Blood in the Water and Other Secrets

by Janice Law

  I saw Dave’s agenda plain as day. Any time we met, he wanted to invite me for lunch, a quick drink, a semi-innocent get together. “What about your wife?” I asked, scanning the crowd for Caroline. “This will take a while . . .”

  “A half hour,” Hugh said eagerly. “My office is right down off Franklin.”

  “Practically next door!” exclaimed Dave. “Besides, I can leave Caroline the Mercedes. You’re not running the Corvette in this weather, are you, Hugh?”

  “Too cold for her now,” Hugh said.

  It always annoys me when men refer to cars as feminine.

  “Hugh’s got a vintage Corvette convertible,” Dave said. He growled again, and to the imitation of much horsepower, we bade farewell to the Opera Guild and stepped from the permanent twilight of the hotel suite to the cold, brilliant afternoon sunshine.

  Hugh’s company was in an old factory block. Though Hugh, himself, seemed permanently disheveled, his BMW was new, and his large workrooms were equipped with a fleet of top of the line Mac Workstations. A corkboard the length of his office was covered with notes, photos, and drawings for various works in progress.

  “Hey, here you are!” said Dave, examining a row of photos. I was standing before the studio’s satellite map, full face, both profiles, a better grade of mug shot.

  “What awful snaps,” I said.

  “Off the television screen, I’m afraid,” Hugh apologized. “We’ve captured some on video and that’s better. I wish the Opera had taped Fledermaus. Still, we redraw everything, anyway.”

  He switched on one of his machines and called up a file. “This is better, don’t you think?” The monitor bloomed with purples, pinks and lavenders, as a woman with dark, flowing hair filled the screen. She was a Queen of the Night wearing a vaguely military costume and a crescent moon in her hair. I could definitely see a resemblance.

  “Wow,” said Dave. “Way to go!” And he growled again.

  In the face of my own interior image, my secret self-portrait, Dave’s brand of sexuality was suddenly terminally boring. You know those exercises in beginning art and writing classes: make a mask, describe yourself as your favorite animal, do an abstract portrait that represents your inner self? Well, everything I’d tried to make myself was floating on those glowing pixels, and I couldn’t take my eyes off Hugh Spencer’s computer screen.

  “Do you like it?” asked Hugh, in a soft, insinuating voice. I could feel the invitation.

  “She’s remarkable,” I said. When our eyes met, I smelt the burn in the air and felt an atmospheric disarrangement.

  “Wow,” said Dave. “You sure this is a kids’ game? Safe to buy this one for Patsy?” And he laughed again.

  “It’s an adventure, puzzle game like Stone Tower,” Hugh said, dead serious. He did not seem to pick up double entendres. “The Dark Queen is the object of your quest. If you can find her, you win the game. But she’s also part of the complications. She can help you if you make the right decisions along the way, or she can turn malevolent and bounce you right out of the game.”

  “Like weather,” I said.

  “Exactly. She’s a sort of magic weather goddess,” Hugh said.

  His gleaming eyes transformed his face, and I realized that in this unexpected shape, in this unpromising situation, I’d gotten my wish. At that moment, I should have heard my mother’s warning, but it was too late. I was a prisoner of my imagination, caught by the habits of a long fantasy life. Hugh and I got rid of Dave and went out to dinner. We wound up a late and extravagant night back in my apartment.

  That’s how our affair started, and, while it lasted, it was brilliant. Have you ever been to the big science museum up in Boston? The one with the colossal Van de Graaff generator? Bang! And a lightning flash! Think 100,000 volts and let your imagination go but don’t expect the details from me. Passion’s a saleable commodity these days, and I have something else planned for the material.

  It will suffice to say that we were happy for a while, as people are who attain what they think they’ve always wanted. I’ll amend that. We were unusually happy, because we reflected each other, and, in the most seductive of mirrors, saw ourselves as we had dreamed we’d be: a little larger and more important than life. Isn’t that the true agenda of romance?

  He worshipped me; I could live with that. What was more difficult to abide was The Dark Queen, character and game, both of which gradually took on sinister overtones. I was perfect, you see, for the Queen, for the game, for his interior fantasy. Perfect already. Pay attention here: already is the key word.

  I don’t know how many of you have had experience with Perfection: the Ultimate Challenge. Forget the marathon, presidential fundraising, the Iditarod: perfection’s what really stretches the sinews, because it’s static. Perfection can only decline, and poor Hugh had already convinced himself that he couldn’t finish The Dark Queen without me. Me, that is, as I was the day we met.

  To illustrate the difficulties that developed, we have to move forward almost exactly one year— I know the date, because I again had the Opera Gala on my calendar. That autumn, I’d felt a certain shift in taste coming, a psychic isobar, and I decided on a new look, a new hairstyle. In the media business, these are commercial decisions, you understand, and extra important the older one gets. I decided shorter, neater hair was required and probably lighter, too. Brenda, the stylist, concurred

  “Smart,” she said. “A lighter, younger effect.”

  “Yes,” I said, when she’d worked her magic, “yes, I think this will do.” The studio brass approved, the public response was favorable, but Hugh was devastated. I’d broken his heart, derailed his project, betrayed The Dark Queen. He went on and on before attempting manual strangulation and, when he discovered I outweighed him by 30 pounds, tears, remorse, hysterics. I’d gotten my demon lover, all right.

  We broke up soon afterwards. Hugh had genius, but I have common sense. A couple of well-placed bruises could have hurt my career, and Van de Graaff generators, although spectacular in every way, can become wearing on a daily basis. I told him this was the end. Ready to be older and wiser, I changed my locks, my phone number, and my parking garage, even as Hugh prepared to realize my fantasy. Though his pursuit added a certain edge to life, be assured it was inconvenient.

  He was diabolically clever. He broke into my computer and into my apartment. He left messages on my desk at work and obtained a CB that interfered with my stereo. I would be relaxing with Tchaikovsky— Swan Lake, maybe— I hadn’t totally lost my taste for lush strings and ghostly romance— and there would be Hugh’s voice, desperately yearning, “Nadine! Nadine! Come back!” as if I were one of the enchanted swan maidens, or, I suppose, in my case, swan matrons, though that doesn’t have quite the same ring.

  But I must not stray from the point, which was that eventually he wore me down into sympathy and foolishness. Hugh called me late one afternoon— he was amazingly ingenious in procuring my phone number. He wept, he pleaded, he apologized, he promised. His masterwork, The Dark Queen was almost finished. It was on the cusp and needed but a single touch to bring it to completion, to perfection. Perfection : I should have shuddered at the word.

  If he could see me for an evening, a half hour, a few minutes, a few minutes was all he needed, a few minutes of inspiration. And to say good-bye, we needed to say good-bye, we needed to end better. It was his fault, but he repented; he was sorry. He desperately needed to say good-bye and then he’d leave me forever. He would. You can see that Hugh had plenty of inspiration when he really tried.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll meet you.”

  “I’ll pick you up,” he said. “We’ll have dinner. A farewell dinner. A celebration for The Dark Queen.”

  I said that sounded all right. We drove to a romantic inn near the shore, a pricey, ancient Yankee place with faded chintz, wide boards, candles in pewter sconces— even a blazing wood fire, because it was a cold night, too cold for the Corvette convertible. Hugh looked happy.
We toasted the game, our past, and our new, rational friendship in which we would meet once a year.

  “What date?” I asked. “The anniversary of the day we met?”

  “No,” he said. “This date. Every year on this date, no matter what.”

  I liked the idea. I like obsession and romance, even a touch of danger, so long as they don’t interfere with normal life. “Every year,” I agreed. “Here?”

  “Yes,” he said, his eyes like black fire, like glistening slivers of the hardest, darkest anthracite. “Here, along the river.”

  Our glasses clinked; I’d had my hair tinted dark again for our meeting, and he was delighted with the firelight rippling over my violet moire silk. In his own way, Hugh was fascinating and charming, too, as long as I was the Dark Queen and perfect. We had a couple hours of genuine happiness, and when it was time to leave, we shook hands over the table and kissed in the parking lot. There was snow in the air and a dusting of white on Hugh’s BMW.

  “Good luck finishing your game,” I said as we sped through the night. The river and the shore are quiet and dark that time of year.

  Hugh looked at me, the look I had seen that first day at the Opera Guild reception, the look of Cassius, the assassin. “The game is finished,” he said. “The game has been finished for a week.”

  “Surely not,” I said. “You insisted on this meeting, because . . .”

  “The computer game is finished, but not our game,” he said.

  I don’t know about you, but I like the portentous better in books than in life. I believe I said so.

  “The game ends in death,” Hugh said. “The Dark Queen, the Queen of the Night, the Queen of Spades, she’s always death.”

  He’d pushed the BMW almost to escape velocity, and as we careened around a curve, I saw the black glisten of the river ahead and forecast the future. I saw our car leaving the road: I saw us flying over the verge and flipping down the steep bank into eternal darkness. I saw that, and I grabbed the wheel, twisting us away from the water and The Dark Queen and Hugh’s madness and sending us across the road toward the trees and the utility poles on the other side.

  He shouted and wrenched the wheel free. I had no doubt then. I got my hand on the ignition and turned the key just before there was a terrible, spine-shattering jolt. Air bags mushroomed to fill the compartment with gas and nylon, and, in their smothering embrace, I found pain and finality.

  That was the end of my demon lover: the driver’s side hit first and even the best German engineering with air bags cannot protect against a 70 year old ash hit at 90 miles an hour. The whole left side of the BMW sheered off, and I was lucky that my unlocked door was sprung in the impact, because a trucker hauling fish up from the coast was able to pull me out into full-fledged celebrity and scandal.

  Of course, in almost every way I’ve been altered for the worse, although I’m an even better weather forecaster than I was before. All those plates and screws and bones with pins in them have made me an exquisite human barometer. Let me tell you, I know storms intimately now.

  But when the plastic surgery’s complete and the orthopedic therapy is finished, I’ll be back. The cosmetic surgeon promises to make me more attractive than ever. He has this image, this idea in mind. He’s cute, sexy even, without bad habits that I can see, but a man who wants to turn you into his ideal is half way to being a psychopath. I think I’d be better off with the orthopedic surgeon, who finds me fascinating, replacement parts and all, or the lawyer who helped me sue Hugh’s estate and institute libel actions against some of his defenders. I’ve been astonished at how enterprising and malicious some of Hugh’s friends have been and how creatively they’ve blown up a few indiscreet phone calls.

  But I have the ultimate response and intend to make a good thing out of notoriety. Perhaps I’ve not mentioned that I preserved every scrap of correspondence, including e-mail? I made sure that my answering service kept all Hugh’s messages, and I had every word on my answer machine transcribed. Money in the bank with all the interest in Hugh Spencer, and I’m publishing as soon as possible.

  The Dark Queen is still flying off the shelves, propelled by sensation and disaster. And quality, too, for Hugh really was a genius. With its infamous suicide pact loop, The Dark Queen is “archetypal,” “Jungian,” “cutting edge,” “the first game for grown-ups,” to quote the reviewers. Hugh’s gruesome, spectacular, and ambiguous end hasn’t hurt, either.

  “His life and art,” said one recent commentator, “encapsulated the searching anguish of the end of the twentieth century.” That’s as may be, but I do sense a certain fin de siecle appeal, and I’m beginning to see young women dressed as the Queen of the Night.

  So I’ll survive nicely. My memoirs are in the works, and even pre-plastic surgery, I’m becoming a fixture on the more daring talk shows. I intend to be bigger than ever— and not just in the local media market, either. But some nights, I still go home to turn on the computer and rendezvous with the Dark Queen, my alter ego, my danger, my apotheosis, and also with Hugh, who’s no longer a danger and a nuisance but a romantic genius whose quirky talent pervades his work and whose fateful passion rumbles through the foreboding music that accompanies The Dark Queen.

  I confess that other men seem somewhat insipid since my demon lover attained his ideal form. It cost me a lot to get him, but obsession can tolerate a few bionic parts, and I’d find it very hard to give up Hugh, my ideal Hugh, now. He haunts my imagination, and though I’m moving on, with possibilities on every side, there are autumn days when I think of the night stars and black water and imagine a rendezvous with Hugh down along the river.

  The Man Kali Visited

  I am at the inquest and a sallow faced man with short hair and a blue striped suit is warning me to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth and asking me to state my name and occupation. I am stumbling over my words and forgetting American idioms and remembering irrelevant slang from Bombay, because I am feeling hopelessly and irredeemably foreign. Not only is the “truth” in this matter slippery and elusive, but the court does not seem ready for the “whole truth”;, and “nothing but the truth” may be impossible.

  “My name is Neena Dasgupta and I am office manager and secretary to the publisher of Skin Magazine.” Skin Magazine runs photographs of pretty women with no clothes on and stories about sexy women by young men of minimal talent and maximal imagination. Its publisher, Mr. A, was my employer and my salvation. Thanks to Skin Magazine, I went from being the discarded wife of an ambitious graduate student to an independent woman on a good salary.

  “Will you tell the court where you were on the afternoon of September 9th, 1993?”

  “I was at the offices of Skin Magazine until 5:30 P.M.” Very nice offices, too. I helped with the design. Modern and airy but with interesting colors, cinnabar, ocher, deep pink and turquoise; colors of the sub-continent; colors for moments of nostalgia and reflection.

  “Can you describe that afternoon for the court?”

  “It was a most ordinary afternoon. We were laying out pages for the November issue, and I personally was getting Mr. A’s schedule organized for the next few weeks.”

  What this means is planning everything for him, paying the bills, answering his correspondence, dealing with the lawyers, two ex-wives, his elderly mother, and his neurotic Doberman’s veterinarian. Although insufficiently appreciated by the puritanical American public, my poor Mr. A was a creative person. He wanted to distill sex into pictures and to distill women into beauty. Perhaps those were wrong desires, yet from my point of view, they seemed quite traditional. Our temple sculptors have been turning naked men and women into images for centuries. But in this new and different climate, it is natural for people to keep their clothing on. And so instead of grottos and temples full of beautiful sculptures and paintings, we have Skin Magazine which pays me, as I have mentioned, very well to be keeping Mr. A’s schedule straight and seeing that his printers are paid and checking that all mo
dels are old enough or are accompanied with permission forms signed by their mothers.

  “’Mr. A’ is Mr. James Rembrandt Addison?”

  “That is correct.”

  “And Mr. Addison was in the office that afternoon?”

  This is, for anyone who knew Mr. A, a foolish question. Where else would he be? Skin Magazine was life as he was wanting to live it, where all women are beautiful and sympathetic, all men are attractive and successful, and the dull stretches and sharp edges of life are covered by a mist of desire. This was childish, of course, but we are all as childish as we can manage. What is sad is that we cannot contrive to be children forever, not even in fantasy.

  That is what I have learned from this matter, but I do not think the judge wishes to hear my ideas. He is an elderly man with a red face and white hair. I am thinking that he has grown old listening and judging, which must be a so tiring life. I am guessing that he will not want complications in the simple case of a fatal heart attack.

  That is definitely how Mr. A died. No “foul play” of the ordinary sort. He was completely alone, I am sure. Of course, I would willingly have stayed with him and supported him in the face of immaterial, as of material, threat, but he would not permit that. To let me stay would have been to acknowledge the situation, the implications, the dangers, all of which were complicated, elusive, and unusual.

  I decide not to attempt this part of “the truth.” Instead, I say, “He went out jogging at one as usual and he had a reservation for lunch at 1:45 at La Caricole. He returned at 2:45 and worked on slides and picture selection until 5. Mr. A always had the final say on pictures.”

  “The office closes at five?”

  “Yes, but Mr. A often worked later and I sometimes stayed late, too, if there was a shoot scheduled.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Mr. A, Mr. Addison, was always very proper.”

  There is laughter in the court and the judge is displeased. You are seeing here an illustration of my point: the “whole truth” is not required because it is not welcome. But Mr A, who took sexy photos and published soft porn, never told a dirty joke, fondled a model, or made raunchy remarks. He could be very sweet, but all his sexual energy was going into his pictures. Which were always of a perfect woman in a perfect situation. Which were pictures. Only. If you are understanding my point.