Naturally, she asked me about the most imposing house our town can point to. It sits on a hill, a five-story château—the only one in town—and is fenced about in high wrought iron. It is far removed from its gate. I couldn’t say who lived there now, or whether he owned or rented. I had heard the name and forgot. It is not easy to explain to strangers, but in the winter, people choose to burrow down in Provincetown. Getting to know new arrivals is no simpler than traveling from island to island. Besides, none of my acquaintances, dressed as we were for winter (dungarees, boots and parkas) would ever get past a gate. I assumed that the present seigneur of our one imposing house had to be some kind of rich gink. So I drew on the rich man I knew best (who happened, indeed, to be Patty Lareine’s ex-husband from Tampa) and I moved him all the way north to Provincetown and loaned him the château. I did not wish to lose momentum with Miss Jessica.
“Oh, that place belongs,” I said, “to Meeks Wardley Hilby the Third. He lives all alone there.” I paused. “I used to know him. We went to Exeter at the same time.”
“Oh,” said Jessica after quite a pause, “do you think we could pay him a visit?”
“He’s not there now. He rarely stays in town any longer.”
“Too bad,” she said.
“You wouldn’t like him,” I told her. “He’s a very odd fellow. At Exeter he used to drive all the deans crazy by tweaking the dress code. We had to wear jackets and ties to class, but old Wardley would get himself up like a prince of the Salvation Army.”
There must have been some promise in my voice, for she began to laugh happily, but I remember that even as I began to tell her more I had the strongest feeling I should not go on—just as irrational as an unaccountable smell of smoke—do you know, I sometimes think we are all of us equal to broadcasting stations and some stories should not be put on the air. Let us leave it that I had an unmistakable injunction not to continue (which I knew I would ignore—that much is to be said for an attractive blonde!) and at the moment, even as I looked for the next words, an image came to me across the years, bright as a coin from the mind, of Meeks Wardley Hilby III, of Wardley, gangling along in his chinos, his patent-leather pumps and his old dinner jacket that he wore every day to class (to the consternation of half the faculty) his satin lapels faded and scuffed, his purple socks and heliotrope bow tie standing out like neon signs in Vegas.
“God,” I said to Jessica, “we used to call him ‘goon-child.’ ”
“You have to tell me all about him,” she said. “Please.”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “The story has its sordid touches.”
“Oh, do tell us,” said Pangborn.
I hardly needed encouragement. “Attribute it to the father,” I said. “There has to be a powerful influence coming from the father. He’s dead now. Meeks Wardley Hilby the Second.”
“How do you tell them apart?” asked Pangborn.
“Well, they always called the father Meeks and the son Wardley. There was no confusion.”
“Ah,” he said. “Were they at all alike?”
“Not much. Meeks was a sportsman and Wardley was Wardley. In childhood, the nurses used to tie his hands to the bed. Meeks’s orders. It was calculated to put a stop to Wardley’s onanism.” I looked at her as if to say, “This is the detail I was afraid of.” She gave a smile, which I took to mean, “We’re by the fire. Tell your tale.”
I did. I worked at it with great care, and gave them a full account of the adolescence of Meeks Wardley Hilby III, never stopping to chide myself for this outrageous change of venue from the palace on the Gulf Coast to the northern estate here on the hill, but then, this was only Pond and Pangborn I was telling it to. What would they care, I told myself, where it took place?
So I went on. Meeks’s wife, Wardley’s mother, was sickly, and Meeks took a mistress. Wardley’s mother died when he was in his first year at Exeter, and soon after, the father married the mistress. Neither of them ever liked Wardley. He liked them no better. Since they kept a door locked on the third floor of their house, Wardley decided that was the room to get into. Not, however, until he was kicked out of Exeter in his last year was he ever home long enough to find his father and the new wife away for a night. On the first evening that that happened, he worked himself up sufficiently to inch along an exterior molding of the mansion’s wall three stories up from the ground, and went in through the window.
“I love this,” said Jessica. “What was in the room?”
He discovered, I told her, a large old-fashioned view camera with a black cloth, mounted on a heavy tripod in one corner, and on a library table, five red vellum scrapbooks. It was a special pornographic collection. The five scrapbooks contained large sepia photographs of Meeks making love to his mistress.
“The one who was now the wife?” asked Pangborn.
I nodded. As described by the son, the first pictures must have been taken in the year Wardley was born. Each successive volume of the scrapbooks showed the father and mistress getting older. A year or two after the death of Wardley’s mother, not long after the new marriage, another man appeared in the photos. “He was the manager of the estate,” I said. “Wardley told me that he dined with the family every day.”
At this point Lonnie clapped his hands together. “Incredible,” he said. The later photographs showed the manager making love to the wife while the father sat five feet away reading a newspaper. The lovers would adopt different positions but Meeks kept reading the paper.
“Who was the photographer?” Jessica asked.
“Wardley said it was the butler.”
“What a house!” Jessica exclaimed. “Only in New England could this occur.” We all laughed a great deal at that.
I did not add that the butler seduced Wardley at the age of fourteen. Nor did I offer Wardley’s statement on the matter: “I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to regain property rights to my rectum.” There was probably a fine line of propriety to tread with Jessica. I had not found it yet, so I was cautious. “At nineteen,” I said, “Wardley got married. I think it was to confound his father. Meeks was a confirmed anti-Semite and the bride was a Jewish girl. She also happened to have a large nose.”
They enjoyed this so much that I felt a few regrets at going on, but no helping it now—I also had the ruthlessness of the storyteller and the next detail was crucial. “This nose,” I said, “as Wardley described it, curled over her upper lip until she looked as if she were breathing the fumes of her mouth. For some reason, maybe because he was a gourmet, this was indescribably carnal to Wardley.”
“Oh, I hope it turned out all right,” remarked Jessica.
“Well, not exactly,” I said. “Wardley’s wife had been well brought up. So, woe to Wardley when she discovered that he, too, had a pornography collection. She destroyed it. Then she made it worse. She managed to charm the father. After five years of marriage she succeeded in pleasing Meeks enough for the old man to give a dinner party for his son and daughter-in-law. Wardley got very drunk, and later that night, brained his wife with a candlestick. She happened to die from the blow.”
“Oh, no,” said Jessica. “It all took place in that house on the hill?”
“Yes.”
“What,” asked Pangborn, “was the legal upshot?”
“Well, believe it if you will, they did not use insanity for a defense.”
“Then he must have done some time.”
“He did.” I was not about to mention that we had not only gone to Exeter together but actually met each other again in the same prison at the same time.
“It sounds to me as if the father was directing his son’s case,” said Lonnie.
“I think you’re right.”
“Of course! With a plea of insanity, the defense would have had to bring the scrapbooks into court.” Lonnie locked his fingers together and flexed them outward. “So,” he said, “Wardley took the fall. What was going to jail worth to him?”
“One million dollars a y
ear,” I answered. “Put in a trust fund each year for each year he served, plus a split with his stepmother on the estate after the father’s death.”
“Do you know for a fact whether they paid it over to him?” Lonnie asked.
Jessica shook her head. “I don’t see such people honoring their agreement.”
I shrugged. “Meeks paid,” I told them, “because Wardley had filched the scrapbooks. Believe me, when Meeks died, the stepmother kept the bargain. Meeks Wardley Hilby the Third came out of jail a wealthy man.”
Jessica said, “I love how you tell a story.”
Pangborn nodded. “Priceless,” he said.
She was pleased. The trip to this strange place seemed to have come to a few good minutes, after all. “Does Wardley,” she asked, “plan to live in the house again?”
I was hesitating what to say to this when Pangborn replied, “Of course not. Our new friend here has made it all up.”
“Well, Leonard,” I said, “remind me to hire you if I need a lawyer.”
“Did you make it up?” she asked.
I was not about to give a small smile and say, “Some of it.” Instead I said, “Yes. Every last drop,” and emptied my drink. Leonard, doubtless, had already made his inquiries about who owned the estate.
My next recollection is that I was alone again. They had gone into the dining room.
I remember drinking, and writing, and watching the water. Some observations I would put in my pocket and some I would rip up. The sound of paper as it was being torn set off reverberations in me. I began to chortle within. I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it—that’s happiness, I told myself. It made me wish Jessica Pond was next to me once more. She might have given a glad howl at the thought.
It comes back to me that I then wrote a longer note which I found in my pocket the next day. For some reason I gave it a title: RECOGNITION. “The perception of the possibility of greatness in myself has always been followed by desire to murder the nearest unworthy.” Then I underlined the next sentence: “It is better to keep a modest notion of oneself!”
The more, however, that I read this note, the more I seemed to install myself in that impregnable hauteur which is, perhaps, the most satisfying aspect of solitary drinking. The knowledge that Jessica Pond and Leonard Pangborn were sitting at a table not a hundred feet away, oblivious to what might be their considerable peril, had an intoxicating effect on me, and I began to contemplate—I must say it was with no serious passion, rather as one more variety of amusing myself through another night—how easy it would be to do away with them. Consider it! After twenty-four days without Patty Lareine, this is the sort of man I had become!
Here was my reasoning. A clandestine couple, each of whom is obviously well-placed in whatever world they inhabit in California, decide to go to Boston together. They are discreet about their mutual plans. Perhaps they tell an intimate or two, perhaps no one, but since they drive off to Provincetown on a whim, and in a rented car, the perpetrator need only—should the deed be done—drive their car one hundred and twenty miles back to Boston and leave it on the street. Assuming the bodies have been well-buried, it would be weeks, if ever, before any concern for the man and woman as missing persons might stir newspaper publicity in these parts. By then, would anyone at The Widow’s Walk remember their faces? Even in that event, the police would have to assume, given the location of the car, that they returned to Boston and met their end there. I lived within the logic of this fine scenario, enjoyed my drink a little more, enjoyed the power I possessed over them by thinking thoughts such as these, and there … it is precisely there … I lost the rest of the evening. In the morning I would no longer be able to put it together to satisfy myself.
What I can’t recollect is whether or not I began to drink again with Pond and Pangborn. It is as likely, I should think, that I boozed by myself, got into my car and went home. If I did, I would have gone directly to sleep. Although that, by the evidence of what I found when I awakened, was not possible.
I also have another scenario, which is certainly clearer than a dream, although I could have dreamt it. It is that Patty Lareine returned and we had a terrible quarrel. I see her mouth. Yet I do not recollect a word. Could it have been a dream?
Then I also have the clearest impression that Jessica and Leonard did indeed join me after they ate, and I invited them to my home (to Patty Lareine’s home). We sat in the living room while the man and woman listened to me with attention. I seem to remember that. Then we took a trip in a car, but if it was my Porsche, I could not have taken both of them. Perhaps we went in two cars.
I also remember returning home alone. The dog was in terror of me. He is a big Labrador, but he crept away as I came near. I sat down at the edge of my bed and jotted one more note before I lay down. That I recall. I dozed off sitting up and staring at the notebook. Then I woke up in a few seconds (or was it an hour?) and read what I had written: “Despair is the emotion we feel at the death of beings within us.”
That was my last thought before I went to sleep. Yet none of these scenarios, nor very little of them, can be true—because when I woke in the morning, I had a tattoo on my arm that had not been there before.
TWO
I have much to tell about this day, but it did not begin with any great rush to arise. The truth is that I stayed in bed for a long time and did not trust my eyes to the light. In that self-imposed darkness, I tried to decide on what I could remember of the night after I left The Widow’s Walk.
The procedure was not strange to me. It did not matter how much I drank, I could always get my car home. I had returned my car safely on nights when others who had swallowed as much would have been slumbering at the bottom of the sea. I would enter the house, reach my bed, and come to in the morning with my brain feeling as if it had been split by an ax. I remembered nothing. Yet if that proved the only symptom, and I knew no other uneasiness than the debauch I had put upon my liver, it was all right. Others would tell me later what I had done. If I felt no dread, then I could have done nothing too terrible. Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.
Since Patty Lareine left, however, I had been encountering new phenomena, and they were curious. Did drink have me chasing for the root of the wound? I can only say that my memory would be clear to me in the morning, but shattered, that is to say, in pieces. Each fragment was sharp enough, yet like puzzles that have been thrown together, not all the pieces seemed to come out of the same box. Which is equal, I suppose, to saying my dreams were now as reasonable as my memory, or my memory was as untrustworthy as my dreams. In either event, I could not tell them apart. It is a frightful state. You wake up in pure confusion over what you might or might not have done. That is like entering a labyrinth of caves. Somewhere along the way, the fine long thread that is supposed to lead you back has been broken. Now at each turning it is possible to be certain that you have come this way, or, equally, that you have never been here before.
I speak of this because I awoke on Day Twenty-five and lay nearly still for an hour before I chose to open my eyes. I was feeling dread with an intimacy I had not known since I came out of prison. There were mornings in the penitentiary when you got up from sleep with the knowledge that somebody bad—far beyond your own measure of how to be bad—was looking for you. Those were the worst mornings in prison.
Now I had the conviction that something would happen to me before the day was done, and in this anticipation was my dread. Yet with it all, I had one surprise. Lying there with a ferocious headache, trying behind closed eyes to keep my memory in view—it was like following a film with numerous breaks—a weight of apprehension lying in my stomach mean as lead, I still had an erection, an honest-to-God all-out ram of an erection. I wanted to screw Jessica Pond.
I would be reminded of this little fact in the days ahead. But let us take it in order. When your mind is a book where pages
are missing—no, worse, two books, each with its own gaps—well, order becomes as close a virtue as clean floors in a monastery. So I say only that it was because of this erection that I was saved the shock of opening my eyes on my tattoo, but remembered it instead. (However, at this instant, I could picture neither the parlor nor the face of the tattoo artist.) Somewhere I had registered the fact. With all my distress, it was still curious. How many facets memory could utilize! To remember that an act had been undertaken (although one could visualize none of it) was like reading about someone in a newspaper. So-and-So embezzled $80,000. The headline is all one perceives; the fact, however, is registered. Ergo, I was noting this fact about myself. Tim Madden had a tattoo. I knew it with my eyes closed. The erection reminded me of it.
In prison I had always resisted acquiring one. I felt enough of a con. All the same, you cannot give three years to the slammer without picking up a considerable amount of tattoo culture. I had heard about the rush. One man in four or five received a real rush of sexual excitement while the needle was being pricked into him. I also recollected how horny I had been for Ms. Pond. Had she been about while the artist was doing my watermark? Could she have been waiting in my car? Had we said goodbye to Lonnie Pangborn?
I opened my eyes. The tattoo was crusty, and sticky—some kind of glorified Band-Aid had come loose during the night. Still, I could read it. Laurel, it said. Laurel, in a curlicue script of blue ink within a small red heart. Let no one say I had special taste when it came to engravings.
My humor broke like a rotten egg. Patty Lareine had also seen this tattoo. Last night! Abruptly I had the clearest vision of her. She was shrieking at me in our living room. “Laurel? Are you daring to inflict Laurel on me again?”
Yes, but how much of this had actually happened? It was obvious to me that I could conceive of conversations as easily as I could live them. Was I not a writer, after all? Patty Lareine disappeared twenty-five days ago with a black stud of her choice, a tall, sullen, beautifully put together dude who had been hanging around through the summer, ready to capitalize on that carnal affinity toward black men which lives in the hearts of certain blondes like lightning and thunder. Or, for all I know, smolders in the heart like oily rags behind a barn door. Whatever she felt, there was no mistaking the results. Once a year, give a season or two, she would have a fling with Mr. Black. Some big black. He could be heavy, or he could be as quick as a basketball player, but he was always big. The size put them out of my physical reach—I think it delighted her contempt for me that I was not man enough under such circumstances to load my pistol and do a down-home chase-off. “Just like your dad would in North Carolina?” I asked. “You bet!” she’d reply with all the sassy, spiteful, untrammeled mouth of an eighteen-year-old in cutoffs at some Dr Pepper gas station. God, she was unafraid of me. I was terrified I would indeed get my gun, but never to chase Mr. Black. He was just appropriating what I, too, would grab if I could fill his jockstrap and sweat properly in his black logic. No, I was afraid I would get my pistol and never leave the house before emptying a magazine into her all-superior fuck-you face.
Tough Guys Don't Dance Page 3
