None of this Ever Really Happened (17 page)

For a couple of days after seeing Lydia, I avoided human
contact, slept on the floor, and rode my bike. Gene told me
to wait, so I waited. The first day was muggy and misty, and
I rode slowly north along the lakeshore, picked up the North
Shore bike path in Lake Forest heading west, turned north on
the Des Plaines River bike path, and ended up in Libertyville
at an old barroom called The Firkin that has good food and
great beers on tap. I ate a salmon sandwich, drank two cold
glasses of Hoegarden and read some of Eric Hanson's
Motoring
with Mohammed.
When I started back, the sun had
burned the mist away, so I found a bright, grassy spot beside
the river, intertwined my legs with my bike, and slept
on my back for an hour before riding back to the city. Then
I sat on the deck with Art, Cooper, and my book, and read
until dark.

The second day I rode the lakeshore south to Hyde Park.
A front had passed through in the night, and the pavement
and grass were wet with the showers it had brought; the air
was cool and clear. I stopped often to look at the city and the
lake, to watch boats coming and going, a basketball game,
the dogs at the dog beach, and the black, Puerto Rican, and
Vietnamese fishermen along the rocks and harbors. I spent
an hour in the 57th Street Bookstore, and bought Jochen
Hemmleb's
Ghosts of Everest
about the search for Mallory
and Irvine, bought a falafel and a big iced tea on 55th Street,
and rode down to the lake to eat. That evening I took some
cold beers and sat outside at Penny's Noodles to eat Thai food
and finish reading the Hanson book.

The third day I had a phone message from my mother,
who had moved to the cottage for the summer. She said that
there had been a rain and the gutters had overflowed; they
needed cleaning. Could I take a day or two to come up, clean
them out, and spend a little time? I was happy to do so. She
is a reader and napper who was unlikely to intrude on my
solitude. Besides, I'd been wanting to take a ride on the Kal-Haven
bike trail that runs on an old railway right of way
along the Black River. I put my bike and Cooper in the back
of my station wagon and Art in the front, where he leaned
against the door and looked out the window like a teenager. I
listened to an audiotape of Joyce's "The Dead," and I thought
how pure an example it is of Keats's line, "Beauty is truth,
truth beauty." Sad truth. The sad truth good men have to
face about themselves. "Would I?" I wondered. "Have I? Am
I even a good man?" I listened to the last paragraph again.
It was training, I thought, for writing Molly Bloom's monologue.
I love the way Joyce turns words back on themselves:
Snow "was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on
the treeless hills,
falling softly
upon the Bog of Allen and, farther
westward,
softly falling
into the dark mutinous Shannon
waves."

In 1900 it took a day to get to southern Michigan from
Chicago by steamer. In 1924, when my grandfather first made
the trip, it took eight hours by car, and then you often had to
walk over the last few dunes carrying your bags so the cars
could climb them without getting stuck. Today it's two hours
from the Loop by superhighway, but then, when I'm falling
asleep at night on our porch, I can hear the trucks on that
highway and sometimes I can see the lights of the nuclear-power
plant across the dunes to the north of us and even hear
the steam rising from the cooling towers. You can get there
easier today, but it's not quite as far away. Life is as full of reversals
as Joyce's syntax, I thought to myself. Once the world
was wild except for pockets of civilization. Now the world is
crisscrossed by highways, contrails, and microwaves, except
for a few preserved pockets of wilderness like Quetico. Going
there is fabricated adventure, postmodern and artificial just
like the adventurers of today, rich people who climb mountains
and sail balloons around the world unnecessarily. But if
this old cottage in the woods was also an illusion, it was one I
valued. I stood on the roof, my hands in wet work gloves, and
I could see only woods and water all around and beneath me
all the way to the horizon.

I like cleaning gutters because it is a dirty, easy job. The
dirty part lets you feel accomplished. The easy part leaves
time for the beach. I took my chair and umbrella there and
read much of the afternoon. The water was cool and cleansing,
and I shampooed my hair in it. Cooper lay panting in the
wet sand, and Art played with a long stick, asking everyone
who passed to throw it for him. My mother had made a beef
stew with carrots and leeks and we ate it on the porch with
French bread and red wine. I went to bed early listening to
the calls of night birds.

When I got up at dawn, my face felt grubby, and I realized
that I hadn't shaved in a while. I took a few minutes to do so,
and there he was in the photograph of Lisa's parents clipped
from the paper and still taped to the mirror. He was the other
man; he was the man at their table. It was the way he was rising
and turning simultaneously, just as he rose and turned,
stepping out of Lisa's car that rainy, December night. It was
the angle of his back, his posture, the way he held his head. It
was he. "I'll be damned," I said out loud.

I did not run back into the city as I was inclined to do at
first. I took my bike ride, although I admit to being distracted
and now remember the trail as little more than a long green
tunnel. It could not be a coincidence. He must have known
them. He must have known her. Perhaps he was another doctor.
If so, his apparent neglect or indifference was even more
troubling. But could I be sure? Was I certain or was I desperate?
I stopped my bike, straddled it, dug the photo out of
my pocket, and unfolded it. I was certain. On some essential,
visceral level, I was absolutely certain.

The next day was Saturday, so I packed up the dogs and
my bike and headed back into the city in time to catch Tanya
Kim at Outfitters. "I want to see if you know someone." I
handed her the photograph.

"Are you kidding?" she said. "Is this some kind of joke?"

"Not your parents. Him. That guy."

"Oh," she said. "No, I don't think so."

"I thought he might be a friend or maybe a colleague of
your parents."

"I don't know him," she said.

A
S I LOOK BACK NOW
, it seems to me that the summers
of my boyhood often had themes, although I don't
know quite how they got them nor which one went
with which year. It was all fantasy stuff, all self-invention.
One summer a bunch of us spent weeks blazing trails through
the Michigan woods. We trampled them, mapped them,
and marked them by painting tin-can lids and nailing these
to trees. Another summer a friend and I started a lawn-mowing
business with an emphasis on the business part; we
spent all the money we made on business cards, triplicate-receipt
books, and clip-on ties. Another time a bunch of us
formed a band, although no one could really play an instrument.
We sat around someone's basement wearing yellow-,
pink-, and blue-tinted sunglasses, pounding, beating, strumming
and wailing really bad songs. We spoke of record contracts.
A couple summers we played softball every morning
from ten to noon and kept meticulous personal records; in
the end we had almost as many at-bats as the big leaguers we
were imagining ourselves to be. When I was a little older, I
saved up my money and bought a secondhand drafting table,
and one summer I was an architect wearing white short-sleeved
shirts and designing a toolshed my father later built.
The next summer, a friend and I wrote a daily comic strip
about turtles because turtles were about all we could draw.

That summer I lived at Carolyn O'Connor's—the summer
of Lisa Kim—I indulged myself as if I were a kid again.
This time, of course, I was a detective. It wasn't all that hard
to do, either, with ten weeks free and no one there to shake
her head or roll her eyes. It involved imagination, prevarication,
and a lot of telephone calls. The first of these I made to
the hospital where the Kims were on staff, and the second to
Miriam Prescott, the woman who was the head of the hospital's
special-events committee. She invited me to meet her at
her club.

In the Fitzgerald/Hemingway debate, I side with Hemingway
and then some. It seems to me that money often insulates
people and makes them silly, like the Kronberg-Muellers
and their circle in Mexico. I thought Miriam Prescott would
be like one of them or else a long-faced patrician woman
in tweed, despite the heat. Instead she had buck teeth and
freckles, and I felt bad about taking advantage of her almost
before I knew that I was doing it.

I was surprised to be led to a café table on a terrace beside the
tennis courts. "I took the liberty," she said as we shook hands.

A waitress was already delivering fancy tuna-salad sandwiches
with elegant little homemade potato chips, cornichons,
big stuffed green olives, and glasses of iced tea.

"A working lunch," she said, pleased with herself. "I can
always justify it when the cause is good."

"Well," I said, "this is . . . thank you."

She waved me off. "Just like Henry to make all that fuss
and be so cross and then send someone right over. Anyway,
where shall we begin?" On the phone I'd told her that I work
for the
Tribune,
and I do sort of and sometimes, but she must
have thought I was on assignment. I decided to play along.

"Well, let's begin with your dinner dance," I said.

"Of course, it's just one of our three big annual fundraisers."
She told me about the other two in considerable detail,
and then about the dinner dance itself, the silent auction,
the raffles, how the theme is chosen, the committee, how
much money was raised for the hospital. I took notes and
was happy that I'd thought to bring a notebook and pen.

"Well," I said finally, "you've given me a lot to work with."

"I hope so. You can never get too much publicity. Any
idea when your article might run?"

"I'm sorry. I just write them. The editors fit them in. Since
this is about your whole program, not just the one event, I
suppose they might even hold it until . . . what's coming up?
Your fall outing?"

"That might be nice. That wouldn't be bad at all," she said.

"May I ask you a question?" I unfolded the photograph
of Lisa Kim's parents taken at the last dinner dance which I'd
torn from the newspaper, and smoothed it out in front of her.

"I picked this out of the files, and I just wondered . . ."

"Oh, that's Dr. Kim and Dr. Kim, our Korean couple.
We're so pleased with them. He's a radiologist and she's a
pediatrician.
Very, very competent."

"And this gentleman?" I asked. "He looks so familiar to
me."

"Let's see. Oh, that's Dr. Decarre. Albert Decarre."

"And is he a radiologist or . . . ?"

"No, no. He's a psychiatrist," she said.

That morning I sat on Carolyn's deck a long time looking at
his phone number in the phone book. Up until now, everything
could be rewound and erased. After this I wasn't quite
so sure. I took the dogs down to the dog beach at Belmont
Harbor and threw sticks for them; I went through the dialogue—
especially my half—in my mind. I went home and
wrote it down. In the afternoon I bought a prepaid cell phone
with cash; I filled out the forms using a fictitious name and
address. I bought some Diet Dr Pepper and put three cans on
ice. Just before I called, I opened one.

"Dr. Decarre?" I asked.

"Speaking."

"My name is David Lester. I'm a freelance writer and
I'm working on an article for the
Chicago Tribune
about the
death of the actress Lisa Kim. Our article is going to state
that an eyewitness saw you with Ms. Kim a few minutes
before the accident occurred. Do you have any reaction to
that claim?"

"What? No. No, no."

"We are also going to print that you had a personal relationship
with Ms. Kim. Can you confirm or deny this?"

"Lisa Kim was a family friend. I've been friends of her
parents for many years. I'd known Lisa since she was a child.
That's all."

"Paul? What is it, dear?" a voice asked in the background.

"Nothing. Just the hospital." I jerked my head up. He had
just lied. Why had he just lied?

"We're ready to serve," the voice said.

"I'll be right there," Decarre said.

"Dr. Decarre, how long was Lisa Kim a patient of yours?"
I asked.

"I can neither confirm nor deny that anyone is or was a patient
of mine. It is a violation of the Illinois Mental Health and
Developmental Disabilities Confidentiality Code to do so."

"Would you like at this time to make any statement, clarify
or add information to the article?" I asked. "We would be
happy to represent your point of view."

There was a long pause. "No."

"Thank you for your time," I said and hung up. The son of
a bitch had lied, and he hadn't denied that Lisa had been his
patient. And if he was a longtime family friend, why didn't
Tanya Kim recognize him in the photograph? That didn't
make sense.

My phone rang, and it was Lydia. Charlie Duke had called
her out of the blue. "He's in Kansas seeing his family. He
wants to visit us."

"What? Didn't you tell him?"

"Of course I told him. I said, 'Charlie, you need to know
that Pete and I aren't living together right now.'" I don't think
either of us had really said it before. I wondered if it had been
hard, and if she had rehearsed saying the words, as I probably
would have.

"Do you know what he said?" she asked.

"What?"

"He said, 'Oh you poor kids. That seals it. I'll be right
there.' " I laughed. I heard her laugh.

"So when's he coming?" I asked.

"Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow? Oh Jesus, Lydia, I'm not sure I can do this."

"Well, he's coming. I'll handle this if you can't." Lydia's answers
sometimes reminded me of wines. They had tiny hints
of martyrdom with the suggestion of moral superiority and
guilt infliction.

I went to see Rosalie Belcher Svigos again on my way
to pick Charlie up at the bus station. First I called her cell
phone, gambling that she wouldn't pick up, and she didn't. I
left a cryptic little message. Would be in the hospital at 10:00
tomorrow morning. Know the name of the guy in Lisa's car.
Rosalie called me three times and I didn't pick up. The third
time she left a message to meet her at a certain nurses' station
on the eleventh floor. Good. I wanted to see her face when I
said his name.

I was on time and so was she. "Who is he?" she said immediately.

"Albert Decarre. I think he was Lisa's psychiatrist and her
lover."

"Fuck!" she said. "Son of a bitch. I was afraid something
like this was going on." She took me into a family-counseling
room and sat down hard in a chair. She wanted to know my
evidence, and I laid it out for her. I told her about the photograph
and phone call. I told her about his lie and his nondenial.
I did not tell her about the hypnosis. She shook her
head. "What makes you think they were lovers?" she asked.

"Lisa wrote—but for some reason didn't send—a letter addressed
to P, 'P' period." I took the letter from my hip pocket
and gave it to her. She slowly and carefully read it twice.

"Wow," she said. "How'd you get this."

"Maud gave it to me thinking I was P. I gave it to an old
boyfriend of Lisa's named Peter Carey, thinking he was P; he
said it wasn't for him. Then who was it meant for? When I
was talking to Decarre on the phone, his wife came in and
called him 'Paul'; he goes by 'Paul.' Maybe it's far-fetched, but
I started playing around with it, and it's not too hard to get
from 'Paul Decarre' to 'P. Decarre' to 'de Carre' if you frenchify
it to 'Peter Carey'?"

"Not so far-fetched," said Rosalie. Apparently Lisa gave
everyone she knew a nickname or called them by their initials.
Rosalie said I would have been "P" or "Mr. P" or "PF
Flyer" or "Old Shoe" or who knows. She also said that she
had always felt something wasn't right about Lisa's death, had
always known it, but couldn't find even a shred of evidence,
so when I called, she'd agreed to see me out of desperation;
I was the first person to share her suspicion. It was the timing
of the whole thing that bothered her. Lisa had called her
a few weeks earlier to say that she was very, very in love, but
she wouldn't say with whom. Both those things were unlike
her; she usually let other people fall in love with her,
and she always told Rosalie everything. And there was the
movie she'd been cast in. She was very excited about it. She
was working hard on the role and making plans to go to New
York. She was running every day and taking megavitamin
shots. She'd never felt happier or better. It was, said Rosalie,
an anti-coincidence, and she didn't believe in coincidences
of any kind. Then there was the whole heroin thing. "It just
didn't fit," Rosalie said. "It wasn't Lisa. It wasn't right. Let's
look this guy up." She went out into the hall and came back
pulling a computer on a cart. I looked over her shoulder. He'd
gone to a good med school, been in a top-notch residency
program. His clinical interests were depression, drug abuse,
eating disorders, marital problems, phobias, sexual dysfunctions,
sex therapy.

"Maybe they all say that," I said.

We looked at two other psychiatrists on the staff. They
had entirely different areas of specialization. "Let me look at
something else," said Rosalie. "Listen to this. According to the
Illinois Department of Professional Regulation, Dr. Albert
Decarre has been reprimanded for professional misconduct."

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"Don't know," Rosalie said, "but it could include having a
relationship with a patient."

"So he may have done this before?"

"Possibly. He's done something. What you really need
to know is whether Lisa was his patient." She said that she
couldn't help me with that because that information would
be in the doctor's records, not the hospital's. When I told her
Decarre had a stiff back and asked if she could find out about
it, she said only if he'd had surgery, and then depending on
where the surgery had been performed. She said she'd try.
Her eyes swept by me like spotlights at a grand opening. "If
this guy," she said, "if this guy. . . ." Then she focused on me.
"What else are you trying to find out?"

I told her I needed to know Lisa's mother's maiden name
and Lisa's Social Security number.

"Dr. Kim's maiden name is Sam. The Social Security number
I don't know, but I might be able to find out. Lisa stayed
with us for two weeks when she was between apartments and
left a lot of stuff. Let me look at it; I might find a check stub
or something."

I told her I didn't understand the line, "You can say that
our little friend helped . . ." I was afraid it might be a reference
to drugs. "What else could it be?"

"Maybe the megavitamins, and those are prescription. I
bet you this guy was writing scripts for her."

There was a time when Charlie Duke could have stepped off
that bus as if it were a Learjet, but this day he looked about
like everyone else who had come from Topeka by Greyhound,
and that wasn't very good. His linen slacks were badly
wrinkled, his guayabera shirt could not hide that he'd grown
thicker and softer in the middle, his gray hair had a yellowish
cast to it, and there was a road map of fine red capillaries
on his nose. Then, when he smiled, I saw that the long
white roots of his teeth were exposed. "Periodontal disease,"
he would say. "Awful stuff. Going to lose them all. Oh well."
But that was later.

Charlie tossed one long arm around my shoulders and
kissed me on the forehead; there was a time when he could
have pulled that off, too. "You poor kids," he said. "I just can't
imagine. You'll have to tell me all about it." I never did, and
he never brought it up again.

I gave him the Cook's tour of the city: Printer's Row,
University of Chicago, the Adler Planetarium with skyline
view (Charlie took several pictures with an ancient-but-immaculate
Instamatic camera), the Loop, the lakefront, and
Millennium Park. Charlie made a big deal about having to
visit "the legendary Billy Goat Tavern," and I knew what that
was about. He needed a drink. He'd been drinking when I
picked him up although it was barely noon, and I grimaced
at the thought of Charlie on a bus with a pint in a brown bag.