Middle Age (69 page)

Scented hand lotion, and weekly manicures. Saturday mornings in Salthill, while her hair was being “done.” Always impeccable nail polish.

Her rings, the tastefully large diamond and the gold wedding ring, an heirloom; and the emerald Owen had given her for their twentieth an-Middle Age: A Romance

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niversary. Where were Augusta’s beautiful rings? Owen felt the special horror of their loss. A vain childish woman but he’d adored her.
Yes, but
you never knew her, only Adam Berendt had known her
. “Mr. Cutler?”—they were expecting something of him. He was not playing his role, perhaps.

Sections of the body were being displayed like cuts of meat. Almost, you might think this was a provocative work of contemporary art. Pop art, or shock art, an object fashioned to resemble a hideously mutilated female torso, made of lifelike clay. Owen reached out to touch the thing, and was gratified that it was stony cold.
Augusta was burning hot, this could not be
Augusta
. That mole on the rib cage, beneath the left breast, Owen recognized, did he?—or had he never seen it before? The big flaccid breasts were not recognizable, were they? Owen was shaking his head, no. His heart was pounding so violently he believed he might faint, and he would not have resisted fainting.
Better to die, to be extinguished
.
Than to have
such knowledge
. “Mr. Cutler? Are you all right?” Brusquely he informed them yes, of course. He’d made this journey of thousands of miles into Hell for the purpose of identifying, or not identifying, his missing wife, it was an insult to him to be continually asked if he was
all right!
Now the thing, the body, was being turned over on the gurney, slowly, with care, so that the back could be examined. Now the sheet covering the mutilated neck slipped just slightly, and Owen saw what was not to be seen: a stump of a neck, and no head.
No head
. He smiled, confused. How could he identify Augusta if Augusta’s head was gone?
Where was Augusta’s
head?
“This is very strange. This is . . .” They seemed not to hear. They were asking him about moles, freckles, scars. As if they hadn’t already asked him, and he’d told them what he knew. It angered him that they spoke to him, even the leathery-faced man in his hire, as you’d speak to a brain-damaged person. “Yes,” he said. “I see.” He was puzzling over the meaning of a cluster of freckles beneath the corpse’s left shoulder blade.

(Hadn’t that cluster of freckles been a smaller cluster of moles, higher up on Augusta’s back?) On the lower back, amid the fatty, bruised, discolored middle-aged flesh, there was a large mole, at first glance you’d think it was an insect, and Owen’s instinct was to brush it away. How Gussie hated insects! Next, he examined the arms, which were relatively unin-jured, the fair skin dotted with myriad small freckles, but not covered in fine pale hairs as he remembered Augusta’s arms. (Unless Owen’s memory was outdated. Possibly, in middle age, Augusta’s arms had become hairless, like her legs she no longer had to shave?) It was at this point that

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he glanced sidelong at Elias West who was staring at the thing on the table with a look of recognition.
It is Gussie
.
This man sees
.

“No,” Owen said quickly, panting. “I don’t believe it is. I—don’t think so. Not Augusta. Not this.” He’d begun to cry. In an instant, his stony face had cracked, and was dissolving. The examination appeared to be concluded. Owen was led from the refrigerated room. At the threshold he stumbled, but regained his balance, and his dignity. “How am I to blame for this?
I am not to blame
. Why did you do such a thing to me, and to our family, Augusta!”

A tile floor lurched upward, cracking against his cheek. The stricken man was brought to the emergency room of the local hospital and treated for shock, cardiac trauma. He hadn’t had a heart attack per se or a stroke but he’d been unconscious for nearly ten minutes which was “worrisome”

as the attending physician said, and so he was kept overnight in the hospital for observation and in the morning discharged, with a strong suggestion that he make an appointment to see his personal physician as quickly as possible. A subdued Elias West drove Owen in a rental car back to the Naples airport. Owen Cutler’s effort at identifying the female corpse would be indicated in police reports as “inconclusive.” He seemed to acknowledge that, yes, the mutilated woman was his wife, or had been his wife; at the same time, no, she was not. Elias West dared not press his employer on the issue for fear of being immediately discharged from his job.

During the drive to Naples, the men scarcely spoke. Owen seemed irritated with West, or in any case indifferent. He appeared tired, an aged man. There was a large white bandage on his left cheek, partly obscuring a purple welt. His seersucker suit was badly rumpled as if he’d slept in it and he had not shaved that morning. For most of the drive he looked through items he’d brought in his briefcase, photographs of beautiful Augusta dating back to the late sixties when they’d first met; it may have been that Owen saw how little the woman he’d loved resembled herself from season to season and from photograph to photograph, for at last he gave up, with a sigh, and shut the briefcase. As the rental car sped along the state highway through hazy white sunshine Owen tried to read in
The Ethical Life
but soon grew restless. He said, with the wistful air of a man making a profound discovery, in utter aloneness, “These words. These philosophers.

Froth of bubbles over a void, that’s all. They tell themselves things not to notice.” Shortly afterward he drifted into a light doze and the book slipped from his fingers, onto the floor.

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At the small Naples airport, Elias West made travel arrangements for the trip back north. Finally he dared bring up the subject of whether he should continue in his search for Mrs. Cutler or whether—the woman in the Cropsey morgue was, in fact, Mrs. Cutler?

Staring at the floor, with a vacant expression, Owen said after a moment, “It’s her. You know it’s her. But we won’t give up our search, Elias, will we?
Never
.”

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F   into the past! It was like being drawn into a whirlpool, seeking out another’s secret life. Augusta wondered at times if she would drown. If this was forbidden knowledge she was seeking, and would regret it.

Still, the adventure was exciting to her! It was like nothing Augusta had done before in her sheltered Salthill life. A woman traveling alone, driving rental cars, always in dark glasses, staying in roadside motels and eating her meals in her room, letting her hair grow out laced with silver . . . “In the pursuit of the truth of Adam Berendt.”

Except the truth meant little to her, really. She wanted only this intimacy with Adam, now the man had vanished from the earth. She wanted finally to know him as no one else had ever known him, including his other women.

In Miami Beach, before setting out on her journey, Augusta had acquired a new digital camera for the purpose of taking photographs of Brady’s/Berendt’s backgrounds. She’d acquired a new, temporary name and the identification to accompany it, a simple virtuous-sounding name,

“Elizabeth Eastman.” (She’d teased Elias West: “How about I call myself

‘Liz West’?” Only a joke, of course.) When Augusta had fled Salthill the previous autumn she’d been desperate and had had no plan except to put distance between herself and the puppet-life she’d been leading, by that time a life excruciating to her who was reminded daily in Salthill of Adam Berendt’s absence; it wasn’t until months later that she woke one morning, to splotches of sunshine on a white latticed window, with the idea of trac-ing Adam back to his origins.

“I will! I will try.”

It would give her unraveled life a meaning. Augusta Cutler’s life, that had so little meaning.

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Her life she’d many times wanted to toss away, as you’d toss away an empty wrapper. Without sentiment, and without regret.

And there was the dread of growing older: always older. In America, that was the abyss. Adam had chided her, how trivial this was, this age-obsession of Americans, and she’d said angrily, why yes, yes it is trivial, some of us are drowning in it, take pity!

She, Augusta Cutler, now fifty-three years old.

Reason enough, maybe, for leaving Salthill-on-Hudson where everyone knew her.

“But no one knows me! Fuck them all.”

A  A  , or suspected, was that Adam had changed his name to “Adam Berendt” sometime after June 6. She suspected this because one afternoon going through his filing cabinet out of curiosity (in fact: jealousy of other women friends of Adam’s) she’d discovered a much-creased, yellowed high school “equivalency” diploma issued to “Francis Xavier Brady” by the Red Lake, Minnesota, school district, in June 6.

Rarely did Adam lock the rear door of his house on the river, the door leading into his studio. It was understood that his closest friends were welcome to drop in at any time whether Adam was home or not, and Augusta often did, to await him. And so she’d dropped by that afternoon to discover only Adam’s dogs home . . . and these were friendly dogs, who recognized their master’s friend Augusta.

Augusta’s mind raced. What did the diploma
mean?
Why would Adam have it in his possession? The logic must be: “Francis Xavier Brady”

was Adam Berendt’s younger self.

Always there’d been the vague idea that, just possibly, Adam Berendt had changed his name. No one seemed to know exactly how old he was, but clearly he was over fifty, and perhaps not fifty-five. Say he’d been born in . In 6, he’d have been twenty-two years old. Late to be earning a high school diploma, unless something had happened to interrupt his education.

This line of thinking was exciting to Augusta. She so yearned for intimacy with the man, which he’d denied her.

Here was the logic: Adam was the most reticent of men, no one in Salthill seemed to know anything about him before the mid-s when
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he was living in Manhattan, and on Long Island, prior to his move to Rockland County in 8. If you asked Adam any direct, personal question, Adam would deflect it with a joke: “How do I know? I’m not a historian of my own life.” Or, any question involving a date: “How do I know?

Let’s say—‘Once upon a time.’ ” It seemed to be known that Adam hadn’t been a sculptor, or hadn’t been known as a sculptor, before moving to Salthill and buying the old Deppe house. What his Salthill friends knew of the years preceding his move they’d pieced together from accounts provided by New Yorkers who claimed to have known Adam Berendt as a man involved in real estate investments and in the stock market. (“But involved in a quiet way. You’d never have guessed how well he was doing.”) Augusta once met a couple who’d lived in an apartment building in which Adam had lived in –, on East th Street; Augusta checked out the building and was mildly disappointed, it was only just a high-rise Manhattan apartment building. Beatrice Archer told Augusta that Avery had run into a man who claimed to have been a “poker friend” of Adam Berendt’s when Adam lived in Nassau County, Long Island; there, he’d lived in a succession of rentals, bewildering his friends by never buying a house for himself. Nor was Adam linked to any specific woman: he’d had numerous friends, friends devoted to him, including of course women.

In Salthill, it was rumored that Adam and Augusta were having an affair. Augusta alluded to the rumor with lusty good humor—“Only
if
.”

Adam seemed oblivious of it, or scornful.

Augusta believed, if Adam was involved with anyone, it was the younger woman, the red-haired Marina Troy. “Except, no: what would Adam see in
her?
The woman has no sex.”

It made sense that a man so secretive might certainly have changed his name, but, searching through other drawers in the filing cabinet, which was an old, scarified aluminum cabinet Adam had picked up at a fire sale, Augusta found no document confirming a name change, nor any more pa-perwork involving “Francis Xavier Brady.”

There was a sound of Adam’s car at the top of the driveway! Hurriedly, guiltily Augusta put away the diploma and shut up the filing cabinet and left Adam’s study as she’d found it. Adam’s dogs, that had accompanied her into the study, now trotted out barking with excitement at their master’s arrival. Adam would see Augusta’s car in the drive; he’d know she was in the house, and waiting for him; often Augusta dropped by his studio to admire his work-in-progress; she was a woman who “took an interest” in

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art, especially if the artists were friends of hers. There was nothing out of the ordinary here, nothing to stir Adam’s suspicion. But how excited Augusta was: in a state like sexual arousal. She knew! She knew a secret of Adam’s! There was this intimacy between them, of which the man himself was unaware.

When Adam entered the house with his heavy footfall, there was Augusta innocently in the kitchen, giving the dogs fresh water from the faucet. They’d rushed to Adam, and now trotted back to her, crowding affectionately against her legs. The dogs were Apollo and—a smaller, older yellow dog, a female, whose name Augusta was forgetting. For this was years ago: the little yellow dog, a foundling like Apollo, had long since died.

Augusta recalled her younger, more hopeful self with a tinge of loss: she’d been wearing a poppy-orange cotton chemise with a skirt slit up the sides, mandarin-style, and open-toed cork shoes. How crucial her clothes, her costumes, had seemed to her in that long-ago life! Her shapely, rather pale legs were bare, and her hair was newly burnished, like a helmet. She might have been Adam Berendt’s devoted wife awaiting him in this run-down old “historic” house on the river, the ex-debutante wife of the down-at-the-heels sculptor, except that wasn’t the scenario. Augusta felt Adam’s fingertips touching the back of her head, as she stooped to set the dogs’