Next Life Might Be Kinder (3 page)

T
WO MORNINGS AFTER
our wedding, at about eight-thirty, there was a knock at the door. We were now set up in our apartment, room 58. We only had a bed, a desk, a rocking chair in the living room, and four ladder-back chairs at the kitchen table. Elizabeth opened the door. I was sitting at the table having coffee. This was the first time we'd laid eyes on Alfonse Padgett. He looked about fifty; later I learned he was forty-three. He wore his bellman's uniform with epaulets, a bellman's cap, and trousers with a dark stripe that ran the length of the legs. He was roughly six feet tall, handsome though a bit gaunt, his black hair was slicked back, and he had a noticeable scar, about three inches long, horizontal as a natural furrow, on his forehead. Above his left breast pocket
Mr. Padgett
was stitched in gold cursive. “A Mrs. Lattimore?” he said, then checked a piece of paper. “I have the right room, don't I?”

“Yes, you do,” Elizabeth said. Then she did an odd thing. Lizzy had on a Dalhousie University sweatshirt, jeans, and black tennis shoes and socks, but immediately went and put a sweater on. The radiators were working nicely, and the apartment was well heated. Looking back, I don't comprehend this in some mystical way, like she was feeling a premonitory chill at the sight of Alfonse Padgett. It's just that the sweater didn't seem necessary. When she came back to the living room she said, “I take it you're delivering my chaise longue?”

“Brought it up on the service lift,” he said. He stepped aside and we could see the chaise longue in the hallway. My thought was that he must be physically strong to move furniture like this. He then picked it up and carried it into the living room and set it down. Then he said something definitely off-tilt: “Some men get to carry a bride over the threshold. Me, a musty old piece of furniture, eh?” He left without another word, shutting the door behind him. We more or less shrugged this incident off. Elizabeth looked so happy to see the chaise longue.

“Did you see the name?” Elizabeth said. “Mr. Padgett.”

“Now I get to sit on the chaise longue you've been telling me so much about.”

“Well, we have to break it in,” Elizabeth said. She slid the sweater off over her head and then, her hair now disheveled, began to lift the sweatshirt off.

“Elizabeth, you said it was from Victorian times. There's a good chance it's already
been
broken in.”

“Not by us, darling. Not by us newlyweds. T-shirt now fallen to the floor, she was naked from the waist up. She bunched up her hair and held it above her head, and whenever she held her hair up that way, it was my fall from grace. “I'm going to take the rest of my clothes off and we'll lie down on this Victorian chaise lounge. And later . . . But let's give it some time. I'm going to tell you all about how I discovered Marghanita Laski, okay? And especially her novel
The Victorian Chaise-Longue.
Because you'll want to know all the details. And I'm ready to tell you. I know what you're thinking, that there's not room enough for both of us, but you know what? There's room enough if we fit ourselves together.”

Elizabeth removed her shoes and socks, her jeans and panties. I got out of my clothes, too, adding to the pile on the kitchen floor. I lay down on the chaise longue. With her legs around my hips, Elizabeth slid me into her. She leaned forward, her breasts against my chest, her arms tight around my neck and shoulders, moving to her rhythm, which became mine. “I'm all jostled and alert, but maybe not. I'm just not sure,” she said. Fragments, like things said in sleep. I don't know where they came from. I believe she was speaking to me, though maybe as much to herself. Attempting to turn over in tandem, we almost fell off the chaise longue but managed not to. Then her legs were around my shoulders, and she pulled me deep inside and said, “I was so thirsty and now I'm not”—somehow these non sequiturs intensified everything—“but I will be,” and then, trembling convulsively, “I'm there,” and then I was.

It wasn't more than three minutes, our breaths ratcheting down to near normal, before she said, “Stay inside me, okay? You know, for as long as you can.” We lay side by side, her leg stretched over mine, and she was speaking over my shoulder, more or less into the maroon velvet back of the chaise longue, with its ornate wooden framework and equally ornate wooden legs. “I'd put things off. I had to find a topic for my dissertation at Dalhousie quickly. I mean in a week. My professors were on my case. I don't blame them. They wanted good things for me. I spoke with my adviser, Professor Auchard. Auchard asked if there was anyone whose novels I secretly loved. Putting it a bit provocatively, I thought, but I knew he meant novels that I thought were excellent but nobody much talked about, let alone taught them. He wanted me to discover someone new on his behalf, I think. I understood that right away. I thought that was great. So I said, Yes, Marghanita Laski's novels. And I was so, so happy that he had never heard of Marghanita Laski, and here I'd thought he'd read everything.”

“Is Marghanita Laski still alive?” I said.

“Yes, she lives somewhere in England, I think. I actually met her. I went to Europe and met her. It all started with a letter I wrote to her.”

“Why write her in the first place?”

“See,
The Victorian Chaise-Longue
was published in 1953. I first read it when I was eighteen, my first week at Dalhousie. I'd found a Penguin paperback—you know, with the orange cover—in a bin at a library sale. Fifteen cents, I think. I picked it up, read the back cover, which I still can recite by heart: ‘In this short, eerie novel a young mother who is recovering from tuberculosis falls asleep on a Victorian chaise-longue and is ushered into a waking nightmare of death among strangers.' I'm telling you, darling, with just that I was hooked.

“But my letter, maybe four or five handwritten pages, was all about the fact that I'd found a real Victorian chaise longue. Found it in a shop on Water Street. I told her I used my holiday money from my parents to purchase it. Told her it was my one piece of furniture, besides my bed and student desk, in my room across from Dalhousie. I told her I sometimes slept on it.”

“Were you surprised she wrote back?”

“Yeah, I didn't expect to hear from her. And when I told Professor Auchard about the exchange of letters, he said, ‘You've found your topic.' And so I had.”

“Yes, and now you're on page eighty-six.”

Since Elizabeth's death, I have read the manuscript a dozen times. That is, up to page 193, the page she was on when she died. In fact, Lily Svetgartot mentioned to Peter Istvakson that she'd noticed the unfinished dissertation on my work desk the first time she visited me at my cottage (as an uninvited guest), and the director immediately wanted to see it. Lily Svetgartot wrote me a note stating that Istvakson “needs to know everything possible there is to know. He'd very much appreciate reading the dissertation.” But I refused.

With Dr. Nissensen, November 7, 1972:

 

In my session today I told Dr. Nissensen that two nights back, Elizabeth, after setting out books on the beach, had said, “Sam, I'm up to page two hundred five,” which meant that she was continuing to work on her dissertation.

“I see,” Dr. Nissensen said. “Where do you imagine she does her writing? Perhaps she's taken a room near Port Medway.”

“Perhaps she has. And your tone just now—go fuck yourself. I feel like leaving.”

“I meant it as an inquisitive tone, Mr. Lattimore. We're still learning what not to take too personally in here, aren't we.”

“I take everything personally. Why else would I want to talk with you?”

“My apologies. I promise to be more aware of my tone.”

“I take the weather personally. I take that Van Gogh drawing on your wall personally.”

“I understand,” Nissensen said. I tried to decipher what he wrote in his notebook; it might've been just the word “personally.”

The title Elizabeth chose for her dissertation was
The Preoccupations of Marghanita Laski.
She had tried out a lot of subtitles, but finally decided each one rationalized rather than clarified. For example, one evening she set down her pencil (she wrote her first draft in longhand in blue exam notebooks) and said, “How about ‘Metaphor as Passion in
The Victorian Chaise-Longue
'? No, see what I mean? That's shit. If a title's good, it doesn't need a subtitle, right?” Elizabeth wanted eventually to teach in university. “Cardiff University or Swansea, those are my first choices, but I'd also love for us to try living in Edinburgh—someday, I mean. But that's all in the future.”

Elizabeth was twenty-nine years old when Alfonse Padgett murdered her. So young. It tears me up how young she was. This evening as I looked at her on the beach, I ached for lack of touching her. A palpable ache. For her rich auburn hair that fell thickly to her shoulders; she often had it bobby-pinned up like veritable cascades at the ready. She confessed early in our courtship that while Myrna Loy was her favorite actress, in matters of hairstyle she took instruction from any number of movie stars from the thirties and forties. “Mainly Veronica Lake,” she said. Elizabeth was emphatic in her assertion that this was not masquerade or nostalgia for a time she did not live in, but rather that she was exhibiting a kind of scholarship in the form of hairstyles. “You can ask me about who this or that particular style is based on, which exact movie,” she said, “and I can tell you—go ahead, test me on it. I'm going to get an A-plus every time.” In fact, as I sat in our kitchen, maybe six months before she died, Elizabeth had walked in, fluffed up her hair with her hands, and said, “Who do you think?”

“I can't even guess,” I said.

She said, “Veronica Lake in
This Gun for Hire.
With Alan Ladd.”

Tonight on the beach, as usual, Elizabeth had lined up eleven books, about two or three inches apart. She sat five or six meters behind them, clutching her knees, staring, as if one book or all of them would suddenly pick up and move on their own volition. I have learned to calibrate with some accuracy how close I can approach Elizabeth before she turns and says something. Her first words determine our distance. I can tell what she's comfortable with in this respect. Between ten and fifteen meters' distance, generally speaking. I realize my descriptions contain a lot of measurements; I think that is because I need literally to take a measure of this kind of reality I am experiencing, though that is more Dr. Nissensen's way of thinking than mine. Anyway, Elizabeth talked a little while, recalling some funny things Marie Ligget had told her, then spoke about her dissertation on
The Victorian Chaise-Longue.
I wrote as much as I could in my notebook. After Elizabeth left the beach, I turned to see Philip and Cynthia standing on their back porch, watching me. They turned and went back inside.

With Dr. Nissensen, November 21, 1972:

 

I thought the office was slightly overheated, but didn't comment.

“I see you've brought your notebook, Sam.” Nissensen said.

“I'd like to read Elizabeth's and my conversation. Which occurred last night.”

“I take it you drove in early this morning, then.”

“Yes, I checked into my hotel at about two
A.M.
”

“The Haliburton House Inn has a night clerk?”

“They leave a key. Honor system.”

“Please continue.”

I read from the notebook: “‘Sam, I'm on page two hundred five now. I'm writing about one of my favorite passages. It has to do with prayer. Let me recite it. “But prayer should be ecstasy . . .'” She repeated ‘But prayer should be ecstasy' over and over again, like a broken record, except it had a variable and extended melody to it, so it wasn't really like a broken record . . .”

Dr. Nissensen said, “The sentence certainly is taken out of context for me, considering that I haven't read
The Victorian Chaise-Longue
—you asked me not to. I took it as a reasonable request, though it limits my potential understanding of certain conversations you say that you and Elizabeth are having.”

“‘You
say
you are having'? I
say
it because I'm having them.”

“That put you off. I'm sorry. All right, let's stay with the passage you quoted. I'm interested in the idea of prayer. Is it possible that your seeing and hearing Elizabeth is a kind of answered prayer? That you have raised it to that level, almost theological? Let me ask it more directly: do you pray to see Elizabeth, and in turn consider seeing her your prayer being answered?”

“No, I just walk down to the beach and there she is.”

Then arrived the longest silence I had yet experienced in Dr. Nissensen's office, or at least it felt like the longest. “Because, Mr. Lattimore—” At this point in our sessions, sometimes it was “Sam,” sometimes it was “Mr. Lattimore.” He closed his eyes, opened them, and took a sip of water from the glass next to his chair. “Because, according to the transcript of the court proceedings—remember, you asked me to read the transcript. You acquired this transcript—didn't you tell me the house detective at the hotel got it for you? I assume you read it. According to his testimony, the last thing Alfonse Padgett said to Elizabeth was ‘If you pray, pray now.'”

“I tried not to read it. Then I read it. Why are you quoting from it?”

“Just that one item.”

“‘If you pray, pray now.' The most hideous, godless, cynical, arrogant, violent nightmare words a human being can say.”

“I could not agree more,” Nissensen said.

“I hope someone uses the handle of a shovel to fuck him to death in prison.”