Degree of Guilt

by Unknown

  Terri had not expected this. And something about Rappaport herself put Terri on edge, a too-slim woman in her forties with a thin face and marmoset eyes that shone with a bright intelligence. She wore little makeup, and what might have been unruly black hair was tamed by a hairstyle short enough to be severe. Her clothes enhanced the impression of someone too serious to care about frills – gray slacks, turtleneck sweater, flat black pumps, no jewelry at all. Even Terri’s wool suit and white blouse felt inappropriate and overdone.

  Rappaport’s hand, extended to Terri, felt fragile. ‘You’ve come so far,’ she said. ‘Mark would have been flattered.’

  ‘I appreciate your seeing me.’

  ‘Yes?’ The word held a note of denial, as if Rappaport wished to forget her own suggestion that Terri come. ‘Well, please step in.’

  They walked through an alcove, past a library with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, and entered the living room.

  The room was spacious, furnished with spare iron sculpture and abstract prints. The hardwood floors were a bleached white, and the furnishings were white Indian leather; the absence of color lent the sensation of someone who had bled the emotion from her life.

  ‘May I bring you some coffee?’ Rappaport asked.

  Terri sensed that she would rather busy herself than talk; she projected the neutral and slightly distracted air of someone who had been snatched from thought by a visitor of no great interest.

  ‘Black coffee would be nice,’ she said, and Rappaport left the room.

  The front wall was virtually consumed by a rectangle of glass. Through the window, Central Park in winter looked like a moonscape – grass shrouded in snow, empty paths, a pond frozen to an icy mirror. Clouds darkened the distant towers of the East Side, casting shadows across bare trees; their naked branches reminded Terri of the sculpture in the room itself. Staring into the park, Terri wondered how a freelance editor could afford the view.

  As if to answer, Melissa Rappaport spoke from behind her. ‘This apartment was Mark’s originally. Of course, the furnishings are quite different now.’

  Terri nodded; there was little here that matched her sense of Ransom. ‘The view is lovely,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you.’ Rappaport handed Terri a china cup and saucer, gesturing toward the couch. ‘Please sit down. You won’t mind if I stand – I sit all day.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Rappaport stood with her hands in her pockets. Her posture lent a certain mutability to the moment, as if a change of mood would send her to the door. Terri decided to say nothing.

  ‘Your telephone call,’ Rappaport said at length. ‘I suppose it shook me.’ Her tone was neutral, as if she were speculating about the emotions of someone else.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Terri said.

  ‘We were married for almost six years, you know. I sometimes hear people say divorce is easier without children. . . .’ The woman shrugged, cutting herself off.

  ‘How did you meet?’ Terri asked.

  Rappaport’s lips formed something halfway between smile and grimace. ‘I was Mark’s editor. At Doubleday.’

  ‘That must have been quite interesting.’

  ‘Challenging. Mark had such talent – he was like a volcano, spewing words in wonderful bursts and torrents. There was life on every page. It was just that he loved each phrase too much, could never slaughter his babies.’ Rappaport’s voice had a staccato intensity Terri had not heard before. ‘I suppose I gave him the structure he needed, a sense of where passion became excess.’

  ‘That’s important,’ Terri said. ‘For me, sometimes it’s the difference between finishing a book and picking up something else.’

  Rappaport looked at Terri more closely. ‘Have you read anything Mark wrote?’

  ‘The novels, mostly.’ Including, Terri did not add, the one she had reread on the flight east, to refresh her memory.

  ‘What did you think?’

  Terri sipped coffee, considering her answer. ‘I liked the lush way he used language – for another writer it would have been too much, but Mark Ransom could immerse me in a world where I didn’t want to turn the pages too fast. Also he seemed to feel his male characters from the inside, even the worst ones, so that I could believe that they were particular human beings and not types.’

  There was life in Rappaport’s eyes now, a hint of challenge. ‘And?’

  Terri met her gaze. ‘And,’ she said slowly, ‘the way he wrote about women made me uncomfortable.’

  The strange semismile reappeared, as if this were familiar ground. ‘Why, exactly?’

  ‘Because he never wrote from a woman’s point of view. They were always seen from the outside, either as bitch goddesses or as something for two men to compete for. The sex was conquest. . . .’ Terri paused. ‘I didn’t get the feeling Mark Ransom liked women, that’s all.’

  ‘When I met him, that’s not quite how it seemed to me.’ Rappaport’s tone held the trace of ancient argument, with someone else than Terri. ‘Writers need understanding; fear impairs it. Mark had great understanding of everything but women because we frightened him so much.’

  ‘But why?’

  Rappaport shrugged. ‘I think it happened to Mark the way it happened to other men I’ve known – their mothers. I never met Siobhan Ransom, but my sense is that she made Mark live his boyhood under a sort of military occupation of the mind and heart – no privacy, much guilt, few male activities, and tremendous pressure to succeed or lose her love. And his father was a cipher.’ Rappaport turned to the window. ‘Mark was sterile, you know. He couldn’t have children.’

  ‘No. I didn’t know.’

  ‘No one was supposed to. It hurt him very badly.’ Rappaport became pensive. ‘I used to think Mark believed that somehow his mother had stolen his manhood. And that beneath Mark’s sexuality was an anger born of fear.’

  Terri nodded. ‘They ran an old tape of him on television last night, denouncing the pro-choice movement. He tried to be ironic, but he seemed to feel such anger. Not just at abortion but at the women who spoke up for abortion rights.’

  ‘Oh, I think Mark took all that personally somehow.’ Rappaport clasped her hands; Terri had begun noting the small aimless gestures of a woman trying not to reach for a cigarette. ‘I tried not to feel any anger of my own but to understand why Mark had become the way he was.’

  Terri looked at her curiously. ‘Was that hard?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Rappaport turned to her. ‘But I cared. For Mark’s sake, and for the sake of what Mark wrote.’

  ‘Did you feel that his writing became better. I mean, in that way?’

  ‘In that way, I did nothing for him, in his writing or in his life.’ Rappaport’s voice was quiet, bitter. ‘But then Mark’s writing didn’t kill him, did it? Your client did. That’s why you’re here.’

  Terri was silent, unnerved by the shift in mood. Then she asked, ‘Did Mark ever watch Mary Carelli? Or talk about her?’

  ‘No. Of course not.’

  ‘Why “of course not”?’

  ‘Because she’s neither interesting nor appealing.’ Rappaport frowned. ‘I understand that she’s quite beautiful and that people watch her interviews, but to me she’s all surface and calculation.’

  But what did he think? Terri wondered. ‘Plus she wasn’t Mark’s type, you said.’

  ‘It was a cheap remark – or wounded, perhaps.’ Rappaport snatched a black purse from the coffee table in front of Terri and reached inside for a cigarette. ‘Really, I’m a bit sorry I troubled you to come. You called me at a moment of disequilibrium.’

  Her tone was dismissive. Terri felt something akin to panic; Rappaport seemed to be slipping away, as if she had taxed her own patience. Instinctively, Terri said, ‘I felt you reacting to Laura Chase.’

  The cigarette paused in front of Rappaport’s lips. ‘Was that what it was?’

  The question sounded rhetorical. ‘Yes,’ Terri repeated quietly. ‘I think it was Laura Chase.’
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  Carefully, Melissa Rappaport picked up a silver lighter, snapped forth a flame, and took one deep drag of her cigarette. She smoked hungrily, Terri thought, like a man.

  Terri broke the silence. ‘Did Mark ever talk about Laura Chase?’

  Rappaport sat at the other end of the couch and placed an ashtray in her lap. She looked not at Terri but at a Kafkaesque print, distorted rectangles and broken lines. ‘Mark,’ she said finally, ‘was obsessed with her.’

  ‘Obsessed?’

  ‘I chose that word with care. Mark read everything there was about her, had a scrapbook of publicity pictures, knew all about her marriages and the hundreds of men she’d slept with, all the apocrypha about Laura and why she died – a preoccupation so morbid that, in my mind, it became a sort of mental necrophilia. And he’d heard the rumors about James Colt, of course. I think he even imagined himself as Colt: to him, it made sense that one of the most powerful men in America would take a woman who, Mark once wrote, “was the primal image at the heart of every male, half goddess and half slave.”’ She gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Mark even made me watch her movies, over and over, until I knew every line as well as he did.’

  ‘Made you?’

  Terri saw Rappaport nod slightly. ‘Not literally. I wanted to, you see, so that I could understand what went on inside him.’ Rappaport took another drag. ‘I was in my early thirties when I met him, but I hadn’t that much experience with men.’

  ‘What did you expect to learn?’

  ‘How to be a woman, of course. I was less than certain of myself that way – sexually.’ Her tone was still ironic, but her mouth was set in a line. ‘I was trying to learn what so appealed to Mark about Laura Chase, and he was going to learn to love that part of me that wasn’t her at all. Or so I thought.’

  Terri shifted in her chair. She had begun to feel Rappaport resonate with the echoes of a long-ago psychic explosion, from which the current woman had been reconstructed with great care. ‘Laura Chase,’ she said, ‘was not much like you or me or anyone else I know.’

  ‘Do you mean bleached blond and voluptuous, with a mock-sexy voice and an air of undereducated precocity? Or do you mean alcoholic, nymphomaniac, and wholly lacking in self-esteem?’ Rappaport paused, as if listening to herself. ‘In the end,’ she continued more softly, ‘all I shared with Laura Chase was a lack of self-esteem. And that, it now seems clear, was exactly what I’d started with.’

  Terri’s coffee cup was half full; she had not touched it in some moments. Finally, she asked, ‘Was that because of how he treated you?’

  Rappaport shook her head. ‘He treated me that way because that was who I was. Toward the end, when he lost interest in me, I grew more desperate.’

  ‘Lost interest?’

  ‘Physically – he wouldn’t react to me. It made me try harder, as it were. I’d always believed that I was smart but not that I could make someone love me. During the day, I’d slash words, scenes, whole chapters, imposing enough discipline on his talent so that people would want him.’ She paused, staring fixedly at the print. ‘At night, I would do anything Mark asked.’

  Terri’s voice felt tight. ‘But he didn’t mistreat you.’

  ‘No. He simply pretended to.’

  It was a moment before Terri understood. ‘He invented scenes of some kind?’

  ‘Of a particular kind.’ Terri saw that the cigarette had burned close to Rappaport’s fingers. ‘He would pretend to rape me.’

  Silent, Terri reached over and took the cigarette from Rappaport’s hand. The woman seemed not to notice. Placing it in the ashtray, Terri saw that her own hand was shaking.

  ‘How did he “pretend”?’ Terri asked.

  ‘With my cooperation, of course.’ Rappaport’s words, measured and toneless, had the inevitability of catharsis. ‘Every night I would call him from work, to tell him that I was leaving. Then I would ride home on the subway, wondering whether it would happen. It was part of our game.

  ‘You see, what made it work for Mark was that he would never tell me. I would open the door and find a darkened apartment, not knowing whether he had gone out or was inside, waiting.

  ‘I never knew until I felt Mark smother my mouth.

  ‘I never knew how, or which room. All I knew was how worthless it made me feel.’ Rappaport’s profile was still and white, and her gaze seemed directed at something outside the room. ‘Sometimes he left without saying anything at all. Like a stranger who had raped me.’

  Terri was conscious of her own body, small, taut, leaning forward. ‘Did you ever tell anyone?’

  ‘No. It was just a game we played.’ Rappaport’s eyes shut. ‘But he’s dead now, isn’t he.’

  Terri’s throat was dry. ‘When we spoke,’ she said finally, ‘something connected all this with Mary Carelli. I thought then it was the tape.’

  ‘The tape?’ Rappaport touched her eyes. ‘Of course, you had no idea what you were dredging up.’

  Terri watched her. ‘Can you talk about it?’

  Rappaport nodded, silent.

  Terri waited. When Rappaport spoke again, her eyes had opened, and her voice was dry and precise.

  ‘The apartment was dark, as if it might happen. But he had been going out more, playing our “game” less and less. I didn’t expect him to be there.

  ‘When I saw a faint glow from the bedroom, and then a shadow crossing it, I was almost grateful.

  ‘I was alone in the hallway, bracing myself, when he came through the door.

  ‘All I saw was a flash of red hair.’

  Abruptly, Rappaport stood, as if at a sound that only she heard. ‘He threw me over his shoulder, too hard. I remember my head snapping back, being dazed. Before I knew what was happening, he had thrown me facedown on the bed, pulled up my dress, torn my underwear and stockings from behind.

  ‘Mark took me that way.

  ‘I still didn’t understand. Then he grabbed the hair at the nape of my neck and wrenched my head up. To show me.

  ‘The light was from the television screen. He had a stag film on the VCR.

  ‘It was Laura Chase.

  ‘She was very young, before she became a movie star. There were two men with her. It looked like she was crying.

  ‘Mark’s face was next to mine, watching the two men take her as he had me, from behind. I didn’t know that I was watching too, until I began to cry.’

  Rappaport paused, tears in her eyes. ‘When the film was over, I knew that I would never be with Mark again. But I didn’t know why Laura Chase had killed herself until I spoke to you.’

  Terri looked away. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Melissa Rappaport turned to her. ‘Don’t be. It was the last time I was ever with a man.’ Her smile seemed more painful than her tears. ‘You see, that was what I learned from Mark.’

  ‘That,’ Paget’s voice said, ‘sounds like what we needed.’

  From a telephone booth, Terri watched the baggage carousel spin. Drained by a long flight spent thinking of little but Melissa Rappaport, she still held the scrap of paper with Paget’s new telephone number. ‘If she’s willing to testify,’ she answered. ‘And if the judge will let it in.’

  For a moment, Paget did not answer; the sound of someone paging a John McDermott echoed in the cavern of an airport at night. ‘Would you mind dropping by here?’ Paget asked. ‘I hate to keep you, but I’m seeing Brooks and Sharpe tomorrow morning, and it would help to know exactly what she told you.’

  Terri hesitated. It was seven-thirty and the sitter had said that Elena was asleep. Paget sounded anxious, and something about Rappaport had made her feel more alone.

  ‘Give me directions,’ she said.

  A half hour later, Terri found a three-story white Edwardian with bay windows, a slanted roof, and a spotlit palm tree that seemed to have migrated from Los Angeles. She stopped to examine the tree, struck by its incongruity.

  ‘I keep hoping it’ll die,’ Paget’s voice said. ‘But the thing’s obnoxiously hea
lthy.’

  As Terri looked up, he rose from a lawn chair on the front porch and came down the stairs, dressed in jeans and a white Irish fisherman’s sweater.

  ‘I like it,’ she told him.

  ‘You and Carlo.’ He gave the tree a look of mild bemusement. ‘That foolish palm is why I bought this place.’

  ‘Because of a tree?’ She turned to look again. ‘This must be the world’s most expensive palm.’

  ‘Tell that to Carlo.’ Paget stood next to her, contemplating the tree. ‘After he came to live with me, we went out one day to look at houses. Nothing interested him until we saw this place, and then I could hardly get him to leave. He told me we had to live here because the tree looked like home.’

  Terri glanced at him, surprised. ‘Where had he been living?’

  ‘Boston, of course. The date palm capital of Massachusetts.’

  Terri smiled. ‘Kids’ minds are really funny. Elena once asked me why Richie and I hadn’t taken her on the honeymoon.’

  Paget cocked his head. ‘That’s one question that Carlo’s never asked.’

  Terri was quiet. ‘So,’ she finally ventured, ‘whose idea was the spotlight?’

  ‘Mine. Or so Carlo informed me.’ Paget turned to her. ‘Ever notice how literal little kids can be?’

  This was not, Terri thought, a conversation she had ever imagined. ‘Sure. I try to be pretty careful about what I say to Elena.’

  Paget nodded. ‘We drove away from here, Carlo still chattering about the palm tree. The whole thing was so bizarre I could hardly keep from laughing – I was about to spend a million dollars to buy a tree I couldn’t stand. So I turned to Carlo and said with utter seriousness, “Don’t worry, son, not only will your doting father buy this house, but I’ll get the lighting on the tree just right.” It was one of those remarks you make to a kid which is really for the amusement of another adult – or, in my case, because I was laughing at the idea of myself as a father.’ Gazing up at the spotlight, Paget shook his head. ‘It was also a mistake. Carlo remembered every word.’

  Terri smiled at him. Silent, Paget kept his eyes on the tree; she had the sense that he needed to talk about his son but seldom did, so that now he felt embarrassed.