by D. W. Buffa
“You were very good, Mr. Joseph Antonelli.”
I knew who it was before I looked, the voice I used to listen to in the middle of the night when I was still young, the voice that could now make me remember things I thought I had forgotten. Sitting alone at the end of the spectators’ bench closest to the door, Jennifer laughed at the surprised expression I had not been able to hide.
“What are you doing here?” I asked as she began to walk toward me. Holding her hands in front of her, staring down at her shoes, a mirthful look on her face, she slid first one foot, then the other ahead. I watched her come, wondering at the mischief going on in her mind. “When did you get back?”
“A couple of days ago,” she said, looking up. As soon as she saw me, her expression changed. “What is it? Why do you have that funny look on your face?” she asked, cocking her head.
“I was thinking about the agonies of self-doubt and suspicion I would have gone through—that I used to go through—when you went away somewhere and I didn’t hear from you the moment you got back.”
She wrapped her fingers around my arm and gently squeezed.
Then she let go and the catlike grin again spread over her mouth and her eyes began their cheerful dance. “Did I ever tell you that before you ever asked me out, before you even knew I was alive, I was dreaming about you and about the things that would happen, things I would do that would make you notice me, make you want to be with me and love me the way I already knew I was going to love you?” Her hand was on my sleeve again, and as she pressed her fingers tight, she tossed her head.
“And did I ever tell you that I was doing exactly the same thing, dreaming about what I would do to make you want to be with me, fall in love with me as desperately as I was in love with you?” I asked.
The door on the side opened and the clerk bustled in to collect something she had left on her desk.
“How did you know I was here?” I asked as we left the courtroom.
“I called your office and your secretary told me you were in court this morning. I thought it would be fun to watch.”
I shifted the briefcase to the other arm and held the door for her.
“It was interesting. You seemed so serious. It was you, and it wasn’t you. It’s funny. I used to think about what you’d be like when you were older, and then, watching you, I kept thinking about what you were like when you were younger.” Trying to keep hold of the thought, she stopped and turned to me. “I see you the way you were, and when I do, I start to see you the way you’ve become. Does that make sense? To see you both ways at once, as if all the time between then and now vanished? That you’ve always been both what you are and what you were?”
We stood outside in the late morning light, not quite certain what to do next.
“I’m parked down the street,” she said.
“I don’t have to go back to the office for a while.” After an awkward pause, I added, “I mean if you have time.”
Aimlessly, we wandered down the street. My hand brushed against hers, and once or twice she touched my sleeve, gently tugging it to emphasize something she said. We passed a cafe, noticed it was largely deserted, and without a word about what we were doing, turned around, went inside, and took a booth at the back. A stoop-shouldered, blunt-eyed waitress, her mouth twitching at the side while she listened, took our brief order.
Soundlessly, her eyes locked in a petrified stare, she brought two sand-colored mugs and a grease-stained coffeepot. Setting the mugs together at the edge of the table, she filled them full and, taking the pot away, left them there.
I crossed my eyes and made a face as I shoved one cup toward Jennifer and dragged the other one toward me. She started to laugh, then covered her mouth with her hand. I took a drink and then put it down. It had a stale bitter taste and I wanted to take it back and ask for a fresh pot. Jennifer put her hand on my wrist. “It’s all right,” she said after she had taken a sip. “It isn’t that bad.”
I shook my head in disagreement, pushed the cup out of my way, and leaned forward on my elbows. “How was your mother?”
“Fine. I told her I’d seen you.” She paused, amused at something that had been said. “I told her about our first date—what I said to you when you brought me home.” Her eyes stayed on me while she turned her head slightly to the side. “She said that the next time I wanted to invite you to spend the night, I didn’t need to ask.” Her eyes flashed for just an instant, and then she looked down and stirred cream into the coal black coffee. “And what have you been doing while I was gone?”
“Not too much. I got so drunk the night we had dinner and you had to go home early that I had to call for help. Howard Flynn—there’s a story—took me home and put me to bed and came back the next morning to take me to work.”
“You got drunk?” she asked, a look of alarm in her eyes.
“Close enough. First time in a long time.”
“But why?”
Somewhere below the surface of my conscious mind I knew the answer, but I was not ready to put it into words, and I was not sure I ever would. After all this time—a lifetime—Jennifer was back, and things I thought were dead had come back to life.
At least I thought they had, or was I just imagining that nothing had really changed, that I still loved her because of the way I had loved her then, all those years ago, when I thought I would never see her again and was convinced that my life was as good as over? That night at dinner I thought I was falling in love with her the way I had the first time, but then, after she was gone, I began to wonder how much of it was because of what had happened before, how much of it was because it seemed somehow finally to make sense out of things and to give some meaning to a broken heart. If we had just met, two middle-aged strangers, would there have been any real attraction at all, or would we have just enjoyed each other’s company and not been terribly worried whether we ever saw each other again? I did not want to talk about it. Things were all too tangled up.
“I didn’t intend to get drunk,” I said with a shrug. “It just happened.”
Jennifer looked at me, searching my eyes, a gentle, sympathetic smile floating over her wide mouth.
“It’s all right, Joey. You don’t have to be in love with me.”
The thought, spoken out loud, spoken by her, that I might not be in love with her anymore, gave me a strange, empty feeling, as if I were losing her again, the way I had lost her before.
“No,” I insisted vehemently, “that’s not it. I am in love with you. It’s just that I don’t quite understand it.”
For a while we did not say anything. We sat there, seeing each other the way we used to be, the way no one else had ever seen us, and realized as we did that whatever else had happened there was something about us both that had not changed at all.
I began to talk, but not about us. I told her instead about the things I had done while she was away. I told her about my visit with the widow of Calvin Jeffries and what Calvin Jeffries had done with her help to Elliott Winston.
“He’s been in the state hospital for twelve years?” she asked, horrified. “I told you what happened to me. I was in the hospital, but for only six months, and it wasn’t a state hospital—an asylum for the criminally insane—it was a private clinic where everyone is very discreet and everyone has a private room.” She shook her head. “Twelve years! In a place like that!
“You start to change,” she went on, talking in a clear, calm voice. “Even when you’re there for just a relatively short period of time. You don’t notice it, not at first, and perhaps if you stay there for a long time you never notice it. You have your particular problem, the problem that brought you there, but everyone around you—all the other patients—have problems, too. There is not as much difference between you and the others as there is on the outside. Everyone has a mental illness, and you begin to see that as the normal state of things.”
No matter how hard I tried, I still saw her the way she had been. It was almost impossi
ble for me to think of her hospitalized for depression. Instead of trying to go further into what she had said, instead of inquiring into what she understood as the ambiguous meaning of normality, I denied that she had ever been seriously ill.
“But you’re fine now. Elliott Winston, on the other hand, will probably never be well.”
She started to say something, seemed to think better of it, and withdrew behind a polite smile. She sipped on her coffee for a while and then asked me how I had spent the weekend.
“Nothing unusual. I went into the office Saturday morning, then played chess with a Russian emigre whose father was executed by Stalin in the name of history.”
She was not sure whether I was telling the truth or not.
“Anatoly Chicherin runs a bookstore. He convinced me to play chess with him, though I don’t know why: I could play him for a hundred years and never win.”
“His father was killed by Stalin?”
I leaned against the wall and pulled my knee onto the bench seat. “The irony is that Anatoly became a state prosecutor. He left when the Soviet Union self-destructed. He likes to talk about criminal cases. That’s how we became friends. He’s fascinated by the way we do it here.” I tapped my fingers on the table, watching the way she kept her eyes on me. “He thinks we’re crazy. He says everyone here wants to win; no one cares about justice. He insists he never charged anyone unless he was absolutely certain they were guilty. Imagine! Inside the most corrupt system in the world, and he would not think of charging anyone if he thought there was a chance they were innocent.”
I was showing off, talking about things on a grand scale, though I knew all the time that it had no effect because it made no difference. Talk, be silent, say something halfway interesting, or make a fool out of myself, the way she looked at me would not change.
“Saturday was the first time he told me about his father. We were talking about the Jeffries murder. A second judge—Quincy Griswald—was killed Friday night, and I thought there was a chance that the same person might have done both.”
“You don’t think so now?”
“No. The one they arrested for the Jeffries murder did it, but for a while I wasn’t sure. I was trying to understand how someone might commit suicide over something he didn’t do. That’s what led Anatoly to tell me about his father.”
I looked down at the table and then slowly raised my eyes.
“You look at me the same way you used to.”
Her face brightened. “Good. Tell me about his father.”
I stretched my leg out, pulled up my other knee and grasped it with both hands. “His father believed in Communism. He also wanted to protect his family. He was accused of treason. It was a lie. But he confessed, though he knew it was a death sentence.
In effect, he committed suicide, and he did it because of what he believed and who he wanted to protect.”
I turned my head toward her and then, a moment later, sat up and leaned forward. “An Arab terrorist drives a truck full of explosives into a building and blows himself up and we think he’s crazy, but he thinks he’s dying for Allah and is going to par-adise. How many Christians were burned at the stake during the Inquisition because other Christians thought they were heretics?
Atheists died for the Communist Party because they believed they were acting on behalf of the new god, history. We think all of them were crazy, but what do we believe in? What are we willing to die for?”
“A mother will die for her children,” she said simply.
I was sure she was right. It probably explained why every religion had been founded by a man.
Jennifer reached inside her purse and removed an orange plastic bottle. With the kind of precision that comes with habit, she unscrewed the cap, tapped a single white capsule into the palm of her hand, put it into her mouth, and washed it down with water from her glass. As soon as she swallowed, the cap was back on the bottle and the bottle back in her purse.
“Lithium,” she explained. “I forgot to take it this morning.”
I wondered if she had, or if she had decided to wait to see my reaction. It was not that long ago that someone suffering severe depression was put away, and spent the rest of their days staring at a wall, without the will to move or the power to speak.
Now you took a pill and wondered whether people believed it was no different than taking insulin for diabetes, or whether, deep down, they thought you would never be quite right.
Outside, she took my hand as we walked up the sidewalk, headed for her car. She seemed relaxed, perfectly at ease, almost girlish. Tossing her head to the side, she teased me about the briefcase I was cradling under my arm. “Did anyone ever tell you,” she said, reaching in front of me to tap the cracked leather,
“that you could probably use a new one?”
“It’s the only one I’ve ever had,” I replied. “We’ve been through a lot together.”
Her large wide eyes, painted yellow by the high arching sun, did their light-footed dance, mocking my stiff-legged attachment to what I was used to. “Yes,” she said, “but you’ve survived it.”
“It can be repaired,” I tried to insist, but she only laughed.
Holding hands, we walked along, blending in with the faceless parade, just another middle-aged couple, not worth the attention of anyone else, an anonymous part of a great swirling mass.
“Here,” she said in a soft, husky voice, that seemed always on the verge of laughter.
“Where?” I asked dimly, startled out of a daydream of my own.
I gawked at the buildings around us, wondering if she meant one of them or something else.
“Here,” she repeated, laughing at the confusion in my eyes.
“My car. It’s in here.”
We were standing at the front entrance of a parking garage.
A horn blared and we stepped out of the way as a frizzy blonde steered a brown Lexus into the street.
“I’ll drop you at the office if you like.”
I could have walked there in less time than it was going to take to get the car out of the garage. “That would be great,” I replied.
We found the Porsche and I watched, fascinated, as she drove down the narrow spiral chute that led out to the street. Her eyes, glazed with the thrill of it, stayed fixed on a spot immediately ahead of the car, while her mouth moved with the soundless rhythm of someone talking to herself.
“Is it still your intention to die like Isadora Duncan, your scarf caught in the spokes of your Bugatti?” I asked dryly when she passed through the last curve and was slowing to a stop at the ticket taker’s window.
“No,” she said as she paid the bill. “That was a schoolgirl fan-tasy. Now I’m all grown up.” She darted a glance to her left and then turned right out of the garage. “I want to die in bed,” she said as she sped through an intersection to beat the light. “Of overexertion.”
She parked across the street from my building. Leaning against the window, she smiled. “I’m glad I came today. I liked watching you in court.”
I opened the door and started to get out. “Would you like to have dinner tonight?” I asked, turning back to her.
She smiled, and I knew the answer, and more than that I knew that the answer would now always be the same.
I watched her drive off, the tires squealing as she raced down the street, her hand trailing out the window, waving one last goodbye. As I jogged across the street, I remembered what it was like, years ago, when I was a teenage kid and I could run forever and never get tired and could not imagine that I ever would.
Helen was waiting for me when I walked into the office. She marched right behind me, clutching a wad of phone messages in her hand. “Before we do anything else,” I said as I dropped into my chair, “could you do me a favor?” I opened the briefcase, removed everything in it, and handed it to her. “Could you take this somewhere and have it repaired. All it needs is some new stitching where the handle fell off.”
She looked at the b
riefcase, then looked at me. “You sure you don’t want to get a new one?”
“Anything important?” I asked.
“There’s one from Howard Flynn,” she said, handing me the stack.
Flynn answered on the first ring. “Stewart called about an hour ago. He said you might be interested. They made an arrest in the Griswald murder.”
“It was good of him to call,” I said, wondering why he had gone to the trouble. If it were not already public information, it would be by the end of the day.
“That isn’t the reason,” Flynn went on. “He thought you’d be interested because the guy they arrested was another mental patient.”
Seventeen
_______
John Smith, for that is the name by which I first came to know him, suffered from a serious mental defect, but there was no record that he had ever been a patient in a mental hospital. It would have been surprising if there had. John Smith did not exist.
There was no record of him anywhere; there was no record he had even been born. He had been found under a bridge, the same one where the killer of Calvin Jeffries had been found, living in the cardboard squalor of a homeless camp. When the police arrived, he was sitting on his haunches, digging in the dirt with the steel point of the knife that turned out to be the weapon used to murder Quincy Griswald. When the police, guns drawn, demanded he surrender it, he stood up, clutched it to his chest, and repeated over and over again the single word “Mine.” He did not resist when they took it away from him, but as soon as it was out of his grasp he began to cry.
They brought him to the police station and he said the same thing all over again when they asked him if the knife was his.
When they asked him if he had used it to murder Quincy Griswald, he still mumbled that same word. They told him he would feel better if he admitted what he had done, and there was not a sign that he understood what they meant. It was only when they asked him where he had gotten the knife that there was a spark of recognition in his eyes and that he made something like a clear response. “Billy,” he said. That was all. Just that single one-word name. No last name, no description of what this unknown person looked like, nothing about where he gave it to him or why.
