When I caught up to him outside on the mobbed street, bumped by sharp-edged Christmas presents and angry elbows, I said: “Am I supposed to be shocked? Is that the game you played with Wendy? How far can I go? How bad a boy can I be?”
“Fuck you,” he said into my face, his breath warm in the cold, smelling of the onion he had eaten with his hamburger. He turned his back and walked away.
I chased after him. I had no pride about it; I ran and grabbed him.
“Leave me alone!” He tried to shake me off.
We startled the intent self-absorbed New Yorkers out of their privacy. Several stood and watched for a moment, their packages drooping, their breath flowing toward us. I pleaded with him shamelessly: “Please, Ben, you just trusted me—”
“Go ahead, tell the cops. Put me away. You can’t scare me.”
“I don’t want to!” I stamped my foot like a girl. “I just want to be honest.”
“I’m such a fucking idiot!” He smashed his hand against his forehead. He hit himself so hard his head was whiplashed and the blow left a red welt, an impression of the palm of his hand.
“Ben!” Appalled, I grabbed his wrist to stop him from doing it again.
“I can’t believe what a fucking loser I am,” he moaned. The pedestrians had moved on—our current dramatics weren’t entertaining enough. Apparently a woman chasing a man was a superior show to a whining male failure.
“The money’s not important. Why did you want to make money, anyway—what use is it?”
He shook his head from side to side, wildly, as if trying to escape from the pursuit of this fact: “I killed her mother.” That seemed to be news to him.
“Yes,” I agreed to the obvious because he didn’t appear to know it was obvious.
“What have I got to give her? I took away her mother and…” His hands, in agony, grabbed at nothing. His face wrinkled, his mouth opened soundlessly and then he sobbed, knees sagging, shoulders slumped, his chest quaking. He stood rooted to the spot, but his torso jerked with unhappiness. I approached him with open arms. His head fell on my shoulder; he cried into my neck. I held him and gently rocked his big body, whispering soothing words.
People walked around us, as if we were a misplaced streetlight. After a while he quieted. One woman smiled at me over his shoulder: she thought us tender. We were.
Finally, when he leaned away and looked shyly into my eyes, I told him: “You can give Naomi your self. Your real self. And you can give her the truth.”
“I can’t tell her!” He was horrified.
“You can admit what you’ve done and get yourself free of all this as soon as possible. You can guarantee that she’ll know you and see you while you’re in prison, and that she’ll have you when you’re out. But if you go on lying and fighting, she has to lie and fight with you, or grow to hate you.”
“I can’t.”
“You have to, Ben. For all of us. You have to save us by telling the truth.”
He grabbed my bare hand, fingers red from the winter air, and kissed it frantically, tears running down his face. “I don’t want to lose you…I don’t want to grow a beard…”
I smiled. “If you tell the truth you don’t have to worry about any of that.”
He repels you, doesn’t he? At that moment, I think I loved him. This tenderness, this neediness, that was what Wendy had seen, had wanted to care for. I had been wrong, terribly wrong, to think she married him merely out of desperation to procreate. She had wanted to save him, to satisfy his great longing. Ben pressed my hands on his eyes, using them like a handkerchief to soak up his tears. “I’ll do whatever you say, Molly.”
“We’ll go to your lawyer and tell him you want to confess and bargain for a short sentence. I think we might get a psychiatric evaluation, Ben. Maybe you’ll never have to go to prison.”
“I don’t want to go now.”
“Let’s get it over with.”
“Now?” he complained in a pained whine. “It’s happening so fast. I won’t even see Nommy one more time.…”
“Just to Varney. We don’t have to go to the police right away—”
“Let’s spend this week together. Okay? We’ll go next Monday.”
He pleaded like a boy wanting more dessert; I was a firm, kindly mother: “No, Ben.”
“Let’s go away for a couple days. Just the three of us. Please? Let me be with you and Nommy for two more days, okay?”
“We can talk to your lawyer today and agree to go to the police next week—”
“Molly!” he moaned, and pressed his face pathetically into my hands. “Please…please…please…”
I gave in. Partly to his vision: us three together, happy in our solitude, storing up courage to face our future.
The ride downtown was quick, no more than fifteen minutes. I was thrilled. Everything had been lifted off me, all the weights of sorrow. I could breathe deeply, inhale the world without fear, because all the worries had answers. It would be hard and it would cost the three of us a great deal, but we could be saved, Ben and Naomi and I. We could be saved.
We went in together to the Riverside School and stood side by side in the lobby, surrounded by looks of amazement and disgust until Naomi came downstairs. Pam and Janet didn’t greet me, averting their eyes, pretending to be so absorbed in conversation with each other that they didn’t see me.
Naomi ran into Ben’s arms, swaying from side to side, mumbling, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” Parents and children passed us quickly, in a hurry to get out. They were all gone by the time Naomi released her father. I didn’t care. I was happy and free, my conscience clear for the first time since Wendy’s death.
As soon as Naomi had untangled from Ben, I bent down for my hug. Naomi stepped back, away from me, and frowned.
“What are you doing here?” she asked coldly.
MY FANTASY THAT THE THREE OF US WOULD BE HAPPY together, pardoned and redeemed, died quickly during that walk. Quickly—but it was agony.
I tried to catch her eye—she looked only at him. I tried to take her hand—she pulled away and moved to the far side of Ben, interposing him between us. I moved to her free flank—she changed position again.
Naomi had sensed the new situation, although she couldn’t know in her conscious mind. Naïve, you think, that I didn’t anticipate her reaction to peace between me and Ben. It meant I was becoming her mother, I decided; naturally she resented my presumption.
At home Ben said to her, “How about we go to the country for a couple days?”
“Now?” She put her hands on her hips, a scold: “Daddy, you’re teasing.”
“No I’m not.”
“It’s not the weekend.”
“I know. So what? We’ll go to a hotel for tonight and tomorrow. We’ll tell your teacher you were sick.”
Naomi jumped with pleasure. “A hotel?”
“Sure.”
Another leap. “With an indoor pool?”
“No. Only an outdoor pool.”
She loved his joke. “We’re polar bears,” she said, and sprang into the air again.
Her excitement lasted while she figured out what toys to take and I picked out her clothes. My longing for happiness, it turns out, is pathetically simpleminded: once more I was foolish enough to think that everything would be okay. Instead, when Naomi found out I was coming along, her disgust returned.
“I’ll go and pack,” I told Ben when I finished getting her things. He had been in his bedroom, presumably doing the same.
“What for?” she said.
“Molly’s coming with us.” Ben was gentle.
“You are?” Her skepticism had no delight in it.
Ben wasn’t surprised that she didn’t want me along. Had I been kidding myself from the beginning? Was I merely an intruder to her?
“You wanted me to come for Christmas,” I argued.
“But that’s a vacation. I thought you have to work on Saturdays.”
“Don’t you want me to come?” I b
egged Naomi.
“Of course she—,” Ben began.
“You can come,” she interrupted with a magnificent indifference. I left to pack.
My apartment seemed so dreary. I used to be pleased to leave Wendy’s stuffy messy place for my spare elegance. Now the leather and steel of the Nautilus resembled a medieval torture device and our kitchen was a mockery of the bright, loud country homes it emulated. Even my mother’s trailer—hot and sweet with the baking of blueberry pies—had more true elegance than this sterile environment.
While packing I was angrier and angrier with Naomi. I had an evil thought: maybe she had made things worse between Ben and Wendy. How else could I make sense of the change in her attitude? Naomi liked me as long as Ben and I were hostile; she didn’t like me when we were friendly. Was she jealous? Had she been divisive with Wendy and Ben? Played them off each other to win special attention and love through competitive bidding?
I wanted to smack her. I had given up so much, I had risked everything to save her. I had even forced myself to love her disgusting father.…
The phone interrupted this pain. By then I was so worked up that if Ben was the caller, I planned to say I wouldn’t go. Let them have this last trip to themselves—see if I care.
It was Jake Prosser. He spoke without pauses for me to answer, as if I were a phone machine. “Molly, I’ve just received a letter from Stefan’s lawyer, Judith Liverwright—”
Stefan had hired a feminist lawyer, famous for defending battered women, a bizarre selection, only it wasn’t, it was his way of sending a message.
Jake was still talking: “—and they’re going for the jugular. I’ve just flipped through it—it’s nine pages—and they’re leaving nothing out. I thought this was going to be civilized, what the hell’s—?”
I interrupted and told him I had retained someone else to handle my divorce.
“Fine.” He cut off the possibility of an explanation. “Tell Amy”—his secretary—“who it is and I’ll fax this over.” He hung up without a good-bye, not even bothering to transfer me to Amy.
I wasted no time, dialing Stefan’s private line at his office. “Hello,” he answered in a confidential whisper. I was interrupting him in midsession with a patient. I had only done this twice in our marriage, once when his father was hospitalized with the stroke that eventually killed him, and recently when I learned that Wendy was missing.
“Stefan, Prosser’s gotten the letter. I know what you’re trying to do—”
“I can’t talk. I’m with a patient. But I have a suggestion to make before your lawyer responds. Call Harriet Fliess.”
“Don’t play games. Tell me why I should call her.”
“She’s willing to file in family court to petition for custody of Naomi.” He hung up.
I slumped next to the phone, pressing my temples, struggling to understand this legal quiz, as if I were back at school faced with a test for which I had neglected to study.
I’m embarrassed that I required more than a few minutes before I got it: as long as Ben remained single (and if Stefan tied me up in a complicated divorce I could not marry Ben in time), then a cousin’s challenge to Ben’s custody of Naomi had a reasonable chance. Stefan must have talked Harriet out of her devotion to Ben. How, I didn’t know, but after all, Stefan is paid well to talk people in and out of all kinds of madness.
Stefan was no fool: he had deduced why I wanted our divorce. But that was before, before Ben had confessed to me. Now Naomi was only part of the reason for my desire to be with Ben.
When the phone rang again I answered wearily, woozy from the earlier blows, still in a fog, unsure of how I could counterpunch.
“Hello?” The half-female voice was demanding and nervous. “Is this Molly Gray?”
I recognized Larry’s voice immediately. “Yes,” I said gloomily, nodding my head. I wasn’t surprised to hear from him: God was obviously against me, massing His forces. Or maybe it was Satan. Can you tell the difference?
“My name is Lawrence Brady.”
I felt no shame—I still couldn’t stand him. “Yes…?”
“I was given your number by a Mr. Fliess. Were you and his daughter driving…?” and Larry went on to describe our encounter at Burger King, including the fact that his friend B.J. had left to follow me and the little girl back to New York. “He had an accident. He was killed,” Larry said at the end of this speech. He moaned on the word killed. “The police say he lost control…they don’t know why. Do you—?”
I said: “No.”
“No what?” he demanded. “It wasn’t you or you don’t know?”
“I wasn’t there.” This time I was the one to hang up. I trembled. There seemed to be nothing in me but hate: my heart was dirty and crumbling, as black and as fragile as charred wood.
The phone rang again within seconds. I didn’t answer. I stood a few feet away, trembling. Larry wouldn’t quit. B.J. was his friend and he wouldn’t leave me alone any more than I had let Ben be.
I heard the crash again, saw the truck roll over, bouncing off the concrete. I covered my face and screamed to shout out the noise; to stop the remembering.
The phone stopped.
There was no reason to stay in my empty apartment or my empty life: after all, I belonged with Ben and Naomi.
I PACKED FRANTICALLY AND CROSSED THE HALL. “Where were you?” Ben greeted me. “I just called you. Someone phoned—I don’t know how he got the new number—”
“I told him,” I heard Naomi say, but I talked over her, asking Ben: “What did he tell you?”
“He asked me if you and—”
“Was it B.J.?” Naomi was perched on the large suitcase Ben had packed for himself. From its size I had to assume he had brought along his secret wardrobe. His presumptuousness irritated me; his desire to repeat our lovemaking, although predictable and natural (if such a thing can be natural), sickened me.
“It was Larry,” I answered her. “Calling to say B.J. is okay.” I told Ben a simplified and dishonest account of our meeting with them. Naomi cooperated, although I think for her it was the truth. She talked about making the snowwoman as if that had been great fun; in her version B.J. didn’t carry her to the truck, he was merely curious about why we were driving so late and then wanted to help us find our way home.
“What happened to him?” she asked. She seemed to be less annoyed with me, although still distant.
“He had a blowout. He had to stop and change his tire. By the time he was done we were too far ahead.”
Ben was suspicious. On the way to the Westchester hotel where he had succeeded in booking rooms he went over it: our location, why we had stopped to eat, why they had been friendly, why B.J. followed us so far.…
“I’ll explain later,” I whispered sternly.
The hotel in Westchester was modern, intended solely for conferences, I think; but desperate New Yorkers who couldn’t afford weekend houses used it for getaways, playing tennis in airfilled bubbles, swimming indoors, and skiing cross-country on its snow-covered golf course. The hotel had come to accommodate this business by arranging special events for kids, even a kind of supervised play for a few hours each afternoon. But that was on weekends—we had arrived in the midst of a convention of American Honda dealers. Two of them passed us as we registered, one-upping each other with the cost of their new homes.
“If the world made any sense I would have their money,” Ben mumbled to me.
The options he had held against Japanese stocks were bought with my money I reminded him.
“Thanks for the memories,” he answered. I thought his joke was a good sign.
We ordered room service. That made a mess. Naomi complained, justifiably, about her tasteless spaghetti, left it gelling on her plate, and demanded Ben take her for a nighttime swim. She whined when Ben refused. Because he didn’t say no cleanly, Naomi tried to coax him into changing his mind. They did a slow, passive dance of demand and refusal which made my teeth ache. Finally, Ben be
came so exasperated he shouted no (brutally, right into her big eyes) and told her to leave him alone. I was sorry I had come. I was sick of both of them.
Naomi sidled up to me and whispered seductively, “I want to show you I can swim across the pool by myself.” Her message was clear: if I indulged her, she would like me again. I found her behavior manipulative and depressing. “You promised, Molly. You promised you would watch me swim across the pool.”
“Tomorrow,” I grumbled.
“Anyway, it’s time for you to go to sleep,” Ben said. They got into another long hassle, only this time Ben was very insistent. Even when she was tucked in bed in the other room, quietly reading, he wasn’t satisfied. He nagged her, turning off her light (something he never did at home), his tone stern. She asked him to lie with her for a while. He refused bluntly. She then asked if I could lie with her. He said no.
What was his rush? Why did he want her unconscious?
He wants to dress up, I realized.
I was kidding myself. This would never work. They were both greedy, tapeworms of need: they would consume me.
“I’ll lie with her!” I half screamed, interrupting their nauseating argument, and walked toward her room.
Ben grabbed me at the doorway in full view of Naomi. “No. I told her no and that’s it.”
“You don’t tell me what I can and cannot do,” I said, jerking my arm free.
Naomi yelled: “It’s okay! I don’t want you to!” She dove under the covers.
“Okay,” Ben said. “You heard her.”
She was just a baby: What was wrong with me? Her longing for attention and love had no likeness to his thwarted needs. What was the matter with me? How could I judge her so harshly?
I went over to the mass huddled under the hotel’s scratchy bedspread.
“Molly!” Ben whispered sharply.
“Leave me alone,” I said. “I’m giving her a kiss good night.”
I uncovered her. She hooked my neck with her skinny arms and pulled my face to hers. “I love you, Molly,” she whispered in my ear. The hairs at her temples were wet with perspiration. It was too hot in the room.
“I love you too, honey,” I said. On my way out of the room I lowered the heater. “Go to sleep,” I told her. That was the best thing for her—unknowing rest.
The Murderer Next Door Page 29
