SoHo Sins (39 page)

Either way, she was doomed, unless I took her crime on myself, unless I sacrificed myself.

Years later, before she graduated from Bradford, Hogan gave a copy of the tape to Melissa. He told her, “This is to keep you honest. Jack is my best friend. I have another copy. Don’t ever make me use it.”

That’s when Missy stowed the tape under her bedroom floor. She’s half forgotten it, I’m sure. The same way she’s half forgotten me.

But I won’t be forgotten, Jack. I exist. I demand to be recognized. You have to hear and see me; you have to remember Angela Oliver—as a woman, an artist, a mother. Yes, and a murderer—of poor Philip. But not of Amanda! No, I won’t make it easy for you, and I won’t go away. You can keep me in prison, but you can’t keep me out of your mind. I’m too much a part of your life. I gave birth to the woman you love.

Oh, don’t deny it. Not to me. I watched the pair of you for too many years. I saw. You can’t hide any longer behind that suave disguise, that good uncle mask. Not now. You’ve gone too far.

Damn you, can’t you see who Melissa really is?

You can watch the tape, Jack. Anytime. Black and white—as plain as words on paper. All you have to do is go downstairs and look.

But you won’t, will you? No, you don’t want to wreck your fairy-tale Wooster Street setup, your playhouse. You don’t want to botch the little make-believe life you’ve constructed for yourself. For yourself and your precious Melissa.

Well, I’m botching it for you. Because I can’t stand it. Because it can’t go on anymore. I’ve told Melissa that you know everything. What she’s done, what she is. I wrote to her yesterday. It’s over now.

You don’t want to read this any more than you want to see the surveillance tape. You don’t want the truth, Jack. Not the whole of it.

That’s why you’ll never be Hogan.

God knows if you’ll ever be a man at all.

Yours righteously,

Angela

After I read the letter a couple times, I set it aside and walked to the liquor cabinet for a scotch. I wanted to sit for a few minutes to decide exactly what to think. Holding my drink, I settled into the armchair—the same one I sat in the night of the Crosby Street bust, the night that Melissa lay sleeping behind a narrow door on the far side of the loft.

The rantings of a madwoman, a confessed killer, locked up for years in a cell. That’s what I thought. Angela could not give up control, or the attempt at control, even as she sat in her orange jumpsuit in a maximum security prison. Unable to strike out at us any other way, she would try to poison us with her words. We didn’t have to let her. We could go on. Other things were pressing on me. I was preoccupied with the new art season and the preparations for Melissa’s childbirth—a baby present to buy, the electrical sockets to childproof. I had exhibitions to mount and bills to pay.

“You stupid bloody fool, Jack.” I could just hear Angela saying it. Well, if she thought I was obtuse, she had only herself to blame. The damage she did to my brain, the legacy of her resin-laced morning espresso, is slight but irreversible. My doctors are quite clear, quite ruthlessly honest, in their prognosis. They say the deterioration could soon accelerate, leaving me at first a single beat—one mental half-step—behind my former self, behind all less afflicted thinkers. How will I know if it happens? My unnamable feelings for Melissa—whatever they are, if I’ve ever known what they are—may have a similar effect. Just as a man’s failing eyesight makes all young women lovelier.

It may be, in fact, that a gentle forgetfulness, a slight vagueness about what is happening now, is the best state in which to begin the journey of advancing age. I’ve only just stepped out onto that long avenue, in the first dim hour of evening, but I already know where it leads. Where all streets lead.

“I opened the letter from your mother,” I told Melissa the next day. “She accuses you, rather graphically, of killing Aunt Amanda.”

“So, what’s new? Mom accuses everyone, blames everyone. Except herself.”

“That’s true; she always did.”

“Every time I visit, she has a new conspiracy, a new culprit. You might be next.”

“What reason would I have to kill Mandy?”

“If she knew half as much about your art dealing as I do, you’d have lots.”

“Maybe.” I stepped closer to Missy. “Then you’ve given up on Angela, have you? Whatever happened to ‘me and Mom against the world’?”

“That was a long time ago. My mother is so over, Jack.”

Melissa was wearing a maternity dress from one of the best SoHo shops, its long swoop disguising her distended stomach. When she turned her eyes to me, her blond hair shone radiantly around her face—almost blindingly.

“Did you try to cover for her back then?” I asked. “Is that why you played Paul Morse for a fool?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Or did Angela actually put you up to it? Did she teach you to shoot so that you could be her living weapon, her revenge?”

Melissa shrugged. “Could be. Or maybe I thought it all up myself. Maybe it was my idea from the first, and she was just the good mom trying to save me. Who knows? Who even cares anymore?”

“I do, Missy. Tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Did you play me, too?”

“Oh, you mean did I make you have dirty thoughts, Uncle Jack?”

I couldn’t answer.

“Well, maybe those naughty ideas were there in your head all along. Maybe you just got lucky and found me.”

“You call that luck?”

“Most men would kill for it.”

“Or die rather, like Paul.”

“Oh? Was it really so bad, what we had? I never heard you complain.”

“How could I? You worked together, you and your mother. To trap me, to make me helpless against you.”

“Did we? You poor little man.”

“All that girlish flirtation.”

“Do you think I was kidding?”

“Or the night I undressed you. Did you call Angela from the bedroom after that? Did you tell her to phone me, so I’d come to you a second time?”

“Stop. You’re losing it, Jack. What’s wrong with you? With your mind?”

“You, Melissa.”

She half-smiled, holding my eyes. “Really?” Her voice lowered. “Me now, love, or me back then?”

“You always.”

Slowly, her face took on a distant cast. “It was all so, so long ago, darling. When I was just little. It seems like a dream, doesn’t it? Let’s not blame each other for dreaming.”

“Your mother says there’s a way I can know for sure.”

Melissa paused, regarding me evenly.

“There’s a way to know everything, Jack. If you want to search for it hard enough.” She reached out and took my right hand, holding it warmly. “But do you?”

Without waiting for an answer, Missy placed my hand on the swell of her belly. She held it down, pressing lightly, until I detected a faint stirring beneath my palm, deep inside her.

“Can you feel it?”

“Yes.”

“Say you can feel it, Jack.”

“I can feel it.”

“You can feel my babies?”

My glance betrayed my surprise.

“Twins, Jack, a boy and a girl. If they don’t kill each other inside me first. I feel so nauseous, like a hungover drunk every morning.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Should I lie for you—the way I did in the old days?”

“No.”

“Say you can feel them, then.”

“I can, yes. I do.”

“Now tell me. Exactly how much do you want to know?”

Melissa put her other hand on top of the first, pressing my palm more firmly to her swollen womb.

“How much truth can you live with?”

I peered at her desperately, still my beautiful Missy.

“How much, Jack?”

I had no answer, then or now.

The new child, I suppose, is what we have to compensate us for failures and losses, for the early deaths of Mandy and Philip, for the slow demise of my Nathalie. Always and only the coming on and coming on and coming on of new life. Not as a corrective—since nothing in the past can be redeemed, least of all the unchanging dead—but as a fresh start, a perpetual beginning. Melissa is not living out the balance of her parents’ lives; she is living her own. So, too, will her daughter. That is the terrible beauty of it.

One evening when Hogan and I were drinking at Pravda, I asked him about the security tape. He turned his head away and shrugged.

“Forget it,” he said. “I made that up to see what Angela would say. She said plenty.”

“And you wouldn’t be saying that now just to protect me—the way you protected Melissa back then?”

“Come on, Jack. Do I seem like that kind of guy?”

Even now, those questions—Missy’s, Hogan’s—still come to me sometimes at night, when I hear the baby’s cry below me, as piercing as a car alarm.

Don tells me we could soundproof the intervening floor and make the money back on tax deductions and an improved rental rate, once I decide to stop underwriting the increasingly affluent, ungrateful young family downstairs.

Not so large a family as expected, however. Melissa returned from the hospital with only one child. The male twin, she told me, vanished in the womb.

I didn’t quite understand.

“He died and was absorbed,” she said. “It’s fairly common.” Reclining on the cushions of my couch, Missy was having her first cup of chamomile at home after a painful delivery. “The pediatrician said not to feel bad at all. It just happens.”

“Absorbed by what?” I asked

Missy sipped her tea. “By his sister, naturally.”

No doubt Don is right. I might be happier without the sounds from below. But it is not a matter of reason. Melissa’s daughter has spoken, long before words have been granted her—a message less of fear or discomfort than of sharp impatience. Or accusation. This child, this Jacqueline, is like ourselves reborn, fierce in her innocence, demanding the world at any price. Each night, her shrill voice rouses me from my imperfect sleep, and I lie patiently while the room composes itself around me in the dark.

So be it. Someday, soon perhaps, I will go down and retrieve the buried tape. Someday, if it exists, I will sit in my chair near the window and watch the grainy footage. And someday I will live alone, with only strangers in my building, steeped in full and awful certitude.

But for now, in these last nights together, I choose to lie awake and listen, attuned to the slightest change in the infant’s wail down below, as Melissa, ever the attentive mother, rises and shuffles across the floorboards to her antique crib, my costly gift. With those few steps, I know, she delivers soothing words—mixed with the comfort of her ample breasts, her tepid milk—to the little monster howling for our SoHo sins.