Now You See Him (6 page)
R
OB WALKED TOWARD HER FROM THE BEDROOM
door, before stopping at the foot of the bed. That much we can surmise. Seeing him appear before her first thing in the morning, Kate doubtless greeted him calmly and began to chat. The habit of calmness was deeply ingrained in her, but she also would have quickly realized the situation was dangerous, and that in such circumstances it was important to keep talking, to keep time expanding, to maintain the fiction that everything was tranquil, and that the sight of your ex-lover entering your apartment at dawn due to a key you’d never bothered to get back from him and standing before you now unshaven, stinking, and with a suspicious pistol-shaped bulge in his pocket, was just another casual event in your day.
We know that three months had gone by since he’d moved out of their apartment, shouting that she’d betrayed him for “Mammon.” In that period, she’d seen him only
once, for a drink at a bar. It was an evening that had ended badly, according to eyewitnesses, with Rob “raising his voice and pointing his finger a lot.” She’d subsequently received three e-mails from him. These were later read out loud at the trial. The first, in its entirety, ran, “Cruelty is not a religion, even when practiced diligently and with faith.” The second contained simply the word “darling” in the subject box and as message bore a repeating cascade of
x
’s and
o
’s. The third, sent not long before Rob’s morning visit, had a video attachment of the ritual slaughter of a lamb by Hindu Muslims. Accompanying the attachment were the simple words, “There will be consequences.”
Kate always gave the impression of being as organized as a Filofax, and beneath whatever conversation she was able to make just then she was surely already calculating the percentages and working up a plan. As she got out of bed, that plan was already in place. In the summer heat, she slept without clothes, and the first part of her plan would have been to face Rob with the full-frontal effect of her nudity.
What was running through his mind just then as she came toward him, unafraid? What was he thinking as he looked into the eyes of the woman who had dropped him hard, grown successful and then stomped on the hurt by hooking up with the man who’d helped make her famous? In the tragedy of what followed, I think all of us were struck by the fact that no one ever talked about how much he loved her through it all; no one spoke about how deeply attached to her he was, or how he began to feel himself literally shrinking as her literary celebrity began to grow. Artists live powerfully in their own imaginations
and sometimes have problems believing they actually exist. Most likely, as she grew more concretely successful, Rob felt himself becoming ever more physically insubstantial. Mostly likely, as he lay in his miserable Chinatown apartment day after day, hemmed in by four walls and the crash of the crazy city traffic, he felt himself leaving his own body inch by inch, dematerializing from the floor up. By this logic, he was finally driven less by the desire for vengeance than to save himself from quite literally disappearing off the earth.
He stood in front of her, blinking rapidly—a habit of his from childhood when under stress. It was 7:14
A.M
. Three minutes had elapsed since his arrival. An elderly Hungarian woman, Mrs. Halasz, lived below. She testified that while sitting in her housecoat waiting for the coffee to brew, she’d heard heavy feet on the stairs, and then the squeaking of the joists in her ceiling, followed by silence. This was soon interrupted by the sudden squealing of chairs on the kitchen floor.
Something strange was happening. Having in the interim donned a cotton robe, Kate was sitting down at the kitchen table, and Rob was sitting across from her. Two cups of half-drunk coffee were later found. The logical deduction is that Kate had apparently gotten up to make them, and then sat down again.
Probably by now she had begun to relax somewhat. The sun was out, the day was brightening, and in the little yellow dell of the kitchen, a certain kind of cheer reigned. A radio, tuned to a classical station, now popped on automatically, as it did each morning at 7:15
A.M
. At that particular hour of that particular day we know that
Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto was playing. As the violins fiddled and rose and fell in emulation of the sound of the ocean, she sipped her coffee and watched for cues that would tell her what to do next. Below the comforting burr of her own voice as she spoke to Rob she was likely looking around the room, sizing it up for its lethal potential, perhaps considering the heavy ceramic mug on the table in front of her. In the right hands, after all, a kitchen is a nest of glittering weapons. But for the moment, at least, she did nothing.
Somewhere between the first and second cups of coffee, Rob laid out
his
plan. In his backpack he had brought a large blue-cloth ringed binder, one of those notebooks of grade school. It was filled with his slanting windblown penmanship, the words set down as if they might at any moment scatter in a gust of feeling. The notebook was labeled simply “You” and was authored by “Me.” A star piece of evidence at the trial, exhibited in a cloudy plastic bag, the binder was more than three inches thick.
It was an almanac of crazed obsession. Some of us took to calling it “the Fatal Valentine.” There were five pages of nicknames. There were four pages of anagrams of the words “Kate Pierce I love you.” In a separate section entitled The Truth there were pages upon pages describing her face, at rest, when smiling, in orgasm, and a series of caressing sketches of individual features—the “auburn chutes” and “gorgeous proteinic swirls,” of her hair, the “petty crimes” of her shoulders. Employing all his art with words, he’d drawn the moment of their first meeting in prose, haloing it with foreknowledge on both their parts. He’d transfigured their two difficult years together
in Manhattan as “a glide in the park,” and elevated their down-at-heels apartment into a “pagan temple of shabby chic.”
Mrs. Halasz testified that for a good long time she heard a “singsong” sound coming from the floor above, and at least initially, we were mystified by what this might refer to. But then it slowly dawned on all of us. The old lady was overhearing the sound of Rob reading out loud. She was witnessing Rob using his literary gift to try to drill through the retaining wall of a woman’s heart.
O
N THE DAY OF MY APPOINTMENT WITH
Belinda, I was both sad and excited. I had e-mailed the office upon awakening that I’d be late that day for medical reasons, and had come down to breakfast in a good mood. But the atmosphere of the kitchen that morning was in the nature of a major reality check. Things weren’t simply hostile. Things, rather, were deeply and seemingly irrevocably sedimented with resentment. There was a long silence in the room as I stared at the soggy archipelago of my raisin bran, suddenly fatigued and feeling the house at that moment seeming to weigh on me with its literal downward pressure of three repeating floors of furniture, rugs, bedding and clothes. I slumped in my chair. The silence lengthened. With startling autonomy, a car drove by on the street outside. When I raised my eyes, Lucy was looking at me from the sink.
“What?” I asked quietly.
“Oh, please,” she said, and then turned away.
What I would have loved, just then, was to be extraordinarily busy. I would have loved to be under the tearing pressure of deadlines, throwing up great clouds of vocational guy-dust while shooting away in a roar of career wheel spin.
Instead, still in my undershirt, I watched her back as she puttered around the kitchen a moment, cleaning up. When she’s angry, her torso becomes unnaturally rigid, and she seems to be made of two people, the upper part spearing stiffly upward, the lower part still lithe and desirable. I gazed at this fantastical figure, this wifely hippogriff, while finishing my cereal in silence (the boys had already left for school). Then I came to the decision that, though defeated by Lucy’s recent refusal to engage, I would give it another shot. I got up, pushing my chair back with a loud squeal.
“They’re forecasting an unseasonably warm day today,” I said in my most affable voice. “Why don’t we do something with the kids when I get home from work?”
“Well,” she said to the sink, still keeping her back to me, “I can think of at least two reasons.”
I crossed the room and went up behind her.
“Come on,” I said softly, “this is crazy, honey. Lighten up.”
“Why?” she asked the sink.
“You know why.”
“No I don’t.”
“Because”—I waved my hands in the air, unseen by her—“there’s nothing there.”
She whirled around to face me, and put her hands on her hips.
“Nothing where?” she asked.
“Nothing between me and Belinda Castor,” I said.
“Oh, Nick,” she said, “Nick, my darling husband.” She smiled pleasantly as she turned back to the sink. “Where was I exactly when you became so utterly full of shit?”
“She’s an old friend, and that’s all,” I said, determined to ignore the provocation. “And you know how I’ve been lately, since everything that happened”—I waved my hands again—“with Rob. It’s like, she’s the only link in the world left back to the guy and I need to go there.”
“She’s my enemy,” she said firmly, salting a sponge with Ajax. “And once upon a time that would have been enough for you.”
I stared at the place where her hair began on the thrillingly long stalk of her neck and felt my heart begin to pound for reasons I couldn’t understand. I massaged my forehead.
“Number one, that’s ridiculous,” I said, “And number two, I know she’s not your favorite person, but I need to see her for me,
me
”—I raised my voice—“
I
need to see her, honey. This is exactly the kind of thing that will bring me some closure. And maybe the only thing.”
“Closure?”
She’d whirled around to face me again, and spoke slowly and loudly, as if rage had made her hard of hearing. “He was someone you knew from about a hundred years ago, Nick. We’re not talking about a parent here. We’re talking some circle-jerk buddy from childhood. I mean, look”—her shoulders suddenly fell—“sweetie, I know it hurt you that he died. It hurt me too, but just how pathetic is it that you’re still whacked out about it, months later, and that you’re going sniffing around his
totally
unstable sister to boot?”
“I’m not sniffing around her,” I said, trying to kill the wobble in my voice. “She called. I called back. I’m going to see her for a couple hours. And by the way, I don’t care if it seems pathetic. Pathetic is for other people. What
I’m
telling you is that I need to do this, that it’s important to me, and that while I understand your dislike of the woman, I simply don’t think it worth getting into a major meltdown over.”
“And what I’m telling you,” she responded instantly, “is that you’re stealing from this marriage to ser vice some Tom Sawyer fantasy about your past that never existed.”
“Is that really for you to judge?” I asked.
She gave a short, bitter laugh. “Uh, yes,” she said, turning to go, “it is.” She started up the stairs, and after mounting two of them, stopped and turned back to where I still stood, my hands uneasily in my pockets, shaking my head at no one in particular.
“You’re blowing it,” she said, “you’re blowing it, Nick, and you’re gonna regret it.” Another two stomps up the steps. “And remember to take out the recyclables today—it’s paper day.” A receding series of thumps as she stomped down the hall. “No, plastic, sorry,” came the voice, trailing off as it entered the bedroom and was end-stopped, a moment later, by the sound of the door being slammed.
I got in the car in a strange, whirling mood of exhilaration and despair. Belinda had requested that I simply meet her at the storage facility rather than a coffee shop, and as I drove there, I found myself stabbing the gas and the brake, taking corners on the edge of traction, and arriving at the battered front office in a rush of slurring gravel. This was not eagerness; it was the familiar expedient of
scapegoating the nearest thing at hand. When younger, a chain of broken toys, then busted go-karts, had performed the same ser vice. I slammed the car door hard and then entered the office. The desk clerk told me that Belinda hadn’t yet arrived, and I settled down to wait.
A quarter hour of paging through old
Newsweek
s, and I heard the snoring sound of a far-off car with a broken muffler. Presently this grew in volume to a roar, and preceded the arrival of a small dusty truck, which bounced over the rutted gravel of the parking lot and slewed to a stop. The shape of the driver’s head told me it was her immediately. The truck door popped open, and as she got out, I received the strange impression of a person blurred by time but still instantly recognizable. Dressed in black and wearing a black bandanna pirate style on her head, she looked cute, big nosed, tired and definitely heavier than I remembered.
Belinda entered with a self-important rustle of clothes, and went up to the counter, not seeing me where I sat watching her over my magazine. In her low voice she gave the clerk her name and asked for the keys to a certain locker. While she waited, I stood up, fighting nerves, and went over and introduced myself. I had forgotten how intensely blue—like Rob’s—were her eyes. Nearly instantly a shocked smile spread across her face. “Good lord!” she cried. “Have you been here the whole time? You look great. How are you, friend?”
“I’m fine, fine, Belinda. And what a—how nice it is to see you.”
After a moment’s hesitation, she leaned forward, delicately for a big girl, and put out her cheek to be kissed.
As I kissed her back, I was reached by a faint scent, a mix of female odors and long travel in a closed car, which I found oddly stimulating. Uncertain what to do suddenly, I coughed into a fist.
“And so?” she cried in a throaty voice.
“Ma’am?” The clerk, having waited for a lull, chose this moment to speak. “Would you sign this, please?”
She was still smiling as she reached down and doodled her signature, and then turned back to me.
“I’m stunned by how good you look, first of all,” she said, and laughed again, with a big depth of lungs in the sound, in a way that reminded you, whether you liked it or not, of the power of her body.
Laughing along with her, and a bit struck by how unbereaved she seemed, I told her that marriage with kids meant no late nights and merely an occasional glass of wine, and the truth was that being bored was the best fountain of youth known to man. I found myself settling easily into this mode of deprecation of the thing—my marriage—I’d spent years painstakingly building from the ground up. She laughed again, holding my eye, and asked if I’d accompany her to her shed. We left the building, and as she walked to her pickup truck, she cast her eye at my dusty Chevy Suburban.
“Wow,” she said, hopping into her truck, slamming her door behind her, and then leaning out the window, cheerful, “is that thing big enough for you?”
A minute later, we were pulling into parking places, and then she was getting out and standing a moment stretching while holding one hand in the small of her back. “Oh, these old bones,” she said, and I laughed as I watched her
lifted throat, creamy like a splash of milk against the black fabric, floating over the bending front of her body. She’d always been unembarrassed about her body, and I told myself, standing in front of her and having no choice but to look on as she flexed and groaned, cracking, that I now understood that perhaps she wasn’t loose at all but rather simply indifferent to other people’s opinions, and that this had been misinterpreted by the uptight high school tribes. Maybe I was simply guilty for how we’d first sawed at each other during that hot, throbbing summer of those many years ago, but I enjoyed reinterpreting her previous reputation in this new light. It made me feel good inside.
“You okay, Rollo?”
She was looking at me closely. Rollo was her pet name for me.
“Me?” I said. “I’m great, B. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t
very
happy to see you, but I’m fine.”
“Me too. I only ask because you’re looking a little pale there,” she said, and yawned with a waft of stale bacterial breath. “Whaddya say we check out the storage?”
We shrugged open the garage door to the unit, and then poked around amid the old piles of furniture, and the tarped-over mysterious lumps and the things tied with batlike folds of fabric. “I didn’t know Dracula lived this far north,” I said, clearing the way.
She laughed.
“Speaking of which, I recently saw your mom on a condolence call.” I hefted a large dusty candelabra that looked like a huge knobbed hand and examined it. “Her house is kinda dark, you could say.”
“Dark? The woman lives like a refugee in her own home.
Once or twice a year I whisper the phrase ‘managed care’ in her ear and she doesn’t talk to me for a month. Lemme guess, she was blotto.”
“Uh, yes she was, I’m afraid.”
She shook her head to herself and sighed. “It’s hard to get her to stop the one thing left that gives her any pleasure. I really do appreciate you going, Nick. You always were the little gentleman”—she picked up an antique iron and blew dust off it—“and I’m sure it meant a lot. Do you think this thing is worth something?”
Looking at her, delighted with the quick pivots of her conversation—her speech rhythms were clearly those of someone who’d spent years away from Monarch—I told her that there was a new antiques store in town, and maybe she could get it evaluated there. She said nothing, and into that silence I suddenly found myself talking rapidly, for some reason. I could feel the cursive shapes my lips and mouth made as I gave a little speech about how the town had changed, and how the people had changed with it, and about the new crop of parents, of which I was one. I could hear myself babbling on robotically about the real but difficult satisfactions of home life, and how, though for a while things had been rocky between Lucy and me, we seemed to have found our own real if somewhat fragile peace. I liked that peace, I said, lying. Belinda wasn’t speaking back. She seemed instead to be wholly absorbed in staring at her iron. Finally she put the iron down.
“Come here,” she said, and when I took a step forward, still talking, she bent over and kissed me on the mouth. Her lips were covered with a faintly waxy paste that tasted
of synthetic fruit, but behind that was a deep, roused plumpness that dropped through my body in a hot curtain. The arches of my feet curled.
“Relax,” she said softly.
I was too flustered to speak for a moment.
“You’re with an old friend who knows you very well. I don’t need the blow-by-blow of the last ten years. It means a lot that you came to see me today, Nicky. It’s important for me and I thank you for it.”
I looked at her, feeling static and suddenly expanded within at the same time. It was one of those bell-timbre moments. I think I began smiling stupidly.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
She laughed at me, but gently, and in a way that was so familiar to me it was like a touch upon the foundations of my own soul. Even the silence that followed seemed familiar. During that special high school summer twenty years earlier, we’d been apprentice dharma bums together, transported by the dreamy mumblings of Carlos Castaneda to a place where we found the quiet itself a fraught, richly communicating thing. If we listened carefully enough, we were certain that the distances had a hiss; that trees sighed, even on windless days; that clouds breathed their way backward across the sky. In that bell jar of sacred silence, we slowly took off each other’s clothes, and fucked votively, struck dumb with reverence for the way quiet seemed naturally to gather around our moving bodies. I couldn’t help smiling as I remembered the innocence of that summer, and the way we dressed throbbing desire in high-toned sentiments. Later, after college, it would all become much easier. I lifted my eyes and looked at her. A wall of ancient
feeling stood between us in the dusty air of the shed. She leaned forward through the wall and threaded her fingers into mine.
“This is nice,” she said quietly.
“Yes it is.”
We looked away from each other, both embarrassed, I think, by the sudden surge of feeling, and then she gently unlaced her hand from mine, and we continued to move through the things, but more quietly, she sorting what she didn’t want into one pile of junk, and taking those few pieces—an antique sconce, some candlesticks, a beautiful pewter serving set—she did. After about half an hour, we were done.
