About the Author (23 page)

“Where did you go yesterday when you stormed out?”

Taken aback (I hadn’t even realized that she knew I had gone out), I stammered, fatally, “M-me? I went for a walk. To cool down.”

I am (as should be obvious by now) an expert liar, but only when given the chance to prepare myself. Otherwise my falsehoods sound as weasely and evasive as the next person’s. She pulled her hand away. I made an effort to amend my speech, but once again I fumbled.

The phone rang. Saved by the bell. Or so I thought.

Janet answered it. “Oh,
hi
,” she said, making an effort to sound cheerful. She glanced at me. “Actually, I’m a little under the weather. . . . No, nothing serious. And you? . . . Good. I guess you want to talk to Cal. . . . Oh, that’s sweet of you. He’s right here. . . . It’s nice to talk to you, too. Hold on.”

She handed me the receiver.

“Cunningham, you lucky
bas
tard,” said a raw, raspy voice. “Never lose that girl.”

“Blackie,” I said, grimacing.

He explained that he was going to be attending a wedding this weekend in Charlotte, Vermont, a town a half hour’s drive from us, on the shore of Lake Champlain. “I’ve freed up Sunday night to have dinner with you and your gorgeous bride,” he said.

I clamped my hand over my eyes. Sunday. The day after tomorrow! Could he have chosen a worse time? But with no excuse at the ready, I could say nothing but, “Sounds great. Let me just run it by Janet.” With my palm over the receiver, I repeated Blackie’s invitation to her. She shrugged unenthusiastically.

“Janet says that sounds great,” I said into the phone.

“Then it’s a deal,” Blackie said. He then began to pour into my ear the latest gossip from the Manhattan literary world. Janet stood up and shuffled out of the room. A minute later, I heard the shower come on down the hallway. When I was finally able to get Blackie off the line, I went down the hall to the bathroom.

“It should be pretty fun to see Blackie, don’t you think?” I said to her through the half-closed bathroom door.

I heard, at best, a grunt in reply.

I hovered there a minute. There did not seem to be anything to add. If she had come right out and accused me of having an affair, I could at least have denied it. But I was not supposed to know anything about her suspicions, since I had learned of them only by eavesdropping through Les’s closet door.

Wordlessly, I returned to the kitchen and sat down at the table. Then, slowly, I reached up and grasped my hair in both hands. I pulled until my scalp seemed to shriek and tears of pain started to my eyes. How to escape this nightmare? How? Give Les all my money—
all of it
, the whole criminal bundle: bank accounts, stocks and bonds, mutual funds, real estate, possessions. Everything. If she would only promise to turn over the laptop and leave us alone. Make up some excuse for Janet: a bad—no, a
very
bad—investment. Because unless I
did
something, and soon, to extricate us from this web of interlaced deceit, our marriage would choke to death, would die of the poison that Les was injecting into it with her evil hints, her Iagoesque insinuations. And once I had lost Janet, I would have nothing anyway, so why, why,
why
could I not act?

“So, enough about the petty dealings of the Manhattan literary world,” Blackie growled, scooping his second preprandial martini from the white tablecloth. “How has life been treating you in your sleepy little backwater?”

I shrugged and smiled, shrugged again, then lit my eighth cigarette of the evening. I took a long, cheek-hollowing drag. It had been three years since I quit smoking. So much for that.

We were sitting in the sunken dining area of the Sirloin Saloon, a steak barn located amid the gas stations and submarine-sandwich shops littering the highway between Shelburne and Charlotte. From high in the room, a row of stuffed animal heads—moose, deer, buffalo—stared down at us in the colored glow of the Tiffany lamps.

“Oh, you know,” I said.

“I’ll tell you.” Blackie chuckled, snapping his fingers at a passing waiter. “I don’t know how you stand it. No intrigues, no infighting, no cut and thrust. Still, you’ve got Janet, and that might be enough to keep any man happy on a desert island. Two more of these,” he said to the waiter, waving his index finger at the two empty martini glasses on the table in front of us. He turned back to me. “It’s a shame she couldn’t be with us tonight.”

It certainly was. But there had been no question of her coming along. I had, you see, finally lost control.

It had begun around noon that day. Janet was off in her painting studio. I was in my office, lying on the small couch, crazed with inertia and despair. I decided that I must try to repair relations between us, if only because we were slated to dine with Blackie in the evening. While passing through the living room, on my way out to Janet’s studio, I had the odd sensation of being watched, of a pair of eyes’ discreetly following me as I crossed the room. I snapped my head around. There, mounted on the wall above the sofa, was Janet’s portrait of Stewart, the painting that I had long ago dispatched to the back hallway. He grinned at me in ironical and ominous greeting. An explosion went off in my brain, misting over my vision with a red cloud of anger and long-suppressed jealousy. Before I could stop myself, I was storming down the driveway to Janet’s studio. I wrenched open the rickety door.

She was sitting in the gloom and staring with peculiar desolation at a large, empty canvas. She slowly turned her head to look at me. In the darkness (my eyes had not yet adjusted from the bright sunlight outside) it looked almost as if there were tears streaking her cheeks. I asked why she had returned the painting of Stewart to the living room. She said nothing. I hit the edge of her palette table with my fist. “
Why did you move that painting
?” I yelled. She looked at me. It’s hard to describe that look. Yes, there was fear in it—the kind of fear that I suspect every woman, deep down, feels toward every man, a fear born of her knowledge of his greater physical strength. But there was also something else in it: an element of contempt, of withering disdain, that someone, in this case
me
, would stoop to a snorting, bellowing, chest-beating display of that greater strength. This glance that blended cowed terror and emasculating contempt is, I’m sure, the red flag to every wife beater and abuser. I am neither. It snapped me to my senses, brought me out of my fugue state, restored me, for a moment, to precarious sanity. And suddenly I was moving toward her, my palms raised in a gesture of peace, my voice softening, my eyes starting with tears. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m sorry, Janet. . . .” She flinched as if I were about to attack her, then pushed past me, actually knocking me backward a little with her forearms. “Stay away from me!” she cried as I staggered back, dumbfounded, in shock. She ran out the door. It was some time before I managed to collect myself and follow her to the house. As I hurried in through the back door, I heard a clanging, clattering sound coming from the living room. I dashed in. Janet was standing in front of the fireplace, holding the portrait of Stewart. She looked at me, her hair in her face, her cheeks flushed. I now saw that she had hurled aside the grate over the cold fireplace. She threw the Masonite board into the ashes. “There!” she cried. “There!” Then she ran out of the room, down the hallway.

I stood rooted to the spot, my nerves echoing with the sound of the bedroom door, which she had slammed with house-shaking force. All was quiet now. Except for my breathing. And my heart. And the sound of her muffled sobs. There are no adequate words to describe how I felt at that moment. So I will refrain from trying. Suffice it to say, that I could not go to her, could not show her my burning, shamed face.

I went to the fireplace, crouched down, and stuck my fingers into the bed of ashes, blindly groping for the board, which had disappeared into the powder. I seized one corner and exhumed the portrait. I blew on its dusted surface. Although covered in a layer of fine ash, his face was perfectly recognizable. I looked into his glinting eyes. “Please, Stewart,” I whispered. “Please leave us alone.” His expression did not change; he simply gazed at me with that half smile.

Some hours later, I spoke to Janet through our locked bedroom door, begging her to please join me for dinner with Blackie. She did not even deign to answer. Who could blame her? I repaired to the kitchen and called Blackie at his hotel, the Basin Harbor Club in Vergennes, to cancel dinner; but he was out. No, no message. It seemed wrong to do it through a third party. There was no way out; I had to go. It was with an odd sense of creeping foreboding that I had set out for this dinner alone, leaving Janet back at the house, on her own.

“So, I guess I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask how the new novel is going,” Blackie said, his voice bringing me back to the tinkling surroundings of the Sirloin Saloon.

I stared for a while at his pale eyelashes, at the funny way his skin was stretched, like that of a burn victim, over the sharp cartilage of his nose, at the odd tucks of skin at the corners of his mouth, as if an invisible thread had been passed through his lips like a horse’s bit, digging into the nearly transparent flesh. By then our entrees had arrived: two charred-looking knots of muscle sitting amid pools of bloody juice. Blackie was inspecting his steak like a surgeon planning the best method of attack on a tricky tumor.

I pushed my plate away and rested my elbows on the table. I had an idea now. It was a dangerous idea, a near-suicidal one, since I could always trip myself up with my own tongue, but I had reached a level of desperation that simply would not allow me to pass up the opportunity once it had occurred to me. Suddenly I saw in sharklike Blackie an invaluable resource that it would be fatal not to tap. But I would have to tread carefully.

“Blackie,” I said, “how would you feel if I told you that I’ve abandoned the novel?”

He had poked a piece of the dripping meat between his lips and was just beginning to tear the flesh apart with his fangs. He stopped chewing and turned on me the full force of his glaring eyes and nostrils. The meat bulged in his cheek.

“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” I said. “I’ve been working on a new idea. A better idea. A
much
better idea.” I slapped the table, as Les might have done. “Blackie, it’s fucking great!” I explained how my
new
plot involved a blocked writer who steals his deceased roommate’s manuscript and makes a million bucks. “A year passes,” I said. “Our hero is free and clear. Or at least he
thinks
he is. Then one day a visitor arrives, a young woman.
She knows he didn’t write the book
.” I paused to let this sink in. “How does she know?” I resumed. “Well, Blackie, in the early chapters, while our hero and his roommate are still living together, the roommate’s laptop is stolen—by a girl whom our hero has picked up! It’s the same girl! And the laptop has a copy of the novel on its hard drive!”

“Whoa,” Blackie said. “I think I like this. The past coming back to haunt him.”

“Christ, yes,” I moaned, feeling the booze. “And by now he’s happily married and living in an idyllic country retreat. He’s got everything he ever dreamed of. And yet
he’s about to be exposed
!” A couple of neighboring diners turned to look at me. I lowered my voice, trying to get a grip on myself. “The girl starts blackmailing him,” I whispered. “Soon she’s upping the ante, asking for more money, making weird, unreasonable demands; she even threatens to spill the beans to my wife.”

“
His
wife,” Blackie stated.

“Sorry?”

“You said ‘my wife.’ ”

I giggled. “See?” I said, flushing. “Th-that’s how much I’m starting to identify with this story. That’s how
real
it is to me.”

Blackie sipped his wine, a California cabernet several shades darker than the juice on his plate. “I’m intrigued. Have you started writing? Can you show me pages?”

“No,” I said. “That’s the problem. I can never start writing anything until I know what happens. Until I know how the story ends.” I fixed my eyes on him. “Blackie,” I said in a hypnotic monotone, “how does it end?”

He lifted a shoulder. “You’re the writer.” He delicately sheared away a slice of soft beef. “But one thing is for sure. He can’t kill her.”

“He
can’t
? I mean, he can’t.”

“And do you know why not?”

“Let me guess,” I said, reminding myself that Blackie thought we were talking about fiction. “End-user?”

“Bull’s-eye,” he said. “You gotta picture Tom Cruise, or whoever, reading this thing and saying, ‘They want me to play some blocked writer who steals his friend’s book and then
kills
someone?’ Tom’ll throw the thing in the crapper. Now, I think you can get ‘em to swallow the book stealing if you make this guy a bit sympathetic, and maybe make the roommate a bit of a prig. But as for a premeditated murder just to save his own ass? Very, very risky.”

“Granted,” I said, fiddling with one of the butts in the ashtray. “But just for the sake of argument, Blackie, imagine if you could write anything you wanted. Without a thought of commercial considerations. I know that’s hard. But
if
you could. How would you end this book? Or, to put it another way,” I said, hurriedly, “imagine if this were
really
happening; if it
weren’t
fiction. Let’s say
you
were the guy being blackmailed, and your whole world was going to crumble. What would
you
do?”

“Seriously?” He placed his knife and fork side by side on his plate, then extracted a package of Nat Sherman cigarillos from his pocket. He poked a thin brown cylinder into his lips. A match flared in his cupped hands. He inclined his head and sucked the flame into his cigar as if taking a tiny straw-sip of hell.

“I guess,” he said, “I’d have to kill her.”

It was past midnight by the time Blackie and I stumbled out of the Sirloin Saloon and set out, in my car, on the half-hour drive to New Halcyon. Indescribably lightened by our postprandial conversation (about the relative ease of homicide), I had quickly acceded to Blackie’s wild and drunken request that he accompany me home to rouse Janet. I had admitted to him that my wife and I had fought, and Blackie had immediately volunteered to act as peacemaker. I knew that Janet had a soft spot for him, and this knowledge, working in combination with the alcohol and the aforementioned lightness associated with our long postdinner discussion, led me to the dubious conviction that bringing Blackie home was a superb idea.