The Autumn Dead (22 page)

The next call was the real shocker and as soon as I heard who it was I thought of what Dr. Evans had said, that Karen's pattern was to have a new lover waiting in the wings before she got rid of the old one. And Evans had sensed that there was, in fact, a man in her life at the time Karen had been withdrawing from him.

I sat there in the prim pleasantness of the dead woman's bedroom and listened to the voice, an old-familiar voice, and didn't know what to think or say or do; I just thought of all the people involved, and all the people betrayed.

After a time, I turned off the player and just sat there, listening to the night wind and lonely creaking of a house where anything like real life had stopped in the summer of 1962.

Then I got angry and it was what I needed just then, real anger, and I went down the stairs and out of the house and down the gravel road past where Evelyn lay sprawled in her leathers like some piece of trendy violent sculpture, and I got in my Toyota.

Ten minutes later I was at a drive-up phone.

"You can go home now."

"Really?" Donna said. "You're not worried about that woman anymore?"

"She's dead."

Pause. "You don't sound so good, Dwyer."

"I don't feel so good."

"Why don't you meet me at my apartment in an hour or so."

"There's something I've got to do."

"It doesn't sound like something that's going to make you very happy."

So I thought about it and then I talked about it and then I felt much better than I should have, much better than I would have keeping silent. Donna does that for me.

"J
ack."

"Hi. Gary home?" I tried sounding as if it were Christmas and I were dropping off presents for the kids and I were wearing a red Santa cap and a glow from toddies, but I knew better and she knew better, too.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing."

"Jack, come on. I've known you a long time. Something's up."

"It's probably nothing. I just need to see Gary."

"He's at school."

"At this time?"

"He teaches a course in creative writing at night. Adult ed."

"I see." I stared past her into the house. It was inevitably tidy, tidy as she was, with the same kind of poor but resolute dignity. "I'm going to ask you something, and I wouldn't blame you if you'd ask me to leave."

"God, Jack." She put her hands to her face. "You're scaring me."

"I'm sorry."

"Oh, Jack."

And then she came up to me and slid her arms around me and I held her, sexless as a sibling in the soiled light of her living room there, and I permitted myself only certain pleasures in her embrace, the clean smell of her hair, the faintest shape of her small breasts against my chest, the ageless sense of the maternal that bound me up when I finally relaxed and let her begin stroking the back of my head. I was the one who had frightened her, yet she was calming me down. I thought of Glendon Evans' remark that women were the great teachers. And so they were.

"Mom?"

The boy's word said many things, all of them shocked, all of them scared.

She eased away from me and said, "It's just Jack, honey. He's just—sort of upset about something. Jack, I don't believe you've met Gary Junior."

"No," I said, trying to find my voice like a freshman who's been caught kissing a girl in the sudden presence of her father. "No. I haven't."

So I made a big beer-commercial thing of shaking the kid's hand and cuffing him on the shoulder and standing back as if he were a car and I were appraising him and I said, "He's got your looks, Susan. " He was a chunky kid with his old man's shaggy brown hair and that odd gaze of belligerent intelligence, as if he knew something vital but would be damned if he ever told you what it was.

She smiled. "And Gary's brains."

He was seventeen or so and he just wanted out of there. "Can I take the Pontiac?"

"I just finish telling you how smart he is and he says 'Can I take the Pontiac?' Honey, it's 'May I take the Pontiac?' "

"May I, then?"

"You know where the keys are. And tell Jack that you were glad to meet him."

But I was the guy he'd just seen in some kind of curious embrace with his mother and he didn't feel much like saying that he was glad he'd met me. And I didn't blame him at all.

After he was gone, she looked at me levelly and said, "You were going to ask me something that might cause me to ask you to leave."

"Right."

"Well.''

"Does Gary have a writing room?"

"As a matter of fact, he does. The attic."

"I wonder if I could see it."

"You want to see Gary's writing room?" For the first time irritation could be heard in her tone. "Why?"

"It's not anything I can explain."

"Jack, please tell me what's going on. I don't want to be angry with you. I don't want to ask you to leave, but I need you to tell me the truth."

I thought about that, about telling her the truth, but it would be too complicated and would only hurt her more. And at this point, I wasn't sure of what the truth was exactly, anyway.

I said, "I think Karen gave him something."

"Karen?"

"Yes."

"Gave him what?"

"I'm not sure."

"Jack, this is all so crazy."

"She may have given him something that will shed some light on her death."

"Well, you don't think Gary had anything to do with it, do you?"

I said it very quickly. "No."

She sighed and broke out in a grin that was accompanied by tears of relief. This time she hugged me hard enough to hurt my back.

"You had me so scared," she said. "I didn't know what was going on." Then she took my hand and said, "I'm going to take you to the steps leading to the attic now, Jack, and, you take all the time you want."

I
t was about what you might expect, an unfinished attic filled with bookcases containing hundreds of paperbacks, everything from Thomas Mann to Leonard Cohen, from e.e. cummings to Gregory Corso.

What I wanted I found with almost no difficulty. I only had to rattle open and rifle through a few file drawers, jerk back and sort through a few desk drawers.

And there it was.

I slid it inside my shirt and went back downstairs.

She must have heard me coming down the steps because she called from the kitchen, "Come on out here."

When I got there, she said, "You know what I made tonight? Gingersnaps. Real ones. Here. Have one."

So I had one and then I had two and all the while we made quick talk of weather and gingersnaps and teenagers these days, and then she said, "Well, find anything?"

" 'fraid not."

"Oh, I'm sorry, Jack."

"It's all right."

She said, "You want another one?"

"No, thanks." I had my hand on the back door. I wondered if she knew. The thing I'd shoved down inside my shirt seemed to be glowing. She had to see. Had to know.

"You sure?"

"I'm sure."

She laughed. "Well, I hope the next time I see you, it's on a happier note."

"It will be, Susan. It will be."

Then I was gone.

F
t. Wilson had been built during the final economic boom of the sixties, when so - many dead young Americans over in Nam meant so many live jobs over here, and it had been designed, by an architect who was too tricky by half, with a waterfall between the two main sections of the rambling two-story brick structure, a comic imitation of Frank Lloyd Wright.

It was nearly ten-thirty and people were drifting out to their cars in the lot. They were middle-aged with middle-aged flesh and an air of middle-aged dreams. At forty you don't take night-school courses because you've got an eye on glory; all you've got an eye on is the next rung up in some vast drab institution somewhere. Level Six, as the people in Personnel might say, the exception being classes such as Creative Writing, where glory is still possible, even if said glory does only come in the form of a fifteen-dollar check for your first professional sale to a magazine promoting the likelihood of an imminent alien invasion or the possibility that Liberace has joined James Dean and John Kennedy on an island in the Pacific known only to an ancient race of henna-skinned religious cannibals.

The inside of the high school was almost lurid with fluorescent light and the odor of cleaning solvent. The main hall was jammed with people heading for cars. I asked one of them for directions to Mr. Roberts' room and she told me.

When I got there, he was sitting on the edge of his desk, smoking a cigarette and talking earnestly to a plump woman in a yellow pantsuit that had gone out of style with Jimmy Carter. She was smoking, too.

Watching him, I had the sense that he must be a good teacher, taking everybody just as seriously as he took himself, looking for the same talent in his students he sought in himself, and probably finding it in neither.

He stuck out a Diet Pepsi can for the woman to push her cigarette in and then he said, "All you need to remember, Mary, is that it's better to put in the things about your childhood later on, after you've got the reader hooked on the story line itself. I'd start out right off with the ambulance scene. It's really gripping."

The way she smiled, she might just have discovered the real meaning of life.

"Oh, Gary," she said, "I just love taking your class."

"You're doing very well, Mary. Very well."

She pulled a purse big enough to hold a Japanese car over her wide shoulder, picked up a pile of schoolbooks, nodded good-bye, and left the room. On her way out, she saw me and smiled. "He's wonderful, isn't he?" And he was—patient, caring, taking pleasure in her pleasure.

I smiled at her and her enthusiasm. She was my age maybe, and she radiated a high, uncomplicated passion for life. And that's something I've always only been able to envy, that kind of simple and beautiful enthusiasm for things. I'm always too busy worrying about what can go wrong or wondering what the guy
really
meant.

Gary still hadn't seen me. He was busy pushing papers and books into a briefcase as scuffed as his shoes always were. I watched him there amid all the empty desks, like lifeboats on a mean vast ocean, his graying hair pulled back into a ponytail, his jeans still bell-bottomed, his eyeglasses rimless. He was the last of the species
hippie
. At his funeral somebody would probably read something from one of the Doors' songs.

I said, "How long were you having an affair with Karen, Gary?"

He didn't look up. He knew exactly what had been said and he knew exactly who'd said it.

I came into the room. He still hadn't looked up.

I put the manuscript on the desk. The room was painted the dull green of most institutions. It seemed to hush us with its terrible powers to disintegrate personalities. Finally, I said, "I didn't get a chance to read it all. But I read enough of it."

All he said was, "Susan know about this?"

"Jesus," he said. "I really have fucked things up, haven't I?"

"Yeah, I guess you have."

"The only other time I was unfaithful was back in the sixties. At some kind of English teachers' seminar. This woman with a face that reminded me of Cherie Conners. You remember Cherie Conners?"

"Sure."

"I always wanted to screw her. That's sort of what I was doing with this woman at the English teachers' convention. Closing my eyes and pretending she was Cherie. You know she died of an aneurysm a few years ago? Cherie, I mean?"