“I know.” She’d done the calculating.
“And that means”—he looked up at the ceiling, counting to himself—“we were in high school, Joy’s age, when he was born.”
That one she hadn’t thought about. He said, “That’s technically a whole generation.”
“Well. Let’s not get carried away.”
“No, really. It’s more than a generation. Fifteen years is what they consider a generation.” From the italics she heard in his words, she could tell it was important to him to make this point, so she let it go.
“I drank too much at a reception,” she said, “and let myself do something I shouldn’t have.” Blaming it on the wine. She remembered blabbing on and on to Martin about black people, white people; what was it she had said? Something she’d never have said sober, no doubt. But he’d seemed to forgive her. “It was only that one time.” Another lie; it had been six times—the night of the Lewison competition last spring, and then once a week since school had started, until now. She persuaded herself, as she was speaking, that to tell Gil the details would only add insult to injury. The important thing was that she was confessing, wasn’t it? It didn’t matter whether it was one time or six—the first time was the one that changed things, wasn’t it? The fact that the line had been crossed was the important thing—not how many times.
He gathered the papers from the table slowly, drawing them into a pile in an order that might have made sense or might not; she couldn’t tell. She could see that as he performed the task, he was forming his thoughts. “I can’t believe you did that,” he said finally, placing his palm on the papers as if afraid they might fly away. “I never thought you were the kind of person who would do this to me.”
Her first impulse was to say I’m not. Then she realized how absurd that would sound, on the face of it. “Neither did I,” she said instead. A defense had been brewing at some depth of herself, she realized, and now it rose to the surface. “So now we’ve both done things the other wouldn’t have imagined.”
A movement of his mouth caused a few drops of spit to fall on the pages of his accounts, and he wiped them with the back of his hand. “You’re going to compare them? You’re going to compare what I did, here”—he gestured at the bank documents—“to an affair?”
“Why not? They’re both betrayals.”
“Not the same kind.”
“Are you serious? You took my parents’ money and just gave it away, without even telling me! What would you call it?”
He was quiet for a moment before murmuring, “I didn’t give it away. I mean, I didn’t think of it like that.” But there was concession in his tone.
“It doesn’t matter how you thought of it. That’s what happened. And it wasn’t just me you betrayed. It was Joy, too.” How she wished she could hang on to the feeling of righteous anger that accompanied these words. But it was gone as soon as she named it, to herself, for what it was.
Gil was still looking down at the papers, though she knew he was not actually seeing the numbers there. “When I did what I did,” he said, in an even smaller voice, “I did it because I was afraid to tell you. And I honestly thought it would have a good outcome—that you’d forgive me once you saw how much we made on the initial investment. I see how stupid I was to think that, now. But stupid isn’t the same as—what you did.” What word had he been planning to use? Deceitful? Treacherous? She was grateful to him for switching tracks at the last minute.
But then he must have decided he didn’t want to let her off the hook. “I mean, what I felt was fear. When you slept with him, what did you feel?”
She hesitated. “I felt pissed off. And I wanted to hurt you.”
“Okay.” Though she could see that it did hurt him, he also seemed to appreciate what she told him and to accept it as the full truth. “Thank you for that.”
It was partly true; it had been true the first time, the night of the Lewison Award, her drinking too much wine, acknowledging to herself her attraction to Martin (and his to her), and allowing herself to act on it after thinking the words Fuck it, meaning her marriage to Gil. But after that, it wasn’t about Gil anymore. It was about the excitement she felt at being so intimate with an artist of Martin’s talent. Not because she was certain he would be famous—celebrated, even—in a very short time, although she was certain of this. She was pretty sure she wasn’t a “star-fucker”—a term she’d heard on campus when students clamored to be invited to after-parties with visiting artists.
No, it had more to do with the kind of person she believed Martin to be when she saw what he could do with a brush, what he could render on the canvas. He used color in a way she’d never seen before, and she knew she wasn’t the only one who had such a visceral response to his work; it was as if he had access to a more refined, more nuanced palette than the rest of them could see. To be able to make her feel what he did with his art, he had to have a mind that worked in a way that was different from most of the others and, she admitted to herself, from hers. He had to see the world in a way she only wished she could. Was it a kind of wisdom? It seemed so, to her. Especially in someone so young. Being close to such brilliance made her feel elevated, in a way she’d never experienced before. It was heady, exhilarating, a thrill.
But this was not something she could explain to Gil, as she had not explained it to Martin, or even to herself before now. Across the table from her, her husband slumped, as if the conversation had taken all the wind out of him. Eventually he got up and mumbled that he’d be spending the night at the Odd Men Out office, and she let him go. When she picked Joy up at Belle Meadow, she told her that her father had been called away to a faucet emergency in Rochester (a faucet emergency! Where had that come from?) and that he would likely spend the night in a hotel there when he was done. “Whatever,” Joy said, and shrugged. It was her favorite word these days, and her favorite gesture, at least in conversation with Susanne.
The next day when Gil called to say he needed to stay away awhile longer, Susanne told him she’d been doing some thinking and that she understood their marriage would be different now, but did different have to mean worse? Maybe it would end up being a good thing, she suggested. A blessing in disguise. Yes, they’d betrayed and hurt each other, but it was out in the open now, right? They could move on from there. He was silent on the phone for so long that she wondered if he’d hung up.
Neither of them had any way of knowing how different their marriage would be within a few weeks, and why. For the moment, their crisis was over. They would never think of it as a crisis again, because in light of what came so soon after, it didn’t even compare.
After
Wednesday, December 9
They were supposed to transfer me to the county jail yesterday, but there’s been some kind of holdup. Ramona’s looking into it. This morning I planned to ask her what she could do to force them to let me take a shower, which I haven’t done since before my arrest, but that went out of my head as soon as she arrived to say that her investigators had located Linda Martin outside Atlanta. And without too much trouble, to Ramona’s surprise. Her name is Linda Martin-Forsyth now. To forestall hearing more, I asked how I was supposed to pay for the investigators who’d done the legwork. Ramona told me not to worry, but the look on her face signaled that something remained to be said.
“What?” I asked, steeling myself.
“She put up the bail money. We stressed to her that this is a case of an innocent person being falsely accused.” An innocent person. I could have been anybody—they’d decided that it was safer to appeal to Linda Martin’s general sense of morality than to her instincts as a mother to defend her child.
“And?” I could tell there was still more; I wanted to get it over with.
But Ramona fiddled with the collar of her white blouse and said, “There’s no ‘and.’ She posted your bail. That’s it.”
“She didn’t ask any questions? About me?” Ramona shrugged and said she guessed not. “Then fo
rget it. I don’t want her money.” Though I recognized it as ridiculous, I wanted to cry.
Ramona said quietly, “Don’t be silly. You need to accept this. And it’s not like a permanent gift—she’ll get it back after the trial.” When still I remained silent, she went on to acknowledge that she understood this was hard. “It’s not fair when someone who says he’s innocent has to go through all of this.”
The nuance of her remark was not lost on me. Not someone who’s innocent but someone who says he’s innocent.
“So you think there’ll be a trial?”
The question seemed to surprise her. “Yes. I think they have enough to indict.”
“Even though it’s circumstantial?”
“It’s not unusual that that’s all a prosecutor has. A grand jury only has to decide whether there’s enough evidence of any kind to go forward with the case—the standard is different from the one for a jury in a trial.” I must have reacted to this, because she snapped her fingers and said, “Come on. This is not the time to be hanging your head. Tell me what I need to know to help you, then we’ll get you out of here.”
She asked me to describe my relationship with Susanne, beginning with the day we met a year and a half ago. I told her the basics—just an outline, really—but as I spoke, an alternative memory (the one containing all the details) ran on a parallel track beside the stripped-down version I offered to Ramona. In the memory, I sat across from Susanne in her office at the Genesee Valley Academy of Fine Arts, my application file open on the desk between us. I was nervous, because I was such an admirer of her Show of Hands (one of the first exhibits of sculpture I ever saw “in person”: sculptures of hands in various poses portraying emotion—clasped in hope, fisted in frustration, fingers twined in the child’s steeple game to evoke whimsy), though I was too shy to bring it up. I also didn’t know how my own work would compare to that of the other applicants.
“Why do you want to come here?” Susanne asked, the first question in the interview. Later, after we began sleeping together, she told me that she’d left out the sentence she assumed I would understand preceded her question: “You could go anywhere.”
But I had not understood this. Instead I believed she was challenging me, because I had no recommendations from any real artists, though I’d studied art in the sense that the security job I’d held at the gallery in Rochester, since graduating from college, allowed me to look at and learn from paintings all day.
I shifted in my chair. “I’m pretty much self-taught, so I figure I might have some bad habits I should correct before it’s too late. Also, I have this project I want to work on, something I’ve been planning for years, and I figured it would be useful to—have some help.” I faltered at the end because, yes, I was interested to see what professors could teach me, but it was as much for the connections to the official art world, and guidance through those ranks, that I sought admission to the school.
Susanne was smiling a little. “It’s okay,” she said. “I wasn’t asking you to justify your application.” She had a little overbite, I saw, and the misalignment made me feel a flash of tenderness toward her. “If you can paint like this with ‘bad habits,’ I’m not the only one who wants to see what you’d do with good ones.” Then she straightened up, closed her lips over her teeth, and adjusted herself back into the role of interviewer. “A number of us looked at your submission—more than the ones who had to. What you do with color is just incredible. You already have fans here among the faculty, including me.” She began flipping again through my portfolio pages—photographs of paintings I made in an early effort to imitate the Old Masters, using people from my own neighborhood as models. For my Birth of Venus, I painted a girl in my class, who had hair so long she could sit on it, holding the hair over her crotch with one hand and the other hand covering her breasts, although instead of being nude as in the original, she wore cut-offs and a tee-shirt that said EXISTENCE CAN BE REARRANGED. For An Old Woman Reading, I painted Grandee holding open her favorite book, The Price of the Ticket.
Susanne asked which painters I was particularly fond of. I went on for longer than I should have about my admiration for Chuck Close, even quoting him about his desire to “knock people’s socks off” with his work. Then I mentioned discovering Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration of the Negro for a project in my ninth-grade history class and how ever since then I’d been fascinated by the idea of painting multiple grids.
“Are you blushing?” she asked, when I paused after saying the word “Negro.” I was impressed; most white people can’t tell when a black person blushes, and at that moment I wished it was true of her.
“It’s just that a lot of people expect me to be Basquiat. But my art isn’t political—it’s personal. I mean, if something political comes out of it, fine, but that isn’t where I start from.” I coughed a little to make myself shut up, thinking it was already too late.
“Well, no one would expect you to be Basquiat here. All of our students are pretty good at being themselves, for better or worse.” Those teeth sticking out in a smile again. She flipped down her reading glasses to look at her watch, then told me she was sorry but she had another appointment, and stood to say good-bye. Her hand was warm when I shook it, and though I was sure I only imagined it, I thought her eyes lingered on my face.
Of course, I didn’t elaborate upon any of this in speaking to Ramona, beyond acknowledging that yes, I had been Susanne’s teaching assistant, and yes, we’d had an affair, which began with a single night last May. I’d thought that would be it—that was my understanding—but then we’d ended up sleeping together again after classes started in September. Not long before Joy died, Susanne broke it off. I told Ramona I’d texted her, but Susanne didn’t respond. Right after that was the first time (of only two times, before the day of Joy’s disappearance) that I drove to her house.
“They have people who can testify to seeing you parked in her neighborhood.” Ramona read to me from her notes. “More than once.”
“It was two times,” I repeated. I knew she must be referring to the frowzy woman from the house a few doors down from Susanne’s, who’d come out and, smelling of tangerine as she leaned toward my car, asked Can I help you? when I sensed that what she really wanted to say was What are you doing here? but realized she could not. “I kept thinking I’d work up the courage to ask her to come out and talk to me,” I told Ramona. “That’s not a crime, is it?” But I knew how it sounded.
Ramona shrugged. I didn’t take it as a good sign that my lawyer was shrugging when I asked if I’d committed a crime. But then she said, “I wouldn’t say so, because it requires the assumption that Susanne herself—Mrs. Enright—felt threatened somehow by your actions, and that doesn’t appear to be the case. It doesn’t appear that she even knew about it—they haven’t presented any indication of that.” She rolled up her white sleeves. “Did you ever go to her house as an invited guest?”
I nodded, and she asked, When? I told her about the barbecue on Labor Day. Had I met Joy then? Yes. Had we had a conversation? Yes. Ramona asked what we’d talked about.
“Art,” I said. “Drawing and painting, mine and hers. She’s—she was an impressionist. She was good.”
Ramona scribbled a note to herself. “Did you ever have occasion to talk to her privately, besides that day?”
I told her no, then panicked. My instincts warned me against mentioning the visit Joy had made to my house on Halloween, but why? There’d been nothing wrong in it, but would Ramona—and other people—believe that? I knew I should correct myself and tell Ramona I’d just remembered a second encounter, but I couldn’t make myself speak the words.
Instead I said, “They’re going to indict me, aren’t they,” a statement instead of a question.
She sighed. “I’ll say it again: it’s more likely than not. But I’m still trying to see if I can talk to the people who said they saw you with the mask—the guy who was working at the convenience store and the teenager, a fr
iend of Joy’s, outside. Maybe I can find out something we haven’t already been told.”
“There was a girl at the pay phone.” I hadn’t remembered before, but now I recalled seeing her nearly in tears as she spoke into the receiver. Her face had reminded me of Rodin’s Crying Woman. “Why she’d say I had a mask on, though, I have no idea.” As in the courtroom when I stood before the judge, I was aware of reining in the anger I felt as I said it. “The cashier I’d met before, at Susanne’s house. He worked for her husband, then was laid off. He seemed kind of—well, I’m not sure how much of an impression he’ll make on a jury. He struck me as not too clear.” Remembering how he rambled on at the barbecue, I’d been going to say “not too bright,” then figured Ramona probably wasn’t interested in my assessment of the witness’s intelligence. And of course, I might have been mistaken. “But the store owner would remember me, I think. He kind of went out of his way to strike up a conversation. I can’t think of a reason for him to have anything against me.”
“I’ll see if I can meet with the teenager first,” Ramona said. “But don’t get your hopes up—she isn’t required to talk to me.” She rapped her pen against the pad, considering. “I’m also thinking we might want to ask Susanne. She can testify that she asked you to go after Joy.”
“Don’t use the phrase ‘go after,’” I said, but she didn’t seem to realize that I was mimicking her own words back to her, from our first meeting. I added, “Absolutely not. With what she’s going through?”
“What she’s going through isn’t your fault.” I felt a streak of relief at realizing Ramona must now believe in my innocence, even if she hadn’t started that way. “And I’m sure she wouldn’t want to see you on trial for a crime you didn’t commit.”
How Will I Know You? Page 11
