Fatal Flaw (9 page)

9

BERWYN IS
the story of American sprawl writ across a rolling suburban landscape. At first it was farm county, supplying the big city with its corn and tomatoes. But early in the nineteenth century a few grand estates were carved out by the aristocratic wealthy as necessary places of refuge from the hurly-burly hoi polloi of the city. Of course the estates needed staff, staff that lived in the city, so the railroad, coincidentally owned by those with just such estates, built a train line to ferry the staff back and forth from their meager urban dwellings. It was the railroad that serviced these estates that became known as the Main Line, a name that soon came to designate the entire area. But the raw plow of progress always follows transportation, and it wasn’t long before developers began to sell neat little houses not far from the stations, promising easy train commutes to the city. As the years went on, the suburban outcroppings grew, some would say metastasized, spreading outward, invading farmland like a heartless disease, until only the original great estates were left intact. But who anymore could afford to maintain an eighty-acre estate in the middle of the ’burbs? One by one the estates were sold, subdivided, developed, and turned into the very creatures they had spawned, but with a difference. No typical suburban split-levels were to be built upon these blue-blooded
grounds. It was as if their aristocratic origins infected the new developments, and what was created instead were strange imitations of the great manor houses, with falsely majestic fronts and grotesquely shaped wings all out of proportion to their three-quarter-acre lots.

Welcome to the Brontë Estates, luxury homes starting in the low $800,000s. McMansions for those whose aspirations had outlived their times. The American dream on steroids.

I remember when the Forrests first moved into their new house in the Brontë Estates, showing off the seven thousand square feet of luxurious, state-of-the-art suburban space. The ground was still packed hard from the heavy vehicles, the land barren of all but the youngest, barest twigs planted by the developers, most lots were still construction sites, but Leila and Guy were proud as new parents. They had chosen the Heathcliff model, with the extra bedroom, the cathedral ceilings, the oversize great room, the atmosphere of continual yearning. A house, they said, to grow into. Leila talked of all her decorating ideas, and Guy fiddled with the new lawn mower, though his sod lawn had yet to be laid. They had lived in an apartment in the city until Leila had become pregnant with their second child, so they exuded that special glow of freshly minted suburbanites ensconced in a McMansion of their very own. The grass would arrive on a truck, the skinny trees would grow, how could the future be anything but lush?

“Hello, Victor,” said the former Leila Peale at her front door. “I was wondering when you’d arrive.”

“Mind if I come in for a few moments?”

“Of course not. I always have time for an old friend.”

I thought she was being facetious. When Guy had left his family for Hailey, the family friends were forced to make a choice, Leila or Guy. Leila, being the more sympathetic figure and having the older connection to their social set, seemed to end up with everyone but me. I had known Guy long before his marriage and, though I thought what he had done was despicable, I ended up, almost against my will, on his side of the aisle. That he had told me everything before he left his wife and I had said nothing to her only cemented my place outside her circle. I hadn’t seen her, hadn’t spoken
to her, since the separation, so when Leila called me an old friend I thought she was making a joke. But she surprised me by ushering me not into the formal parlor with its stiff French furnishings reserved for painfully polite conversation but through the open kitchen area into the spacious, vaulted informal room used by family and friends.

So there we were, perched in the plush green furnishings, two iced teas on coasters atop the coffee table, chatting like, well, like old friends. I wanted to pat her on the knee and assure her that I was taking care of everything, that Guy would pay for all he had done, but it was better to maintain my secrets. When she looked at me, I supposed she saw the bastard lawyer defending her bastard husband. When I looked at her, I supposed I saw an ally.

“I saw you on TV, Victor, giving your little speech as you left the courthouse.”

“It’s part of the job.”

“Well, it doesn’t look as if you hate it.”

“No, can’t say I do.”

“And they do seem to like putting you on.”

“Such is the burden of startling good looks and a winning personality.”

She laughed at that, a deep, good-natured laugh, and curled her legs beneath her on the couch. It reminded me of better times, when Leila and Guy were my mature married friends and I played the part of the unsettled single guy. Leila was a big-boned women with an inviting, if not beautiful, face. Friendly and warm with a lively sense of humor, she had made a nice contrast to the serious and humorless Guy.

Slowly her laughter subsided and her face darkened. “How is he?” she asked.

“Not so good.”

“I didn’t think so. Guy sometimes pretended to be a hard guy, as if the tattoo prepared him for anything, but he is not the prison type.”

“Who is, really? How are the children handling it?” They had two: Laura, a lovely, quiet girl, aged six, and Elliott, a terror who never outgrew his terrible twos, aged four. “Do they know?”

“Not really. It’s not as if he had been much of a presence in their lives after he left anyway. I told them their daddy is in trouble but that it’s all a mistake and he’ll be with them soon.”

“He wants to see them.”

“I don’t think that’s best. After the trial, if he’s convicted, I expect we’ll have to work something out about visitation, but until then I don’t think it healthy for a six-and four-year-old to see their father in prison. I’ve talked it over with the pediatrician and she agrees.”

“I’ll tell him. He’ll be disappointed, but I’m sure he’ll understand.”

“He should write letters. They’d love to hear from him and Laura, at least, can write back. Is there anything else I can do? Anything? I’ll do what I can.”

“That’s sort of why I came, but I’m a little surprised at the offer. I thought a part of you would be glad it turned out like it did.”

“He’s still my husband, Victor, the father of my children. I don’t want him in jail.”

“And Hailey?”

She winced, as if she had just chewed a rotten morsel of beef. “I don’t wish anyone dead, but I won’t mourn Hailey Prouix. Somehow she turned Guy against himself, and that’s a crime. You know, Victor, I was suing her.”

“Suing her?”

“Alienation of affection I think is the legal term, but basically I was suing her for stealing my husband. There have been successful suits just like it all over the country. One woman I heard won a million dollars.”

“Sounds like the lottery.”

“I was suing that witch for every penny she had.”

“What good would that have done, Leila?”

“Other than the money?” She laughed again. “Oh, I suppose in some bitter way it would have cheered me. I wanted to take something from her that she cared about, just like she took Guy from me.”

“He had something to do with it, too.”

“He was bewitched.”

“Leila.”

“Well, it wasn’t love. What Guy and I had together was love, what he had with her was something else. I think love is more than just a one-way obsession, don’t you, Victor? Doesn’t it have to be based on some sort of understanding of the other? Doesn’t it have to be reciprocated in some way to be real?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and in that moment I could have sworn I caught a whiff of jasmine, Hailey’s scent, and I remembered, suddenly, an afternoon we spent together just a few weeks before her death. I blinked the memory away before it overwhelmed me. “Reciprocated or not,” I said, “the emotion feels just the same either way.”

“Yes, that’s just it. It feels the same either way, but it isn’t the same. One is real, genuine, an emotional coming-together that forms the basis for everything meaningful. The other is a solipsistic delusion, not so different from a teenager with a crush on a rock star or a stalker obsessed with his prey. Whatever those emotions are, no matter how strong, they are not love. Guy was obsessed with her, I know that, and I can understand it, but it wasn’t love. Whatever trouble he’s in, it arrived because in the midst of his obsession he thought she was feeling what he was feeling, when she was incapable of returning what he felt with anything but scorn.”

“How do you know what she was capable of?”

“So defensive, Victor. It’s charming, your trying to defend my husband’s emotional life, but I know her. I know how she met my husband and why. And I had a run-in with her on my own. After the complaint was filed by some young attorney in my father’s office, she called me. Out of the blue she called me, and what she said…Victor, I was third-team all-American as a swimmer in college and let me tell you, a swimmers’ locker room can be pretty raucous—some of the girls could shame a sailor—but still, I have never heard language coming from a woman like I heard over the phone. When she hung up, I was too startled to be angry. What I was, actually, was sorry for Guy.”

“What did she say?”

“I won’t tell you word for word, I don’t use that kind of language in my home, but it was something to the effect that if I wanted him back so badly, I was welcome to him. But then she warned me that
with the taste of her still in his teeth there was no way in hell he was coming back to me. I’ll give her this, at least she knew where her power lay.”

“So you hated her.”

“No, it wasn’t so personal. I wanted it to be personal, me against her, then maybe the lawsuit would have given me true satisfaction, but it wasn’t like that. She was more a force of nature, like a sudden raging storm or a tornado. You don’t hate it, but you sure as hell feel sorry for anyone in its path.”

I winced. I couldn’t help it. It was easy enough to dismiss Leila’s disparagements as the words of a woman scorned, because take away the informal setting and the apparent calm of her voice and that was what she was, a woman scorned, whose husband had left her for something sweeter. It was easy enough to dismiss all she said, except that Leila herself was a presence not easily dismissed.

“Leila,” I said, wanting to change the topic, “Guy is pretty shaken. He says he needs to get out of jail until the trial, but it looks like he won’t have enough assets to put up for bond if bail is set.”

“I thought there was money?”

“There is some, yes. We’re in the process of tracking it down, getting an exact figure, but, from what we can tell so far, there were apparently some bad investments and some unaccounted-for withdrawals.”

“Bad investments and unaccounted-for withdrawals.” She repeated my words, as if to imprint the new idea in her consciousness. “No money? There’s no money?”

“We haven’t tracked down the exact figure yet.”

The exact figure apparently didn’t matter. She started laughing, as if some great practical joke had been played for her benefit. “Well, you don’t have to bother. I can guess all right. There’s no money. So much for my lawsuit.” Her laughter continued, ratcheted up in intensity. “So much for Juan Gonzalez.”

“Who? The ballplayer?”

“Forget it. Nothing.” She kept laughing until she noticed me sitting there glumly and regained her composure. “But, Victor, if there’s no money, how are you getting paid?”

“I don’t know.”

“The loyalty of an old friend?”

“Something like that.”

“I wonder if Guy knows how lucky he is to have you.”

“The point is, Leila, that Guy wants to know if you’d put up the house for his bail. It might not be enough even if you could, but he wanted me to ask, and I said I would, even though I—”

“Yes.”

“Excuse me?”

“Yes, I would put up the house to get him out of jail. Will it be enough?”

“I don’t know.”

“The mortgage is pretty high, and I don’t know how much equity there is, but whatever I can do I will do. I also have some investments we could use.”

“You know he was trying to run when they arrested him. He could try to run again.”

“He won’t. His life is here.”

“And he might have actually killed her.”

“If he did, he had good reason. Is there something I have to sign?”

“You might want to talk to a lawyer before you do anything. If he runs, you could lose the house. You might want to talk to your father.”

“I know what my father would say and I don’t care. You bring to me what you want me to sign and I will sign it. And you tell Guy I’m still waiting.”

“Waiting?”

“He’ll know.”

“You’re waiting? For him?” My eyes opened wide with my incredulity. “You’re waiting for him to come back?”

“This is his home, too.”

“You still love him, even after all he did?”

“It’s not like a faucet, Victor. You don’t just turn it off.”

“You ever think he’s not worthy of it?”

“Every day.”

“And that if he does get out, he might not choose to live with you again?”

“Victor, everything you say makes a great deal of sense, and
thank you for your sage advice, but I’m willing to take my chances. Sometimes in the middle of our lives we don’t realize that our dreams have come true. It’s only after it all disappears that we know. I want it back the way it was before ever we heard of Hailey Prouix. I want my husband back, my children’s father back, my life back. I want everything the way it was.”

“It can never be that way again, Leila. Whatever it is, it will be different.”

“Maybe better, who can tell? She’s dead, isn’t she? You bring me the paper, I’ll sign what I need to sign.”

I hadn’t thought of it before, it hadn’t seemed a possibility before, but now how could I avoid it? Even knowing what I knew, even with all my certainties, how could I avoid it?

“On the night Hailey was killed,” I said, “where were you around ten o’clock?”

“That’s funny, Victor. The police asked me the very same question.”