The Hellfire Club (15 page)

31

“LET’S START WITH
the small stuff,” he said. “Are you aware of what you’re like in the middle of the night?”

“How would you know what I’m like in the middle of the night? You’re always downstairs drinking kümmel.”

“Did you ever try to sleep next to someone who jerks around so much the whole bed moves? Sometimes you sweat so much the sheets get soaked.”

“You’re talking about a couple of nights last week.”

“This is what I mean,” he said. “You don’t have any idea of what you really
do.
”

She nodded. “So I’ve been having more bad nights than I thought, and that’s been disturbing for you. Okay, I get that, but I’ll sleep better now that Dick Dart is behind bars.”

He bit his lower lip and leaned back in his chair. “When you’re having one of these bad nights, do you sometimes look around under the pillows for a gun?”

For a moment Nora was too startled to speak. “Well, yes. Sometimes, after a really bad nightmare, I guess I do that.”

“You used to sleep with a gun under your pillow.”

“At the Evac Hospital. How did you ever figure out what I was looking for?”

“It came to me one night while you were sweating like crazy and rummaging under every pillow on the bed. You were hardly looking for a teddy bear. I’m just wondering, what would you do with a gun if you found one?”

“How should I know?” He was waiting for the rest of it.
Go on,
she told herself,
give him the rest of it.
“One night two guys raped me, and a surgeon gave me a gun so I’d feel more protected.”

“You were raped and you never told me?”

“It was a long time ago. You never wanted to hear any more than about a tenth of what used to go on. Nobody does.” Feeling that she had explained either too little or too much, Nora assessed Davey’s response and saw equal quantities of injury and shock.

“You didn’t think that this was something I ought to know about?”

“For God’s sake, I wasn’t deliberately keeping a big, dark secret from you. You weren’t exactly in a hurry to tell me all about Paddi Mann and the Hellfire Club either, were you?”

“That’s different,” he said. “Don’t look at me that way, Nora, it just is different.” His eyes narrowed. “I suppose some of these nightmares of yours are about the rape?”

“The bad ones.”

He shook his head, baffled. “I can’t believe you never told me.”

“Really, Davey, apart from not wanting to think about it all that much, I guess I didn’t want to upset you.”

He looked up at the ceiling again, drew in a huge breath, and pushed it out of his lungs. “Let’s get to the next point. This Blackbird Books stuff is just a delusion. You had me going for a while, I’ll grant you that, but the whole thing is ridiculous.”

It was as if he had slapped her. “How can you say that? You can finally—”

“Stop right there. There’s no way in the world my father would agree to it. If I went in there the way we planned, he’d bust me down to the mailroom. The whole thing was just a hysterical daydream. What got into me?” For a time he rubbed his forehead, eyes clamped shut. “Next point. You are not—I repeat, not— under any circumstances, to badger my mother into giving you her so-called manuscript. That is
out.
”

“I already told you I wasn’t,” she said. “Why don’t you move on to the next point, if there is one.”

“Oh, there are several. And we’re still dealing with the little stuff, remember.”

She leaned back and looked at him, inwardly reeling from the irony of the situation. When he finally displayed the confidence she had been trying to encourage in him, he used it to complain about her.

“I want you to show my father the respect he deserves. I’m sick and tired of this constant rudeness.”

“You want me to keep quiet when he insults me.”

“If that’s how you hear what I just said, yes. Now, about moving out of Westerholm. That’s crazy. All you want to do is run away from your problems, and on top of that you want to destroy my relationship with my parents, which I won’t let happen.”

“Davey, Westerholm doesn’t suit us at all. New York is a lot more interesting, it’s more diverse, more exciting, more—”

“More dangerous, more expensive. We hardly need any more excitement in our lives. I go to New York every day, remember? You want to deal with homeless people lying all over the streets and muggers around every corner? You’d go crazier than you already are.”

“You actually think I’m crazy?”

He shook his head and held up his hands. “Forget about it. We’re getting into the serious stuff now. Let’s consider the way Natalie Weil reacted to you in the police station. She went nuts. And it wasn’t because of me. It wasn’t because of that cop. It was because she saw you.”

“Something happened to her. That’s why she acted like that.”

“Something happened to her, all right. And where it happened was in the same nursery where you took that kid when you decided to play God. Do you want me to believe that’s a coincidence?”

“You think
I
took her there?” The sheer unreasonableness of this idea made her momentarily forget to breathe.

“There’s no other way to explain things. You locked her up in that empty building and kept her there until she managed to get out. Now I’m wondering whether or not you remember doing all this. Because you really did seem startled when Natalie started screaming, and I don’t think you’re that good an actress, Nora. I think you must have had some kind of psychotic break.”

“I kept her locked up in an empty building. I guess I must have thrown all that blood around her bedroom, too. What else did I do? Torture her? Did I let her starve?”

“You tell me,” Davey said. “But from the way she acted—the way she
looked—
I’d say both.”

“You astound me.”

“The feeling is mutual.”

Nora regarded him during the silence which followed this exchange, thinking that he had somehow managed to become a person she did not at all know. “Would you mind telling me why I would do all this to Natalie Weil, whom I like? And whom I haven’t seen, in spite of what you told Holly Fenn, for almost two years?”

For the first time during this confrontation, Davey began to look uncomfortable. He turned some thought over in his mind, and the discomfort moved visibly into anger. “Dear me, what in the world could it be? Wow, I wonder.”

“Well, I do,” Nora said. “Apparently it’s staring me in the face, but I can’t see it.”

“Is this really necessary? At this point, I mean?”

“You bastard,” she said. “You want me to guess?”

“You don’t have to guess, Nora. You just want me to say it.”

“So say it.”

He rolled his head back and looked at her as if she had just asked him to eat a handful of dirt. “You know about me and Natalie. Satisfied now?”

“You and Natalie Weil?”

Wearily, he nodded.

“You were having an affair with
Natalie Weil
?”

“Our sex life was hardly wonderful, was it? When we did have sex, you were turned off, Nora. The reason for that is, you started going into the Twilight Zone.
I
don’t know where you went, but wherever it was, there wasn’t much room in there for me.”

“No,” she said, battling to contain the waves of rage, nausea, and disbelief rolling through her. “You cut
me
out. You were anxious about work, or so I thought, you had all this anxiety, and it began to affect you when we went to bed, and then you started getting even more anxious because of that, which affected you even more.”

“It was all my fault.”

“It was nobody’s fault!” Nora shouted. “You’re blaming me because you were sleeping with Natalie, damn her, and you know what that is? Babyish. I didn’t tell you to stick your dick into her. You thought that one up all by yourself.”

“You’re right,” he said. “You’re not responsible. You hardly know what reality is anymore.”

“I’m beginning to find out. When did this start? Did you drive up to her house one day and say, Gee, Natalie, old Nora and I aren’t getting it on very well anymore, how about a tumble?”

“If you want to know how it started, I met her in the Main Street Delicatessen one day, and we started talking, and I invited her to lunch. It just sort of took off from there.”

“How long ago was this wonderful lunch?”

“About two months ago. I’m just wondering how you found out about it, and when you started to hatch your crazy plan.”

“I found out about two seconds ago!” she yelled.

“It’s going to be interesting to hear what Natalie says when she’s able to talk. Because from what I saw, you scare the shit out of her.”

“I should,” Nora said. “But because of what she did to me, not the other way around.”

At an impasse, they stared at each other for a moment. Then a recognition came to Nora. “This is why you wanted to go to her house that day. You wanted to see if you left anything behind. All that stuff you told me last night was just another Davey Chancel fairy tale.”

“Okay, I was afraid I might have left something at her house. If I saw something, I could say I left it behind the last time we visited her.”

“And tell me some lie about how it got there.”

He shrugged.

“How did Paddi Mann’s book get into Natalie’s house?”

He smiled. “Dick Dart didn’t give it to her, that’s for sure.”

Nora felt like throwing every dish in the kitchen at the wall. Then, in a shivering bolt of clarity, she remembered Alden’s talking to Davey on the terrace about Dick Dart, saying something like
I wonder what Leland’s wife thinks about her son romancing the same women her husband seduced forty years ago.
Alden had said,
It’d be a strange boy who did that, wouldn’t you think?
Alden had been the man Natalie called “the Prune.” Alden had probably taken the photographs in Natalie’s kitchen. No longer smiling, Davey gave her an uncertain, guilty glance, and she knew she was right. “Natalie had an affair with your father, didn’t she?”

Davey blinked and looked guiltier than ever. “Ah. Well. She did.” He bit his lower lip and considered her. “Funny you should know about that.”

“I didn’t know. It just sort of hit me.”

“I suppose she could have told you when it was going on. Didn’t you meet Natalie in the supermarket a while ago?”

“Alden gave her those Blackbird Books,” she said, having come to another recognition. “I wondered why they were separate like that on the shelf. They were a gift from a lover, and she kept them together.”

“She never got around to them,” Davey said.

“No wonder, given her active life. Did she cut him off when you turned up? Was it like a trade-in deal, a newer model, like that?”

“Their thing was over by then. It was no big deal in the first place.”

“Unlike your grand passion. Stealing your old man’s slut away from him must have perked the old ego right up. Kind of a primal victory.”

“I didn’t know about her and my father until later.” Davey’s left leg began to jitter, and he chewed on his lip some more.

“Did you get any comparisons? Length? Endurance? The sort of thing you boys worry about so much?”

“Shut up,” he said. “Of course not. It was no big deal.”

“Nothing is a big deal to you, is it? You have no idea what your feelings are. You just push them aside and hope they’ll go away.”

“Nora, I had a fling. People all over the world do the same thing. But if I’m as emotionally stupid as you say I am, why are we having this conversation? I’m worried about you, I know that much. The only way
I
know to explain these things is what I just said. And if you’re going off the rails, I don’t know what to do with you.”

“But I didn’t do it! You had this sneaky little affair, you
betrayed
me, and then you took your guilt and handed it over to me. If I’m crazy, your adultery is justified.”

“Okay,” he said. “Maybe there is some other explanation. I hope there is, because I really can’t say I like this one very much.”

“Oh, I love it,” she said. “It shows so much trust and compassion.”

“So I guess we’ll wait and see.”

“I can’t stand this anymore,” Nora said, electric with rage. “I can’t stand
you
anymore. I’m furious with you for sleeping with Natalie, yet if you can show me that you might begin to understand who I am, I could probably get over that eventually, but this garbage is so much worse that I . . .” She ran out of words.

“If I’m wrong, I’ll crawl over broken glass to apologize.”

“Gee, it makes me so happy to hear that,” she said.

He stood up and hurried from the room without looking at her.

32

AFTER THE DOOR
to the family room had opened and closed, Nora unclenched her hands and tried to force her body to relax. The beginning of
Manon Lescaut
drifted up the stairs. He was going to hide, presumably until a squad of policemen showed up to drag her away in shackles to the lunatic asylum.

He had
reduced
her,
dwindled
her. In his version of their marriage, a criminally irrational wife tormented a caring, beleaguered husband. Nora was not too angry to admit that their sex life had been imperfect, and she knew that many marriages, perhaps even most, had repaired themselves after an unfaithfulness. She could acknowledge that her night terrors, apparently far worse than she had imagined, might have played a role in what Davey had done. She found herself ready to take on her share of guilt. What she could not forgive was that Davey had
written her off.

As soon as the difference in their ages had become a
difference—
Davey had started to panic. A woman’s forty-nine lay several crucial steps beyond a man’s forty. Menopause, not nightmares and irrational behavior, was spooking Davey Chancel.

This was really bleak, and Nora pushed herself away from the table. She piled their dishes and gathered the silverware, resisting the impulse to hurl it all to the floor. She put the plates, cups, and silver into the dishwasher, the pans into the sink. If Davey left her, where would she go? Would he move into the Poplars while she stayed in this house? The idea of living alone on Crooked Mile Road made her feel almost dizzy with nausea.

She could remember what she had done every day since Natalie’s disappearance. She had shopped, made the bed, cleaned the house, read, exercised. She had phoned agents on behalf of Blackbird Books. The afternoon of the day after Natalie’s disappearance, when Davey would have had her tormenting the missing woman on the South Post Road, Nora had run into Arturo Landrigan’s wife, Beth, in a Main Street café called Alice’s Adventure. In spite of being married to a man so crass that he felt he should bathe in a golden tub (“Makes you feel like a great wine in a golden goblet,” Arturo had confided), Beth Landrigan was an unpretentious, smart, sympathetic woman in her mid-fifties, one of the few women in Westerholm who seemed to offer Nora the promise of friendship, the chief obstacle to which was their husbands’ mild mutual antipathy. Davey thought that Arturo Landrigan was a philistine, and Nora could imagine what Landrigan made of Davey. The two women had taken advantage of their chance meeting to share an unplanned hour at Alice’s Adventure, and at least half of that time had been spent talking about Natalie Weil.

Maybe I really am crazy, she said to herself twenty minutes later as she drove her car aimlessly down Westerholm’s tree-lined streets. Nora took another turn, went up a curving ramp, and found herself surrounded by many more cars than she had noticed before. Then she realized that she was driving down the Merritt Parkway in the direction of New York. Some part of her had decided to run away, and this part was taking the rest of her with it. They had covered about fifteen miles; New York was only twenty-five more away. In half an hour she could be ditching the car in a garage off the FDR Drive. She had a couple of hundred dollars in her bag and could get more from an automatic teller. She could check into a hotel under a false name, stay there for a couple of days, and see what happened.
If you’re going to change your life, Nora,
she said to herself,
all you have to do is keep driving.

So there were presently two Noras seated behind the wheel of her Volvo. One of them was going to continue down the Merritt Parkway, and the other was going to get off at the next exit and drive back to Westerholm. Both of these actions seemed equally possible. The first had a definite edge in appeal, and the second corresponded far more with her own idea of her character. But why should she be condemned always to follow her idea of what was right? And why should she automatically assume that turning back was the only right course of action? If what she wanted was to flee to New York, then New York was the right choice.

Nora decided not to decide: she would see what she did and add up the cost later. For a few minutes she sped down the parkway in a state of pleasantly suspended moral freedom. An exit sign appeared and slipped past, followed by the exit itself. The two separate Noras enjoyed their peaceful habitation of a single body. Ten minutes later another exit sign floated toward her, and she remained in the left-hand lane and thought,
So now we know.
Several seconds later, when the exit itself appeared before her, she flicked her turn indicator and nipped across just in time to get off the parkway.