About the Author (25 page)

“I don’t care if you’ve been having an affair! That’s not why I’m going!”

“An affair?” I said, confused, then catching up. “No, it’s nothing like that. That’s not what I was going to say. It’s about Les and St—”

“
No
!” she cried. “Don’t talk to me about
her
!” She covered her face.

I moved forward again, to put my arms around her. Suddenly she took her hands away from her face and looked at me. I stopped. She was, to my surprise, not crying. I had never seen this look on her face before.

“She made love to me tonight,” Janet said. “
We
made love.”

I flinched. Was it that word
love
that made the admission so much worse than what I had seen tonight with my own eyes? I searched for something to say. I didn’t come up with much. Rudiments of speech. A weak hand gesture. I just needed a minute to fight down the jealousy; I just needed a second to regain my composure. Then I would tell her all about Stewart, about my stealing his book, about who I really was.

“And it wasn’t the first time,” she said.

I was not sure I had heard her correctly.

“A few days ago. I went to her house. To look at Stewart’s diaries. She kissed me. And I kissed her.”

You may argue that I
should
have known what those mysterious silences were all about when I was hiding in Les’s closet. But that which is impossible is, simply, impossible.

I felt nauseated, dizzy, disoriented. Something I had heard Les say to Janet while I was hidden in the closet came back to me
: How well do you really know him
? I had never asked myself this question about Janet.

“So,” I said, “you’re in
love
with her?”

“
No
,” she said. “I was drunk, and stoned. And miserable.”

“Do you still love me?”

She looked away, toward the window, as if she expected to see the answer written out there on the lawn. But the night was dark, and the glass pane gave back only a reflection of her own face, that perfect, almond-shaped oval framed by her long, dark hair. She turned back to me.

“I need some perspective,” she said. “I need some time away. Away from both of you.”

Both of you
.

“It’s almost four in the morning,” I said, groping for some way to keep her. “You can’t drive to your parents’ place now.”

She said that she planned to stop at a motel tonight, then phone her parents in the morning to say that she’d be getting into Boston at around noon. She would tell them that she had decided to clear out of our house for a while because I was at a delicate stage of my novel and needed peace and quiet.

So she’d thought it all through. She was serious. This was
happening
.

“I’ve never had an affair,” I said, desperate now. “I never
would
have an affair. I swear to God, I swear on my
life
, that—”

“Don’t, Cal. Please. Just let me go.”

There was no point, anymore, in pretending to myself that I was going to tell her about my imposture, about Stewart. What could such a confession do now, other than steel her against me? We were beyond that now.

But where exactly
were
we? Was it true that she simply needed a few days away to distance herself from the events of the past weeks, the past hours? Would she, after a spell with her parents, realize that she had overreacted to my moodiness? Or would the time away permit her an uninterrupted period of brooding on my odd behavior of the past few months? Would distance make the pattern of my personality take shape, just as the images on her canvases took shape when a viewer stood back from them? Would she suddenly see me as the stranger who I, of course, really was? Would she be phoning me from her parents’ house a week from now to say that she had accepted a teaching job at a school in Boston and was leaving me?

She moved past me, humping her bag on her thigh. I sprang off the bed to help her, but she said she was fine. Then we were outside, standing on the driveway. The crickets were going mad. She slung the bag into her trunk, then turned to face me. Everything seemed unreal, as if I were watching two perfect strangers fumble through an unscripted improvisation. She told me not to call; she would ring me in a week or so. She hoped I would be patient. I was losing her. I was losing the only thing of value in my life. Not my celebrity, not my money, not the wretched novel that bore my name. But Janet.

She opened the car door and got in. I was standing a few paces away, by the back door. Two moths fluttered from nowhere and began to circle the little light in the door of Janet’s car.

“It wasn’t her fault,” she said. “You won’t say anything to her?”

“No,” I said.

She pulled in her leg.

“
I love you
!” I cried, but too late: the crunch of the car door obliterated my blurted avowal. Then her engine caught. I saw her face flash in the side window, just as it had done when she pulled up at the Pleasant View to pick me up for our very first date—but now woeful, tear-stained, lost. Then she was gone.

After my mother’s death, I recall being struck by the strangeness of how, despite the unreality that lay like a sick sheen over everything, I continued to walk through the paces of my day, as if life were simply an accumulation of utterly meaningless, automatic tasks: rising in the morning; eating cornflakes; walking to school; talking, smiling, breathing—until you, too, have put in your quota of futilities, and die. It was with something of the same robotic habituation that I now turned and walked down the driveway to Janet’s studio. The bulb had been left on and needed to be turned off. In the instant before I reached out to extinguish the light, my eye fell on the wet portrait of Les propped against the rolls of canvas in a corner of the studio. Bending, I seized a stiff rag and methodically wiped away at the image, smearing it into muddy streaks. But even this act felt empty, without import, despite its freight of terrible, symbolic significance.

She was gone.

Picture me as I roamed the empty, echoing rooms of our former Dream House. A bottle of gin swings from my fingers. I stumble from the living room (where I have been weeping over her paintings) and teeter through the front hall into the paneled den, my makeshift bedroom ever since her decampment. Halted, swaying, I glance at the window above the desk. It reflects a stranger: jaws crosshatched with stubble; mouth knocked out of shape, as if housing ill-fitting dentures; eyes sunk in shadow, like the orbits of a skull. The rest of the pane is black. So it must be night again. Or still.

I drop my ass onto the sofa. Hang my head. This narrow couch, with its creaking, sticky leather upholstery, is not an ideal place to sleep, but I haven’t been able to face our bedroom ever since . . . ever since . . . and suddenly I am weeping again. Whimpering. A thread of snot drops like a plumb line from my left nostril onto my bare ankle. I am going to pieces. I am going down. I have not spoken to anyone for what feels like weeks but must in fact be only a few days. Blackie called from Burlington Airport on his way back to New York. Against a background of echoing airport PA announcements, he spoke of his bewildered awakening in a strange hotel room; of bizarre dreams featuring naked females on a moonlit driveway; of the egg-shaped, mauve-tinted, grit-speckled gash in his forehead. The phone rang only one more time, at an odd, half-lit hour.
Janet
! was my immediate thought. But no. The voice that oozed like a thin trickle of pestilence belonged to Les. In an insinuating whisper, she said that “Alain” was making “the drop” and that I should “get set.” It took me a second before I deciphered these inane cloak-and-daggerisms. My whole world had fallen apart, and she was still talking about her ridiculous drug-smuggling deal, still spewing her nonsensical potboiler clichés—

“Listen to me, you filthy bitch,” I began, voicing a few clichés of my own. But the girl had already hung up.

I could not say what time of day that call had come (dawn? dusk?) or if it even
had
come. It might have been one of the more or less constant auditory and visual hallucinations that began to afflict me in my sleeplessness and drunkenness. How I longed to hear Janet’s voice. Yet I could not call her at her parents’ place. She had said that she would contact me when (or if) the time was right. My shame and guilt were such that I would not contravene her order. I would have to be patient.

And so I wandered our empty rooms at all hours of the day and night. I wept. I yelled. I drank. I drank. And I drank. Those haunted days and nights. I had become as posthumous as Stewart, a fleeting specter moving furtively past dark windows where ominous night crouched, waiting, in its black vestments. Was I conscious of plotting vengeance? Was I deliberately and methodically constructing a strategy to remove the shadow that hung over my life? Was I, legalistically speaking,
premeditating
?

Not consciously. And yet one night—or very early one morning—I happened to be awakened on the couch by the flickering light from the TV. For days the tube had been puking its remorseless stream of game shows, infomercials, situation comedies, weather updates, and “reality programming.” Now the bright screen offered up a 1950s-era black-and-white movie. I was about to zap it off when details of the film’s lush rural setting—the ripe, rounded hills and wooded valleys; the rutted dirt roads and sudden vistas of mist-softened meadows—hooked my attention. Seemed familiar. Weirdly so. I hit the mute button. For the first time in days, the house came alive with voices other than the ones in my head.

Owing to a drunkenness that overlapped with an earlier hangover, it took me some minutes to grasp the plot. Eventually it became clear that it was a story of threatened love: the movie’s hawk-profiled leading man had become engaged to a porcelain-skinned beauty. Marriage and riches, and a happily-ever-after life, awaited him in her rural paradise. That is, until the arrival on the scene of a figure from his past, a frowzy bottle blonde who threatened to ruin everything by divulging his terrible secret: she was carrying his child.

I have since found out the name of that movie and rented it. It was
A Place in the Sun
(1951, directed by George Stevens, adapted from the Theodore Dreiser novel
An American Tragedy;
winner of six Oscars, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters, and Montgomery Clift). Now, I admit that the young Taylor, who played the fantasy bride-to-be, possessed a beauty different from Janet’s, and puffy Winters had little of my enemy’s skanky yet potent sexual charm. And I myself am a less whittled and fey presence than the ambiguous, delicate Clift. Yet the parallels—or maybe I should say the triangular congruities—between his life and mine were uncanny, inescapable. Here was my precise predicament, only slightly altered in certain details. How I read my
own
plight in Monty’s furtive, cornered glances! How I wept with him at the cruel machinations of a fate that had allowed one small indiscretion from his past to threaten to wipe out, at a stroke, the perfection of his American future! And how I felt something cold and primeval stir within me as Monty arrived at the inevitable, unavoidable—even blandly predictable—solution to his dilemma!

With my breath coming in rapid, panting puffs, I slid from the sofa, then crawled toward the TV. I sat cross-legged in the screen’s aura, like a worshiper, like a man under hypnosis, and stared round-eyed at the screen as Monty showed me how to do it.

Night. A moonlit river. Monty’s eyes darting nervously as he plies the oars of the clumsy old rowboat. Pathetic, doomed Shelley, her gaze both sulky and spiteful, sits facing him in the stern. She is speaking, but neither Monty nor I can hear a word, as our brains urge us, in an increasingly hysterical whisper, to do it,
do it, DO IT
! The boat slides silkily through blood-black water, beneath dark foliage that drips with gelid Hollywood moonlight. The moment nears: any second now . . . any second . . . .

The suspense was too much. I jumped up and rushed out of the den into the living room. There, in a near epilepsy of agitation, I paced the floor, muttering aloud, like a madman, “
Of course! Of course! Of course
!”

And I do mean “Of course.” Anyone else would have seen the solution much sooner. I had simply been too close to the situation. It took the “distancing” action of the movie to make me recongnize what had been staring me in the face all along: the perfect scenario for creating her apparently accidental demise. Because obviously all the silly schemes that Blackie and I had dreamed up at the Sirloin Saloon had proved useless in the cold light of hangover: sawed ladder rungs, a rewired toaster, a slip in the bath, accidental asphyxiation, brake failure, a hunting mishap—all required either a degree of technical knowledge that I lacked or a certain unlikely compliance on the part of the victim.
How
, for instance, to entice her up a booby-trapped ladder (especially one high enough to ensure that her fall would be fatal)?
How
to lure her into the woods on a hunting expedition so that I might, when her back was turned, “accidentally” level my sights at her head?
How
exactly to introduce the undetectable few milligrams of poison into the beer bottle? I had long since rejected every scheme that Blackie and I had discussed—and indeed the entire improbable, implausible notion of murder. That is, until I saw that movie, and the elements of the “perfect crime” were offered up to me: canoe, river, heavy paddle—elements that, ironically, had been in my possession all along, and that the prospective victim herself had been foisting upon me for weeks!

By the time I crept back to the TV, the movie’s final credits had started to scroll. I’ve since watched the movie to the end, so I know that Monty was immediately arrested for Shelley’s murder, convicted, and sentenced to death. But even if I had happened to see that discouraging denouement at the time, I could not have been dissuaded from my plan. I did not intend, like Monty, to leave any witnesses. That I
could
kill was not in question. I had no
choice
but to kill. Now that the perfect plan had presented itself to me, I had no intention of hesitating.