Long Shot

by Paul Monette

  “Do I have to say I’ll do it,” he asked, “before you tell me what it is?”

  “Oh, just a diamond,” she said lightly. “Sentimental value, mostly.” But insured, she might have added, for a cool four hundred thou. She rummaged again in the leather bag, till she pulled from the tangle the copy of Walden he’d left on her bed last Thursday. With them both thus armed, it looked more and more like a seminar. “There’s a map in here,” she said, slipping an envelope out of the book. “The X is where I left it hanging. Also, money for the plane. I’m afraid it’s cash, but I didn’t know what else you took. You don’t need a key. The house you’ll figure out as you go. It’s built to be very simple.”

  He took the envelope out of her hand, briefly weighed its heft, and tucked it in the middle of his book. There was a pause. There ought to have been a pause before he took the envelope, giving him time to struggle with the verities. But something had sent his mind racing ahead—the deserted mission itself, perhaps, with the air of a thousand stories buried just beyond the gate. Suddenly, Vivien’s errand didn’t seem terribly out of the ordinary. In any case, he shrugged the issue of where it all would end. More and more, he seemed to know he would solve this case for no one but himself. It didn’t much matter what roundabout ways he took.

  “How do you know I’ll go?”

  “Writers like to travel, don’t they?”

  As they came in under the shadow of the tower, she took his arm and turned them back the other way. It might have been nothing more than a walk around the courtyard. A couple of stately mission elders, making plans to spread the word. When they drew up close to the fountain again, as if to toss a final coin, Greg realized the cricket had stopped its dry-legged racket. It probably heard a scrap of him and Vivien, he thought—till it knew, with a sudden sinking in its heart, that somehow it was stranded on a set.

  “I’ll call you when I get back,” she said. “We can meet in some dark alley to make the exchange. I think that’s everything, isn’t it? Let’s go eat.”

  “But you haven’t told me what it says.”

  “What?” she said, for the first time caught off guard. She followed the point of his finger. “Oh, you mean the gate. Well, all right. It’ll only depress you, but you asked. Lay me to rest,” she recited, her voice gone singsong, cool as a breeze, “among those men I loved so much.”

  She was absolutely right. It was almost more than they could take, such lonely types as they. The mission priests were lucky men, to give it all up so peacefully. They made it out to be something tender, mixing earth to earth with all the men of their kind.

  “Sounds great,” said Greg. “Maybe we should all go live in a mission.”

  “Or die in one, at least.”

  There was nothing left to do but go. Arm in arm, they walked away without a backward glance. They seemed to feel the motto wrought in the gate as a sort of reproof. For living in fear of sentiment, perhaps—though here they might have retorted that it read a lot better than it lived. Besides, Greg thought with a dry-mouthed pout, the problem wasn’t love. If the two of them had laid out their resumes, it would have been clear what a creditable job they did of loving well when occasion arose. The real trouble lay in being loved. With so many mirrors and mug shots hanging about on the walls, a person took care of that part all by himself.

  “Is there still a Walden Pond?”

  “Of course,” he said as he disengaged his arm and reached for the dented metal door. They had to get out of here fast. They’d done enough lagging back and talking it out in the dark. “Why?”

  “You mean they didn’t pave it over? Well, that’s a relief. Ever been there?”

  “No.”

  The daylight broke upon them, and they froze. They’d have liked to keep their chitchat going like sixty, if only to show they’d each survived the other’s grandstand play—he with his verdict of murder one, she with her all-expenses-paid. But they’d surfaced again in the real world now. For all they knew, the match of wits would not sustain in the light of day. Perhaps, like champagne left in the glass too long, they would flatten and go sour. To look at them then—in the glare of the studio sun, and neither one with a deal—they seemed as dwarfed as children. Still, they could not turn back.

  She made a sudden beeline to the Rolls, where Artie was slumped in the driver’s seat, reading the trades. She handed in her leather bag, retaining only the book. She wasn’t the sort who needed liquid assets on her person. She leaned down and murmured some words about matters of scheduling, while Greg checked out the people who were walking back and forth in the street outside the alley. He felt afraid of everyone. Because things were so private now between him and her, people would start to notice. Would doubtless jump to conclusions he hadn’t the power to reverse.

  When she came his way again, they instinctively kept a foot of space between them. Then they emerged from the alley beside Stage Nine and fell in among the studio workers hurrying back from lunch. Each with a bright green paper back, they looked as out of place as out-of-towners. Only the unconnected needed guidebooks, after all. Greg tried to tell himself it was just a bad attack of being oversensitive. Besides, they weren’t looking at him. It was Vivien—strolling along as if it were any old busy street, and she some clear-eyed country girl, having a day in town. They gawked at her from every side, and she didn’t miss a step.

  “I gather it’s smaller than Tahoe,” she said.

  “Of course,” he replied, looking into the face of a mogul who tried to catch Vivien’s eye as they passed. “It’s really very small. I think you can walk around it in an hour.”

  “The smaller the better,” said Vivien resolutely. And Greg had a horrible thought: She was going to start waving the book in the air, like a redneck toting a Bible. “You get tired of a view that goes on and on,” she said, her mind on some specific vista Greg could not hope to imagine. “Well, I do anyway. Tell me, do you think it’s still in private hands?”

  “What? You mean Walden?”

  She wanted to buy it?

  He gave her a sidelong look. She honestly seemed to pay no mind to the way they watched her. Unlike him, she didn’t come down with the woozies when she found herself in the teeming mass. Perhaps because it parted automatically, just to let her by. Whatever the explanation was—untouchable by dint of royal blood, so rich she could buy and sell the crowds she walked through ten times over—she seemed to have no fear of being overwhelmed.

  “I think it’s a national park or something,” Greg informed her dryly. “Why don’t you make them an offer? Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

  What he’d always looked for before, he thought, was someone to lead him through the line of fire. He’d come across some fearless type, and right away he’d think: This is the one. As an agoraphobe, he tended to live with his back to the wall, armed for all-out war. But the longer he watched her, detached from the melee around her, the more did he wonder if, after all, he couldn’t make it on his own. It was a matter of what one paid attention to, it seemed. The others didn’t exist unless you let them.

  “Well, something like it, then,” she said, dismissing the thought of eminent domain. “There must be other ponds. All you need’s a realtor with a little brains.”

  The heads kept turning, wherever they went. As they pushed through the glass doors into the commissary, three big men from the starship crew came out the other way, toothpicks in their teeth. They rolled their eyes at Vivien Cokes, and then they looked at him. He clearly didn’t exist, except in terms of her. When they trailed behind the maître d’, making their way to a corner table, he saw the room erupt and crane for a glimpse. It made him feel two things at once. On the one hand, quite invisible—no more than a kind of shadow that she cast. But terribly important, too, or else why would she eat with him? Altogether, he found himself strangely unthreatened. Ready to go to the ends of the earth.

  As they ducked and slid into the booth, he had an awful urge—to come back at the end triumphant
, the diamond in his hand and the killer’s name on the tip of his tongue. All he had to do was tough it out alone. He bet he knew more about that than she did.

  “You know,” he said in a worldly way, taking a glance at the prices on the menu, “it’s not supposed to require a pond. I mean, Walden is really nowhere. It’s in your head.”

  “Well, it’s not in mine,” she protested smartly, scanning the list of specials with a rueful eye. “And I’ll wager it’s not in yours. But like I said, I’m ahead of you. You’re only on 106. We’ll talk about it later. I wouldn’t want to spoil the plot.”

  “I’m not much of a reader,” he said. No time for anything now but heroic isolation. “Don’t hold your breath.”

  “What are you going to have?”

  “Soup. Why did you go to Bermuda?”

  “No reason. What kind?”

  “I don’t know,” he said irritably, putting the menu aside. “Whatever they’ve got.”

  “You’ll be sorry,” she said. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Did you leave him?”

  “Jasper? Oh, I suppose. At the time, I was sick of everything.”

  “And now?”

  “Do you think I killed him?”

  “Good God, no!”

  “Well, that’s a load off my mind, right there.”

  She snapped her fingers once in the air, as if to spirit them off. And the waiters came running from every side, falling all over each other to get there first.

  chapter 4

  “SAILING” WAS ONE WAY of putting it. In fact, it was two hundred feet of oceangoing yacht, formerly in the hands of the Aga Khan. Of eleven staterooms, Vivien would occupy numbers 1 and 2—the latter set aside for her personal luggage, in her case enough to fill the belly of a 707. Erika and Felix, who always cruised in the spring and fall, had moved up the sailing date by a full two weeks, so that Vivien Cokes could flee the tawdry aftermath of Jasper’s death. In Erika’s set, the feel of unparalleled luxury was the only way they knew to prove that life (though a vale of tears) went stumbling on.

  Thus they kept on board such amenities as pastry chef, hairdresser, and Sicilian masseur—the last of whom did a double shift in the nightly round of musical beds. Viven, needless to say, would not be required to do anything, beyond a minimal amount of keeping up appearances. Everything else would be done before she thought to ask. Besides, Erika and Felix were a known quantity. She’d covered the seven seas with them at the helm. The food would be three-star all the way. At the backgammon board, the stakes would be in five figures. This tub was not for nothing called The Ritz.

  No matter if Erika got capricious, sometimes halving her lithium so as to get a little mad. Or that Felix was so dreadful with the locals—furious if no one spoke English—that he threatened to turn a day in port into an international episode. Vivien let a lot of things go by. Like the other guests, for instance. She had sat in the course of time at the right of every major power—all the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it seemed, and men who were on as many boards as she had pairs of shoes. There was always some fleetingly famous type who’d pitched a winning season. People she couldn’t keep straight from year to year.

  It meant maybe three or four hours a day of attending to other men’s dreams. In Vivien’s presence, they seemed to affect a slow and low-voiced version of the boys they must have been in high school. They didn’t know what they wanted from her. She made a thousand little murmurs of assent, no matter what they said, and watched for a chance to break away. On balance, she knew that her brief appearances paid her way. She still had a dozen waking hours a day to stare out across the rail.

  She’d only admitted it once, to Jasper: Travel of any sort made her feel as safe as a child again. She never remotely entertained the thought that anything would crash. She’d spent the summers of her youth rocketing through the landscape. She shuttled back and forth between one parent and the other, developing all the skills of a commuter. Her earliest recollection was a Queen of Angels Pullman bound for San Francisco, with Vivien tucked between a governess and a Spanish maid. The first of every October, she crossed on the Queen Elizabeth—once in the thrall of a tutor, Miss Wharton, who walked the decks reciting Byron, as if they’d put out to sea in Plato’s Academy. Somehow, it always felt good to get moving again.

  Though she’d learned in time to be moved by the sight of mountainous harbors, of coral-island chains not big enough for an airport, she never became a creature of destinations. A change of landscape didn’t really strike her as much of a change. It was pure and simple journeying she loved. The feel of the open road. As a girl, she liked to imagine herself a wild horse or a migrant bird. It was never quite the same when she grew up, but still she traveled for good luck’s sake, the way another woman might touch wood. As if death could not pin down a moving target.

  This time, though, it wasn’t going to work. She made up the usual lists and went about taking care of details, but with only half a heart. From Monday night till Wednesday afternoon, she oversaw the packing—tucking things one in the other, and minimizing wrinkles. From Carl she borrowed a smart-ass secretary, to help her clear the desk of the heaviest of the condolences. She knew all along it was mere diversionary tactics. She filled up a string of trunks, but like somebody throwing off excess baggage. As if she planned to put her past in the attic.

  She betrayed nothing of this to Erika, though. As the day approached to cast away, Erika called her woman to woman, practically on the hour, to talk out matters of policy as to hemlines and porcelain nails. Vivien swore she couldn’t wait to be out of sight of land. She affected to find it thrilling that Felix had signed up a psychic to come along for the ride. As always, she called and arranged for two cases of Dom Perignon to be delivered right to the dock. She ordered pots of orchids placed in every stateroom. She even remembered to have made up a refill of her Lomotil. She found the acts of preparation bracing, in spite of the fact that she wasn’t about to get stuck in a boat off Baja.

  Not that she had any alternate plan. All she knew was this: She had to go off by herself, because everyone else was still tied up disposing of what was left of Jasper. She wouldn’t have minded joining Greg for a couple of days in Bermuda, but that was out of the question now. She’d badly misread him. Somehow, she thought he’d had a thing with Harry Dawes that lasted years and years. That hangdog look, last Thursday at the grave—it seemed so unmistakably tied to the loss of one’s other half.

  Poor Greg. She could see that he needed some time in a place like the house on Harrington Sound. A walk on the cliffs would clear his head. What’s more, he needed to have it all to himself. Before they talked on the mission set, she had more or less hoped they could have their Walden seminar moved to the limestone house in the cedar grove. She saw them sitting in lilies up to their ears, tossing off quotes and living, however briefly, off the land. But that was a lot of wishful thinking. For some reason, he couldn’t bear Thoreau. Not even for Harry Dawes could he get past 106. He’d decided it was bullshit, though he wouldn’t tell her why.

  So who exactly was he, if he wasn’t who she thought?

  It would have to wait till they both got back. She packed and packed and got used to the fact that she had to travel solo. She’d done it enough before. It was what she was really good at. Thus, late Wednesday, after she heard what she happened to hear, she was just as glad she’d put it all off, deciding where to go. It was only then that she understood how far away it would have to be. Somewhere she’d never been to. Somewhere she wouldn’t be seen. So far away, she might not even know it till she’d passed the last frontier.

  Lucky for her, she had everything ready.

  It was just after six, on Wednesday evening. She was propped up in bed, reading over the end of Chapter 10. “Earth’s eye,” Thoreau had just called the pond. Vivien gripped a spotty Bic and underlined five lines at a stretch. She’d grown so used to the prose, she no longer got tangled among the burrs. She read it straight through and saw
what he meant:

  Men come tamely home at night from the next field or street, where their household echoes haunt, and their life pines because it breathes its own breath over again; their shadows, morning and evening, reach farther than their daily steps. We should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and character.

  How true, she thought contentedly. And she plopped an exclamation point in the margin just beside it.

  She closed her eyes to let it sink in, more than glad to take it along on a nap. The farther she read, the odder it seemed that Thoreau had developed an audience. Surely, at any given time, there were only a few who felt this way. She could hardly believe they numbered enough to keep the book in print. As to why the colleges pushed it so, she couldn’t really say. She assumed they all read it the way she had, in the crudest kind of outline. In any event, Thoreau wasn’t like a college kid at all. He didn’t want to be popular, for one thing. He didn’t hate the little town he grew up in. And he wasn’t after a girl.

  She started up and turned her head, as if she’d heard a gun go off. In fact, it was quite the opposite. For the first time since returning here to Steepside, she missed the sound of water. She got up and opened the sliding door, but she wasn’t thinking clearly. The angles of the house were such that she couldn’t see west from this end. Could it be the water had not been on all week? She tried to recall, but she drew a blank. She’d been hearing it all her life. It was just as much a given as the view. The loss of it was something like the windows going dark.

  She turned and hurried along the tunnel. She loped across the canyon room, then onto the deck on the steepest side. There didn’t appear to be anyone anywhere, neither in nor out, and she wondered again if the emptiness was all they’d ever bought for living here. Somebody watching her make her way around the western end—one hand gliding along the railing, the other still holding her place in the book—would have thought she’d had a sudden need to ponder the dome of space that ranged about her house. Only those few who knew Steepside top to bottom could have second-guessed her destination. For this was the only route to Jasper’s place.