Man in The Woods (16 page)

She kisses him as she speaks, until he turns his head.

“What?” Kate asks.

“I have to tell you something,” he says.

She can barely see him in the dim light from the hallway. “That’s never good,” she says.

He is silent for a few moments. He knows what she cannot know—he is about to change everything. “It’s not,” he says. “It’s not good.”

“Oh Paul…What is it? Just tell me.”

“A couple of weeks ago,” he says, and stops. He wants to live for one more moment in a world in which he has not said this. Once it starts it cannot stop; it will be like having taken an ax to a tree.

“What?” she says. “A couple of weeks ago. What?”

“I killed a man,” he says. “A couple of weeks ago I killed a man.”

The way he was leading up to it, she would have bet anything that he was going to tell her he was involved with somebody else, and in spite of herself her first reaction is a rush of relief. Her second reaction is the rest of her life.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“You seem unusually quiet today,” Todd Lawson says.

Paul does not trust himself to speak, and he is doing his best to keep his mind occupied by listening to the moist crunch of his footsteps through the hardening, thickening loam of the woods, and to the furious territorial squawks of the blue jays, those holdout birds who never leave, a dozen of them circling. The sky is a wrinkled purple-and-gray shawl. Below, rain, melt, and runoff have pooled shallowly and formed a fragile skin of ice. It’s difficult to resist applying the rude nudge of a toe to the spun-sugar puddles, turning them into spiderwebs of cracks and fissures.

Now that he has told Kate what he has done, the pressure to say it again and again and again builds daily. Today, Paul, Evangeline, and Shep were at the painter Hunter DeMille’s house, a reclaimed lighthouse in the middle of the Hudson. Paul was showing DeMille plans he had drawn up to build a network of wooden walkways, upon which the boggy two acres of land the lighthouse stands might be traversed, and while they spoke Shep effortlessly won the heart of DeMille’s seven-year-old son, Cooper, from whom laughter was such an infrequent sound that DeMille immediately put in a bid to buy the dog. As outrageous as it was to think that Paul might spontaneously decide to unload his dog, DeMille carried on in his attempts to buy Shep, and Evangeline looked on, disheartened to see a man whom she had studied in her Marlowe College art history classes behave in such a presumptuous manner. Paul, wishing only to silence the insistent painter, started mentally rehearsing the shocking reveal of why he could never give Shep up, and as DeMille angrily raised the price higher and higher, until he was offering Paul ten thousand dollars for the dog, the urge to simply tell the old guy that he had killed a man over this dog became so strong that the desire to confess to violence became violence in itself. Similarly, he has wanted to tell Evangeline the actual story of how he found Shep, and he has wanted to tell Annabelle, who, last Sunday, when Paul at last got around to repairing the steps on her porch, told him he was being unusually quiet.

The need to talk about what he has done surges behind a dam of common sense, but common sense is not enough to hold such a deep and powerful force and so the dam must be shored up, spackled with words. Yet small talk is impossible for Paul right now and so the words he says are perilously close to the words he is afraid to say.

“Do you think you could make it through if you were ever put in jail?” he asks Lawson.

Lawson has been walking a few paces in front of Paul but stops, turns. “For a night?”

“For a year, or ten years.”

“Live free or die, baby, like the license plate says. But why? Thinking of committing a crime?” Lawson plucks a tiny brown and withered pinecone from the end of an icy branch, rubs it between his thumb and forefinger, and lets it fall to the ground. Shep comes seesawing over to check out what has dropped to the ground, sniffs it, and looks up with a cheerful expression, as if to jolly Lawson into dropping something of higher value.

“So do you think you could do it?” Paul persists.

“I don’t know. It would be hard. I can’t even sit through a movie.”

They have been hiking what was once the Leyden Gun Club but which has been recently sold and slated for development: the hundred-unit condo will be called Turkey Hollow, presumably in honor of the many wild turkeys who have met their end on these acres. Suddenly, they are standing on the edge of a winding blacktop road. A couple of joggers come chugging by, two men in their forties and, by the look of them, corporate types, with salt-and-pepper hair, slender legs, sweatshirts announcing their patronage of the Four Seasons Istanbul and a place called Smuggler’s Cove, which, by the look of it, with its palm trees and parrots, is somewhere in the Caribbean. The joggers give no indication of having any awareness of either Paul or Todd’s presence. A tattered trail of their conversation wafts behind them—the one with the sweatshirt from the Four Seasons is talking about measures his company is taking to back up their data in case worst predictions about Y2K come true.

“That guy in the Istanbul shirt?” Lawson says when the joggers are a safe distance away. “He’s married to an old girlfriend of yours.”

“Yeah?”

“Lynn Dobkin.”

“I thought she moved to London or someplace.”

“I think that’s where they met, but now they’re here. Part of the time, anyhow.” Lawson takes a deep breath, the way people do when their thoughts turn to the past. “She was so good-looking she made you good-looking.” Todd presents his palm to be slapped, but Paul pretends not to notice.

“That was never going to go anywhere.”

“What do you mean?” Todd says. “You were already there, there was nowhere left to go.”

“Lynn was very involved with being Jewish,” Paul says. “I was the first non-Jew she had ever gone out with.”

“And who were you seeing before that?” Todd asks. “The acupuncturist?”

“Pauline. Not an acupuncturist. Shiatsu massage. And you know what? Someone named Paul cannot go out with someone named Pauline.”

“Really?” Todd says. “I could deal with a problem like that. She was gorgeous.”

Paul shrugs. He hears the distant hum of a car engine and the lit-fuse hiss of tire treads on wet blacktop; he snaps his fingers and Shep comes to his side, and Paul hooks his finger through the dog’s collar. The dog seems wised up to cars, but you never know. An animal is liable to do anything, any animal.

“She was gorgeous and the sex was amazing,” Todd says. “Remember?”

Paul frowns. He doubts he said such a thing, but where else would Todd get the idea? Because it was true, truer words were never spoken, there were times when the sense memory of being with Pauline comes back to him, brilliant and unbidden.

“And what about Indigo Albright?” Lawson asks.

“Now you’re really reaching into the past,” Paul says, but he feels the sweetness of being known. It amazes him that Todd has been so mindful all these years. How long have they actually known each other? He cannot affix a date to the time of their first meeting. Todd is one of those people whom you feel you have always known, even though you have a difficult time imagining where he goes when he is not standing directly in front of you. He seems, both in his remarks and his actions, without motive—but is such a thing possible? Is there any human being without motive? Doesn’t motive rule the inner life as commandingly as gravity rules the outer?

“Let me ask you a question,” Paul says. They have come to the part of the road that begins the eastern edge of Kate’s property; a dying locust tree, its trunk, bulging with cancers, bears a yellow plastic no hunting sign with her name written on it in Magic Marker. The lights of the house are not visible from here, but the glow of them rises through the late-afternoon air like a cool yellowish mist. Paul feels the blind mammalian weight of Shep leaning against his legs. “Did you know the guy Kate was with, before me?”

“Sure. I still do. Daniel Emerson. Why? Need a lawyer?”

“I might,” Paul says, and forces himself to smile. “But what happened with him? Something bad, right?”

“Yeah. A fireworks accident. On Ferguson Richmond’s property. Thing is, men get into the woods—we go back to our elemental selves, and shit happens. Anyhow, the guy recovered, though it took a while. And in the meanwhile Dan ended up with the guy’s wife. Welcome to Leyden.”

“He really broke Kate’s heart,” Paul says.

“I know. Everybody knows.”

“She won’t even say his name.”

“Well now you have her all to yourself.”

Paul shakes his head. “What is it with us?”

“With who?”

“You know. Men.”

“Men do what men do. We’re just part of the scheme of things,” Todd says, punching Paul lightly on the arm. “We’re just nature.”

“Poor Kate,” Paul says.

“Well happy ending. She’s got you now.” Todd reaches down, picks up a rock from the side of the road, and heaves it high into the air, over the trees. Long seconds go by before they hear it come back to earth.

“But what’s going on, Paul?” Todd asks softly. “Are you in trouble? Something you want to tell me? I mean, you don’t have to. But if you want to, I’m here.”

“I know,” Paul says. “And it’s much appreciated.”

They make the turn around another bend in the road. The northern end of Kate’s house is visible here; the lights of the room she has designated as the library burn bright yellow against the sudden deep blue of the evening. If Paul’s heart had knees it would fall to them right now.

“I sort of feel like I’m in jail, half the time,” Paul says. “I’m living the way you’re supposed to when they lock you up, when you just sit there and contemplate your wrongdoing.”

“Hey,” Todd says. “Listen to me. I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, but I do know this: there is no way on earth that you belong in jail, I don’t care what you’ve done.”

Paul laughs. It’s unbelievable to him what a lift it gives him to hear those words. “You want to come in?” he asks Todd. “Cup of tea, or we could open a bottle of wine.”

“No thanks,” Todd says. “I’ve got señorita plans.”

“Well I can’t stand in the way of that,” Paul says.

“I mean literally señorita,” Todd says. “Did you ever meet Vicky Rodriguez? She nannies for the Rosenbergs over at Southwind. My grandfather used to have dinners at that house. The Rosenbergs have no idea what the history of that place is, their own house, I have to tell them all about it. This town is changing so fast.”

“It’s just different rich people,” Paul says. “The new richies will make their own history.”

“Not just that. There’s five times as many houses. If they put a fast train on the tracks, we’re going to be a suburb. No one makes anything, no one fixes anything. Everybody lives by their little rules, everyone’s worrying over their retirements and paying their insurance premiums. The adventure’s gone. They’ve cut the balls off this place. It’s not for me. And it’s not for you either. It’s not for us.”

They are standing at the beginning of the driveway leading down to Kate’s house. Off to the side, a small herd of deer are foraging for what’s left of the summer’s grass; every now and then one of them lifts its head and its eyes shine like amethyst. From this vantage, the house is not visible, except for its halo of light. Shep has gotten so accustomed to seeing deer and has had so little success chasing them that now he seems to actually
pretend
not to see them. His energies are focused on going back to the house. The back half of his body writhes with excitement; his two favorite parts of a walk are being asked to come along and being allowed to return.

“Well,” Paul says, “I’ll see you.”

“Here’s the thing,” Todd says. He lays his hand on Paul’s shoulder. “If you’ve done something, you have to trust yourself to deal with it within yourself, on your own terms. It’s the do-it-yourself ethic, my friend. Men like us, we don’t look to other people to fix things for us. A sink gets stopped up, we don’t call a plumber, we snake it out, we change the gaskets, we do whatever it takes, and if a tree gets struck by lightning and falls on our house we get in there with a chainsaw and cut the tree into two-foot lengths and then we repair the roof. Whatever it is that’s bothering you, you’ll deal with it, I know you will, you always have. You’ve got something that’s so fucking far beyond adherence to the rules—you’ve got honor.”

Todd rocks back on his heels and grins. There’s a gap between his right incisor and the next tooth, a dark tunnel leading to the depths of him.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

In the silence of the car, he has been composing a letter in his mind, or a speech.
Dear Kate, I love you so deeply and so much
. But he sees her glancing at him and he speaks. “They say that murderers always return to the scene of the crime,” Paul says, sinking lower in the passenger seat as Kate steers her car off of the Taconic Parkway and onto the Saw Mill.

“No one’s a murderer here, so you can just shut up about that,” says Kate. She assumes this will sound affectionate, loyal, and confident, but she sees Paul’s uncertain expression and now she reaches for him, rests her hand on his knee, and adds, “I’m sorry.”

He looks at her quizzically, as if a world in which Kate has to be sorry is somehow bizarre.
But I don’t think I was ever meant to live with another person
.

“Next exit, right?” Kate asks.

Paul’s knees ride nervously up and down. He looks like someone in an interrogation room who is starting to realize he won’t be able to hold out much longer. He looks like someone who is about to crack. As they close in on Tarrytown his mind is besieged with irrational fears, fears that began when he acquiesced to Kate’s request to see for herself the place where he did it, beat a man to death, and which have intensified the closer they get to Martingham. Yet he maintains his resolve to see it through. Kate is hammering out her own sense of what had happened that November afternoon, what happened to Paul, and what, by extension, and through the intractable bonds of love, has happened to her, and Paul feels he has no right to interfere.

Until today, she did not ask which woods he had stopped in, and Paul never volunteered. Once, maybe the night he told her what he had done, or perhaps it was the day after, he started to tell her in detail where he had turned off the road, where he had parked his truck, but some instinct had made her stop him. Kate, normally curious, and sometimes insatiably so, didn’t want to be able to picture Paul’s deed too clearly. She had already begun on the path she had chosen, which was to keep him safe, this man, her man, who, except for that one thing, that one terrible thing, did nothing but make life better for everyone around him. Ignorance wasn’t bliss but rather a gauzy scarf thrown over the lamp of knowledge, coloring the light, making it less harsh.

Yet it was odd to know so little about what had really happened that November afternoon, and Kate has begun to wonder how the blows had landed, where the body had fallen, what happened first, what happened second, what happened after that. And where? How could Paul and the man find themselves so alone, like two fugitives facing each other in the wilderness, how could this happen in the middle of Westchester County, which was in itself so close to Manhattan, and was really just the hem of the city’s long skirt?

Your life was good, really good, when I met you
…It is eleven in the morning and now that they have turned off the Saw Mill there are no other cars in sight. Kate is aware that Paul hasn’t spoken in several minutes, nor has he made eye contact with her. His knees continue to jiggle and he keeps his eyes fixed on the passing landscape. She comes to a stop at a T-junction. “Take a right, and then another right, and then there’s the entrance,” Paul says.

“I’m sorry,” Kate says.

He shakes his head. He will have none of that.
You have your life, your writing, Ruby…

“I just have to do this,” Kate says.

“We’re here. We’re doing it. It’s for the best.”

“I do think it will be.”

Paul shrugs. He turns toward her suddenly, his face lacking in kindness. For a moment she can almost see it happening. “Maybe God wants us to be here. Is that what you’re thinking?” he asks.

She feels the words like a blow, and her first response is to say something equally angry, but she is thrown off course by the sheer unfamiliarity of verbal nastiness from Paul, whose infrequent moments of irritation have heretofore been expressed through withdrawal and silence. “Maybe you’re right,” she says, “maybe that’s exactly what God wants.”

“Well I’d like to know something about his wishes because this complete silence is a drag. I killed a man and the universe is totally silent.”

She turns on the access road leading to Martingham State Park. Blue spruces border the blacktop; the white line dividing the road seems freshly painted. Above, the sky is lumpy and gray, a vast frozen oyster of a sky.

“We’re going to be okay,” she says. “You’re never going to be caught, we’re never going to tell anyone. We’ll just live with it. What else can we do?”

“I don’t know,” Paul says. “It might be better if I’d turned myself in. Easier.” He slips his hand into his coat; his stomach feels as if he is digesting gravel.
I feel like an infection…I think it’s time for me to disappear…

“It would be pointless,” Kate says, a little sharply. “The thing is, nobody saw you. I used to write about this stuff, Paul, I know what I’m talking about. People who get caught? Most of them are already in the system, with long records of criminal behavior. And most of them are dumb or crazy. Or it’s so obvious, like the OJ thing, it’s like who else could it have been? Husbands kill their wives, wives kill their husbands, disgruntled employees, impatient heirs, these are the people who get caught.”

“I’m already caught,” Paul says.

Today there are other vehicles in the park’s east lot, six of them, any of which could be an unmarked police car. As Kate noses her car toward the same slot in which Paul had parked his truck, he is suddenly overcome by fear; it feels as if he is inhabited by a thousand small hands, all busily shredding his reason. So fierce, vast, and shaming is his panic that he can barely breathe, and Kate, who last night stayed up late and alone, drinking Snapple and watching an old production of
Macbeth
on PBS, remembers something dear Ban-quo says in the first act:
Or have we eaten on the insane root/That takes the reason prisoner?
Good question, Kate thinks, accelerating as she circles the parking lot. Paul is looking into each car as they pass it.

“I think the best thing is to act natural,” Kate says.

“There’s two people in that black Buick,” he whispers.
She’s done this to me …

Kate cranes her neck to get a better view. He’s right, two people. But they look like teenagers, a kid in a Mets cap, another with pink hair. They’ve probably come here to smoke pot. But she doesn’t want to argue with him. She keeps driving, out of the parking area, back onto the access road. “Now what?” she says.

“I don’t know,” Paul says. “We’re here because of you.” He sees the look on her face. He didn’t mean to hurt her.
Monster…

“Maybe this was a bad idea,” Kate says. “I don’t need to see any more. We can go back home.”

Home. The word pierces Paul, the idea that there is a place in the world where he belongs, and the ease with which Kate has said it. He reaches for her hand. “No, it’s okay. Let’s turn around. I’ll show you where it happened.”

“You don’t have to. I get it. I don’t even know why I wanted to do this in the first place.”

“It was just seeing those cars.”

“Those were just a couple of teenage guys in that Buick. I think they were getting high.”

“Last time the place was empty. It’s weird to see so many cars.”

“It’s a park. People come and go.” She looks over at Paul. His hands are folded in his lap, tightening and loosening their clasp.

“I was at the post office yesterday,” Paul says. “A supplier sent me some chips of Louisiana cypress that I had to pick up.”

“And?” she asks. His voice sounds hollow, distant. She is starting to miss him and long for him already, as if he has betrayed her and she has not been able to forgive him.

“And there was this guy in front of me, he was already at the window. Buying stamps. But he was very particular about it, he wanted fancy ones. So Gerald shows him some Elvis stamps and those Robert Indiana love stamps, a bunch of stuff, and here’s this guy, he’s about fifty, he’s wearing his earmuffs and mittens inside the post office though it’s always insanely hot in there, and he’s taking his time making his big decision of the day. I’ve already been there for quite a while and I’ve got so much to do back at the shop, and I’m staring at this guy’s neck and trying to do a mind control thing to make him hurry up. But he thinks and he thinks and then he finally decides which sheet of stamps he’s going to buy and he starts taking nickels and dimes out of his belly bag, ten, twenty, twenty-five, thirty-five, forty, and I’m thinking to myself: I’d like to break this guy’s neck.” He looks at Kate, pleadingly. “You know what I’m saying. This guy is getting on my nerves and the next thing I know I want to kill him with my bare hands.”

“We all think things like that,” Kate says.

“But I’ve actually gone and done it,” says Paul. “And it’s made me aware of how often I think about it, how often I’ve always thought about it. Someone’s driving too slowly in front of me, or I see some slob throwing garbage out of his truck, or somebody treats me like I’m a servant. I could murder that guy, this one I’d like to kick in the ass, this one I’d like to shake. But when you’ve actually done it?” He shakes his head. “I hope you never have to wonder about yourself the way I wonder about myself.”

They have come to a stop sign. “What do you want me to do, Paul? Shall I turn around, or should we just go back to Leyden?”

“I was just thinking…We’re going to be having a big party soon? I think that’s going to be weird. It doesn’t seem right.”

“It’ll be fine,” Kate says. “We need to see people. And we should just act as normally as possible.” She means it to be comforting, just old-fashioned common sense, but to her own ears she sounds like someone who has entered into a conspiracy.

“I feel strange around people,” Paul says. “I’m not part of them. I’m part of something else.”

“People love you, Paul. They really do.”

“I’m afraid of myself.”

She takes his hand and places it on her throat. “I’m not afraid of you, I don’t think you’ve gone feral or something. I love you and I trust you and my advice, if you’re looking for advice, is for you to love and trust yourself, because you deserve it.”

“What about—”

“There’s nothing we can do about that at this point. It’s in God’s hands—and the way it seems so far is nobody else cares.”

“All right,” Paul says. “I’ll show you where.”

Halfway across the intersecting road, Kate makes a U-turn and they return to Martingham State Park. As they walk from the parking area to the trail, Paul notices a sign informing people of all that is forbidden in the park, including fires, bottles, weapons, and dogs. Dogs. There is a silhouette of a German shepherd, circled in red with a forbidding line drawn through it. Paul wonders if this is new; he has no memory of seeing it last month. He feels something touching him and he is startled for an instant before realizing Kate has taken his hand.

If he was ever to be apprehended for that killing, today would be the day, Paul thinks. He feels both terror and relief at the prospect. He sees something in a nearby white birch—a camera? Maybe that’s exactly how the police are proceeding: they are filming everyone who comes to this spot and then checking their footprints against the prints they took on the day of the killing. He grins horribly at the camera.
Film away motherfuckers
. Then he is overcome with remorse: he does not want to get caught. Yes he does. No he doesn’t. Yes he does. Doesn’t. Does. Does not. Yet when they get closer to the tree the camera turns out to be a cancerous bulge. Still, that doesn’t mean anything.

“This is how I walked in. And over there,” he says, lowering his voice, because they have come to a turn in the path, and someone—anyone—could be just a few feet away, “that’s where the picnic tables are, or were anyhow.”

They are still here, and, on this cold winter morning, unoccupied, a coarse sheen of ice on their surface. With the roar of his own surging blood in his ears, Paul shows Kate where he placed his wristwatch, a gift from Kate herself. Though there is no one else near to them, everything he says to her is delivered in a low murmur, and when the wind picks up there are words here and there she cannot make out but she lets it go because even though his voice is flat and seems devoid of emotion, he is continually swallowing, breathing quickly, shallowly, and it seems to her that a sharp noise or a sudden movement would undo him completely. When he walks with her from the picnic table upon which he was sitting to the table where the man was beating Shep, his steps are shaky, uncertain, and when he points to the leg of the picnic table to which the dog had been leashed, his narration of the events of that day suddenly stops and he just stands there in silence, remembering.
I love you Kate…You made a home for me I never felt so at home anywhere else…I love your body the feel of you your mind your crazy soul…

Kate looks at the trees that encircle this clearing, their branches yearning toward the sky. She is trying to take it in, trying to absorb it and make it indelible, but it all seems like one of those dreams that you know you will forget even as you are dreaming it. “Over here?” she asks. “Is this where he…” She points to a spot on the ground, near the table.

“Yes. Maybe a little closer. Like here.” His gesture is sweeping, indistinct.
You are holding on to me and I am sinking I need to cut you loose
.

A large, lacy snowflake floats between them, and then another and another. Kate puts her hand out and catches a flake that dissolves on her leather glove. She wraps her arm around Paul’s waist as they head back to the car. They are already in a steady snowfall. Blue jays squawk in the distance. The hemlock boughs are catching the snowfall. The sunshine filters through the dark clouds illuminating everything, the trees, the picnic tables, the stones on the ground, and the snowfall itself, an immense swirling softness connecting heaven and earth.

For an instant, they both feel it.

“We’re being forgiven,” Kate whispers.