trunk or b) observed unloading the cargo. Further, my nerves couldn't be trusted to drive the car in this situation. The second option was dismembering the body, dissolving it with lime or acid, and burying the results in the backyard. In other words, this was not going to happen. The first two options were terrible and there was no good third one. How had I arrived at this juncture? Contemplating an affair with the managing partner's daughter, exploring a morally murky real estate transaction, and now pondering the disposal of a corpse? Had I become unhinged by the proximity of my own death? And was that necessarily a bad thing?

“I'm going upstairs to scrub the stank off.”

When she left the room I kneeled down next to the intruder's body and rifled his pockets. There was a beat-up leather wallet. In it was a wrinkled five-dollar bill and a library card that identified this man as Karl Bannerman. A library card! What were his interests? His tastes? Mysteries? True crime? Perhaps he read poetry.

In the hope that fresh air would help me organize my thoughts, I stepped outside. The idea that this horror show had been foretold in any way and that Karl Bannerman's presence had some cosmic significance made no sense. He was nothing more than a malign coincidence, bad luck, a random actor. Standing in the backyard staring at the Simonson house, I knew the rest of my time on Earth was going to be spent writhing on a spit, wracked by self-recrimination so deep it would throttle the ability to feel anything else. Nothing prepared one for having taken a life. It was unendurable. How much was I supposed to tolerate before being reduced to a gibbering jumble? How much could anyone withstand before he looked to the uncaring heavens and cried uncle? The night itself was tightening around me. There was a sick feeling in my gut. I didn't know whether it was bile dripping or the chemo. I had taken the anti-nausea pills but there were no chemicals that could be prescribed to dampen the dread that had come to permeate everything.

When I returned to the scene it was immediately apparent something was amiss. Nothing moved. The air in the room was perfectly still. And the body was no longer there. The place Karl Bannerman had lain was empty, the only remnant of his presence a small bloodstain barely discernible on the rug. Had he gone upstairs? Was Spaulding there now? I charged into the foyer and noticed the front door was open. When I looked down the street he was bounding through the shadows.

Relief washed over me, quickly followed by terror. He was still out there, getting ready to do God knows what. I raced upstairs to tell Spaulding. After she got over her shock at the corpse's zombielike reanimation and retreat, I suggested we return to the city together. It was a testament to my vestigial fear of Ed Simonson's wrath and the effect it would have on my hopes for a partnership that this sense won out over my fear of the marauding hobo and I insisted we walk to the station to avoid a cab driver seeing the two of us together. Somewhere in my discombobulated condition I was still worried about the partnership.

“You can't be serious,” she said. “I'm not walking.”

“I'll protect you,” I said.

In an act I could not have previously imagined (these were starting to accumulate) I took a stainless steel carving knife from a kitchen drawer and stuck it in my belt like a samurai. My successful defense of Spaulding made me slightly giddy. I would handle whatever further randomness the universe had in store by stabbing it.

“You're really going to take a kitchen knife?”

“Unless Ed has a gun.”

When Spaulding realized I was completely serious, we locked the house and fled into the troubled night.