The Confession (26 page)

Some people are cursed. There are people whom the devil follows. Given all that has happened, I suppose it is inevitable that certain rumors would circulate. That these rumors would say I was the unidentified man. The one people saw in the darkness that day, on the waterfront, up there on the sand on Tomales.

The truth is, I had resettled long before her disappearance. I lived an itinerant life for a while, I admit. I changed my name, my looks. I took up residence in old hotels, but eventually I found a new life, in a new town. I pulled myself together.

For obvious reasons, I cannot tell you the name of that town. I do not want my alleged crimes to haunt me. I can tell you, though, that in many ways—the most important ways, perhaps—the place where I live now is not so far from where I lived before. I can create for you the general shape of my life now, the truth of things, even if in the interest of this truth there are certain details I must alter. Such is often the way with truth. The facts are not wide enough to contain it.

I don’t think I risk my identity too much if I tell you I am remarried. In the town where I am living, there is a college nearby. I have found myself a new career, lecturing to students, undergraduates in the field of psychology. I have always been able to speak well, and though I started out as an adjunct, it wasn’t too long before I had earned myself a small place on the faculty here. I should tell you, too, that the years have not been unkind to me. I am a decade older—and I have thickened as men do—but though my face carries the marks of its hardship, it carries, too, the look of experience. I have grown into my new role, taking on the look of a college professor, with my jacket, my glasses and my well-trimmed beard.

I still, sometimes, wear my hair in a pony.

I have stepped into my new life as onto a stage, I admit, but I enjoy it. I enjoy, too, those young eyes watching me at the lectern, as I pose and ponder, as I remove my jacket, roll up my sleeves, write on the blackboard the name of the class:

The psychology of the self.

I look about earnestly, and the earnest young eyes look at me full of expectation.

This new existence, I have not achieved it alone. It wasn’t too long after I found my way here that I met up with my new wife. She is a beautiful woman, and there are times when it seems this is the only life I have ever lived. She has just turned the comer on fifty, and I am not so far behind. She has three children who are grown. Her clothes are stylish and her hair is colored in such a way as to resemble a sun-drenched version of its former self. On the refrigerator there are pictures of the two of us together, on vacations to the kind of places people like us go. Tuscany, maybe. Or Sao Paulo. Or one of those beaches on the backside of the Big Island, away from the tourists. We lounge in our polo shirts and our shorts, mug for the camera, put our hands around each other’s waists. We smile. Also, on that same refrigerator, are the pictures of her kids and their families, children and grandchildren. They are like my own now. A couple of times a year, they make it home, gathering around the table for the feast, and the children grab me about the knees and call me grandpa.

So I have left the past behind as well as I could. Part of it lives there in the darkness, in my memory, but those memories are for me alone. If my wife wonders about my life before we married, she doesn’t ask—just as I don’t ask her. She has her photographs in her albums, of course, but they are but thin manifestations, images between bound covers there on the bottom shelf.

In many ways my life perhaps is not so different than yours. I have my routine, my work to do. I drive down our tree-lined street, through the neighborhood, across town. I walk across campus. My office is lined with books, with Freud and Hillman and Jung and Rank, case studies of this and that, deviance, brain disease, sexual insatiability, and when my students come to visit they glance about at all these books as if they are doorways into the unknown. I linger in the halls here. I talk to my colleagues. (I am well-liked, but there is one here who despises me. There is always one. He fought my appointment, cast aspersions on my scholarship, resists my promotions. The simple explanation: he is envious of my success. Of my wife, too, I suspect. But, as I said, there is always one like him, one such shadow.) I go about my business. I walk down the hall to the class where the light comes pouring through the windows like something in a sunlit dream.

I write on the board:

Who are you?

I smile, and the kids look about at each other, confused. Then I explain to them. It is a game. I invite the kids to play, to peel back the onion, all of our multiple selves, until eventually we come to that frightening part that lives in each of us. I look at a young woman in the front row, leaning on her elbows, hanging on to every word. Sometimes she comes up to me after class. I have seen her lingering—off the main path, in the daffodils, in her plaid skirt, her white blouse, her black boots.

In every life there are certain patterns, certain things that get repeated,

A while ago, I contacted Nate Jackson, the private detective. He was surprised to hear from me, but he talked in the old congenial way. His daughter had had more trouble, it seemed—and had moved to Europe, across the sea.

“That’s too bad,” I said. “There’s a small matter, I wanted to clear up. The tape.”

“Oh, I got it, doc. It was right where you said.”

“Good, good. It turns out, there’s a duplicate.”

There was silence now, a little awkward. I heard that breathing of his, and imagined his wide cheeks. Did he think I had withheld it on purpose? I didn’t want him to believe this. So I told him I’d be glad to send it to him. There was just a small favor he could do.

Go out into the marsh. To the wooden pier. Take five steps east. Then dig.

He obliged me. It’s funny the ties that bind us to people you would not expect.

As soon as I received the box, I took it down into the basement. The lock was rusted, and I had to break it—but the contents were pretty much unchanged. I looked through it all. The button of a skirt. A debutante’s ring. The earring I had taken from Sara on our last meeting. A dozen items like this, two dozen. Collected over time.

All of these were things I had once hoped to bury, but now I realized the folly of it. Because there is always one more thing to bury. We are never done. The reason I wanted the box, I had some mementos to add. New things I won’t mention—another earring, perhaps, a skirtband—but also a certain necklace, with pearls the size of a child’s teeth. So when the box came, I took it downstairs. There was a loose stone—a brick to pull out, and I put new memories inside that little box, and shoved the entire collection into the damp hole behind that loose brick. I go back on occasion, down to the basement, and fumble longingly. Maybe add something more.

Elizabeth
, I think,
My poor Elizabeth.

I go upstairs. Mary, I see, is waiting. She has her hands on her hips, but she gives me a kiss. Somewhat reluctantly, I admit. We are no longer in that phase of our marriage where we touch and fondle at the slightest impulse. Today she looks at me with something like skepticism. Our ardor for one another has cooled. It is inevitable, I guess.

“Where were you?” she asks.

“In the basement. Tinkering.”

“No, I mean before that.”

“At school.”

“I stopped by your office, but I couldn’t find you anywhere.”

“I had to go over to the bookstore. There’s a problem with the text I ordered for my class.”

“Did you get it fixed?”

“No, of course not. You know that place. I was there all morning—and I never did find the right person in the bookstore.”

“Oh,” she says. “Well I hung around your office for quite a while.”

“Fin sorry, honey,” I say.

I come up behind her. We regard ourselves in the hall mirror, and meanwhile I run my hand under her waistband, down into her pants. All this seems to make her feel better, though I can see she is still a little bit disgruntled, ill at ease.

“Let’s go out to dinner,” I say.

She agrees. We go out to one of the nicer places—the type of place where they bring the visiting professors, the deans, the research specialists. I see my colleague there, the one who despises me. I stop to banter nonetheless. We discuss department business. His eyes gleam. Then the talk turns, as it does these days, to the most recent murder. A coed, this one. The talk dies away. Later, my wife and I are hand in hand, coming up the walkway, back to our house.

“I saw her picture, the red hair—the white slacks. She was such a self-assured girl. With such a future. Who would ever think.”

“I don’t know.”

“The boy they arrested, he denies it,” she says.

“They always deny it,” I say.

Then we go inside, and she lies there quietly, and if there are shadows in that darkness, I don’t know, if people disappear into other lives and come back and disappear again, I don’t know that either, but suddenly I am aware of my wife, lying there beside me, and I decide that I must possess her and I do so, taking her roughly (onto her stomach, she moans, not used to this, no, please, she says, but there is ecstasy in her pleading), and for a minute everything disappears into the darkness, and then we are left, lying there, out of breath in the moonlight, exhausted, spent, and my wife sobs.

Then the next morning it is light—a wild, delicious light—and I am back in front of the classroom, where they are all listening to me, mouths open.

Who are you?

The students gather around me, and in their gathering I can sense their futures, their lives. We are talking about the psychopathic image. About death. About rape and murder. The class scintillates.

“Ritual,” says one. “The grizzly crime, the corpse. It’s a social ritual. Goes back to Jack the Ripper.”

“It’s like Jung says. The world is made of opposites. You can’t have the light without the dark. You need it to be whole.”

“We need the face of death in our lives, dream images, the grotesque.”

“Most of the time, we can’t deal with the truth. We black it out.”

“Or we pretend to black it out.”

“I don’t like this conversation at all,” says another. “Not one bit. I feel like I am being manipulated.”

Through all this I say nothing, silent as a Buddha. The wind is quiet. The young woman I mentioned earlier, she has a seat in the front row. She smiles, I smile back. I walk from the classroom. Feel the bright light of the morning. I remember for a moment how I stood on a far-away street, looking down at the water, the empty house with the light on, and I can taste the essence of that moment—the evergreens, the dark scudding clouds, the mountain looming behind, waiting—even now as I walk across the campus, under sycamores, toward the hillock where the young coeds smile and lounge. As I approach, hearing them giggle, there is still another part of me looking down at that empty house, holding the necklace in my hand, the pearls, listening to the knock of that boat against the dock, the sound floating over the darkening sea, hearing it inside me, like the knocking of my heart.
Poor Elizabeth.
Meanwhile, the day is bright all around me. I turn away and walk down the long knoll to where the young woman leans against the tree, standing there in the bed of blooming flowers.
Later, you and me.
I whisper. I give her a wink. She smiles and bends my ear to her mouth, touches it with her tongue. In the distance stands my colleague. Looking at me with scorn, desire. He thinks he knows all of my secrets—and I know his. And for a moment, it’s as if I am him and he is me, and the two of us, we turn away, then turn back, beneath the trees, in this dappled light. We circle each other on the path.