by Chris Knopf
“If that’s how my personality affects people, I’ve brought a lot of joy to the world.”
“Too bad I’m the only one gracious enough to tell you.”
“So, what sort of insult will score some more information?”
She held up her hand and pointed a long, slender index finger at the ceiling.
“Insults have been devalued in today’s market. I’m diversifying into historical fact.”
“Whose history?”
“Yours,” she said, as if disappointed in me for asking.
“I thought you already had that cornered.”
“I want to know why you did it.”
“You’ll have to narrow that. There’re a lot of ‘its.’”
“Why you punched Mason Thigpen in the jaw.”
Thigpen was chief corporate council for the big industrial company I worked for until the last board meeting they mistakenly invited me to, proven by my change of agenda.
“In the nose. I hit him in the nose. Only stupid kids and movie actors hit people in the jaw. The nose is handier and softer and hurts the owner a lot more than it hurts your fist.”
Patrick Getty could have verified that.
“I’m sure that’s true,” she said. “Rather a nasty thought for me personally.”
“You read about Thigpen on the Internet?”
She smiled another disappointed little smile.
“A professional researcher never reveals her sources.”
“It was no big deal,” I said, as I reached in my pocket for a cigarette, then withdrew my hand, remembering the evolved state of the teachers’ lounge.
“No. Only that it abruptly truncated the steady rise of a man being groomed for the executive suite. A man universally admired, even by his rivals, as technically brilliant and blissfully unconcerned about corporate politics.”
“See where bliss’ll get you.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said.
“Me neither. Nothing brilliant about engineering. It’s just engineering.”
“Not that. The corporate politics. I think you were in them up to your neck.”
“So, that’s the deal? You tell me about Robbie Milhouser, and I get to mess up your theory?”
She shook her head.
“I’m not that interested in corporations. There’s something else I want to know,” she said.
If I’d known Rosaline back in those corporate days I’d have tried to hire her. Harness all that obsessive persistence.
“Okay.”
“Why did you wreck those houses?”
I’d heard that question before, a long time ago, and didn’t love hearing it again. For the cops and prosecutors, and the lawyers on both sides, “I don’t know” seemed like a good enough answer. But not for the shrink I’d been forced to see as part of a plea bargain. He wouldn’t let up. Though unlike Rosaline, he had a normal-sized nose and an oversized sense of self-importance. I wouldn’t give him an answer if I had one, which I didn’t.
I told Rosaline as much.
“I don’t believe you,” she said sweetly, leavening the bite of the comment.
“You don’t think it’s possible to not know why you did something?” I asked her. “Doesn’t the fact that people hardly ever know why they do anything keep you folks in business?”
Her smile grew.
“There was a time when I’d let you get away with that, Sam. But I got smarter when I shed my insecurities.”
I was tempted to ask her if she thought fear and anger made you stupider, but I was in deep enough already.
“Okay, so here’s the deal,” I said. “You give me what you can on Robbie, and I’ll give you an hour of couch time. You can ask me anything you want.”
She leaned toward me.
“Couch time it is.”
She used her long middle finger to trace the top of her blouse.
“I’ve already got one of those deals, Rosaline.”
“Highly revocable. But I’ll take a handshake as a down payment.”
The skin of her slender hand was cool and dry, but soft to the touch. Her fingertips slid across my palm when I let go. The door to the lounge opened and a pair of male teachers, delivered by divine forces, barged noisily into the lounge. Rosaline sat back easily into the couch, unruffled.
“Saved by the boors,” she said.
“Postponed, anyway,” I said, despite my better judgment, which as history proves has never been all that good.
She escorted me back to the centurions at the front desk. As we walked, some sort of electromagnetic effect disturbed the energy field between us. I knew this by the slight spike in my pulse rate. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Ditto that,” she said, handing me off and turning lightly again on her toe, then disappearing down the long institutional corridor, lined with lockers filled with secrets past and present, safe from all but the irresistibly curious mind of Rosaline Arnold.
THIRTEEN
WHEN I FINALLY located Amanda she was covered in soot. She was stationed with another blackened soul next to a large dumpster at the end of a relay line starting inside her burned-out house. Charred chunks of sheetrock, two-by-fours and melted fixtures were traveling down the line to where the pitch team tossed them over the seven-foot dumpster wall.
The day had turned bright, the hard light of the season flooding down through the bare tree cover and revealing the ugliness and wreckage of the destroyed property in stark detail. The air was clear, but thick with the bitter, sickly smell of soaked charcoal.
Amanda used the back of her forearm to clear a wave of hair from her face, exposing a smile for me and Eddie as we approached.
“Welcome to the glamorous world of real-estate development,” she said.
“Thanks. I think I’ll observe from here,” I said, standing clear of the ash and dust. Eddie didn’t like the smell and feel of the place, and was happy to stay close to my side.
“I hope we can talk,” she said as she took one end of a shredded piece of half-inch plyscore to help hoist it up and into the dumpster.
“That’s why I’m here,” I said.
Amanda stepped out of the human chain, which reconfigured itself without interrupting the flow of debris.
“I want to plead temporary insanity,” she said as she wiped her hands.
“You had a rough night.”
“I’ve had rougher. I’ve been storing up a little too much lately,” she said, moving out of earshot of the crew. “I wasn’t even aware. Not consciously. The fire triggered something. I took it out on you. I want to say I’m sorry, but I don’t think that’s adequate.”
Like Rosaline Arnold, an excess of curiosity was one of my greater failings. But there were a lot of things I didn’t want to know about, that I preferred to leave unexamined. How I felt about Amanda was one of them. Maybe because of that I never tried very hard to understand her. As if I was afraid of what that understanding would reveal.
One thing I did know was she’d absorbed a disproportionate amount of sorrow in her life, probably more than you could withstand without some adverse consequences taking root. More than I could take, that was certain.
My wife Abby’s life was one of uninterrupted good fortune, if you discounted her choice of husbands. She honored that providence by filling nearly every waking moment with expressions of disgruntlement and complaint. I realized over time that she really didn’t care if I agreed with her or not, as long as I said something that sounded like I was listening, which I did less and less. Eventually all conversation, acerbic or otherwise, dwindled to nothing and a permafrost of silence and disappointment settled into the structure of our relationship.
Long before I’d ever imagined I’d be sleeping with Amanda, I loved to talk to her. I used to go see her at Roy’s bank, pretend I was a worthwhile customer, which I wasn’t. It was the only pleasure I knew in those days. She didn’t know it, but she was the last and only tether I had to the world, more like a go
ssamer thread, barely holding on.
Standing there next to her burned-out house, I remembered what it was like to see her at her desk. To bathe in the glory of a welcome look. I didn’t trust it, but I loved it. I didn’t know there could be such a thing.
I’d said to Sullivan that it couldn’t be worth it. But it was.
“I won’t fight with you. I wouldn’t know how,” I said.
“I know. It’ll never happen again,” she said. “I don’t expect you to believe me. Just give it a little while, and you’ll see.”
Her voice was tired, but the words were clear and unstudied.
She reached up and took my face in both hands and kissed me on the forehead.
“There. Now we look almost the same,” she said.
“Hardly. You look like the inside of my hibachi.”
“I went to see my friends in the City. I hadn’t heard about Robbie until I read the paper this morning. They don’t really think you had anything to do with it, do they?”
“They have all this damning evidence and no other suspects. I’m new to this, but I think that emboldens the prosecution.”
“It was that dreadful scene at the restaurant,” she said.
“Didn’t help. Jackie’s going to want you to back me up on that one.”
“So ridiculous,” she said.
“That’s what I kept saying until they were sticking my fingers on pads of ink and asking me if I had a passport.”
She wrapped her arms around me and held on for about a minute.
“What a nightmare,” she said into my shirt.
“So you never wondered about it,” I said.
She looked up at me like she didn’t understand what I meant.
“About what?”
“The fire. Robbie.”
She looked at me carefully for a second, then shook her head.
“At first, of course,” she said. “But I’ve known Robbie Milhouser my entire life. He was all show. You saw that. Even if he was capable of the thought, he didn’t have, you know …”
“The courage?”
“That’s right. All bluster, no balls,” she said.
“He took a swing at me. Imprecise, but enthusiastic.”
“He didn’t know you. Misinterpreted the gray hair.”
Even under the grime, I could see that Amanda’s olive skin was approaching its palest state—which on her showed more as a spectrum shift from the deep reddish brown of summer to a slightly yellow cast that a few bright days in May would quickly dissolve.
“How long had he wanted to team up with you?” I asked.
She shook her head and shrugged.
“I don’t remember exactly. He came by the job here and tried to get me into a conversation. It took a while for him to come out and say he wanted to form a partnership. I tried to be polite, but all I could think was, how ludicrous. Then he left and I forgot all about it. Until he spotted me in the restaurant.”
Holding her, I thought she felt thinner than I’d remembered, more fragile.
“And what do you mean by damning evidence?” she asked.
“He was killed with my hammer stapler. I bought it last year to install the insulation in my addition.”
The worry on her face that had been competing with other emotions took over. Worry and disbelief.
“That’s just nuts,” she said. “How can they be sure?”
“Fingerprints. And it still had the bar code from the store. It’s mine.”
I explained what else they had on me. Including my footprints all over the scene.
“Of course your footprints were there. We went there together so you could show me all the wrong things they were doing. A lesson in crappy carpentry, I think is what you said.”
“You’ll need to say that, too,” I said. “About being there. You can hold on the construction critique.”
“Burton won’t let this get too far,” she said. “I’m sure of that.”
“Jackie’s my lawyer. Burt’s consulting.”
“You can’t ask for more than that,” she said, her voice pitched for ambiguity.
Jackie had defended Amanda’s husband after he’d tried to defraud her. There wasn’t much Jackie could do to save him from the foregone conclusion, but she mounted a spirited defense. Everything she did was spirited. But you couldn’t blame Amanda for having a few mixed feelings.
I cast about for a change of subject.
“Any more trouble with the houses?” I asked.
“Can’t do much more with this one. So I had a security company concentrate on the other site,” she said. “All quiet so far. The only thing worth reporting was a guy in an old Pontiac who drove by every day, slowing down when he passed the house. I told them if he made a move to shoot first and ask questions later.”
“Better safe than sorry.”
“Is that your philosophy?” she asked. “Always play it safe?”
“Yes. In principle. More honored in the breach.”
“I think it’s safe enough to take a walk, what do you say?”
She took my hand and led me toward the street, then north toward the bay.
Eddie took the lead and we followed him through the neighborhood of plain but cared-for single-story houses that Amanda owned along the lagoon to the east. For years they’d been occupied by long-term, year-round renters, but most of those people had died, or retired to Florida, or wised up in time to buy a place of their own before real-estate prices in the Hamptons wiped out its own middle class. Now they were mostly seasonal rentals, though at least one had emerged as a full-time group home for an illegally large number of immigrant laborers.
I asked her about it.
“I can’t have the place teeming with people, but I’m not going to throw them out,” she said. “Everybody wants them to cut the lawns and clean the toilets, then just disappear at night like vampires in reverse.”
“You got bigger issues than that,” I said. “Like the DEC?”
She looked up at me.
“You heard? That was quick.”
“Jackie caught word of something down at Town Hall. I just guessed it was environmental.”
Several houses down from the group rental, right before a swath of wetlands that fronted the Little Peconic, was the house Amanda had grown up in. It was the freshest-looking place in the neighborhood. She’d had the exterior completely refurbished and the grounds professionally landscaped. Nobody lived there, but housecleaners and gardeners came and went to maintain the property in its pristine, revitalized condition.
She squeezed my arm as we walked by, but whatever associations the sight of the house had stirred were left unspoken.
Eddie caught the smell of the wetlands and hurtled ahead, ears up and tail fully raised. The breeze picked up as we moved closer to the water, a sturdy northwesterly bearing the aroma of the saline, mildly putrescent tidal marsh tucked in behind the narrow pebble beach. Various species of seabird took flight in a burst of fluttery panic, flushed out of the tall grass by Eddie’s unwelcome arrival.
The road ran over a narrow causeway across the wetlands and stopped at the beach, which you entered by squeezing through a white-painted barrier intended to prevent SUVs from trampling the wildlife preserve. Amanda led the way to a dry strip just shy of the tidal line, where she dropped to the ground and lay flat on her back, arms out and feet crossed. I joined her, noticing the deepening blue sky for the first time, etched as always by the leisurely flight paths of gliding gulls and hulking terns.
“I’m screwed,” she said, after a few minutes.
“Put that in layman’s terms.”
“I’m thoroughly screwed.”
“Oh,” I said.
“The DEC has shut me down pending a further investigation into why they should or shouldn’t ruin my life.”
“I thought you had all that stuff worked out.”
“I had a full phase-one environmental study completed and approved.”
“I remember. I was
there for the celebration. Party of two, as I recall.”
“I recall being issued building permits for a half dozen houses. One of which I’d be installing carpets in right now if it hadn’t been for the pyrotechnics.”
“The DEC trumps the local boys. Even I know that,” I said.
“The DEC were the ones who passed on phase one in the first place. I had a whole testing crew on the WB site for a week. I took them into every nook and cranny and fed them coffee and expensive pastries—even offered to launder their gaudy orange jumpsuits.”
“Must have changed their minds.”
She was quiet again for a minute.
“I guess. I don’t know. Who knows?” she said, finally.
“Are you allowed to clean up the burn site?”
“Probably not, technically. But I’m not losing that crew. Too hard to replace.”
“So you don’t know what caused the change of heart.”
“Nothing they’re willing to share. All I have is some bureaucratic gobbledygook about new information and my options for redress. That’s a laugh.”
“They might just want to double-check. Sniff around a little, write a report, hit the town and go back with tales of drunkenness and cruelty.”
She scooped up a handful of smooth rounded pebbles and tossed them at the water. I heard two or three plunks.
“That’s an uncharacteristically optimistic thing to say,” she noted.
“Always been a fan of a half-full glass.”
Some more time went by, which Amanda filled by tossing pebbles into the bay. Eddie checked in on us, licking our faces to make sure we weren’t dead. His breath was perfumed with the dross that collected along the bay shore.
“I’ve always just done what I’m supposed to do,” said Amanda. “I bought all the bullshit about how to be a person, and all that’s ever come of it is crap. I used to have nothing and life was crap, and now I have so much, and it’s still crap. Tell me why I should keep trying to make something worthwhile out of all of this …”
“Crap?”
Amanda was a person I always had a hard time getting into focus. That was my fault, not hers. Even when she was right in front of me, or like now in profile, something about her or me made it impossible to know if I was really seeing her at all.
