None of this Ever Really Happened (23 page)

I
REALIZED ONE
summer day that I was spending entirely
too much time sitting at my desk by the window
in my room, and I got up early to cross the plaza with
Art and eat a good breakfast in the sidewalk café beneath the
arcades. I even bought the English-language paper, hoping
to find out how the Cubs were doing. In it beneath a heading
that read, "Whereabouts—Please contact the American
Embassy," halfway down a long list of names, I found mine.
It surprised me. Was I missing? I tried to remember the last
time I had talked to or even written anyone at home except
Carolyn; it seemed as if it had been days, but it had been
weeks, many weeks. Actually, I hadn't called home since I'd
left San Miguel and come here. Later I put some pesos in the
beggar's tin.

The beggar had a lot to do with why I didn't leave my
room often: the beggar, the fruit cart, and my work. Despite
the steepness of the hill, the stones in the street were so large
and irregular that there was little danger of the fruit cart rolling
away. The beggar sat behind the fruit cart in the shelter
of a doorway with a rusted sardine tin beside him. He looked
like a pile of refuse that the street sweeper was sure to come
back for. The only part of his anatomy that you could pick out
from his colorless heap was his face, featureless and organless
now, looking like a swollen, misshapen fist. When you
dropped a coin into the tin, the beggar scrambled to recover
it and then waved it impatiently, almost frantically, above his
head until the fruit-cart man came to replace it with a banana,
an orange, a slice of melon, a few nuts, a mango, a piece
of papaya, a tangerine or a slice of coconut with a streak of
hot sauce across it. The beggar ate with the same impatience,
clutching and gulping his each morsel like a chipmunk, and
when it was gone, waited for more footsteps, another coin,
more food. I didn't like the beggar much, but he fascinated
me. I didn't even pity him because he was just too far removed
from the whole of my experience, but I had come to
realize lately I envied him a little. I'd been tempted several
times to drop a few hundred pesos in that tin of his and watch
the fruit-cart man dump his entire inventory on the beggar's
head. Perhaps it was his table manners that offended me so.

Late in the day after the rain, the high-plateau sun beyond
my roof shined down into the street onto the fruit cart and
reduced everything for a few minutes to color, a few colors,
insistent primary colors like a child's finger painting. Early
in the morning before the beggar came, even before the fruit
cart came, a woman carrying a pan of water opened a door
in the wall and washed yesterday's peels and rinds and shells
into the gutter.

We all need our monsters—that much is certain—and sometimes
they need each other; neither Saddam Hussein nor
George Bush was very interesting all alone. The same is true
of Mr. Claggart and Billy Budd, or should that pairing be
Mr. Claggart and Captain Vere? I think so. As for everyone's
favorite monster, Adolf Hitler's greatest contribution to destruction
in our time wasn't a worldwide war or the murder
of twelve million, but providing the rest of us with a model of
absolute evil just when we had wisely begun to doubt its existence.
Since 1945, God only knows how many lives have been
given and taken in the name of morality; certainly righteousness
is the greatest destructive force on the planet today.
I saw Albert Decarre six times as a patient in the months
after I got home from Mexico, though I'd intended to see
him only once. The first time I told him I was haunted by
something that I had seen and something that I knew, but
we didn't discuss either of those things until the last time I
saw him. What we did talk about was my family, the love
my parents shared for forty-one years, and the guilt I felt for
hurting Lydia.

"Can you tell me about that relationship?"

I told him that it had everything a relationship is supposed
to have except something neither of us was ever quite
able to define, but both of us knew was missing.

He took notes. "The thing that was missing. Did you see it
in your parents' relationship?"

"I suppose. I think it was like glue, something that
bonded them, some absolute commitment, the 'in sickness
and health, for richer for poorer, for better for worse' part.
That wasn't there. I always knew that something would happen,
and we wouldn't be strong enough to survive it, and we'd
come apart. And we did."

I should tell you that despite myself, I liked Albert Decarre.
He was intelligent, empathetic, thoughtful, helpful,
troubled, and world-weary. His face was deeply lined and his
eyes sunken, things that had not shown up in his photograph.
He carried sadness with him. He was also quite elegant; that's
the only word for it. He was slim, graceful, and soft-spoken.
His clothes fit perfectly. His hair fell just so. At the same time,
he always seemed to be on the very verge of something you
didn't want to be the cause of. Within minutes of meeting
him, I knew exactly why Jeanette Landrow had been afraid
of hurting him.

My sessions with Albert Decarre were really conversations;
if he was thoughtful and soft-spoken, he was not reticent.
He listened well but he also spoke well, and we often
built on each other's ideas, and we sometimes came to important
conclusions. This happened at least twice.

But if I liked Albert Decarre in the beginning, I did not
trust him. I knew as well as anyone that Lucifer can be beguiling.
I never forgot that his ease, charm, and apparent
confidentiality (he could be surprisingly forthcoming) were
all tricks that had seduced others and could seduce me, too. I
came to realize, however, that there was a difference between
them and me: If he was tricking me, I was also tricking him.
Sometimes I sat there watching him as he recrossed his legs
and talked, or absentmindedly stroked his chin and talked,
and I would have to repress a smile; I was the safe that was
about to fall on his head, the car that was about to veer across
the centerline into his lane. There were even times when the
satisfaction I felt was tinged with some feeling for him; I
was, after all, going to destroy him, and anyone—even a bad
man—who is about to meet his fate can enlist our sympathy.
I came to think of this as a twist on the Stockholm syndrome; I
was the captor and I was beginning to identify with him, the
captive; of course, he didn't know he was a captive at all. Later
my identification would become different and stronger.

Most of the conversations we had were about love, the nature
of love. One of the important conclusions we reached—
and I think it fair to say we reached it together—was that
just because one doesn't love another anymore doesn't mean
that he or she never did, that the death of love is as natural a
phenomenon as the birth or existence of love, and that love
doesn't have to commit suicide or be murdered; it can die
naturally, accidentally or even incidentally. It can die even
when we don't want it to, just like a person. I was naturally
thinking of Lydia, Lisa, and Carolyn when we talked about
this stuff. As I watched Decarre, I wondered who he was
thinking of.

Another thing Decarre said that I tried to apply to both
of us was, "The hardest truth of all is that sometimes in this
life you must hurt other people. Not that you do or can, but
that you must." He compared these occasions on a personal
level to earthquakes, forest fires, and natural selection on a
global one. He said that they are necessary—if painful—adjustments
for the greater good and to avoid them is to invite
imbalance and worse. It may surprise you to know that as he
said these things, I didn't sense that he was justifying or rationalizing,
so much as realizing. Naturally I thought about myself
and Lydia, and I thought about Albert and Lisa, and then
I thought about him and me. And that is when my identification
with him truly crystallized because I suddenly knew that
I had to do what I was about to do, exactly because he had
had to do what he had done. Any doubt I may have had was
erased. He and I were alike; we were both beset by lamentable
compulsion. I scheduled my final session with him and left.

One week minus one hour later, I put my backpack with
its precious cargo on the floor and settled into the now-familiar
chair. Albert Decarre sat across the coffee table. I
told him I thought it was time to talk about the thing I had
seen and the thing I knew. He asked me what I had seen.

"I saw someone die."

"Um," he said, "I'm sorry. That can be very hard. Did you
know the person who died?"

"Not beforehand, but I got to know her afterward."

"After her death?"

"Yes. In fact I quite fell in love with her."

"After she was dead?" he asked.

"Yes," I said. "Actually the only time I ever saw her was on
the occasion of her death."

"May I ask you how she died?"

"It was an accident. At least it seemed so at the time."

"And you saw it happen?"

"I saw the whole thing."

"I want to ask you something else. Did you cause the
accident?"

"No."

"Did you have anything to do with her death?"

"No, except I think—or I thought for a long time—that I
could have prevented it."

"You no longer think that?"

"No, I don't think so. Not very often."

"So you have some doubt?"

"A little."

He took some notes and I watched him. He had an unusually
expressive mouth. He had long white fingers. He crossed
his legs in that way that thin people can so that the one fairly
dangled from the other. "A while ago, you said that something
happened that your relationship with Lydia wouldn't
be able to survive. Is this what happened?"

"Yes."

"And you fell in love with the woman who died?"

"Yes, I fell in love with her. The other shoe dropped."

"Interesting phrase. Do you often feel that the other shoe's
about to drop?"

"No, I don't think so, but I did in that relationship."

"Do you feel that now?"

"Now? I guess I do, in a way, but in a very different way.
More as in 'resolution,' and I guess that's why I've come to
see you."

He turned back a page. "Resolution of what's been haunting
you?"

"In a way."

"Tell me this," he said. "Do you think you could ever
have the kind of relationship with a woman that your parents
had?"

"Well, I hope so. I think that's what we're all looking for,
don't you?"

The doctor ignored my question. He said that he dealt
with a lot of people who've had inadequate models in their
lives, or bad models, but sometimes having a good model—a
model that's too good—is the hardest thing of all. He called it
the famous-parent syndrome. If a parent has been extremely
successful, it's a hard thing for a child to live up to. He can
never make as much money, build as big a house, write as
good a book, hit as many home runs as his father, and even
if he does then he knows people will say, "Well, it was just
because of his dad. His father made it possible."

"You think my parents' marriage was too ideal, and I can
never live up to it?" I asked

"It's possible. One thing that interests me is that you chose
to fall in love with someone who was unattainable."

"I didn't exactly choose her," I said.

"You fell in love with someone unattainable. There is
no one less attainable than a dead person, and you may be
surprised to know that lots of people fall in love with dead
people." He smiled. "It's another syndrome." He called it the
widow's syndrome. A man dies after a difficult or troubled
marriage, and his wife turns him into a saint, forgets the dirty
socks on the floor, the drinking, or the womanizing, and
romanticizes
him, turns him into the husband she'd always
wanted, and ends up loving him more in death than she ever
did in life.

"And you think that's what I'm doing?" I asked.

"It's possible," said the doctor. "You see, loving someone
who isn't there is safer than loving someone who is, which is
why 'absence makes the heart grow fonder.' There's no more
profound absence than death, and when someone's dead, you
can make her anyone you want her to be."

"I don't know. It seems a little pat."

"Okay, tell me more. Why do you think you fell in love
with this dead woman?"

I told him that guilt was a factor, that she was beautiful
and interesting and vulnerable.

"Vulnerable after her death?" he asked.

"In an odd way. I told you I saw something and I know
something. That has to do with what I know."

"And what is that?"

"I know that her death wasn't really an accident, or at
least it was an intentional accident."

"An accident she intended? Did she commit suicide?"

"No. She was killed."

"Oh. Murdered?" he asked.

"Yes, she was murdered, and I know who did it."

"How do you know this?" he asked.

"I saw the man who did it."

"You saw him do it? You saw him kill her?"

"No, but I saw him, and I know he did it. I put two and
two together, and I know."

"Pete, may I ask you what your purpose is with regard to
this man?"

"I would like to see him brought to justice, of course."

"May I ask then why you don't just go to the police?"

"I did. That's one of the first things I did." I waited and
watched him.

"And were they able to help you?"

I told him that they helped me see that I knew nothing
about police work, that my "case" against the man was intuitive,
my evidence was either missing or circumstantial, that
the man was a highly respected citizen with no criminal record,
and that I appeared to be on either a wild-goose chase
or a crusade. Here are the things I did not tell him: "They"
was Steve Lotts, who now believed the man to be involved
in the woman's death, Lieutenant Grassi may have suspected
foul play early on, and I now had a lot more evidence that I
hadn't taken to the police because I wanted to be able to act
if they did not. "They said that no prosecutor would dare to
touch the thing, and if one did, he'd get laughed out of the
DA's office. They suggested I seek counseling."