Corkscrew (25 page)

Nothing Wayne had done since, certainly not the Lucie thing, not anything else, had let him believe he had risen in his right to Bryce's esteem. And now to have crept into Bryce's old apartment, live with Bryce's old furniture — Lucie's old furniture, even worse — was so servile, so hang-dog, as though he were living his life through Bryce, and not man enough to stand up and live a life of his own, that he couldn't bring himself to admit to it.

All at once, Bryce said, 'Do you think about Lucie?'

Wayne was astonished. He would have expected Bryce to stay a million miles from that topic. He knew he wouldn't have brought it up, didn't need the reminders, didn't need to dwell on that horrible moment. Why should Bryce? He said, 'Think
what
about her?'

'Well, what happened,' Bryce said. 'You don't think about what happened?'

'Why should I?'

Wayne watched Bryce's profile as Bryce stared fixedly at the road ahead, saying, 'Doesn't it stay with you? By God, it stays with me!'

What is this, Wayne wondered. Guilt? All this time later? He said, 'Why? Why does it have to stay with you?'

'Because I wasn't there!' This was blurted out as though it were the secret of the century, forced from him in extremis.

'You weren't there? Of course you weren't there, you weren't supposed to be there, that was the whole point, remember?'

'Yes, yes, I know.'

'That's why you sent me there,' Wayne said, and was surprised to hear a tinge of bitterness in his voice. He'd thought he'd learned to deal with that.

'But,' Bryce said, and shook his head. Wayne saw that his fingers clenched and unclenched on the steering wheel. 'But I should have been there.'

'You'd have been arrested. You'd be in jail forever.'

'I'd
know
.'

'Know what?'

'What it was like!'

Memory flashed, briefly, scoldingly, and Wayne shook his head. Suddenly hoarse, he said, 'You don't want to know what it was like.'

'Well, if it was that bad, why don't you
think
about it any more?'

'Why should I?'

'I have to! Why do
I
have to?'

'All right,' Wayne said. 'All right. You're obsessing on this.'

'I just want to know what it was
like
.'

'It was hell.'

'But I can't see it! I can't see it.'

'Oh, Jesus, Bryce, I understand what it is.' Wayne shook his head. He almost patted Bryce's arm, but thought better of it. He said, 'I'll tell you what it is. I was there, Bryce, and it was horrible, and you
can't
imagine it, but I don't have to imagine it. I was there. So what I have is a memory, and memories fade. All memories fade, Bryce, that's what they do. But you don't have the memory, all you have is imagination. And imagination never fades.'

They drove in silence for a minute or two, and then Bryce said, 'No, it doesn't. I tried to correct that for a while, but it didn't work out. It came close, but it didn't work out.'

Wayne had no idea what Bryce was talking about, but maybe that was just as well. If he explodes, he told himself, he'll blow me up with him. I'm standing next to him here, and I have no choice. I have to watch him. I have to be ready for… for whatever.

'There's the house,' Bryce said.

'I recognize it,' Wayne told him, 'from
People
.'

There was nobody in the house but the two of them. Bryce opened a can of soup for their lunch, and sliced some fresh local bread, and made coffee. Wayne watched him, and as they sat together at the big dining room table he said, 'Bryce, don't you have anybody working here?'

'There's a guy does the lawn.'

'No, I mean inside the house. A housekeeper. Somebody to do the meals and the laundry and the cleaning and all that.'

'There's a woman comes in once a week.'

'Bryce, you need somebody to live in, a housekeeper. You can afford it, and you should have it. Anybody in your position would have somebody like that.'

Bryce looked around, vaguely, as though for the missing housekeeper. 'I suppose you're right,' he said. 'We could never keep anybody in the house before, I used to have people, but Lucie always fought with them. Fired them, or they quit. I got used to not.'

'Well, you can do it now,' Wayne told him. 'And you should.'

Slowly, Bryce smiled. It made him look younger, and healthier. 'You're right,' he said. 'There's an agency in Danbury, I'll call them. After the interview.'

'Good.'

'You're good for me, Wayne,' Bryce said, and laughed. 'In so many ways, you're good for me.'

After lunch, Bryce showed Wayne around the house, and Wayne found it unexpectedly similar to the apartment in New York. Spacious rooms, decorated tastefully but with some flamboyance. It was funny that Bryce could see Lucie in the New York apartment and be turned off by it, but couldn't see the same influence here. Didn't want to see it, probably. Wanted to like this place because he wanted to stay cooped up here.

'That would be the housekeeper's room.'

'Very nice.'

But the way Bryce had talked in the car, though, maybe it was just as well there wasn't anybody else in the house. What if Bryce was about to go off the deep end, go running to the authorities, confess his sins so he could sleep better at night? He'd drag Wayne to hell with him. Wayne decided he'd listen very carefully over the next two days, and if there was any more of this, any further hints, it would be good to have nobody else around.

There was an airy sunporch that gleamed like satin in the weak March sunlight, and that was where they decided to sit for the interview. Wayne brought out his materials, set up the tape recorder, and was about to switch it on to Record when he stopped, lowered his hand, and said, 'No, wait. Something else first.'

Bryce raised a polite eyebrow.

Wayne said, 'There's a couple things you said, you got me worried, and maybe the best thing is come out with it, clear the air.'

'Things I said?'

'What I'm beginning to worry about,' Wayne told him, 'is that you might maybe suddenly get an urge to confess. Turn yourself in, for whatever reason. You'd drag me down with you, you know.'

Wayne was surprised to see Bryce smile at that, a sad kind of smile but a real one. 'Don't worry, Wayne,' he said. 'I already went through that. I already confessed once, and I won't be doing that again. Guaranteed.'

Wayne stared at him. 'You
confessed
?'

'To Ellen.'

The name meant nothing. 'You — You told somebody—'

'My first wife.'

'Oh, my God. Did she believe you?'

'Of course she believed me,' Bryce said. 'Did you think she'd think I'd make up something like that?'

'Oh, Christ on a crutch. Did you tell her about me?'

'Not by name,' Bryce said. 'Just that I, you know, arranged it.'

'What's she going to do?'

Bryce's grin was incongruous, but also real. He said, 'She chewed
me
out, I can tell you that.'

'Well, yes, of course she'd—'

'For wanting to be so selfish.'

'Yes, you could look at it—'

'For wanting to confess.'

Wayne looked at him. 'What?'

'I wasn't thinking,' Bryce explained. 'I wasn't thinking about my kids, how it would mess them up. You know, they're twenty-three, they're twenty-one, they're nineteen, this would just
destroy
their lives. You can see that, can't you?'

'Absolutely,' Wayne said. 'Sure. Ellen said that?'

'She made me promise,' Bryce said, 'never to tell anybody else about it, ever again. And I won't.'

'Because of your kids,' Wayne said.

'They're the innocent ones,' Bryce said. 'They're the victims.'

'You're right. Okay,' Wayne said, nodding. 'Okay.' He knew Bryce was sincere, he knew he was safe from Bryce in that way, there was nothing he'd have to do to defend himself from Bryce's feelings of guilt. God bless the first wife, Ellen, he thought. 'Let's uh,' he said, 'let's — Shall we start?'

'Sure.'

'This is the New
York Review of Books,
you know, so I've got some, I put together some questions.'

'Shoot.'

Wayne pushed
Record,
and began: 'Wayne Prentice interview of Bryce Proctorr, March twenty-seventh. To begin, one consistent theme in your work that the critics have remarked on is the matter of duality, that actions not only have consequences but also contain a second, altered set of consequences that might have occurred, but did not, but nevertheless haunt what really did take place. This has reminded some critics of Borges' 'The Garden of Forking Paths.' Were you influenced by Borges?'

Bryce nodded, slowly, for some time, his eyes on the tape turning in the recorder. Wayne was wondering if he should ask something further when Bryce said, 'Duality … is, of course, naturally it's in all of us, opposites and the movement of selves inside the skin, and the feeling that this can't be happening to me, but then what is? What
is
happening, if not what is? From that point of view, every decision has to be the right decision, every decision has to be inevitable, no way to get away from what was decided, because history then flows, you see,
flows,
history flows from each decision, and when we stand up here, you see, you see? when you stand up here on this hilltop this is where you are and you could not have been here if you hadn't decided the way you did way back
there.
Of course, naturally, of course, if you made a different decision then,
that
would be the right, the correct one, the only one, the only possible, the only way you could have gone, if only you'd
thought,
if only you'd thought it
through,
and now today, you see, you do see, don't you? today you'd be on some other hilltop looking back and you would see that you were right and that was the only possible hilltop,
that
was the only possible hilltop, if only you'd been patient, and you can't even see that hilltop from here, where you are instead, you can't get to it, you can't ever get to it, but you certainly know, you know now, you
should
have known then, you should have known, you were thinking like a madman, worse, you were thinking like a
storyteller
telling a
story,
with a
hook,
and you didn't see there were other, other, there were other, oh, let's call them
scenarios,
and the multiplicity of the scenarios, yes, forking paths, that's good, I don't know about a garden, but this multiplicity opens and then closes like stones, like giant stones closing, and all the variables, the variations, what shall we say, diversity, the multiformity narrows, constricts, strangles, until there's only the one
,
and that it is the only one is not the excuse, that it's the
inevitable
is not the excuse, that it's the only thing that could have happened only because it's the only thing that
did
happen is not the excuse, and we're left with a duality that is in the spirit, a remorse, a wish undone, a desire for a forking path, a garden, yes, a desire for a flower that does not grow, which is where I've always, my hand has always reached out, but the image and the reality are wrong, to bring us back to your question, the desire for another reality is what makes the writer of fiction, the teller of tales, to bring us back to your question, the liar, the one who forces his reality on to the world but the graft, to bring us back to your question, the graft can never survive on this new root, on this hilltop,
this
one, here. Which is I suppose what I was writing about, if I'd ever cared to pay attention. However, I've never read Borges.'

Wayne stayed just the one night, filling several hours of tape with their interview, then took the train back to New York, sat at his computer, and wrote both sides of the interview, the questions and the answers. Everybody seemed pleased by it.

The second week in April, and Bryce was impatient for real spring to arrive. Almost every day now, he would walk up to the pool enclosure, go inside the fence, and walk around the pool with its dark green cover littered with wet clumps of last year's leaves. He always opened the pool early in May, even though the weather was usually still a little too cold then. But the pool was heated, even if the air was not, and there were always at least a few warm sunny days in May, before most of his neighbors had opened their own pools, when Bryce could swim and soak and work winter out of his body.

The second Tuesday in April, and the second day he'd eaten a lunch made by Mrs Hildebrand. A widow in her late sixties, Mrs Hildebrand had for years been a nutritionist in a private school up near the Massachusetts line. She now had a small income and no nearby family and had been living in a rather grungy apartment in Danbury. She was a quiet woman, unlikely to intrude, and she understood the job well. Cook and clean for a divorced man who worked at home, receive a small wage to supplement her Social Security, also get a room and board, have one day off a week — they'd settled on Thursday, for no particular reason — and keep to herself unless Bryce wanted company, which was unlikely to happen. She was a reader (he suspected she was a fan, though she was too discreet to gush), and there was a television set in her room, so she could fill her idle time at least as well here as in that apartment in Danbury.

There was room in the attached garage for Mrs Hildebrand's little orange Honda Civic, in which she would do the grocery shopping for the house from now on. Not the least of the benefits of his having hired Mrs Hildebrand was the fact there was no longer any chance he might actually run into Marcia Rierdon again one day. He would have to tell Wayne, next time he saw him, how grateful he was for the suggestion.

His meals were much better now, with Mrs Hildebrand in the house. Today, feeling comfortably full — feeling comfortable, in fact — he strolled up to the pool after lunch, and was roaming around it, thinking about swimming, not thinking about anything but swimming, when the cellular phone in his hip pocket rang. He stood at the end of the pool, by the brackets for the diving board he never used, but which for some reason he always had them install again every spring when they opened the pool — maybe because the brackets would be ugly without the board — and pulled the phone out of his pocket. 'Hello?'