Long Shot

by Paul Monette

  So when Abner returned, all dosed with the chic of the royal houses he’d bought up, he nearly had a stroke. The spaceship ranch house high on the hill, with its floating planes and Mayan iconography, was as hateful to him as the suburbs. The architect was summarily dismissed—indeed, came down from Abner’s mountain swearing a blood oath never to work again for a man with too much money. Only four rooms were done right. All the molds for the hand-cast, Mayan-figured bricks were carted off. The chevron-patterned hardwood floors, alternating rows of oak and mahogany, stopped at the door to the dining room, which was Georgian. Abner finished the house with the buckboard carpenter who mended his fences in Orange County. The rest was built to wrap around his travel souvenirs. As a result of which, Steepside from the air was like a priestess locked in the arms of a landed duke.

  The place was empty. He figured he must have misread the papers. If they meant to bury him here at dusk today, there ought to have been a flurry of running back and forth. He wandered down the row of windows. Far below, the vertiginous slopes that swept around the canyon had no place to hide. He saw it all. The trail he’d walked was clear as the dotted line on a map. Perhaps the funeral was just a trick. The silence was as total here as it was in Harry Dawes’s apartment, Monday night at nine.

  He stood at the final window, looking out. Now was his chance to search the place for clues. He wouldn’t have thought it possible, but he had it all to himself. And yet, perverse as ever, he suddenly wanted out of here. The silence seemed to sound a warning not to begin a search there could be no end to. For the first time, he saw the clash of Harry Dawes and Jasper Cokes in terms of their alien habitats. The tumbledown apartment at the Cherokee Nile was a world away from the wilds of Steepside. All the transitions had disappeared. From where he stood, the mountains roller-coastered at fearful angles to the desert plain. The desert sheered off at the ocean.

  No wonder it ended in violence.

  He turned abruptly and crossed the canyon room, determined to go deeper. In the high wall opposite the bank of windows, a row of stone arches opened off the nave. He could see through into the European rooms, set out like dioramas. One arch led to a library bound in leather. The next went into a Deco bar, all mirrored like a jewel box. Instinctively, Greg passed them by. Beyond the arcade, the Wright plan continued down a narrow corridor. It was skylit every ten or fifteen feet, but otherwise it seemed cut out of solid rock. He felt like he’d entered the hill. When the tunnel forked, he went right, as if trying to keep to the rim of the canyon.

  But somehow he must have got turned around. He came out into a bedroom that hovered above the Japanese garden and, beyond it, the green of the glen. After the treeless slopes of the canyon, the hill seemed almost wooded. The grass-cloth walls were covered with masks, in rank on rank of straw, mahogany, bone. Haitian, East African, Eskimo. Greg could not have pinned them down, even as to continent. He only took them in at all for the light they threw on Jasper Cokes. And then he saw—beyond the big-limbed, mountain-cabin chairs—a trail of Hermès luggage leading, half unpacked, into a closet racked with women’s clothes. He’d followed his nose to Vivien’s room.

  He slipped the paperback Walden out of his pocket. He went to the bed and placed it dead center on Vivien’s Navajo blanket. He walked around it a moment, then put out a finger and moved it a couple of inches clockwise, so as to make it look carelessly tossed. It wasn’t the same as the book he found in Harry Dawes’s apartment. Edna bought this one late last night, off a paperback shelf at Pickwick. It wasn’t a clue to anything yet, unless Vivien chose to make it one. Edna wanted to write some little squib on the flyleaf—This book left by the friends of Harry Dawes—but Sid and Greg had managed to outvote her. If Walden was part of the plot, it would simply have to do the work of surfacing itself. Chances were, there was no connection at all. Still, they had to start somewhere.

  He stood in his old abstracted pose—arms folded, shoulders hunched—till he heard the murmur of voices trailing towards him down the tunnel. He fairly leapt for the sliding door that led out to Vivien’s balcony. Sliding it shut behind, he sidled left so the building blocked him. An instant later he fell to his knees, when he saw what looked like an army grouped below him in the yard. Down on all fours, he crept across to the waist-high balcony wall. His heart knocked something terribly. But he rose up slowly and peered over, freezing the scene in a flash. Then he dropped to the floor again as if he’d gotten it all on microfilm.

  No wonder the house was empty. Down below, in a ring of ivy, was the scene of the crime itself. A dozen men were grouped around it in a circle—in varying states of official dress, and talking most laconically. The funeral crew in pinstripe suits. A couple of grim patrolmen, on either side of a stout lieutenant. Steepside guards and hangers-on. They all stared into the water as if they were reading tea leaves. They took their cue from the man in deepest black—Carl Dana, pale and grim, who worried the bridge of his amber-tinted shades and stood there in a silence. The whole unlikely throng of men looked strangely weary and out of ideas. They’d have made a lousy posse. Slow and dim, they might have been here to drain this tub, or to move it somewhere else. They’d come to the point where Jasper’s death assured them they would live forever—as long as they kept the erotics normal.

  Or so it seemed to Greg, who crouched in the balcony corner, hidden from every eye. He wondered which of the men down there would have passed up a chance with Jasper Cokes. It was wrong to think that everything after Monday night was a cover-up. Greg could tell in a single glance that most of those who came up here to play out Jasper’s scene were something close to morons. Why did it make him angry, though? Did it hurt to think that a fool could have masterminded Jasper’s death? Would none but a criminal genius do? Carl was the only one who really filled the bill. And Carl had been out of town till Tuesday afternoon.

  But now he was getting ahead of himself. There was nothing to do but wait till sunset, to see how the three of them looked together. Pictures culled from the past had appeared all week in the papers. Bodyguard, manager, wife—they were tied up tight as an entourage. Sitting in palmy nightclubs, all lined up in the sun on beach chairs, squeezed in the back of limos, they looked as arbitrary as high school kids, as tenuously matched. Carl very bookish and tense. Startling Vivien, hair in a chignon, thin and tan and insolent. Artie plain as day. Whatever had happened to Jasper Cokes, Greg was sure he would get his lead when he saw how the three survivors stood at the grave. He would know which one to implicate.

  For the moment, he was safe. He arranged himself on the slick tile floor, in a lounging sort of way, then tugged his book from his right side pocket. This was the Walden Harry left. When he hiked up here this morning, he’d had one on either side, like ballast. He looked as pure as an Eagle Scout, the dotted silk tie and wingtips notwithstanding. Though he hadn’t planned to read a word, though he’d been in a frenzy getting psyched for the Steepside caper, he’d picked it up in an idle hour, and now he couldn’t stop.

  The cabin at Walden Pond was built. The bean rows planted straight and true. On every other page, Thoreau had shaken his finger at the men still trapped in town. Greg had already gone four chapters, but he started now with his last night’s underlinings. Curled up in his solitary corner, he ran his finger along these lines:

  I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

  How absolutely right, he thought. He looked up into the leaden sky, to see if he could say it any better, and found to his delight that he could not. He’d been thinking something very like it ever since the day he quit writing scripts. No doubt he would have been hard put to say what life in the Concord woods had to do with forging autographs. For his part, all he knew was this: The truth about Harry and Jasper would have to come from him alone. Not including Sid and Edna, everyone else was satisfied that everything was fine
. It was probably just a coincidence, but he had in hand the very last word on being self-reliant. He used to think he had to know precisely what he was looking for. The last two days, he’d begun to see that it might be better to find it as he went.

  He finished his raisins and cashews, wishing he’d stopped for a swallow of water along the way. He read maybe thirty more pages—openly rooting now for the strange, intransigent loner who made his stand on the Concord shore. In half an hour, the sky had parted just a crack. The sun got a bit of a toehold. Before he knew it, his eyesight blurred as he squinted down at the page. So he put in a finger to mark his place and drowsed his lids for a moment’s rest.

  Just at the last, before he went under and let the book fall to the floor, a shiver of grief for Harry Dawes shot through him. As if he dared not let it cloud his waking life, but he had no law against dreaming. Sleep after sleep, he turned again to the love they’d barely made. For a man who prided himself on having no philosophy, he was awfully single-minded. Perhaps it was tied up with reading Thoreau. Perhaps it was leaving his safe apartment to wander the world alone. Whatever it was, that one brief night with Harry Dawes seemed more and more the only place where he could be himself.

  Greg was still sound asleep when Vivien closed the door to her room, with orders not to be bothered. She hung up six hundred dollars’ worth of widow’s weeds in the closet. She peeled off all her riding clothes and dropped them in the hamper. And she had a hand on the sliding door, meaning to let in a breath of air, when the book on the bed caught her eye.

  As she only read books she could leave on a plane or, spotted with oil, beside her deck chair, she knew it wasn’t one of hers. Besides, Thoreau was not her type. She’d had it assigned in college, of course, but there she’d used a fly-by-night outline that did it in eighteen pages. The strident tone and the unwashed manners reminded her of her forebears, Jake and Abner both. She wasn’t the likeliest person to pick up and head for the woods. When it came to cabins, she flew to Bermuda. She didn’t need a book to tell her how to leave the world behind.

  But her first thought, seeing it now, was just what the team from the Cherokee Nile had intended her to think. She thought: Who put this here? It could only have been Carl or Artie, but which one? There was no point trying to figure what she was meant to feel until she’d matched it with the giver. Artie would have left it more or less for spiritual reasons, after the manner in which he brought her shells and potted plants and bits of colored glass. Carl, if it was Carl, was probably bent on finding an image vague enough to swallow up the suicides. Perhaps Jasper Cokes was simply a man gone off on his own.

  But there wasn’t any clue in the book itself. Not a cold-eyed memo from Carl or a timid inscription in Artie’s hand. She flipped the pages in a desultory way, preparatory to throwing it in a drawer. Someone would bring it up later, if someone had a proposal. There was nothing that had to get done right now. She fixed on a passage at random, but hardly took it in. It was just that she saw the word “love,” and wondered what Thoreau had fallen for, with no one else around. She read the paragraph straight through before she stopped to think.

  I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveler’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time.

  Clearly, what this needed was an editor. With all those commas and dovetail clauses, she lost the train of thought before she got the drift. But if she read him right, he was given to mooning in doorways, a whole day at a time. The mere idea made her edgy. With her, the problem wasn’t sitting still so much as too much time to think. Though she had her pick of doors to prop, she preferred to spend her days in transit. If she stopped too long, she tended to find an agenda waiting.

  Solitary places were capricious, after all. They forced her to relive love affairs she’d hardly thought of at the time. Or they lit her far too harshly—Mexico came to mind—so she wasted the day just finding shade and turning down her hat brims. She had no use for a man who was free from time like Thoreau at Walden. She preferred her schedule tight, with an overlap if possible. She was limp from the morning’s double ride as she tucked the book beneath her pillow. She curled like a snail in the Navajo blanket. Frankly, she was tired of leaving home for cabins in the woods. She’d as soon stay here forever, now that—

  She fell asleep before she said it, but what she almost said was: now that Jasper’s dead. If anyone else had heard her, they’d have had their proof that she was heartless underneath. She didn’t care about anything, right? They’d always said so, hadn’t they? No wonder she was silent. She could not wring out a single tear to satisfy convention, and no one seemed to understand that her very resoluteness was her grief. She would not bullshit Jasper Cokes. She could no more put on faces for him now than ever in all their sudden years of being married.

  With only the wall between them, they more or less slept together, she and Greg. If one of them had been awake and cupped an ear and listened, he probably would have heard the other breathing. It may even have been that their dreams got crossed. They could not seem to keep to separate corners. Harry Dawes and Jasper Cokes went back and forth between them, twined like double shadows in the fog. No borders hemmed them in. The dreamers groped in the tidal darkness, fugitive as those they’d lost. Harry Dawes was on a train, riding east to Turner’s Falls. Jasper was tinned in a box of ashes, guarded by a mortician’s gray-lipped apprentice down at the garden gate. But Greg and Vivien couldn’t stop. They were drawn by the selfsame pin of light and caught at shapes they almost knew. Until the dead were in the ground, a glimmer of something stayed, it seemed.

  When Greg woke up, he slipped his book in his pocket and went over the railing. He climbed down the side of the house and circled the redwood tub, where he spent a long moment brooding. The crowd of men had all dispersed. The tub reeked of death, though the water was clear as day. They ought to cover it up, he thought. There was no telling who might tumble in and drown.

  He went in among the lemon trees, as far as the crest of the hill. He could hear the crowd on the boulevard below, though the hillside growth hid everything from sight. He felt the sense of violation more than ever: The people a man didn’t know did not belong at his funeral. All afternoon, as he poked about—expecting any moment to be caught and shown the door—he was seized with a sense of trespass, every time he heard a wave of rumbling from below. He’d have liked to clear out all outsiders, not including him.

  He watched the groom brush down the horses. He watched the gardener hose the driveway. He stood for a while in the little pool house, rifling through a drawer full of bathing suits. By midafternoon, he knew all the cracks in the tennis court, and he could have told you where they piled the trash. He was happy to sit on the low stone walls and take the mountain air. For it turned out Sid was right, that nobody paid him the slightest notice.

  He didn’t feel any different, though, when it came to splitting the man and the myth. Jasper Cokes was nothing to him. His star was artificial. All his pictures junk. At some quite visceral level, Greg reviewed his old resentments: If Jasper had made it, why didn’t he? About once an hour, he took a break with a page or two of Walden. Just like a monk with his breviary—or a kid with big ideas, reading books in snatches on the bus. What his old friends used to call moody, in the days when he lived at a typewriter. Sid and Edna, not so subtle, called it weird.

  When Vivien got up, she took a bath she didn’t need, put on a robe, and went from room to room as if to oversee the plans. From the deck that led off the canyon room, she watched a workman dig the grave on the naked brow of the hill. She stood at the kitchen door a while. The cook was dicing lobster for a salad. In the study, Carl was up to his neck in
telephone calls. Artie was on the roof with the minicam unit, setting up for the main event. It was all going swimmingly. From what she could gather, nothing was out of line except her life.

  It was getting time for her and Greg to meet. They wandered away, between them, the whole of the afternoon, just waiting to catch sight of each other. She didn’t think to venture outside. He didn’t dare go in. Nobody talked to her because they didn’t know what to say. Nobody talked to him because they didn’t know who he was. They were still in different stories, really. Both unnerved by all the waiting, though he didn’t get quite as bored as she did. Given the fact that boredom was the very thing she hid, however, they were more alike than not by four o’clock. Completely out of it, that is.

  It looked as if they were made for each other. But it may have been that fate had put it off too long. Neither had ever known anyone else whose moods were in such constant swing. So as not to seem quite mad, they’d each perfected something close to reticence. They only revealed to others every third or fourth reversal. Their moods appeared to change a couple of times a day, from afternoon to evening wear. In fact, they had sometimes got it down to twice an hour—from black despair to trills of drunken laughter. With it all locked up inside like that, perhaps they no longer had it in their power to show how much alike they were. They were all disguised in moderation.

  At 4:45, she left the house through the Spanish cloister. Artie and Carl were at either side. The dress she’d bought at Giorgio’s was the palest lilac—sadder than black, in her view. Now they made their way through knots of English roses, between two hedges ten feet high. She came right out with it. “Hey,” she whispered, “thanks for the book.” She was staring straight ahead of her, peripheral vision finely tuned to catch the barest nod of recognition. But Artie and Carl kept walking as if she hadn’t said a thing. It was either some mistake or one of them was lying.