The Confession (14 page)

“Look what we have here.”

The cop’s voice was dark and ugly. I scanned the crowd. It took me an instant, but then I saw Minor Robinson in the foray below us, his gaze sweeping the room with that same steadiness it swept the courtroom. Behind him, a step away, stood Elizabeth. Her dress was flame blue. She lit up the place, and I felt a confusion in my chest.

Milofski grunted, a guttural noise like an elbow in the side, full of insinuating pleasure.

He knew the gossip, too. They all did.

Minor bent toward my wife, fondling her obsequiously, touching her elbow. He ran his fingers down her sleeve, bending to listen to a little something she had to say, a request; then he folded into the crowd, leaving Elizabeth alone in her blue dress. I took advantage of the opportunity and headed across the floor.

“Elizabeth,” I said. My voice startled us both. It had a brute edge I had not intended, but the edge was there nonetheless. “What’s going on?”

“I was invited to this party. So I came.”

“You got yourself a date, I see.”

“I didn’t come with Minor.” She held her features in profile, aloof. Her face had an otherworldly paleness and her Ups were pink and her dress had buttons up the front, from the hem to the neckline. The buttons at the collar were undone, almost immodestly, so you could see her long neck, her breast line, and a hint of lace, too, on the camisole beneath.

“You walked in together.”

“We ran into each other, in the parking lot.”

She was lying, I thought. I could see the care with which she had prepared herself. Even so I felt the underlying pull between us. Her glance met mine, faltered. She reddened, breaking into an ungainly blush.

“Let’s go outside.”

“I don’t think so.”

“We can talk. Seize the moment.”

“This isn’t the place, or the time.”

Across the room, I glimpsed Minor threading through the crowd, a drink in each hand. I took Elizabeth by the forearm.

“No.”

I didn’t listen. The room shimmered once again, and for a moment I was a man in a tunnel inside another tunnel, just emerging, squinting into the light. Elizabeth splayed her fingers against my chest.

“No!”

A hush rippled through the people nearby and I felt their eyes on me. I smiled, a wide smile, directed at no one in particular. My face burned. If I had left then, everything that followed that evening might have been avoided, but the entrance was knotted with people and Minor was almost upon us. So I went back the direction I had come, through the large French doors onto the terrace. Outside the jazz quartet had begun to play. The torchlight glistened on the pool. The Tiki hut had lost its artificial look and the band was playing a Chet Baker number, an instrumental that gave you the feeling as if you were floating on a glass ship over a blackening sea.

Sara.

She stood facing the bandstand, alone, all in white, a drink in her hand. A young man watched her from across the pool. In another moment, she would not be alone. The young man would saunter up to her, ask her to dance. I would lose everything.

“Dance?”

“What about your wife?”

“We’re not together.”

“I saw her.”

“She’s with someone else.”

“So you’ll settle for me?”

Sara gave me a smile, a wan turn of the lips that said she, too, wanted to tell me to go away—that she didn’t like the way I’d treated her, ignoring her calls—but she wasn’t quite able to say so, didn’t quite mean it. Instead she placed one hand on my back, the other on my waist while I pressed her close, and we slid together across the dance floor. We did a couple numbers like this, Sara’s cheek soft against mine.

“I have something to tell you.” Her eyes were sad now, guilty looking, and this new sadness confused me.

“Now?”

“Yes.”

We stopped dancing and went across the lawn toward an arbor near the garage. A white roadster stood slouched underneath the trellis, an old car, a convertible. I glanced back through the arbor to the lighted house and saw people moving inside, dancing, gliding about like figures in a dream. Then we leaned side by side against the convertible. It was a warm evening, and I took my tie off, draping it across the front fender.

“Things have changed for me, since the last time I talked to you.”

“Things have changed for me, too.”

“Bill, my boyfriend—he’s in Santa Barbara. His father died.”

“That’s too bad.”

“It was unexpected. Or he would have been here, too.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“We’re getting married,” Sara said.

“Congratulations.”

She started to cry a little bit. I put my arms around her and she buried her head in the hollow of my shoulder. I patted her back, and at the same time felt her chest against mine, and then I started to kiss her in a manner that was not at all platonic—but rough and wanton, full of desire.

Sara responded at first. Then she pulled away.

“I can’t hurt him,” she said. “Not again. Not after what I put him through already. I told him we were finished once, and I can’t do it again. There’s this thing inside me, my heart, my soul, I don’t know what you call it, but it’s divided. Split in two. Part of me wants to be good, wholesome. The other part . . .”

I kissed her again. I pushed her against the convertible.

“I shouldn’t do this.”

I slid my leg between hers, into the warm space between her thighs. One of my hands was under her blouse, the other up her dress. She wore white tights and I ran my hand up and down her legs, and her hips began to move despite herself.

“Oh, Jake. I don’t know.”

I had her down on the trunk now. She was splayed out like a star. I started to slide her tights down, and she held me fiercely. She was shaking. I ran a hand through her hair, trying to steady her. One of her earrings came off in my hand.

I put my lips over hers. I thought of Minor. I wanted to swallow her, to eat her whole. I thought of Elizabeth and the light in her eye. Sara pushed against me, thrashing now, panicky.

“Oh, Jake. No. I can’t do this again.”

I let her up. She ran across the lawn.

“Sara!”

I called after her but she kept going, a white figure disappearing into the blackness under the eucalyptus trees.

I followed, tucking my shirt as I went, putting myself together. As I crossed the lawn, I noticed two figures watching from the side patio. I wondered what kind of picture we might cut, Sara and I, and what these onlookers might think. I slowed down, walking now, and I realized who the two men were. Minor Robinson and Milofski the cop.

By the time I reached the front terrace, Sara stood talking to the attendant, asking for her car. I hung back. I did not want to make a scene. Once she had driven away, I came onto the terrace myself and asked the attendant to retrieve my car as well. Meanwhile Mrs. Wilder and some of the others loitered nearby half-crocked. They made a noise like birds tittering, flying in circles around an abandoned nest.

“Leaving so soon?” she asked

“Work in the morning.”

“On Sunday?”

“The Lord’s work,” I said.

This got laughs all around. Then the attendant appeared with my car and Lady Wilder indulged the prerogative of every drunken hostess, saying good-bye forever, touching me more than might otherwise be allowable, running her fingers down the front of my shirt. (For a second, maybe, I closed my eyes, feeling her fingers touch my chest, and in that instant I imagined myself driving down the streets, “Where’s your tie?” she asked, and I heard myself mutter something back, I don’t know what, and she laughed, but I was not there, I was driving down the illuminated streets, and everything—the houses, the cars, the trees—they were all etched in a glowing, ethereal light, an aura—and I was headed deeper down those streets, deeper into myself.) Lady Wilder gave me a proper kiss then, sexless and gray, and I drove off. I headed for Sausalito, gliding over the same dark avenues I’d imagined just the moment before, illuminated now by the haze of the arc lamps overhead, by passing cars and the moon up there somewhere, glowing behind a cloud. I parked on a side street and walked up the back alley to Saras kitchen. I knocked.

Sara opened the door, just a crack. The apartment was dark behind her.

“No, Jake.”

“Would you like a drink?”

She hesitated. I could see the sadness in her eyes, the desire, and beneath them both a shadow, something she herself could not quite put a name to.

“Just one more time?” I asked.

Sara let me in, and I embraced her, and her body opened around me like a flower, there in the kitchen, and for a little while nothing else mattered anymore. I lost myself, there in the dark, and those moments, our last together, were as fierce and beautiful and pleasurable as any I have ever known.

Then the next day, in the early afternoon, the police came to me with the news that Sara was dead.

What is the nature of memory? Chemical impulses, stored in the brain, like images on tape. Or something else, the soul maybe, examining the essence of existence. In many ways, I suppose, this is the riddle of life.
Who am I?
Why are some events replayed so vividly in our imagination, while others disappear as if they never occurred? Psychologists used to believe every instant of our lives was stored in our consciousness, waiting to be recalled. Nowadays there are different theories. We remember only in fragments, and fill in the gaps. So the self-fashions its memories according to its current needs, and this process is ongoing.

Myself, I remember most vividly how I climbed over Sara in the dark, in her bedroom, and left her apartment as quietly as I was able. I had fallen asleep next to her on the bed, and I could still smell her on my body as I stepped outside. A car rolled by on a nearby street—I saw its headlights at the intersection, a sedan, there a minute, then gone—and I smoked a cigarette. I didn’t smoke them often, but her boyfriend had left a pack behind. So I sat on the stoop, smoking, listening to the early morning sounds. I felt reconstituted, all the anger and confusion gone, everything back in place the way it should be, as if something had been set right inside me—all the parts aligned.

I got up to leave. I walked down the alley.

Did I hear footsteps then, an echo on the concrete, going up the way I’d just departed? Or was this something my imagination came up with later, a new detail, a brush stroke, an embellishment?

I awoke mid-morning, coming up out of the black heart of sleep with the same feeling of refreshment.

Things were going to be all right.

I went about my trailer and put things in order. I hung up my jacket, patting the pockets, and there I found Sara’s earring, the one that had come loose in my hands the night before, out under the arbor. I placed it on the counter, then changed into my clothes for the new day.

I started to think about what I might do with my life.

I went to the gym. I did some chest presses, some leg pulls. Sit-ups and squats. I stared lazily around the room. A woman in gray spandex, dyed blonde, gazing ceilingward as she worked the treadmill. A brunette in blue, breasts taut beneath her polo shirt. A redhead on her way to the parking lot, to her Jag with the personalized plates.

For me, it would be time to hit the tennis courts soon. Maybe not here. Maui, I thought. Or the Virgin Islands. Or maybe I would go the other direction, deep into the heartland.

Studious shrink. Playboy. Man of contradictions—even I sometimes could not bridge the gap.

Back in my trailer I went through my box of keepsakes. Little things. Jewelry, photos. Remembrances of my first wife. Other women. Sara’s earring lay still on the counter. It was over between us. The way we had made love last night, we were like people in the throes of a fever, but that fever had broken. She would not betray her fiance again.

I dropped her earring into the box, fastened the lock, put it under my arm. I grabbed a clam shovel and headed out towards the bay.

As a psychologist, I know the importance of ritual. When we move from one season to the next, it is necessary to mark the changes. That’s what I was doing then, walking through the high reeds along the Corte Madera marsh. I followed the path along an abandoned quay, where I could see San Quentin—with its grim, carnival towers, its stone walls and concertina wire.

I followed the spit out a little further, then went down the marsh bank to a high-water post. The water didn’t come in this far anymore, not since they’d built the levee, and the ground here was dry. I dug a hole. My ritual. The box. Covered with dirt.

I was done with the past.

Elizabeth . . .

I was not ready to let her go. I had put nothing of hers in the box. Even so, the box was under. I patted the dirt. There are some things we never let loose. The seagulls squawked. The pigeons squalled and scattered as I turned down the path.

As I approached the trailer, I saw a black Caprice parked in front. Minor Robinson leaned against the grill, arms akimbo, watching me approach, his jacket open to the wind. (I thought again of the night before, the car at the head of the alley, the footsteps.) He had come to talk to me about Elizabeth, I guessed, to duke it out, cowboy style, because he wanted her for his own. Then Milofski appeared in the doorway of my trailer, stepping out from within.