Mercy (69 page)

The grackles shrieked in the top of the mulberry, where the first rays of the morning sun were turning the blue leaves to green. In a few hours the oppressive heat would be unbearable as the rain-soaked city began steaming under a bright clear sky.

“Do you know if Vickie had ever sought psychiatric help?” Palma asked.

“I don’t know. She sure as hell should have, but I can’t say that she did. I just don’t know.” Two men from the coroner’s office unloaded an aluminum gurney from the back of a morgue van and took it up the sidewalk toward the front door. Hardeman’s shoulders slumped even more. “Jesus, I’m not believing this. I’m really not.”

“Have you got someone you can call to stay with today?” Palma asked. “Our lab technicians are going to need some time in your house.”

Hardeman nodded. “Sure. But what about clothes? I’ve got to pack some clothes. Shoes. Things from the bathroom.”

“We’ll get Officer Saldana to go with you. I’ll talk to her,” Palma said. “I know this is a bad time to put you through the questions. I’m sorry we had to do it.”

“It’s okay,” Hardeman said wearily, shaking her head. “I’ll have to buy a new bed,” she said to Palma, as if Palma was going to help her plan what she should do next. “No way can I sleep in that bed again.” She shook her head, and again turned her face toward the house. “I can’t do it,” she said, and her voice cracked. She snapped her eyes around at Palma as if to see if Palma caught it, heard the revealing slip of vulnerability. But it was too late. The tremor in her voice had been the sound of the last shred of strength she had left. With an anguished look at Palma, she buried her face in her hands and started crying, her shoulders hunching with the quiet, wrenching effort of it.

Without a word, Grant turned and walked away. Palma didn’t even look at him as she stepped over and put her arms around Hardeman and held her, feeling the deep sobs coming up from the pit of her stomach, requiring something from every inch of her body. It was only then, holding her, that Palma realized Hardeman wasn’t even wearing shoes.

54

W
hen Broussard opened his eyes to see the oblique angle of the sun seeping through the cracks of the tall shutters in his bedroom, he was gripped with a sudden sense of paralysis, and an obfuscated memory of something tragic. The high, white ceiling of the room floated in a hazy world of mote-filled morning light. He remembered she was beside him before he actually felt her, and then, remembering, he became aware of the weight of her on the mattress, though he was not actually touching her. His right arm lay on top of the single silk sheet, and without looking at her he reached over with his right hand and placed it on Mary’s buttock. He could feel that she was naked under the peach silk sheet, and from the shape and angle of her taut hip, he could tell that it was cocked in his direction as she lay facing away from him with one leg pulled up a little, the other extended. He moved his right foot ever so slightly and felt her extended leg. Christ Almighty. Through his own perfume he smelled hers, milder, less sweet, almost as if it were the natural fragrance of her body. He could believe that, that cologne spurted through her veins instead of blood, and her flesh wafted an associate perfume as a vessel smells of its contents.’ After last night, he could believe anything about her.

He could believe that she was dead. He held his breath and watched the folds in the sheet that stretched from her to him across his chest. They moved, lightly, lightly with her breathing.

He could believe she was the embodiment of all the women he had ever tried to redeem, that coming last she was in fact first, the afterimage of a prototype, an anomaly so extraordinary that she became a paradigm.

He could believe that she did not lie. And, actually, he believed she didn’t. That was the thing about Mary, she no longer knew the difference between reality and her own fantasies. She told the truth that was Mary’s truth, the truth in Mary’s head.

He could believe that last night had never happened, that he had not seen her do the things she did, but only had wished them fervently, so fervently that he had dreamed them more vividly than dreams.

Slowly he raised his left hand and looked at his painted fingernails. The uneasy sense of dread returned, the pall of a vague remembrance;—or was it a premonition—of something tragic.

Broussard tried to put himself into the context of the moment. He lowered his hand and felt his head. The wig was gone. Hesitantly he wiped a finger across his lips, and it came away smudged with crimson. Stirring under the sheet, he felt that he was naked, and then he was aware that his right hand was still resting on Mary’s buttock. He left it there and raised his other hand again, held it straight above him. Looking at his fingernails, he let the focus of his eyes slide away to the ill-defined regions of the ceiling again. It was a world of transition, fantasy lay behind them, reality was undesired and yet to come.

He carefully lifted his right hand off her and cautiously turned on his side to face her back. He feathered his left hand over the top of the sheet up to where it formed a cuff across her white shoulders. He pinched the cuff in his fingers and began pulling it down slowly, revealing the buttery whorls of her hair bunched around her neck, the ambit of her shoulder, her profile perdu so often observed on the chaise longue, the long angle of her arm, the first swells of her breasts whose actual beauty even his practiced imagination had failed to envisage, the fall of her ribcage that quickly rose again to her hip, her top leg bent for balance, the bottom one extended, showing him the inside of her thigh where he wanted to put his mouth.

She was extraordinary, more beautiful than any other woman he had ever known.

He placed his mouth at the first subtle rise of vertebrae that showed itself from beneath her hair and kissed it. And then he kissed the next one, moving down her spine and counting them, feeling the roundness of each with his lips, imagining that he and she were floating in the lambent upper reaches of the morning, suspended, unencumbered by weight and gravity, able to touch wherever they wished without contortion, down he traveled until the ripples disappeared between the two dimples above her buttocks, and he felt the beginnings of her dividing flesh.

Still floating, carefully, carefully, he placed his left hand on the flat of her stomach above her pubis and pressed gently to turn her over, his right hand guiding her shoulder. He watched the weight of her large breasts shift upon themselves, her pink, conical nipples riding upon their liquidy surfaces, seeking their centers of gravity as she rolled over onto her back. He kissed her navel, feeling the dusty wool of her vulva against his Adam’s apple.

“What are you doing?” she asked. Broussard flinched. He raised his eyes from her navel, looking up between the slopes of her breasts, and met her stare. He imagined how the overnight smear of his makeup must seem to her. Her expression conveyed nothing in particular, just a calm, steady gaze that reminded him uncomfortably of Bernadine’s candid perusals of their intercourse. “Where’s your wig?” she asked.

Her sex had been like that too, straightforward, unabashed, even aggressive. It had been wild and extravagant, and when it was over she had gone to sleep as soundly as if she had been drugged. Now she looked at him with blue-gray eyes that were slightly swollen. He noted again her asymmetrical mouth, and the little pucker at the corner of one side which, when seen straight on, became a more curious detail than he had remembered it in profile. All those hours he had studied her as she lay upon the chaise longue, imagined her undressed, imagined her in ways that he believed only he could imagine her, had not prepared him for the reality. This time his imagination had fallen short.

He lay between her legs, his elbows on the sheet on either side of her hips, her pubis against his chest, and in the gauzy, filtered light of the room he watched her russet-hooded eyes as she studied him. At that moment if all the money he possessed could have bought her thoughts—her authentic thoughts, holographs as it were, from the id, not something refined through her superego—he would have paid it in an instant. There were things inside those eyes he wanted to discover, things he wanted to taste, new savors he was sure he had never known before.

She kept her eyes on him and reached down to his upturned throat and lightly, slowly, raked her fingernails up the length of it to his chin, continuing up his face over smeared lipstick, the morning bristles of his beard no longer hidden by base, over blush and smudged mascara and shadow and liner, her sullen blue-gray eyes watching him, watching her own hands, her own nails. When she reached the top of his head, she moved her hands around in back and haltingly pulled his face back down onto her stomach, pressed his lips into her navel as he felt her lifting her pubis firmly up against his neck.

“Secrets,” she said hoarsely, and then suddenly with one quick thrust of her hips against his throat she hooked her nails under the backs of his jaws and urged him up until he felt his chest against the largeness of her breasts and heard her breathing through her teeth, quick, sucking breaths, as though she were bracing herself against anticipated pain. They clung to each other, and she pulled him to her tightly, more tightly than he would have imagined she could, as he buried his face in her neck, breathing of her blond hair, hair like fragrant spiders’ webs. Resisting a sudden desire to crush her, to snap her back, he concentrated on letting her take him; he concentrated on the slow drift of their intercourse as they ascended through the high, hazy light, buoyed on a rushing sound of whispers.

When he got out of the shower and walked into the bedroom with his towel around his waist, he discovered she already had dried her hair and was sitting naked on the window seat, framed by the shutters thrown back, the windows pushed open to the late-morning heat building in the green woods along the bayou below. She was leaning forward, her arms wrapped around her knees, her breasts silhouetted in the rhomboid space created by the angles of her body. Her head was turned away from him as she looked outside, listening to the mournful burbling of the tiny Spanish doves who gathered in the cool, dark canopies of the magnolias and live oaks.

He didn’t know how she felt, how it would be for her now. For him, it was over. The cautious self-consciousness that characterized his daily life had returned, and he already had withdrawn into the persona of Dr. Broussard in the name of social expediency. He knew she had heard him come into the room, but she didn’t look around as he opened his closet, his other closet. He felt that it wasn’t entirely fair to her that he should return completely to his tightly controlled role without a sense of transition. He was used to it, years of living a divided life had made him accustomed to neck-snapping transitions, but at this moment he felt it was inappropriate. So he compromised. He left his suits and ties in the closet and took down a pair of casual silk trousers, dropped his towel and stepped into them, then followed with a contrasting silk shirt, which he left unbuttoned.

Barefooted, he walked over to the window seat where she was sitting, hesitated, then reached for a chair, pulled it over next to her, and sat down. Still she didn’t look around. He crossed his legs at the knee and glanced down to the sloping lawn. A sluggish breath of warm air moved through the opened windows and the sharp sunlight made him squint. He heard a sudden swooshing noise and below them the sprinkler system sprang to life, sending a thin mist up into the air above the lawn, where it hovered momentarily before falling in a slow, sparkling dance. The system was computerized, and the gardener had forgotten to turn it off. Broussard would have to speak to him. It was stupid to water the lawn after two days of rain.

He looked at her. She hadn’t the slightest inhibition about her body. He supposed that her rather bold preference for nakedness now, with him, was a kind of willful liberation from the self-imposed modesty that she insisted on when she was at home with her husband. Her shins and bare knees faced him, and behind her thin ankles he saw the fawn triangle of her vulva. Just then she suddenly turned her head and caught him looking at her.

“Did you know that I’m bisexual?” she asked, pushing back her hair and resting her eyes on him.

“I didn’t know that,” he said.

She continued looking at him. “Are you surprised?”

“No,” he said.

She didn’t change expressions for a moment, just let her eyes stay on him, and then she smiled. Broussard was taken completely by surprise. It was the first time ever he had seen her smile, but he was equally surprised by the realization that he never before had noted this omission.

“You guessed?” she asked. “How’d you guess?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t guess. I almost expected it.”

Her smile quickly faded.

He would tell her straight-out. He always told them straight-out when the subject finally came up, though he never brought it up himself.

“It often happens that women who have been victims of father-daughter incest are bisexual, or even exclusively lesbian,” he said. “It happens more than you might think.”

Mary squinted at him, resting her chin on her bare knees.

“Is this going to be an obvious psychological calculation?”

“Such as?”

“Defiled by her father as a child, she rejects men in favor of women.”

“No,” Broussard shook his head. “You missed it. It isn’t obvious.”

Mary’s eyes shifted to a guarded opacity, which settled over them like the hooded defense of a serpent’s eyes. He could almost sense her challenge, the dare to unriddle her.

“The Persephone complex,” he said.

“Persephone.”

Broussard nodded.

“As in Greek mythology.”

He nodded again. “Goddess of Spring.”

“Yes, I remember.” She rolled her eyes upward. “Uh, she was carried away to the underworld by…”

“Hades.”

“…the god of the underworld.”

“Her uncle.”

“Oh, really?” She regarded Broussard. “Something to do with spring,” she said vaguely.

“Her mother was Demeter, goddess of the earth and fertility. When her daughter was stolen, Demeter was furious and withheld her favors. The earth became barren until Zeus intervened and forced Hades to allow Persephone to return to her mother on earth. But Hades did not give her up permanently. One third of every year she must return to him. When she does, Demeter withholds her favors from men, the earth ceases to be fruitful. All the time she is with Hades, Persephone longs for her mother, and she is destined to relive this longing over and over for all eternity. Before the seduction, mother and daughter had been inseparable. The seduction destroyed that bond forever. In the mythological stories about Persephone and Demeter, sorrow is the central theme.”