Corkscrew (18 page)

He and Susan Prentice took an instant dislike to one another, and Bryce could see her recognizing it as much as he did. She was a good-looking woman, he supposed, but too controlled, her light brown hair too much of a helmet to her head, her body too neatly trim, as though it had been pruned like a Christmas tree, her movements all too small and careful.

'Merry Christmas,' he said, and showed his party smile, and toasted her with his glass of punch.

'This is really a lovely party,' she said. 'Much better than Romney.'

Romney had been Wayne's first publisher, years ago. Tim Fleet, Bryce knew, had been published by Antelope, but of course if Antelope hosted any parties — not all publishers did — Tim Fleet could not have attended. What a strange thing it must have been to be Tim Fleet.

Bryce said, 'Pegasus is the only publisher I've ever had, so I have no basis for comparison.'

Surprised, Wayne said, 'Is that true? Most writers switch sooner or later.'

'Jerry, my agent, did some saber rattling a couple times,' Bryce told him, 'but Pegasus always came through. And I've been happy here. My first editor was great, and when he retired Joe took over, and that's twelve years, and I'd never leave Joe. If he ever went, I'd go with him.' If I had a book to give him, he thought.

Turning away from that thought, he said to Susan Prentice, 'What was wrong with Romney? Their Christmas parties, I mean.'

'They were very cheap,' she said, 'and it was always in their offices, and it didn't really work, and they'd just order deli stuff and the cheapest possible white wine, and all their A-list writers stayed away in droves.'

Wayne laughed, though shrilly, and said, 'That was it, right there, if only I'd noticed. If you found yourself at Romney's Christmas party, you knew you weren't A-list. You knew you were mid-list.' Grinning at Bryce, he said, 'You know my definition of mid-list? No pulse.'

Lucie! Crumbling backwards to the ground, punching, punching: no pulse. Bryce closed his eyes, and opened them. 'I've been lucky,' he said, 'and I know it. And I'd better circulate, if I want to go on being lucky. Nice to meet you, Susan.'

'And you.'

Bryce wandered the party, but found no one else to have a good conversation with, and soon left. Looking back from the door, he saw Wayne deep in happy conversation with, among others, Joe Katz.

There were as many parties up in the country in December as in the city, and he felt more comfortable at the country parties. The people he knew there were much more diverse, not all writers and editors and agents. The weekenders in the hills around him, who'd become casual friends and party hosts over the years, included lawyers, advertising workers, doctors, the owner of a chain of garden nurseries, a newspaper columnist, even a couple of actors. He felt at ease with these people because they cared more about pool services and deer repellents than about publishing mergers and the vagaries of the
New York Times Book Review.

The actual holidays he expected to spend home alone in the country, but a week before Christmas he got an unexpected phone call from his ex-wife, Ellen. 'The kids are all coming up the afternoon of Christmas Day,' she said, 'and we'll have early dinner, because everybody has to get back. We were wondering if you'd like to join us.'

This offer had never been made before, and was clearly being made now because of the death of Lucie. Bryce's immediate reaction was to say no, was to continue with the idea that he'd stay alone for the holidays, but as he said, 'Well, Ellen, I — ' she said, 'Are you seeing anyone? You could certainly bring—'

'No no,' he said. 'There was a, I don't know if you knew about Isabelle—'

'I don't know your life now, Bryce.'

'Well, there's nobody,' he said.

'So drive up. Oh, around one or two.'

'All right,' he said, and was glad he'd already bought presents, which he'd intended to mail. Since they wouldn't be entrusted to the Post Office after all, he gave them much more elaborate wrappings, with big bows, and large cardboard cutouts of angels declaring the name of the gift's recipient.

Christmas Eve he spent by himself, but that was all right. He watched television, switching around among choruses and comics and sentimental stories, dipping into three separate filmed versions of A
Christmas Carol
— now, there's a property with legs — and thinking how many other people were working or otherwise occupied tonight.

A little after ten the phone rang, and it was Isabelle, the first he'd heard from her since the day she'd decided not to move in with him after all. Several times he'd thought of phoning her, but it seemed too pushy to do, since she was the one who'd rejected him, and also too much trouble. What would be gained by talking to Isabelle?

She was calling from a party; he could hear the crowd noises in the background. 'What's going on?' he asked.

'I was wondering about you. Are you all right?'

'Sure, why wouldn't I be? I'm spending tomorrow with my kids. Where are you?'

'Some friends of my father's,' she told him, 'they have this penthouse just north of the UN, spectacular views out over the East River, it's really fantastic.' Lowering her voice, she said, 'I'm the only one here under sixty. I think I'm their little match girl.'

'They couldn't have done better,' Bryce assured her.

'Are you coming to town at all?'

'Not till after the holidays,' he said, knowing she was asking him to ask her out, but perversely refusing. He didn't
want
to rebuild the relationship, he wanted it to go on crumbling.

It went on crumbling, and soon they said goodbye to one another, and he went back to Christmas Eve in the world of TV. And early the next afternoon he put the shopping bags in the back of the BMW — they'd replaced the one that had been in the multicar collision — and drove the eighteen miles north and west through blustery wind under a bruised multilayer swirling sky — but not yet snow, which was predicted for a few days farther along — toward the house Ellen now shared with Jimmy Branley, outside Newtown.

Branley was an architect, and had designed his house, which Bryce found ostentatious, all the rooms too large and sprawling, the white clapboard and fieldstone house diffused over the crest of a slope as though poured there, trailing down toward a generous swimming pool on one side and an elaborate black-granite ornamental pond on the other.

The interior was all white walls and massive blond beams and yellow brick fireplaces. Branley'd designed much of the furniture, too, all of it low and wide, as though it were being seen in a funhouse mirror. But the house was at its best, Bryce knew, at parties and festive occasions, when people seemed to flow from area to area, and the sound quality was such that you could always have a private conversation without ever feeling isolated from everybody else.

Since this was a weekend place, and by definition then at least to some extent a party house, and since it was also the showcase for Branley to demonstrate his style and skills for potential clients, Bryce had to admit that, whether he liked the house or not, it did the job Branley asked of it.

Bryce wasn't entirely sure what he thought of Branley himself, who was a cheerful, amiable man without a bad word for anybody. An ex-wife's new husband was one thing, but the guy she was living with was something else, even when it had been going on for several years, and when that guy was nearly fifty, with two grown kids of his own. Why Ellen and Branley didn't just go ahead and get married he didn't know; maybe Bryce had turned her permanently away from marriage.

The one thing he knew for sure about Branley that he didn't like was the way the man cheerfully announced, at every opportunity, that he wasn't a reader. Had never read any of Bryce's novels, no doubt never would. Too busy, too content with his architecture career, totally uninterested in fiction.

Bryce sometimes wished he could express such total lack of interest on his part in architecture, but that would just sound silly. Of course he was uninterested in architecture; only architects are interested in architecture. But all literate people are supposed to be interested in literature, or at least that's what Bryce had always believed.

He was the last arrival, and was welcomed cheerily if not effusively. The presents he'd brought were put under the huge tree in the living room with all the other presents already piled there, and he was re-introduced to Kathy and Jack, Branley's children, both mid-twenties, both doing something in cable TV.

Bryce soon regretted coming. The problem was, everything was normal, everything was fine, everyone accepted him, even his own kids seemed warmer than usual. The early dinner was fine, and he was seated next to Kathy Branley, who it turned out had just read
Twice Tolled
in paperback, and wanted to tell him how much she'd enjoyed it. And throughout, he kept thinking, I'm not supposed to be here, I'm not supposed to be with these people, I'm not supposed to be around simple pleasures. He didn't know why he felt that way, and didn't want to question it. He just wished he hadn't come.

Still, however much he might feel out of place here, nevertheless he stayed on, and stayed. After dinner, they opened champagne with the Christmas presents, and then the others started to leave, but Bryce stayed on, not entirely because he wanted to but because some sort of lethargy had overtaken him. And, he realized, too, he wanted to talk with Ellen. He'd been feeling the need to talk with Ellen since he'd seen her at the funeral, and now was maybe his last chance.

Tom and Barry, Bryce's younger children, having driven up together in Tom's car from New York, left together around seven, followed shortly by Branley's two kids, leaving only Ellen and Jimmy, plus Bryce and his twenty-three-year-old, Betsy, who was of course an architecture student and therefore always had a lot to discuss with Branley.

Ellen wound up in the kitchen, and Bryce followed, sitting on one of the chrome-and-canvas chairs at the butcher-block table, listening to Ellen's small talk, understanding that Ellen simply thought he was lonely and she was trying to fill in a little empty time for him.

But it was more than that. At a pause in her chitchat, he said, 'Ellen, there's something I've been wanting to talk to you about.'

'Yes? Sure. What is it?'

'Well,' he said, feeling amazingly awkward, not knowing how to sit with these arms, these legs, 'what it is, I feel this need to confess.'

She half-smiled, expecting some sort of joke. 'Confess? Confess what, Bryce?'

'Well, I hired somebody to kill Lucie.'

She stopped whatever she'd been doing — putting plastic around a pie remnant, something like that — and turned to stare at him. 'You did what?'

'It was going on for so long, you know,' he said, 'and I couldn't work. It was that, more than anything else.'

'You killed Lucie?'

'Had it done. Paid for it done. While I was out of town.'

She strode to the kitchen door, pushed it shut, came quickly to sit at the table opposite him. He'd never seen such a deep vertical streak between her eyes. She said, 'You're telling the truth.'

'Of course I'm telling the truth.' He shrugged, looking away from her. 'It was supposed to make things better.'

'How could you have — How could you even think of such a thing?'

'Thoughts like that have been thought before, Ellen,' he said. 'I didn't invent it.'

'No, of course not,' she said, shaking her own head, as though she'd been stupid. 'And that's what you do, anyway, isn't it? Think up things like that.'

'Usually not quite this… effectively.'

'And what now? Is he blackmailing you? The man who…'

'No, no, he's all right, he's fine, he's perfectly happy.' This time when he shrugged, it was spastic, like a convulsion. '
I'm
the problem.'

'In what way?'

'I still can't work,' he told her. 'I'm trying to think of a book, a new story, and nothing comes. And everything's just
drab.
I told you, that girl, Isabelle, we were together awhile—'

'I don't know her.'

'No. When she left me, she said there wasn't any joy in me any more. And it's true.'

'My God, Bryce, what a mess.'

'It was a terrible mistake,' he said. 'I realize that now, it was the worst thing I could have done. I have to make it right, Ellen. I don't know, for some reason I need you to know about it first. Be ready for it.'

She gave him a wary look. 'Be ready for what?'

'I have to go to the police, of course,' he said. I have to—'

'Don't you
dare
!'

He stared at her, astonished, and she was glaring at him as though he were her worst enemy in the world. 'What?'

'Is there no
end
to how selfish you can be?' Her face was stone, eyes burning ice into him. 'I think I'm used to it, how self-centered you—'

'Ellen, what are you saying? I don't understand.'

'Of course you don't,' she said. 'You have three children, Bryce, at the very
beginning
of their lives, all just on the verge of stepping out to become whoever they're going to be.'

'What has that got to do with—'

'You're a
celebrity,
you fool! You're a famous man! If you drag those children through a murder trial, a media circus, Bryce, I may kill you myself.'

All he could do was gape at her. 'I never—'

'Of course you never,' she said. 'That's always true with you, you
never
never. Bryce, you did a stupid and an evil and an unforgivable thing, but I will not let you make it worse.'

'I thought,' Bryce said, 'if I confessed…' He wiped cobwebs from his face.

'You ruin your children's lives,' she finished. 'You don't get off the hook that easily, Bryce, you don't get to be like the Catholics, just confess everything and it's all gone, the joy is back in your life. You can't
do
that. You have responsibilities.'

'Oh, Ellen,' he said.

'Responsibilities,' she insisted. 'For you, Bryce, confession is bad for the soul.'

He managed a laugh, though not a good one. 'All right,' he agreed. 'You're right, all right, I see that now, I didn't see it before, I'm glad I talked it over with you first.'