Payback

by Mary Gordon

  She hated being here; what made it all worthwhile, more than worthwhile, dressed the wound until it became one of those dueling scars her mother’s uncles were said to have prized, was the idea that she, Heidi Stolz—no, she, Quin Archer—would ram through the brilliant glass carapace, lift up the polished stone, revealing what bred and seethed beneath, would shine light through the vapor, bright, painful light that would cause the tender hands of Agnes Vaughan to try to cover her eyes, to keep the punishing clear light from what she could not bear to see. What she didn’t have the courage for, the courage to look straight on, to face up to what was there.

  She imagines what Agnes Vaughan looks like. Like all those New England women who pride themselves on their plainness. She’ll be wearing no makeup; her skin will be mottled with dark spots caused by sun damage: all those days on their precious beach. Her hair will be thin and a dull gray-brown, pulled back in a scrunchie or pinned up in a French twist…but wisps of straggly thin hair will always be coming out of the pins. She’ll be wearing some loose-fitting shirt…some loose-fitting drawstring pants. Birkenstocks or clogs or some version of Mary Janes that Quin stopped wearing when she was eight. The famous shapely hands will be marked by thick blue veins; the nails will be ridged, unmanicured. Her glasses, which she will need for most things now, will be hanging around her neck on a maroon or gray or taupe or navy cord. Quin wonders whether her voice had changed. Too often for her comfort she had heard Agnes Vaughan’s voice, first comforting, “You’re really very gifted,” then the words of complete abandonment, “How could you have let that happen?”

  She gets out of the car and walks up the stone path to the Vaughans’ front door. She hadn’t counted on the strong response that lodges in her ribs, like a lit match held behind them. A burning, but with none of the rush and energy of a real burn. This is where everything happened. Where everything was lost. The place, the actual locus of abandonment. Of betrayal. The betrayal worse than her actual violation. That had been a shock, but it was a shock delivered by a stranger; the knife had pierced the flesh, but then had been quickly withdrawn; no familiar hand twisted it, kept it lodged. Here, on the very stones she walked now, she had lost all faith in the possibility that she was, if not loved, then well regarded. Never again would she believe that she could count on anyone; all praise, each look that partook even for a moment of approval or regard, any indication of fellow feeling or admiration must be held back, cut off; she was a fortress, one of those castles with only slits for windows, behind each one an armed soldier, his arrow ready for the next approach. She would not say that something had died there; she would not indulge in those high, heated words. Rather, someone had been born there, a creature born armed and bristling, a new species whose success depended on believing in no one, and nothing.

  Joe Mangan, her cameraman, follows ten steps behind her, the camera at his shoulders. She rings the doorbell; the tone is an insistent double ring. And she remembers now; the knocker in the shape of a dolphin. She uses the knocker; four sharp raps, redundant, perhaps because of the tone of the bell, but somehow satisfying.

  The door opens. It is Agnes Vaughan.

  What Quin had imagined: the style of her hair, the looseness of her clothes, her glasses on a string around her neck: all that was right. But for one thing she had not been prepared.

  Agnes Vaughan is beautiful.

  * * *

  —

  “Yes?” she says, her smile uncertain and yet not unwelcoming.

  “Are you Agnes Vaughan?”

  “Well, yes, I am, I suppose, or you could say I was. Now I’m Agnes di Martini.”

  “And I am Quin Archer. But you knew me as Heidi Stolz.”

  Agnes steps back from the doorway. She puts one hand to her throat. Her eyes close for a moment, and then open; she fixes them steadily on the two people at her door.

  And she says, “So here you are.”

  * * *

  WOULD SHE CALL what she was experiencing a fall; certainly there was a sense of downward movement, the shock, expected but not really, of a hard landing; it was as if, in the forty years since she had last seen Heidi Stolz, she had been sitting on a window ledge on the top floor of a very high building, waiting for what she knew would come sometime: the push off the dependable surface, then the free fall, taking no time, everything so fast that the pavement when it arrived seemed always to have been arriving, and, stunned, you lay motionless, waiting for someone to tell you whether you were alive or dead. She has to force herself not to keep her eyes closed. But even with eyes fully opened she can’t see what is in front of her, can’t see what she knows she should be seeing. Only available to her sight: a swarm, a stew, a background of a poisoned green, and spinning through it, whorls or circles: blood red, and lines or lightning shapes, purple and flashing. And through her mind go the words, “This is the hour of lead”—had it really been only this morning she had read that poem—because what she feels closing around her is a dense impenetrable casing…impeding movement, making each breath a risk, a near impossibility. And another kind of lead: the leaden sound of a struck gong, deep, and resonant and resonating out and out. She would like to close her eyes, put her hands over her ears, take herself to the couch and rock back and forth in desperation. But someone is at the door. Two people. Heidi and someone with a camera. They are at her door. They are here to see her. They will become her guests.

  How ridiculous they sound in her mouth, the words that follow, the only possible words, required by convention, good manners, the slightest pressure not to appear uncivilized.

  “Come in. Can I get you something? Coffee, tea. A glass of water, perhaps.”

  “Coffee would be great,” Joe Mangan says, and Quin is irritated with him…she doesn’t want him to be sympathetic to Agnes, to be seduced by her as Heidi had been seduced; she’s learned that the cameraman’s unconscious bias toward the subject influences the way the subject appears on the screen; if the cameraman is on the subject’s side, she’s more attractive; if not, her flaws show clear. Don’t take anything from her, she wants to say. Quin has only minutes to do what she knows she is very good at: calibrating her persona. Preparing a face to meet the faces that she meets. It will be a challenge with Agnes, because Quin has based her career on rejecting the legitimacy of the posture of victimization…and yet the subject must be seen to have suffered, but in a way that hasn’t leached them of energy, of the force that demands retribution. She has learned, though, that her audience doesn’t like a subject on the attack, or someone who appears to be doing so much better than the person they’re confronting that the confrontation seems not like justice but like persecution.

  * * *

  —

  Agnes Vaughan…Miss Vaughan…is sitting on the couch, her feet flat on the floor, her knees closed, her hands folded on her lap, a perfect little girl, Quin thinks, a perfect lady. But the hands are clasped in tension, and Quin sees with pleasure that she has pricked the skin of the famous Agnes Vaughan composure, as you might prick the skin of a chicken you were roasting, to test for doneness. She will prick the skin again, more deeply this time.

  “Before we begin happy hour, Agnes, I need to tell you why we’re here.”

  She’s learned that saying the subject’s name with a particularly insinuating tone often knocks the subject off balance. But it frightens her a bit to say the name, Agnes…only the second time she’s said it aloud in forty years, and the word in her mouth, then in the world, takes on a new reality, a new power, which she would prefer it not to have. “Yes, please,” Agnes says. It takes all her courage to look directly at Heidi.

  “I am the host of a TV show called PAYBACK. We’re based in Brimston, Arizona, but we can be seen nationwide on YouTube. The premise of the show is that someone comes to us who is trying to redress the injustice of someone in his or her past having done them harm and gotten away with it: caused our subject suf
fering and did not suffer, maybe never even thought again of the person they harmed. My idea is that the only way to overcome the curse of victimization is to demand, and to receive, justice. Then, and only then, can the chapter be satisfactorily closed.”

  “I thought of you, Heidi, you must know that. You have never been far from my thoughts.”

  “It’s Quin. Heidi is dead…I killed her when I moved west.”

  “I’m sorry, then…Quin…but I don’t want you to think that I forgot you, forgot what I did to you…I never forgot. I’ve regretted that moment all my life, I know I did you harm; you trusted me, and I betrayed your trust. I am more sorry than I can ever say. And, of course, if there’s anything I can do to make it up to you, you’re perfectly right, that would only be just. And so if you want me to be on your show, of course I will agree to it. I’ll agree to anything you want.”

  This isn’t the response Quin was hoping for; it isn’t the kind of response that makes good television. There’s no arc, no movement, if the accused admits their guilt in the first minutes of the interview. Nowhere for Quin to go that doesn’t seem like kicking a dead horse. She will have to find a point of resistance in Agnes; something she can prick and burst and watch the splash, the mess that is good television.

  “Yes, well, there are some papers we’ll need you to sign. Release forms. My colleague will be here shortly…I’ll just phone him…you have good cell reception here?”

  “Yes, I think so, I’ve never had any problems.”

  Quin reaches into her black patent leather clutch for her orange cell phone. Agnes is surprised that her long fingernails…orange to match her dress, her phone…don’t impede her quick pressing of the buttons that will make her assistant appear.

  “We’re ready for you. It’s a go,” Quin says.

  “I’ll just get some shots of your house, then, if that’s okay,” Joe Mangan says.

  “Yes, of course, anything,” Agnes says. “I’ll get you the coffee.”

  “A glass of cold water for me,” Quin says. “No ice.”

  She’s heard people call her the ice queen. She likes that. She sees herself, cold, sharp, discouraging the idea of touch.

  “We don’t have a lot of light here…we’re going to have to bring some other equipment,” Joe says.

  “Yes, these old windows…they don’t let in much light. It’s an eighteenth-century house. They were reluctant to build houses with a lot of windows; glass was expensive and for a while there was a window tax: your property tax was based on the number of windows in your house.”

  “And better not to let the light in, better to keep reality out,” Quin says.

  Nothing in this room is bright; the walls are the color of sage; the carpets a faded rose and blue; the furniture a darker velvet sage; the lamps are small, the shades and ivory linen; there is, she notices, no overhead lighting. On the wall—was it possible—the portrait of an ancestor, a tousle-haired nineteenth-century boy, everything in tones of brown except for the shocking white of his shirt, the surprising redness of the full lips. Another small painting on the wall: a stream, some woods, dusk…a rower and a boat, again only the white shirt providing a place for lightness. On the shelves a white bowl of black stones; on the table a blue and white bowl of potpourri; rust-colored pillows on the couch, a russet-colored ottoman.

  The cameraman follows Agnes into the kitchen, and she resents the intrusion, feels the privilege, at least in relation to him, of a small refusal.

  “I’ll just be a moment,” she says, closing the kitchen door.

  There is a pounding in her skull, so insistent, so relentless, that she can’t imagine it won’t result in permanent damage. She takes down the bottle of Advil from the cabinet to the right of the stove; she takes three. Which she usually only allows herself after dental work or with an ear infection.

  The name pounds and presses. Heidi Stolz. Quin Archer.

  Whom I have harmed.

  Who has, at long last, come for her revenge.

  Oh no, revenge is wrong. It’s only justice.

  The sharp bitter smell of the coffee seems like an intrusion from another realm, the ordinary realm where, just this morning, she had been herself, letting the dog out, drinking coffee, reading poetry. Now who is she? Now who will she be?

  What she has been waiting to become. Completed. Punished. Forgiven? Forgiveness is something she doesn’t dare even to ask for, is quite sure she won’t be found to deserve.

  She fills the kettle; puts it on the stove; measures the coffee into the glass cylinder and waits for the water to boil. She hopes it never will, because the sound of the whistling kettle will be her signal to go back into that other room, that other world. The world of punishment. The world where she, the criminal, will be judged and, she is sure, condemned.

  How strange Heidi looks, she thinks, or no, Quin…what must she be thinking of to present herself that way, a way so insistent on harshness, on refusal, the demand for distance. The too-bright colors of her dress, her lips, her fingernails. The high heels…can they possibly be comfortable? Aren’t they, certainly, a punishment she willingly inflicts on herself? The over-black, overlong eyelashes…as if the eyes themselves were not the point, were to be protected, concealed, kept from the possibility of any sort of revelation. The hair: a weapon; silver-white spikes, like small knives growing from a skull that insists that you remember it is bone…everything in Heidi-Quin refuses the suggestion of a caress, the giving or receiving of any tenderness at all. And Agnes understands that this is planned, and that this deliberate choice to make a weapon of herself, to keep herself invulnerable, inviolate, is her fault, because she had murdered the tender girl, the girl who showed her teacher glimpses of her yearning, of her vulnerable thirst for a connection. Which Agnes Vaughan had also killed.

  I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to…she wants to cry out. But to whom? Certainly not to Heidi. To Quin. Who would say, quite rightly, looking at her with the strange curtained eyes, “That doesn’t matter in the least.”

  The doorbell rings, and for a moment Agnes has trouble placing the sound, so far is she from anything she would have called familiar.

  “Hey, sweetie pie,” she hears a male voice say, answered by Quin’s “Hey yourself.”

  Sweetie pie. How strange, the words connecting in any way to Quin. She is certain of one thing: the two words must be meant ironically.

  It is required that she leave the kitchen, open the door, and walk into her own living room, which she feels is no longer hers but an occupied city now, its walls broken down, entirely invaded.

  Joe Mangan is walking around the yard, looking at things, choosing what his camera will record. So the male voice must belong to this new man.

  He is very good looking in a way that strikes Agnes as slightly unbelievable. The symmetries are perfect, too perfect perhaps; the high cheekbones in exactly the right relationship to the startling blue eyes, the blond hair—surely it can’t be natural, and she tells herself that it is a fault of hers to be critical of a man bleaching his hair, why not if it’s all right for women—with just the right proportion of gray, the light blue shirt harmonizing so perfectly with the startling blue eyes, the gray trousers picking up exactly the right tones of the shirt, the eyes, the proportional gray of the blond hair.

  She has never seen such white teeth, and the whiteness seems another kind of invasion in the dim light of her familiar room. She wonders if he trimmed his moustache so that it became a frame, an emphasizing frame, for the white teeth. But he is, she sees, trying to be ingratiating, and there is no reason not to take the extended hand…the hairs on his forearms, she notices, are dark brown, nearly black.

  “Rich MacParland,” he says. “The prince consort. Mr. Quin Archer to his friends.”

  Agnes knows she is supposed to laugh, or at least smile conspiratorially, but numbness has overtaken
her, and the best she can muster is a languid nod.

  “I’m Agnes di Martini. You may know me as Agnes Vaughan. But of course, we’ve never met.”

  “No, but I risk the cliché, ‘It’s so good to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.’ ”

  “Agnes is making coffee. My husband is addicted…I’ve tried to get him to switch to green tea, one of the best antioxidants, but it’s his funeral.”

  “My wife is kind enough to select my allowable vices.”

  Agnes understands that this kind of rough bantering is the tonality of their marriage, and there is no need for her to respond.

  “I’ll get the coffee, then,” she says.

  She stands in front of the cupboard where her mugs are kept. The task of choosing exactly the right mug seems daunting—everything will be noted, everything will be judged. She takes down the wooden tray her mother brought back from one of her Roman visits; on this tray, she’d carried cups (tea for her father, lemon, sweet, and for her mother, dark espresso, with the three teaspoons of sugar she preferred) to her parents, who had both been ill in this house, both died here. She would like to think of herself as a child, flinging herself on the beloved ghosts for protection. But there is no protection possible; it would be wrong to wish to be protected, to be spared, from what might plausibly be called her just deserts.

  “Is it your first time in Rhode Island, Mr. MacParland?” she asks, hoping her voice does not betray the fear that has made her throat feel so constricted that each word must be squeezed out.

  “Rich…nobody uses last names anymore unless they’ve just been arrested. Yes, it is…I’m a midwesterner, myself. Omaha, Nebraska, if you can believe your eyes and ears.”