Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) (13 page)

“The one time she came over after Sandrine's death, right?” Morty asked. “That's the time we're talking about?”

“Yes.”

“And other than that last encounter, you'd had nothing to do with her for almost a year before your wife's death?”

“Nothing.”

Morty had now fully taken on the role of Mr. Singleton, who would soon be my relentless cross-examiner.

“Now, Sam, by ‘nothing,' I am to conclude that you have not seen this woman, nor written to her, nor called her, correct?”

“Correct,” I answered.

“You understand that the state can present a case for dual motives,” Morty said. “Or should I say interlocking motives, one reason egging on another, that sort of thing, until . . . I'm sure you get the picture.”

We'd been over this many times, and so with confidence I answered, “Yes, I get the picture.”

“One of them he can never prove, of course,” Morty assured me. “By that I mean you wanted to get rid of your wife because she was going to get more and more dependent upon you, and you wanted to escape that burden and get on with your life.” He paused, then added, “The
other
motive is April.”

It struck me that April had always been “the other,” the one passed over or discarded, whose feelings were not considered and whose loss of dignity had never mattered to anyone save to her husband, poor cuckolded Clayton.

“April is the ‘other woman,' after all,” Morty added.

The “other woman” is a label that could not possibly have seemed less fitting to this gossamer ghost of a woman, but the web of life entangles us all, and it had now ensnared April, who, by the time of Sandrine's death, had certainly felt herself well beyond the reach of so catastrophic a scandal.

Even I had expected that she would escape notice, no matter what inquiry might be made into the manner of Sandrine's death. It had been a tepid, short-lived affair, with little excitement and no love at all, cheap and tawdry, as bland as the rooms in which we'd met on those listless afternoons. April's last words to me had perfectly summed up the lackluster nature of our trysts. “I can never let myself go, Sam,” she'd said with a shrug as she got into her car. “What can you do, if you just can never let yourself go?”

Other than the time she'd showed up at my door, I'd last seen April about a month or so after learning of Sandrine's illness. She'd been standing outside Waylon's drugstore as I'd driven by. She'd been wearing the same blue dress and digging into the same black purse from which, on our first rendezvous, she'd shyly withdrawn a pack of condoms.

I'd pressed down on the accelerator and the car bolted ahead. I'd been terrified she might glance up as I sped away, but in my rearview mirror I'd seen that she was still rifling through her purse. I made it to the corner and was rounding it when she finally lifted her head, but she was still close enough for me to see that it was her car keys she'd been looking for, a blue Toyota that was already three years old when I met her, a car a lot like April, made for routine chores. That she'd ended up in a cheap romance with one of her husband's colleagues could not have surprised her more, though I think she might have taken some fleeting plain Jane pride in bedding the man who was bedding the far—from every point of view—more desirable Sandrine. You could be with her, she'd asked with every awkward, self-demeaning glance, so why are you with me?

I had not once, either before or after this ridiculous affair, been able to answer that question in any way different from the way Sandrine had answered it with regard to her own father's serial philandering with a series of increasingly unattractive coeds:
it doesn't take much to fill a hollow man.

“It was nothing, Morty,” I blurted. “That thing with April. It was never love. It was never anything.”

“It doesn't matter,” Morty interrupted by way of dismissing any further discussion of April's complete innocence in regard to my current situation. “The point will be for the jury to think you're a shit.”

An opinion Mr. Singleton will no doubt harden into utter ire, I thought.

“Ruth made us a couple of tuna sandwiches,” Morty said casually as he took a paper bag from his briefcase. “No mayo on mine.” He laughed. “For obvious reasons. But I think she put a little on yours.” He handed me one of the sandwiches. It was wrapped very neatly in tinfoil.

“Singleton still hasn't exploded those bombs from the pathologist's report,” he added. “I thought he might take Dr. Ortins through some of those troubling details, but other than the business of that back injury the state has decided to hold fire.”

“Singleton's like some hack mystery writer, isn't he?” I asked. “He can choose whomever he wants to narrate his story.”

Morty took a bite from his sandwich.

“He'll probably pick Alabrandi to do the heavy lifting,” he said. “He was the lead detective on the case, after all, and besides a cop is always a good choice.”

“Why?”

“Because the jury is likely to have heard cop narratives before,” Morty answered. “They read those books you just mentioned. Cop books. Mysteries. Whatever you call them. And in those books, cops are often the ones telling the story, right?”

“I wouldn't know,” I told him.

Morty laughed but it was an edgy laugh. “Just don't let the jury know you turn up your nose at their reading material, okay, Sam?” He went back to his sandwich, took a large bit, and chewed slowly. “Anyway, my guess is that Alabrandi will be on the stand for a very long time. He'll probably tell us everything the pathologist didn't with regard to your wife.”

After that, we ate more or less silently, then I walked over to one of the long benches and lay down. There were still a few minutes before my trial resumed, and for the past two days I'd been plagued by a lingering weariness, along with a curious indifference to the books and music that had once formed the pillars of my inner life. I hadn't been able to think as quickly as I once had, either, and yet I'd come to feel that my thinking was growing deeper and more curiously seeded with poignant memories. One thing was certain, things that once mattered no longer did and in their vanishing they'd created more space in my mind. It was strange that by radically confining my life, Sandrine's death, along with its dire consequences, had in some way expanded my consideration of it.

“Yeah, good, take a nap,” Morty advised. “You need to look rested.”

I closed my eyes and, as always, I thought of Sandrine.

It had been a few weeks after her fateful consultation with Dr. Ortins. She had continued to teach, but the terrible news had been steadily sinking into her, the dreadful facts of her disease. We were sitting in the scriptorium. The first chill of autumn was in the air, and there was a small fire crackling. Sandrine was in the big, overstuffed chair, a checkered blanket over her legs, reading. I was on the sofa, doing the same.

Suddenly the book slipped from her hand, but rather than reach for it she simply stared at it a moment, then looked at me. “I've been thinking of my first published article.”

It had been written not long after she'd graduated from the Sorbonne, and she hadn't spoken of it since.

“The one on Blanche Monnier,” she added softly. “You remember?”

“Yes.”

On the morning of May 22, 1901, an anonymous letter had arrived at the police station in Poitiers, a small town in west central France. The letter advised the authorities that a woman was being kept against her will at 21 rue de la Visitation. According to the letter, she had been locked in a room, half starved and living in her own filth, for the past thirty-five years.

The following afternoon, police arrived at this address and demanded admittance. After some resistance, they entered the house, searched it, and on the top floor found Blanche Monnier. She was fifty-two, and she had been imprisoned in this room, sleeping on a putrid mattress, since the age of eighteen.

In her article on the case, Sandrine had written with particular reference to Blanche's mother, the aristocratic Madame Monnier, her determination to prevent her wayward daughter from marrying the penniless suitor with whom Blanche had fallen in love. Sandrine had seen it all from a feminist perspective, of course, Madame Monnier almost as much a victim of patriarchy as the daughter she had imprisoned, an approach that made her article seem terribly dated now, a piece of work that would be remembered, if at all, only by way of a time capsule.

I didn't say any of this to Sandrine, of course.

“Why would you be thinking of Blanche Monnier?” I asked.

“Actually, I wasn't thinking of her,” Sandrine answered. “I just happened to remember that André Gide wrote about her case, and that got me to thinking about how he once told someone that the tragedies of life amused him.” Her gaze was quite penetrating. “Not that they moved or tormented him. Not that they broke his heart but simply that they amused him.”

“What interests you about that?” I asked.

A smile struggled onto her lips, then withered. “His heartlessness.”

“What about it?”

“I was wondering if there would have been any way back for him,” she answered.

“Back to what?”

“Back to feeling something for people,” Sandrine said. “Particularly people who are in trouble or who aren't very smart.”

With that, she'd risen, drawn the robe more tightly around her body, then walked out of the scriptorium and into the kitchen, where I'd found her later sitting alone at the little table that looked out onto the backyard.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“I'm afraid, Sam.”

“Of course, you are,” I said.

As she continued to look at me, her gaze took on an aspect of terror, and though she'd never said it I realized that it was me she feared, something in me.

What could she possibly have glimpsed in my eyes that had frightened her so, I wondered now. Was it something that had alerted her to my own dark thoughts so that she'd known at that horrible instant that the first of the state's perceived motives had been by far the most powerful one, that even then, weeks before her death, I'd been thinking grimly of what was to come, how the house would eventually be converted into a hospital room, everything shoved over to make way for a metal bed, for aluminum stands hung with transparent plastic bags, this house become a place of tubes and drips, the toilet fitted with a raised seat, every available surface covered with medicines, rubber gloves, tissues, cotton balls, plastic drinking bottles sprouting plastic straws, the whole horrid sprawl of invalidism. And not just invalidism, but a horribly protracted death that would stretch into the indefinite future, a death not in one month or two or even three but one that might go on and on, with the whole process of dying getting worse every single day for years and years and years.

Sunday.

Tomorrow.

All day.

A voice finally broke the silence that had descended upon me in the wake of this chilling recollection. It was Morty's.

“Wake up, buddy.”

I opened my eyes.

“Yeah, okay,” I muttered.

Morty's expression alerted me to the fact that he had glimpsed something he didn't like. “You all right?”

“I'm fine,” I said crisply.

But I was not, because my mind had returned to an earlier vision, Sandrine seated in the scriptorium, looking oddly like the invalid she was doomed to become, her legs wrapped in a woolen blanket, her eyes fearfully in contemplation of her own frightful future, one I knew I was destined to share. Was that the first time I'd asked myself in dreadful, scheming earnest: Is there a way out of this?

I looked at Morty and was relieved that he'd seen little or nothing on my face of what was in my mind. Luckily, he'd been too busy lifting his own enormous frame from the chair.

“Show time,” he said once on his feet, then added, “Jesus, I have got to lose some weight.”

Call Gerald Wayland

I had known Gerry Wayland for almost twenty years, though only as the pharmacist who filled our prescriptions. In his friendly manner, he'd dispensed the usual warnings and advisories. Take this before meals; take that after them. This pill is sleep inducing, that one may cause agitation. Either entirely dutiful or absurdly literal, Gerry had even occasionally warned against our operating heavy equipment. But other than this comic observation what did I know of Gerry Wayland, despite the many years I'd “known” him?

Not much, really.

I knew that he was married and had two children, both of whom had graduated college and now lived in distant cities. I knew that his wife was bowling ball round and cherubic, wore big hats, had enormous, pendulous breasts, and had once owned a children's clothing store. In one of the few conversations I'd had with Gerry, he lamented that his wife's business had been “murdered” by Walmart. This was the only killing I had ever heard him mention, so it struck me as ironic that the wheel of circumstance had brought him here to give testimony concerning a crime he could not possibly have imagined before I was accused of it.

As Gerry lifted his right hand and swore to tell the whole truth and nothing but, I noticed how nervous he was. Clearly he hadn't wanted to be here. He'd always seemed a somewhat shy man, and so I suspected that he found the all too public role he had to play in my case faintly distasteful. For that reason, he would no doubt go about it like the guy who straightens the sheet after the actors have left the set of a pornographic movie, that is to say, at arm's length. Without question he had every reason to consider his testimony of little relevance, though Mr. Singleton had surely given him a clear idea of the piece he had been called to add to the puzzle of my crime. I was sure he would give this evidence quickly and matter of factly, then return to the clean, well-lit pharmacy where substances are less volatile and their side effects both better known and better controlled.