A Circle of Wives

by Alice LaPlante

  San Francisco blew my mind. I remember arriving at Ocean Beach at about four on a Sunday afternoon in June. I didn’t know it then, but it was one of those rare sunny days over on that side of the city, and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I stuck my feet in the frigid water for about two seconds, splashed a little on my babies’ faces to make them laugh, and set out to build us a new life. Three years later, after bartending nights at various local joints while subjecting my kids to a series of mediocre babysitters, I finally had both my divorce and my degree in accounting from San Francisco State. People tell me I still have a bit of the Tennessee twang, especially when I get tired or excited. But both my boys talk like the native Californians they almost are.

  The boys are good boys. Though the one dark spot on my marriage to John was that he didn’t get on with them, or they with him. I think after having me to themselves for more than twenty years they didn’t like to share.

  They’ve both been calling a lot since the news got out. They’re worried about me, whether I’ll get by okay. But I stay up nights concerned about them. Especially Jackson, the younger one. He’s a little too keen on get-rich-quick schemes, and has more avarice in his bones than I like to see in a son of mine.

  My brother’s another matter, another one to worry about. He eventually followed me to San Francisco a couple years after I escaped. He’s still what I would call broken. He’s had his share of relationships, some with women, more with men, but none of them seem to last. I think the last boyfriend had a bit of a temper. On the one occasion I had them to dinner they were both injured, Thomas with the remnant of a black eye and his boyfriend noticeably limping. I took Thomas into John’s office and read him the riot act. “I don’t care who you sleep with as long as you treat each other well, and I just don’t see that happening here,” I told him. Thomas shuffled his feet and mumbled, and then on the way out put his fist through our front window. That’s how things take him.

  For Thomas, John had a surprising amount of patience. Perhaps he could tell how important Thomas is to me. But he was generous and forgiving in many instances where he didn’t need to be.

  Thomas has a lot of natural talent as a graphic designer, is self-taught on the computer and doesn’t have any trouble finding work when he puts his mind to it. I wish he’d put his mind to it more often. He’s a bit of a lost soul. But he’s my baby brother, and I love him dearly. I would do anything for him, and he knows it.

  23

  Samantha

  THE COMPLETION OF MY FIRST interviews for this case since the inquest excites me and agitates me both. Weeks have passed, but I find I can’t concentrate. I look at the calendar and realize we’re in June already: Summer is flying by. I leave work early, go home and change, and head out on my bike despite the fact that the sky looks threatening.

  The sun won’t set until after eight, so I’ll have plenty of light. I never ride after dark, having had to fill out too many accident reports from my years on the campus beat. But I got a new bike from Peter for my twenty-eighth birthday, so I’ve been riding a lot lately, even though I don’t even understand how to change the gears; it’s so fancy. I take it down Palm Drive to Campus Drive, and under the 280 overpass, back into the Alpine Road loop. For some reason, squirrels know enough to stay out of your path there, it’s only on campus that their brains are addled enough to commit hara-kiri.

  As I pedal, I barely notice the landscape. I’m sweating profusely, and it’s not because of the heat or the exercise. This case is getting to me. Last night Peter came out of the bedroom at 3 AM to see where I was, and found me facedown on a diagram I’d drawn under the label, the usual suspects, but which made absolutely no sense to me the following morning.

  I’m on a popular bike route. Passed by dozens of riders, outfitted in identical uniforms, looking fierce and determined in their helmets and wraparound sunglasses. The men, in particular, disturb me when they’re dressed like this, it seems so aggressively sexual, the tight black pants with the genitalia outlined front and center. A bunch of them are lounging outside the Alpine Inn, drinking beer, strutting in and out of the pub, pelvises outthrust, in their special clip-on shoes. I ignore them and keep going. I’m not dressed appropriately in their eyes, they scorn me as the amateur I am, I’m wearing some old cutoff sweats and a PAPD T-shirt, and despite my angst over the case I feel strong as I pump my way into the countryside and escape from suburbia. But just as I hit the Portola-Alpine junction, the sky opens and I’m drenched. Ten miles from home and the rain seeming here to stay, pouring down, soaking my hair and clothes, which now hang heavily off me. I decide to keep going. I’m not going to get any wetter, and it’s a warm rain, so I’m not uncomfortable. And the drops splattering against my face and neck, the dark clouds overhanging the hills exhilarate rather than depress me, seem to open up something in me that has been stubbornly closed lately.

  I catch a flicker of a memory. Playing in the rain at my grandmother’s house on the Jersey Shore. The warm wind gusting through the open windows, the rumblings of distant thunder, the spattering of rain as the storm descended, my grandmother pushing me out the door to get the laundry off the line before it got wet, then staying outside myself once the clothes were safe inside. The house doesn’t exist anymore, it was destroyed in one of the mega storms that have been plaguing the East Coast over the past few years, but it was my favorite place in the world when growing up. We always spent at least a couple weeks there in the summer, my parents, my younger brother Gregory, and me. I lived there with my grandmother the entirety of one summer, when I was eight. That terrible and wonderful summer. Those days were genuinely glorious: the salty sea, and the sun, the cold ginger ale waiting for me when I got back from the beach, the sharp tangy scent of the Noxzema my grandmother would spread on my sunburned face to cool it down. Me having her all to myself, my parents back at home in Brooklyn tending to Gregory. Although they hadn’t told me yet, they knew he was dying, and they sent me off to miss as much of it as possible.

  When I got home that September, there was Gregory, on the hospital bed in the living room where he would spend his last days. He’d been an annoyance and an infuriating shadow on my life for years, the snot-nosed younger brother always wanting to bust up my games of dress-up with my friends and bother my parents with his aches and pains and bruises and, eventually, visits to the doctors and stays in the hospital. I was home in time to witness his horrifying end. Never a large boy, he was wasted and waxen, tubes snaking around his bed, into his mouth and wrists and under the covers. Then one day I got home from school and it was over. My parents must have been all cried out by then because they were simply sitting in chairs next to his bed, quietly talking. I think they were even laughing as I came through the door and stopped at the sight of that poor limp body, so clearly not Gregory any longer. He had been there, in all his infuriating physicalness, and then he wasn’t.

  To say there was a hole in my life would be imprecise. To say I missed him would be giving me more credit than I deserve. More humanity than I had back then. We’d had cautious truces, but they were too rare to give me much regret that Gregory was gone. I’d never given any comfort to him while he was around, even after he got sick. Once I’d made a fist in frustration and punched one of the larger bruises on his thigh, causing him to howl with pain. I showed no remorse, and lost a month of playtime after school when I stubbornly refused to apologize.

  I think of Helen, Wife No. 3, and wonder how many Gregories she sees every year, how many she buries. And whether she likes them all, or whether she would also have been as annoyed by my brother Gregory as I’d been.

  My parents divorced the year after Gregory died. Both decent people, truly desiring to be good parents, they did what they could to ease the pain of separation for me. I got my own therapist, as well as regularly attending a family counselor with both of them. My therapist showed me lots of pictures and asked how they made me feel: happy, sad, angry, joyous, pitiful, etc. It was easy to guess th
e right answers, but occasionally I’d throw her by saying a picture of two people shouting at each other made me happy, and a sleeping cat made me angry. My childhood in retrospect consisted of crowds of well-meaning people trying to do the right thing. I didn’t always react appropriately. In fact, I could be a little brat.

  My inability, or my refusal, to make commitments began back then, I believe, if I can indulge in some amateur psychology. My parents pushed me to decide whom I would live with. I chose my mother, and moved cheerfully enough with her into a new apartment in Manhattan. Then I cried, predictably enough, day and night for my father, who stayed at our family apartment in Brooklyn. So we started alternating weeks for visitations. I couldn’t help but see how sad my parents were when it was their turn to hand me over Sunday nights. My father would drive into Manhattan, and there was always a short but emotional parting in the hallway outside my mother’s door, sometimes because I was staying, and sometimes because I was going.

  Most of the tears shed during that difficult era are ancient history. But that back and forth for nine years until I went away to college took its toll. I learned to compromise, but never to commit. I couldn’t even decide on whether to have a cat or a dog, so, predictably, I got both. I never had to choose. I didn’t even choose Peter. He chose me, and somehow that was easy.

  Still, sometimes I find myself yearning for more. To give myself over to something. Not to waver. To embrace passion. Whatever John Taylor lacked in his life, whatever hole he was trying to fill by marrying multiple times, he certainly had passion. And I’m not sure I ever did. This is the conversation that Peter and I agreed not to have. It makes him miserable.

  The rain drives into my face, nearly blinding me as I make my way back down Sand Hill Road. Passion. I decide it must be the root of everything in life. And I feel that it will be at the root of the John Taylor case.

  24

  Deborah

  I KEEP SEEING GHOSTS. Or rather one ghost, in many places. At the grocery store, John walks by pushing a cart containing nothing but a dozen avocados and two gallons of skim milk. But it’s just a portly man of John’s age, probably going on some sort of fad diet, something John would never have done. I see John driving the Volvo behind me, and I’m so intent on looking in the rearview mirror I almost crash into the back of the yellow Toyota idling at the red light on Cowper. I come downstairs every morning at 5 AM, a habit I can’t break, and find myself listening for the sound of his car, that noisy muffler he should have fixed months ago. His inattention to details like that enrages me. Or I guess I should say enraged me. Except that I’m still angry. I find myself raging over his words, spoken so long ago, about how he’d found love with someone else.

  That would have been MJ. I paced through our living room all night, then when the sun came up got in my car and drove to where she lived in south San Jose. I parked in front of her rental house, a flimsy stucco construction with aluminum windows—the ones in the living room barely covered by torn shades, Batman sheets hanging over the bedroom ones. I was relieved when a tall and thin, almost gaunt, woman came out the door. Her shirt was loose and untucked. She had blowsy hair and a ridiculous straw hat with cherries on it, like a dissolute Mary Poppins. I actually vomited from the release of stress—with a total lack of dignity, opened my car door and retched, right outside the house. MJ noticed. She came over, concerned, asked if she could help. Hay-elp. She had a more pronounced accent then than she does now, gave each word more syllables than strictly required. She meant her offer, wasn’t just hoping to be told it was all right, to move on. She was that kind of woman. You could see it from the small lines that edged upward from the corners of her eyes, her mouth surrounded by lines of genuine concern. Her large hands already reaching out, committed to the idea that help was needed, and that she would give it. Not my type of person at all.

  But although certainly compassionate, MJ was apparently not intelligent enough to ask why a well-dressed middle-aged woman was sitting in a top-of-the-line BMW at her home early on a Tuesday morning. She spoke very kindly, offered to get me a glass of water, and when I refused, went back into her house to get one anyway. I took the opportunity to drive off. I don’t believe she remembers, or associates me with that long-ago incident. If so, she hasn’t said anything. Perhaps her life is made up of too many of these random acts of kindness to remember this time when her kindness was rejected.

  I wasn’t sure if the visit made me feel better or worse. Among women in my social sphere, it is tacitly recognized that any favor involves a contract, and to be a contract there must be quid pro quo: this for that. Value for value. Payback. When MJ offered to help me, I felt instinctively that to accept her help would result in me owing her something. That would have been an untenable situation. I am known for being quite generous with my time, for my willingness to help others. But I take my social contracts seriously, and always ultimately demand my quid pro quo. This has gotten me quite satisfactorily through years of dealing with women in organized groups. But my encounter with MJ left me uneasy.

  What would it be like to offer up a gesture of goodwill with no expectation—realistic expectation, I should say—of it ever coming back to you? Planting a seed and not claiming the fruit or the flower that grew from it? That’s why the people who believe in karma are such hypocrites. They live by the same rules as I do, only they expect the universe to even the score. Or some benevolent being. Not bloody likely, as my British friend Josephine likes to say. Not bloody likely that I was going to let this woman, this MJ, prevail. Neither would I owe her anything. So I drove off. Yet in fact she did do me a favor—a huge one. With her relative lack of intelligence, she took on John without asking many questions, thus saving my marriage. So if I act in accordance with my own value system, quid pro quo, I owe MJ. And my debt is not a trivial one.

  25

  Helen

  MY PREVIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH THE detective had been over the phone. The woman had a low, melodious, and mature-sounding voice. So I am surprised to find this young person—barely in her twenties, it seems—waiting among my patients on Wednesday morning. She is dressed casually in jeans and a button-down blue shirt. She’d be a little overheated in our LA midsummer, but I remind myself she comes from Northern California. Her red cowboy boots are stenciled with stars and moons. I can see multiple piercings up the sides of both ears, and detect the remnants of a nose piercing, almost grown in. Today she’s wearing just a single pair of conservative stud earrings of blue glass that match her shirt.

  “How can I help you?” I ask as I gesture her into my office.

  She seems more nervous than I am, drops her notebook, then when she bends to pick it up, tampons and a recorder fall out of her purse.

  She laughs, a bit shamefaced. “So much for appearing the seasoned professional,” she says when she’s collected her possessions. I like her immediately.

  I tell her again that although she’s flown in from San Francisco, I have very little time. It was hard enough finding this half hour. When she says that she might need more, perhaps tomorrow, depending on how this goes, I shake my head firmly. She also says I can have my lawyer present—a suggestion I disregard.

  She removes a stuffed lion and a plush brown bear from one of the chairs in my office, and sits down, turns on the recorder. “First of all, I’d like you to again give me a complete statement of where you were and what you were doing on Friday afternoon and early evening, May 10, 2013,” she says. She places the recorder on the chair next to her, but then, like one of my patients, sees something interesting on the floor and pounces. It’s my office mascot, a stuffed replica of a huge horny toad, so realistic in color and expression that everyone—adults as well as children—is drawn uneasily to it. The only thing not authentic is its size. It’s as large as a basketball, and nearly as round. She places the thing on her lap and strokes it, appears delighted with its softness.

  “As I told you before, I was home alone. Not feeling well. I’d even canceled my aft
ernoon appointments to go home early,” I say, while she makes the toad hop and trill and laughs to herself. She’s quite charming, really. Certainly not coplike. I bring up my calendar. “Yes, I saw my last patient of the day at 11:45.” The detective nods, I know she’s already verified this with my admin assistant. “I then drove back to my condo. Spent the rest of the day and night in bed.”

  “Can anyone verify that you were home at that time?” the detective asks.

  “No,” I say. “I live alone.” I stop for a moment before continuing. “I suppose another resident might have seen me enter the building. But if you’re asking if I can prove I was home that evening the answer is no.”

  I hate canceling appointments. I can’t remember the last time I’ve done such a thing. I remember that afternoon and evening. But I don’t share all of it. I’d been nauseated and vomited until my stomach was empty. Then I continued with the dry heaves well into the night. Not pleasant.

  “Thank you, that’s helpful,” says the girl. She has finally abandoned the toad, it is back on the floor. She is writing in her notebook. She looks up and smiles, and it is a genuine smile. “I’ll need to follow up on this,” she says, almost apologetically. The criminal element in Palo Alto must have an easy time of it. “But I’m afraid that until I do some investigating, you’re still on the hook.”

  “What kind of hook am I on?” I ask. “Just curious.”

  She hesitates. “As you’ve probably gathered from the media reports, we’re not completely satisfied about John’s . . . your husband’s death,” she says.

  “And I’m naturally one of the suspects,” I say.

  “Naturally,” the girl agrees. I’m amused to see that she blushes when she says this.

  “And what motive would I have?” I ask. I’m curious to hear what she comes up with. Probably something banal, like jealousy. But she surprises me.