Braided Lives (75 page)

As I go up the steps Conrad, the earring maker next door, sticks his head out. “You have to do something about that cat! It’s been crying all day and all night. I’m going to call the SPCA.”

“I’m sorry. I’m terribly sorry. I’ve been out of town. A friend was supposed to feed her.”

“I can’t stand that howling.”

“She won’t do it ever again, I promise!”

Damn Donna! After she volunteered, too. Alberta’s Sag Harbor rental was up August 31 and she would have fed Minouska efficiently, even though she has a political objection to pets. As I unlock the door Minouska bursts into the hall. I have to chase her down four flights to the bottom while Conrad peers out through the crack of his door.

“Minouska!” I grab her. “I’ll feed you. Don’t be crazy!” She scratches my arm for the first time in two years. I carry her stiff and protesting in yowls back up the stairs. I dump her inside, grab my suitcase and slam the door. What’s that smell? Like spoiled meat.

When I step to the door of the living room I see her. She lies on her back tangled in my quilt, one arm raised on the pillow, one arm stiff off the bed’s side. The quilt, the mattress, the floor are soaked, puddled in dark congealed blood. Even at the first instant as my knees buckle and I clutch the doorjamb, I know. Even as I call, “Donna!” and run to her to kneel clutching her cold arm, looking into her eyes pale, open and jellied, I know. Her skin is blue. Her mouth is colorless. She is dead.

A cry leaks from my throat. I tug at her, wanting to find some warmth, some life, wanting to beat her, to pummel her back to breathing. The sheets are stuck to her with dried blood from her womb. Did she abort herself? But she had money. She must have found a doctor. Why didn’t she tell me? Why? I moan with rage.

I am sitting on the floor. I have been crying a long time, so long I feel drunk. Her death forces itself through me like raw grain alcohol, white lightning, leaving me dizzy. I gasp for breath. I know I cannot just sit here. I see by the clock that it is seven and I must do something. What do you do with a dead friend? I feel she is mine, yet I reject her death, I will not forgive it. Not this stupid, stupid dying into meat, not the people who killed her with their law-armored hatred of women.

I wash my hands and face. I feed my terrified cat. I walk back into the living room, feeling hollow. She died alone here hemorrhaging violently. Beside the bed is a cup with tea in it and a teapot. A wet towel. She must have tried ice cubes. The phone is off the hook and dead. I put it back. Now the tears run down my face steadily as a faucet left dripping.

I cannot go on sitting here with her. I feel crazy, empty. I must do something but cannot think what. Her hand rigid in midair beside the mattress is the left hand with a gold band. She belongs to Peter in death. I call her number. It feels strange to call in the evening. “Peter, this is Jill—”

“What do you want? Are you calling for her? Where in hell is she?”

“I just came back from Detroit. I found her here. In my apartment. Peter, she’s dead.”

“What?”

“She bled to death here.”

“What did she do, get an abortion? The two of you! I knew it. That bitch! That bitch!” He is sobbing with anger.

I actually understand. I am angry too, although for different reasons. “I don’t know. I just walked in from the airport.”

“That’s your story. What do the police say?”

“What police?”

“Haven’t you called the police?”

“No. I didn’t think of that.”

“Well, you’re in trouble. I’ll call them now. I reported her missing when she didn’t come home last night…. What’s your address?”

“I’ll call them.” I hang up. That was a consoling conversation. We were able to offer each other a lot of comfort. I phone the police and say what I have to say three times, spelling my name, spelling her name. It occurs to me that Peter guessed about the abortion right away, that he was not at all surprised she was pregnant. Whereas Donna thought he’d never guess. A small hole, like a pinprick.

I feel cold, cold through. Not as cold as my poor dear. Her purse is lying on the floor. I pick it up to go through it. The piece of paper I expect is folded neatly inside, written on a Channel 11 memo. Her job at Channel 5 was to begin October. I memorize the doctor’s name and address before I burn the paper at the gas stove and wash the ashes down the sink. That doctor may or may not have failed to save her, but it is the law who killed her: the people who make the laws that try to force us to bear unwanted babies and force us into crudely botched abortions instead, the legislators and the judges, the people who pressure the lawmakers, the people who enforce the rotten laws. I will not help them. I will not open her to them. I put the purse back where I found it. Suddenly I realize I should call Howie. I am still telling him when the buzzer sounds. “That’s the police,” I say. “I’ll call you back.”

“I’ll come right down…. Or should I? Being a medical student, they might think I’m implicated.”

“I’ll call you back.” I am numb.

They
are two voices. I can barely distinguish the police detectives although I know the roles they play are distinct. Too much fog. I stand by the stove where I don’t have to see her. Minouska is cowering under the table. The questions rise before me like large carp out of a cold somber place where no light ever shines. I hold myself, chilled to the heart.

“No, she didn’t say anything to me. I gave her the key because she offered to feed my cat while I was in Detroit seeing my parents.” I show them the plane ticket stub. They look at it very carefully. “The cat used to be her cat, before she got married. I took the cat from her.” I show them Minouska cowering. “No, it was in Ann Arbor. No, she never mentioned being pregnant to me. No, I don’t believe she was having an affair. She was very much in love with her husband. Her cousin, yes. Didn’t I say that?”

Then a second set of police arrive, apparently in response to whatever Peter did after I called him. They are even more suspicious of me than the first batch, and carefully examine my plane tickets. I hear one of them calling in the next room to verify I took the plane. “I went with my …” I start to say boyfriend, then change to fiance. That sounds respectable. “We were visiting our parents—they all live in Detroit—to tell them we’re getting married.”

“Let’s have his name and address.”

They go through her purse, they go through my drawers, they read the papers on my desk, questioning me about my poems. That I write poetry seems suspicious to them and my stock sinks again. “No, she didn’t usually have a key. I gave it to her when she offered to feed my cat while I was in Detroit. I gave her the key last Friday. No, we didn’t leave until Saturday, but she doesn’t come into the city on Saturdays. My parents can confirm I was in Detroit constantly from Saturday at four when they met us at the airport. No, I left my boyfriend at the East Side Airlines Terminal. We took the bus from the airport together. He went to his apartment, I came home. No, she just said she would feed the cat Monday and Tuesday. I said I’d get home today to feed her in the evening. I left a lot of food out Saturday for the weekend. I’ve known my boyfriend since I was sixteen. No, my cousin.”

It takes me awhile to understand they ask the same questions over and over because they expect to trap me in some inconsistency. The phone rings. The heaviest policeman answers it. His name is Muenster, like cheese. “It’s for you,” he says. I’m glad. I don’t want to explain that Donna used to get business calls here. “He says he’s your boyfriend.”

“What’s going on?”

“The police are still here. They seem not to believe me.”

“I’ll come down.”

“No. I’ll call you when it’s over.”

He argues with me, pro forma. I know he doesn’t really want to come. He’s exhausted, he has to be up early and he never liked Donna. They were jealous of each other in a quiet unemphatic way. I am wary that in my need to blame somebody, I could blame him because I was in Detroit and not with her.

“Why did she come into the city all the time? Did she have a boyfriend?”

“She had a job.” I explain the job.

“Hey, that’s her. I know her,” says one of the other cops who have come to crawl over the room. “She does the weather on the TV. Channel Eleven.”

“I never watch that. I do Huntley-Brinkley. They’re the best.”

“It’s the local seven o’clock news. She’s a looker. Or she was. Jesus, I didn’t recognize her.”

“Why didn’t you tell us who she was?” Muenster asks accusingly.

“I did tell you. Donna Stuart Crecy…. You never asked me where she worked.”

They are intrigued. The case for the first time holds some interest. “Probably balling some guy down at the studio,” one of them says to the other. To me, “Did she have any special friends down there? Any guys she talked about?”

“No. She liked her job but she didn’t talk a lot about it. She worked because she and her husband needed the money.” They think the crime was the abortion, not her death. I am turning to ice and ashes. Like Donna.

Three of the detectives have retreated into the hall for a conference. My neighbor Conrad is confiding in Muenster: “So with the damn cat yowling all the time I knew something was wrong. I should have called the SPCA.”

“Yeah? You ever seen a little blonde coming in and out?”

Conrad has seen nobody, but he has heard the cat. No, she doesn’t give many parties, but has a lot of male visitors (am I suspected of running a whorehouse?) and plays records too loud. A doctor comes to examine Donna. I hide in the kitchen. Men keep arriving, consulting each other, departing.

The sandy detective has something in his hand. “Amphetamines. Speed. You know what these are?”

“No.”

“Did your friend ever talk to you about drugs?”

“No. She didn’t even smoke.”

“Smoke what?”

“Anything. She drank very little.” This time I have a memory I’m willing to share. “She did talk to me once about diet pills. She was wondering if they were addictive.”

“Diet pills? These things.”

“I never saw them. She said they were like Dexedrine.”

“Where’d she get them?”

“Her analyst prescribed them.”

“You know his name?”

“Dr. Emil Evans. He’s on Park Avenue. That’s all I know.”

“If he’s an M.D., he can prescribe them. If not…”

“She talk about any hanky-panky with him?” Muenster asks.

A couple of other policemen arrive, one to take photographs. I sit at the kitchen table. Muenster sits with me, suddenly sympathetic. “Guess you knew each other a long time.” The same questions hit me dully from another angle. This feels like a grim and boring dance, a high-school dance where I had to follow the clumsy lead of some huge and sweating boy round and round while he stepped on me and his belt buckle pressed into my Adam’s apple.

Peter arrives. “You’re responsible for this,” he snaps at me.

“She says she was in Detroit,” Muenster says. “Why do you say she’s responsible?”

“She always tried to break up our marriage.”

I realize that Donna never confessed to him about the abortion in Michigan; that remained our secret. Peter is tan, oddly handsome, tiny next to the cops. They take a fast dislike to him because he attempts to manipulate them, telling them whose son he is, which might ring a bell in Detroit but means nothing here. Then men arrive with a stretcher to take Donna, and Peter goes off with them and the sandy detective. Suddenly I realize I cannot remain. I can’t very well stay at Howie’s with Steve and Robbie. I ask the detective if I can call my girlfriend Alberta so I can sleep at her place. He says he thinks it’s a good idea.

He listens to that conversation too. I realize that he has moved in, that I will conduct the rest of my life with Muenster sitting in the room watching me write poems and make phone calls. He will follow me to work and sit nodding and smoking in a corner while I type letters and inventories.

Detective Muenster drops me and Minouska with her cat box and some cat food at Alberta’s. He says they’ll be in touch. Minouska shakes all the way across town.

Lying on Alberta’s bed I cry slowly until I cannot breathe, whereupon she feeds me an antihistamine. She calls Howie for me. My throat is too swollen for me to talk. Finally from her precious supply, Alberta gives me a Seconal, which knocks me out at three A
.M.

When I wake, she has gone to her law office, leaving a note of comfort on the other pillow. She slept on the couch. Minouska is in bed with me, under the covers, pressed taut to my stomach. I turn on my side and begin to cry again.

CHAPTER FORTY

C
RAZY
I
S AS
C
RAZY
D
OES

“T
HERE’S THE UNDERTAKER’S,” Dad says. “We were by last night.” He drives around the side of the big Tudor mansion, following a Gothic-lettered sign advising Ample Parking to the Rear, where an attendant relieves us of the car. The sun casts shadows of hemlocks across the lawn wet from a sprinkler.