Star Witness

by D. W. Buffa

  Waving his hand toward the visitor’s chair, he sank into his own.

  “I don’t see many students in my classroom wearing suits and ties; none, to be precise; and, if you’ll forgive me, you’re rather older than most of the students I get. If someone in administration had wandered in—lost— they might have on a suit, but never one as expensive as that,” he explained with an appraising glance. “That’s part of what I meant when I said you weren’t what I expected. I’m afraid I tend to think of criminal defense lawyers as loud and flamboyant, not people who dress in well-tailored, understated clothes.”

  His face, especially his eyes, became more animated as he spoke, caught up in what for him was the obvious pleasure of explaining the peculiar way in which the mind—his mind—sometimes worked. From the way he held himself to the way each word came fully formed off his tongue there was about him a certain elegance. He was really quite extraordinary, every bit as impressive in the close confines of his office as he had been in front of two hundred utterly fascinated undergraduates. There was nothing the least pretentious about him; there was certainly nothing of the insufferable arrogance of intellectuals caught up in their own imagined importance. There was a kind of modesty about him, the kind found in someone not content with measuring himself against the shortcomings of others.

  Erlich lifted his finely drawn chin and peered at me through steady, sensitive eyes, eyes that looked as if they could see right into the heart of things and not blink at the sight of what they found.

  “I knew eventually you would come to find me,” said Erlich in a gentle voice.

  “Then why didn’t you simply return a call, or answer a letter?” I was compelled to ask.

  “Because I hoped you wouldn’t,” he admitted. “Come to find me, I mean. I understand why you had to; or why you might think you had to.”

  I almost felt an obligation to apologize, as if I had without reason trespassed upon his privacy.

  “I’m just trying to find out what I can about... ”

  I hesitated, not quite sure how to put it; whether to call her by the name by which the world knew her, or the name by which he must have known her; whether to say something in sympathy for what after all the years they had been divorced was not the loss felt by a husband, and, for all I knew, might not even have been that felt by a friend. She was of course the mother of his child.

  “Marian,” said Erlich, sensing my discomfort. “I always called her that. Marian Erlich is the name she used on my daughter’s birth certificate. Marian Walsh before I married her. But I imagine you know that, don’t you?”

  Reaching inside the desk drawer, Erlich pulled out a pack of cigarettes.

  “Old habits die hard,” he said as if it was some private joke he had with himself. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  He lit the cigarette, took a deep drag and then, closing his eyes, slowly let it out through his nostrils.

  “It’s against the rules,” he explained. “I do it every day after class. Only one. It’s my only criminal act, but you’ll notice I do it over and over again. I’m what you call a repeat offender.”

  He took another drag, and looked at me through the column of smoke that was beginning its lazy, spiraling ascent.

  “Do you think that’s the reason some people become criminals, Mr. Antonelli? Because only by breaking the rules do they get any sense of being, any sense that they have an identity of their own? It was one of the strange phenomena of the twentieth century, the fascination with crime and criminals. Not this kind, of course,” he added, nodding with an embarrassed grin toward the burning cigarette. “Serious crime, violent crime ... murder.”

  From the look in his eyes I could tell that he knew as soon as I heard that last word I would think of the murder of his former wife. While he meant that, too, there was a broader point he wished to make.

  “The twentieth century continued and intensified the movement away from the world as it presents itself and reveals itself to us as human beings. Everything has been covered over, buried under layer after layer of thought and language. I mean, just as an example, you can scarcely find anyone even willing to try to understand Plato or Aristotle as they understood themselves, as they understood the world as it revealed itself to them. But never mind that: think how seldom we see anything with our own eyes. We see everything through the eyes of someone else. The new technology—the technology that is supposedly the great contribution of the twentieth century—surrounds us with images, bombards us with them: radio, and the phonograph; then television; and yes, of course, the movies. Everything is artificial, done for effect. An act of violence, on the other hand, is real; it isn’t done for an audience; it isn’t done because of what others will think. People are fascinated with crime because the act itself, the violent assault on this artificial order of things, seems so spontaneous, so authentic, compared with the way the rest of us have to lead our lives.”

  A look of disdain creased his forehead. With narrowed eyes, he took a last drag on the cigarette and then snuffed it out on a small rose-colored ceramic glass he used as a makeshift ashtray.

  “It was for a while the fashion among European intellectuals to extol the virtues of violence as the expression of individual refusal to become a useful, exploitable part of the social machinery.”

  Erlich closed his eyes, raised his eyebrows and sadly shook his head.

  “Typical,” he said, a world-weary look now in his eyes. “Bloodless voluptuaries, sitting in their offices, living out their tepid, tenured existences, thrilled at the thought that someone out there is equally contemptuous of the lives they take and of the consequences to themselves if they are caught.”

  He stared at me for a moment, then drew his head back slowly to the side as a secretive smile spread across his lips.

  “None of us will admit it, but in a way we all admire the murderer, don’t we, Mr. Antonelli? He’s done something we don’t think we would have the courage to do; not just the act of killing, but the courage to face what will happen to our standing in the world. Because of course, that thought, that eminently private thought, that the ability, the willingness to commit violence is a strength we don’t have, is immediately suppressed, brought to bay by the moral certainty that murder is wrong and that anyone who does it is a coward.”

  He had followed his own thought, hunted it with a kind of single-minded fervor until he had taken the chase as far as he wanted to go.

  “I’m sorry,” said Erlich with a start, as if he had just realized what he had done. “I’m afraid I sometimes forget I’m not in class.”

  But then he thought of something else, something he had to explain.

  “I said part of the fascination with crime was because it isn’t done for an audience, isn’t done because of what others will think. That’s not entirely true, though, is it? There are cases—aren’t there?—in which someone commits a crime precisely because they want it to be known, because they want to become known themselves. The ones who kill someone famous because they want to be famous, too; and they won’t be if they kill someone no one knows. Wouldn’t it be more interesting, though, if someone committed a crime—killed someone—because of what they hoped it would make others think of the victim?”

  Abruptly, he shook his head, scolding himself for engaging in the same kind of digression for which he had a moment earlier apologized.

  He had raised a possibility, however, that I had not thought of; one I was not sure I fully understood. I knew of course about situations in which someone famous had been murdered because the killer hoped in demented way to share in the victim’s celebrity; but what did it mean to kill someone to change the way other people thought of the man, or the woman, you killed? Erlich read the question in my eyes.

  “The way Marian was killed, for example. Or perhaps I should say the way she was left after she was killed: her naked body floating in the swimming pool. Don’t you think that creates a certain kind of impression? Don’t you think that left a ce
rtain image in the minds of people who read about it, heard about it? And, my God, who didn’t hear about it?”

  Erlich winced at the memory of it. He looked at me sharply.

  “It was all over the place. The first thing I did when I heard it was to get my daughter out of school. I didn’t want her to hear about it the way everyone else was hearing about it. I took her for a long drive, out to the beach; and I told her there that her mother had died, that she had been killed. You see, I didn’t want her to think what everyone else must have thought: that her mother was doing something she shouldn’t have been doing and was murdered while she was doing it. That’s what I meant, Mr. Antonelli; that’s what I meant when I said that someone might kill someone to change the way people thought about her. If she had been killed in broad daylight, walking down the street, shot by some deranged fool, no one would think of her as anything but a beautiful woman, an accomplished actress; but slashed to death, late at night, naked; found in the morning floating face down in the pool, her stocking still wrapped around her neck—it isn’t the kind of death, even if a violent death, anyone is likely to associate with a respectable woman, is it? You’ve seen the tabloids. I try to keep my daughter out of grocery stores. It’s everything imaginable: sex and murder—sex, drugs and murder. Whoever did it, Mr. Antonelli, destroyed what there was of her reputation. Whether that was done deliberately or not, I wouldn’t know; but someone could have done it on purpose, couldn’t they? Killed her in a way that made it look almost as if she deserved it.”

  It was an instinct bred from a thousand cross-examinations. I heard myself ask:

  “Do you think she deserved it?”

  Most people would have reacted with anger, even outrage; they would have shown some emotion, some sign of resentment at the implication that they could think anyone deserved to die. Erlich did not flinch. With his elbows on the arms of the chair, he folded his hands together.

  “There were times when I thought so, Mr. Antonelli; there were times when I wished she were dead; not because of what had happened between us, but because of the way she treated our daughter. What do you really know about her, Mr. Antonelli? What do you know about Mary Margaret Flanders? She was not what you saw on the screen.

  “We were young,” said Erlich with a pensive sigh. “In some ways, though I was four years older, I was younger than she. I saw things in her,” continued Erlich with a smile that was both rueful and nostalgic, “things that may not have been there; things I may have put there.”

  The smile softened, lost its regret, became more forgiving of youthful failure.

  “We do that, don’t we? See in others what we expect— or what we hope; invent someone, then fall in love with what we make. I did that with Marian, I’m afraid. She was intelligent—oh, she wasn’t brilliant, or anything like that—but she had a clear mind, and she was interested in things, things she did not know anything about. That was it, you see: this gorgeous creature, eager to learn about everything. She made me feel like I was the most important person in the world.”

  A troubled look in his eyes, he struggled to find the exact words with which to clothe his thought.

  “That was her real gift, her real form of intelligence: that ability to make other people feel something in her presence, something that made them feel important.”

  He was bending forward, his head cocked, looking at me with a kind of curiosity, as if there were things about her, and about the way he had felt about her, he still did not quite understand.

  “I’ve never seen any of her movies except for the first one she made, and I left that one before it was over. It wasn’t her, it wasn’t her at all; but at the same time, it was close enough that ... It was a little unnerving because, you see, I saw she could do it there, too: have that same effect she had on me; the effect she had on other people who came in contact with her; have it on the screen when there was, so to speak, no one there at all. It bothered me—no, it depressed me—more than I can tell you. A picture, a moving picture—she wasn’t there, she wasn’t real—and yet, as I looked around that theater, all those faces turned upward, watching her face on film, you could see it, the way they were drawn to her, the way she made them feel.”

  Erlich suddenly stopped talking. He picked up the photograph of his daughter and showed it to me.

  “She has her mother’s looks, doesn’t she?”

  She did look like her mother. She had the same high cheekbones and the same perfectly balanced bone structure; she had the same nose and the same mouth; but she had her father’s eyes. Not the shape of them— that was like her mother’s, too—but the depth, and though it may sound strange to say it of someone still so young, the intelligence.

  “Marian did not have time for her; she did not have time for either one of us. Marian did not have time for anyone who was not part of what was now the only reality she cared about. The time she spent with us was time wasted, time she was not able to spend on her new career.”

  Carefully, Erlich put the picture of his daughter back in place.

  “Marian had always wanted to be an actress, and she had taken that first, significant step, but until she got that part I thought she was giving up on it. She had a year left to go in school. We had a daughter. She talked about going to graduate school. She thought she’d like to become a teacher.

  “Even after she got the part, I still thought that was what she was going to do. Then, when the movie was finished, when she saw herself in it, that is when it happened. She became addicted—and I mean that literally—addicted to what other people said, to what other people thought, to the way she was seen by other people. She could not pass a mirror without stopping— not to look at herself, not to see herself—to study her reflection, to see it from every possible angle, to see the way other people would see her in every conceivable situation.

  “Shortly after the movie came out, we went to a party at the home of some producer. In that crowd of people, some of them quite well known, it was as if she was the only one there. She had that talent, that way about her that made everyone want to look at her. She would be talking to someone, and it was as if a camera was on her, filming a scene in which they were the only two people in the room.”

  With a pronounced air of discovery, Erlich’s eyes blazed and he threw out his hands.

  “Not as if they were really alone, you understand. No, it was as if they were the center of attention for the audience made up of everyone else. It’s the way someone holds herself, the way she moves, when she knows everyone is watching; the way someone walks down the aisle at the Academy Awards, their eyes straight ahead, completely composed, knowing all the time that every eye is on them; that thousands of people are watching; that hundreds of millions are watching on television. I had never seen her so beautiful, and I knew better than I had ever known before, knew with all the reluctant certainty of a broken heart, that the intimate affection of a husband—and perhaps even the innocent love of a child—could never compete with the thrill she got from the adulation of strangers.”

  Staring bleakly at the wall in front of him, Erlich for a moment reflected in silence on what had happened. I had the feeling that he did not blame her at all; that if he blamed anyone, he blamed himself for not grasping sooner how different were the things he thought important from what other people, no matter how intelligent, wanted for themselves. It was a kind of blindness on his part; born, I imagine, out of an unwillingness to accept how different he really was; a reluctance to face how lonely he was destined to be. That perhaps explained why he clung so tenaciously to the idea that he had somehow to protect his daughter from anything like what had happened to her mother. He must have been the only one alive who thought there was something to regret in the life Mary Margaret Flanders had been privileged to live.

  Slowly pressing together the tips of his smooth, tapered fingers, Erlich turned to me, nodded twice and then let slip across his mouth a self-conscious smile.

  “You have an interesting face,
Mr. Antonelli. There’s something about you that makes people want to tell you things about themselves. But you know that, don’t you? It’s part of the reason you’re as good as you are at what you do.”

  The smile broadened and Erlich started to relax.

  “You’ve scarcely asked me a question, and I’ve told you pretty much all I know; certainly more than I’ve ever told anyone else about what Marian was like then.”

  He had a slightly bemused expression on his face, as if he could not quite believe he had actually told me as much as he had. But he also seemed relieved that he had said it out loud; said it in a way that made sense out of it all. I do not believe that he thought it was the whole truth, but as much of it as any of us can hope to find about the things that happen to us that, for better or worse, change our lives forever.

  “I wanted Chloe to have a chance at a normal life. I didn’t want her growing up around Hollywood people. You see, Mr. Antonelli, I was the one who wanted the divorce. Don’t misunderstand,” he added quickly, “Marian would have—eventually. She was so wrapped up in what she was doing that she had not even begun to think that far ahead. When I told her it was not going to work out, that her career was already making too many demands on her, she did not disagree.”

  Erlich looked away, and then, biting his lip, shook his head.

  “Marian seemed almost relieved when I told her I wanted custody of Chloe. She didn’t object when I told her I was taking Chloe to live with me in Europe.

  “On Chloe’s birthday, and at Christmas, Marian sent her gifts, expensive gifts, gifts I suspect she had someone else pick out. She never came to see her. Once, when Chloe wrote to her—she was only five—she got back an autographed picture, the kind they send out as a response to fan mail. Marian did write once in a while, short little notes repeating over and over again how much ‘Mommy loves her little girl.’