Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2)

by Nicholas Guild

  “Do you have any idea what it’s like?” she asked, the edge of bitterness in her voice suggesting that of course he didn’t know, but that he god damn well ought to know because it was his fault. “Do you have any conception at all what it feels like for a woman to be twenty-seven years old and divorced?”

  So apparently they really were divorced. Guinness had wondered once or twice in the last day or two how you went about a thing like that. Had she gone to all the trouble of dissolving the union with her unlocatable husband; or had she simply pretended, to herself and everyone else, that he was dead somewhere? Now he knew.

  “It isn’t very amusing, I can tell you. The seal is broken, and you’re alone. So every man within a radius of a hundred miles thinks you’re just dying to have him put his hands on you.”

  For a moment she was lost in some private, repellent memory; he could watch the faint shudder pass over her, as if she were once again alone and on her library stool in Seattle, the subject of some routine humiliation.

  For the second time that morning, Guinness felt as if he should apologize—but, what the hell, she was the one who had left him. If once or twice she had gotten groped behind the stacks in the reserve book room, that was her problem; she would have to fend off the balding clowns with advanced degrees in poultry science all by herself. He wasn’t interested in taking the rap for that.

  But he couldn’t help it. It was impossible to escape the fact that he had had some hand in the wrong that had been done Kathleen; it wasn’t as if she had left him just to be perverse. He looked at her now, looked at the unhappy little lines at the corners of her mouth, and was once again struck by how much she had changed in what, after all, hadn’t been that many years.

  “So the singles scene didn’t light up your board for you,” he said, perhaps with just a shade more brutality than he had intended. “Is that why you married Duelle? Or are there more horrors yet to come?”

  She didn’t say anything or even frown. She didn’t react at all; it was as if she hadn’t heard him. The reverie simply continued. But Guinness wasn’t such a blockhead as not to know that he had violated their tenuous accord, and that when she did speak again it wouldn’t be to whisper any more confidences.

  But why should he care about that? It wasn’t as if there had been any big reconciliation or anything like that. A Mounds bar shared out on the tailgate of a station wagon couldn’t really qualify as a love feast, and he wasn’t even sure that it would have been what he wanted anyway. Kathleen was different. Maybe he had had a role in effecting the change, and maybe not; but he didn’t think he much liked this bitter little suburban shrew who seemed to think he should wear sackcloth and ashes because she had had a rough time of it.

  Screw her, he really didn’t need for them to be pals. If all she wanted was to sort through her grievances, she could manage by herself.

  “Sorry.”

  The word was out before he realized he had spoken. He smiled, as much from surprise as anything else. “I didn’t mean to sound so damned nasty—or maybe I did, I don’t know.”

  “No, I’m the one who’s sorry,” she said at last. “I guess I have been sounding like a witch.” She closed her eyes and nodded a few times, very slowly, giving the impression that the muscles in her neck were hardening into wood. A tear squeezed from the outside corner of her eyelid—it was odd how she didn’t seem to be able to manage more than one tear at a time—but Guinness restrained the impulse to take her in his arms again. She didn’t want to be comforted like a child; she wasn’t a child, that was precisely the point. So he looked away and waited for her to compose herself.

  It struck him that he had never seen Kathleen cry before the last few days. She had changed. Or was this simply what it took to make her? He was impressed in spite of himself.

  “Why did you marry Duelle?”

  The question made her smile, but not very pleasantly. Kathleen had a smile that could turn you to jelly it was so warm, but this wasn’t it. This was a smile that seemed to hint at a vast experience of the weakness of human nature, including her own, at the naiveté behind such an inquiry.

  Holman Duelle. It wasn’t really such a stupid question. How does a well brought up girl from Seattle, a Phi Beta Kappa and the daughter of a good family, how does she end up in the arms of this grotesque southern cracker with his closet full of white patent leather shoes? Eight years ago in London, if ever the idea should have seeped through that Wittgensteinian fog that protected her from too bruising a contact with the world, she just would have laughed. Imagine such a thing happening to Kathleen Dunmore Guinness.

  “Holman came to some convention hosted by the University of Washington. Elastic wave propagation, or something like that. I can’t be expected to remember all that kind of nonsense.” As she spoke, her attention seemed to be focused on the pale pink lacquer covering her left thumbnail, which she was viciously peeling away with the flat edge of one of her car keys.

  “Anyway, he came to the library late one Friday afternoon. I was in the right frame of mind, so I let him pick me up—just like that. I wasn’t made to live like a nun, you know.”

  She shrugged her shoulders, and Guinness noticed a tiny drop of blood where her key had apparently nicked the nail bed. It was then that he decided he didn’t believe her.

  Not that he doubted the words themselves—why should he? He had himself, if memory served, picked her up quite casually after they had both escaped from a desperately boring seminar at Cambridge, although it had been on Tolstoy rather than wave propagation, elastic or otherwise. Perhaps that was her pattern. Perhaps all those years ago she had just been “in the right frame of mind” to admit some total stranger into her bed, and in the process make of him something more.

  But the edge in her voice, what about that? Kathleen had never been “easy,” as they used to say when Guinness was in high school. She belonged to herself, but there had never been anything particularly casual about how she gave herself, or to whom. To suggest now that she had become that was to ask too much of memory and conscience. Even making allowances for reflected bitterness, she couldn’t have liked ol’ Duelle too much, not even at first.

  “He took me to some steak place, the kind where they have a salad bar and the baked potato comes wrapped in aluminum foil—maybe he was homesick; down here they don’t seem to know that anything else is possible—and we got loaded together on whiskeys and ginger ale. We must have gotten loaded; otherwise I can’t imagine how he ended up back in my kitchen the next morning, pawing through the cereal boxes in search of hominy grits.”

  “Does Rocky like him?”

  Guinness couldn’t think what had prompted him to ask, except perhaps that he had a little trouble squaring this picture of the dissolute Kathleen, the girl from the library who ate baked potatoes with visiting firemen and then invited them home for heavy breathing and a spot of breakfast, with the mother of their child. Or perhaps he only wanted Kathleen to have that kind of trouble.

  “No, she doesn’t.” The reply was dispassionate, almost analytic. As if there were no question of assigning responsibility, as if question and answer were simply pairs in a self evident demonstration. “She never did. But then, you know, children have an instinct about these things. They’ve never been able to stand each other, those two.”

  Guinness suddenly had a vision, lasting no more than a second, of mother and daughter scurrying down the walkway from the Morrison School, Kathleen hunched protectively over Rocky, as if to shield her from an attack that might come from any direction.

  And then there was Duelle, sneaking out of the movie house. If it could be arranged, Guinness decided, friend Duelle was going to be one of the casualties of this little operation. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

  Which brought back into focus the whole question of how much Kathleen might suspect of her husband’s involvement—quite a bit, it would seem. So far, Duelle seemed to occupy a place right up there with himself, as one of the principal villains of
her life.

  “So why don’t you divorce the son of a bitch?”

  Kathleen only smiled again, and continued paring away at her thumbnail in a manner exquisitely horrible to watch. “How many husbands do you think I can afford to throw away, hey?”

  In the long silence that followed, Guinness carefully avoided looking in his ex-wife’s direction. He didn’t want to catch her eye because that would require him to say something, or at least to assume one or another mask, and he didn’t want to involve himself in a falsehood, even if only by implication. The truth, of course, would have been disastrous, that he knew without knowing precisely what the truth in this instance might be.

  Finally he got down from the tailgate of Kathleen’s station wagon and walked over to his own car, ostensibly to find something more to eat. All the way across the thirty or forty feet he could feel her eyes boring a pair of holes between his shoulder blades. It wasn’t going to be forever before she would start insisting that he take sides.

  He opened the door on the passenger’s side and noticed for the first time that his car, rented less than forty-eight hours earlier, was already beginning to smell like the alley behind a Chinese restaurant. It was being out in the fresh air that did it; it was obvious he would have to surrender either fresh air or using his front seat as a pantry, and of the two he thought probably he could do the more readily without fresh air. It really wasn’t even much of a choice.

  On the floor under the dashboard he found a bag of doughnuts he had purchased the afternoon before at a Krispy-Kream on Pleasantburg Road in Greenville; they had been intended as a substitute for dinner, but then the whole episode with Willie Trowbridge, who probably by now was just being dried off and slipped into a plastic bag to await the coroner’s convenience, had put him off his feed. Guinness couldn’t, in fact, remember having eaten any of them. But he must have, because one of them, a plain cake with the heavy, irregular crust that goes under the title of “old-fashioned,” had been reduced to a ragged crescent.

  He took a bite to test whether it was still fresh enough to justify offering any of the others to Kathleen. In the old days, inviting her to share in a bag of doughnuts would have been unimaginable—she probably wouldn’t even have known what a doughnut was—but so much about her had changed that anything seemed possible. The woman sitting on the tailgate of her suburban wagon, her darkish blond hair teased up so that she looked like an owl, might live on nothing else.

  She had taken off her glasses for a moment and was rubbing her left eye with the heal of her hand, as if to press it back into her head. She looked so beaten, Guinness couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. She might have been sitting there waiting for somebody to come up and take her off into the bushes to be shot in the head.

  Poor baby. She was out of her depth and she knew it. The control of her life had passed into other people’s hands, and all she could do was wait until they had decided what they were going to make of it.

  Of course that might be something of a comfort, since that way other people would have all the responsibility. Duelle could be the chief heavy—whether or not she knew how deeply he was involved, she wouldn’t hesitate to hang a good share of it on him. At the very least, couldn’t he have done what they wanted, just packed a suitcase, typed out a beautifully phrased letter of resignation, and gotten her and her child the hell out of there? Yes, friend Holman would be standing first in line. Guinness didn’t mind that so much. He didn’t much like the bastard either.

  But then there was the number two slot, and Guinness didn’t have a doubt in the world that it was all his. She hadn’t said so—she wouldn’t dare because, after all, at the moment she needed him—but there were other ways of getting the point across. If only he had been what he had appeared back in the days of their innocence; if only he had been satisfied with her and the care and feeding of the sixth form, if only he could have left the slaying of monsters to Beowulf, then all would have been well and they would all still be in London together. Kathleen would have a husband she could trust and love, would have had no reason to believe any other arrangement possible, and Rocky would have a father. Not simply an oily intruder who slept in her mother’s bed, but a father. The real article.

  As he watched Kathleen wondering about the disposition of her life, he wondered himself what she must have told Rocky about him, how she had accounted for his absence.

  What had his own mother told him? Simply that the master of the house was gone, implying that responsibility for this abandonment was by some marvelous agency to be assigned equally to father and son. Before a certain age one does not question the logic of these things, and by the time Guinness was old enough to perceive any injustice, the whole issue had developed into a forbidden topic. He hadn’t been more than five or six before it became clear that his mother was his mortal enemy, from whom no comfort and only so much succor as the law might mandate was to be expected. One does not seek to read one’s history in the book of the damned.

  But, of course, his situation had not been equivalent to Rocky’s. His mother had not left her husband. His mother would never, for any imaginable reason, have left any man; she would not have conceived of the relationship as anything except an opportunity for exploitation, and who willingly surrenders a thing like that? So perhaps it had been different for Rocky. Perhaps Kathleen had not denied her child the legend of a father who had loved her. Perhaps Rocky had been taught that he had died, as he had died for Kathleen. Perhaps that was the punishment she had assigned him, to be dead in his daughter’s memory.

  The doughnuts, he decided, were plenty fresh enough for present purposes. So he walked jauntily back to the station wagon, balancing the bag on the flat of his hand like a waiter with a tray.

  “What, more goodies?”

  There was just a trace of a giggle in Kathleen’s voice, as if to convince him that their concord had not been broken. She drew her legs up until the heels of her shoes rested on the edge of the tailgate and wrapped her arms around her knees—when they had been married, she used sometimes to sit on the floor like that for hours, peering down at a book lying open beside her and never moving except to turn the pages—and she smiled. This time the smile was magic, and Guinness felt something inside of him melt.

  “More goodies,” he said, climbing up next to her and opening the bag. He held it out to her as if he were offering cigarettes out of a thin silver case . “Very high in cholesterol, and murder on the waistline. I pretty much live on junk food these days.”

  There was an awkward little silence, and then Kathleen reached tentatively into the bag and took out a sugared doughnut, tore it in half, and dropped one of the halves back inside. While she ate the half she had kept, she kept glancing at him out of the corner of her eye. Guinness tried not to appear to notice and maintained his gaze straight ahead, seeming to look at nothing. He knew what was coming.

  “Is it the same with you these days?” she asked finally. “I mean, are you still in the same line of work?”

  Well, she would have to be sure, wouldn’t she? After all, it would be important now; he wouldn’t be of any use to her if he had taken a vow of nonviolence.

  Guinness turned his head, just enough to catch her at the periphery of his field of vision. Now it was his turn for heavily ironic smiles.

  “Do you mean am I still in the butcher business?” It was somehow perversely satisfying to see that she flinched slightly at the brutality with which he phrased it. “Yes, but I’ve changed companies. I don’t work for the British anymore; now Uncle Sam pays the bills.”

  Neither of them said anything, or dared to look at the other, for perhaps as long as three-quarters of a minute; and Guinness experienced that peculiar sense of shame that had come to him only twice before in his life, the first time after Kathleen had left him because she couldn’t endure the idea of marriage to a paid killer of men, and the second when he had gone down to the hospital morgue in San Mateo to identify the remains of his murdered second wife
. It was as if he contaminated everything around him, which in a sense he did, defiling by his mere presence the objects of his love. Kathleen’s rejection of him and Louise’s death—or, more accurately, the manner of the death—were like judgments that he was unfit to be in the company of other human beings.

  Well, to hell with that.

  “Look, I’m not particularly interested in your good opinion,” he said quietly, as if answering some accusation he had heard a thousand times before and that was beginning to bore him unutterably. “I just want you to tell me what you can about this business, and when I’m finished I’ll just disappear and it’ll be just like I didn’t exist.”

  He slipped his hand into his jacket pocket and took out the photograph of their daughter, the one Kathleen had received in the mail, the one that so graphically demonstrated the fragility of life, and handed it to her.

  “I want you to tell me everything about that.” As he spoke he was careful to look away, he didn’t want to know how she might feel, having the hideous thing before her eyes again. “I want to know how it came, what the guy said over the phone, what he sounded like, everything you did and said, you and Duelle both, the works.”

  But she didn’t say anything, and finally Guinness glanced over and saw that she was pressing the photograph down into her lap with both hands, her thumbs along the borders on either side, as if she thought that by restraining the image she could forestall the reality. She was shivering, even though the morning was already sticky with heat, and when it came at last there was the grief of bitter tears in her voice.

  “When Clara Mandel got one of these, she and her husband didn’t even wait for the moving vans. Hillary didn’t even go back to his office at the university; he just phoned in his resignation and dropped off the keys to their house at the realty company, and they were gone. It wasn’t even forty-eight hours.” When she looked into Guinness’s face, searching for God only knew what comfort, her eyes were large and damp and frightened.