by Paul Monette
She flattened herself against the back of the chair, to slide out the middle drawer. When she saw it was stocked with secretarial odds and ends, she slid it right back in. Then she stared up into the awful Alpine sunset framed in a cruddy engraving over the desk. She wondered idly if Greg might not have the requisite business training to crack these numbers. After all, he’d kept his organization in the black for two years running.
And then it hit her.
Her fingers, still wrapped around the drawer pulls, clenched as if she meant to start a fight. She slid the drawer out a second time. It was no big deal. Probably no one else would have even stopped to notice—except it was so odd. A narrow dark blue folder, of the kind that held an airline ticket. American Airlines, to be exact—which Vivien could be, since she traveled every other week and knew the props by heart. But Carl always used the private jet. It was his idea to buy it. Where could he possibly have to go by commercial service? On a package tour to Hawaii, maybe? Considering what a snob he was about perks—wherever possible steering clear of the masses—it delighted her to catch him out on the smallest incongruity.
She assumed it was quite beside the point. She didn’t share Greg’s sixth sense for clues. The case of Jasper Cokes, if there was a case at all, was buried in the inertia of accounts. Money was where it began and ended. Thus, she picked this ticket up now from among the pencils and old receipts as if she’d found some respite from the headlong drive of the recent past. All the bad blood between Carl and Jasper had vanished from her mind. It was something minor here. Perhaps she could even tease him with it, she thought as she flipped it over. It might help break the tension for them both.
On the reverse side, a clerk had felt-tipped in the passenger’s name: WILLIS, J.
It hadn’t hit her at all, compared to how it hit her now. Her fingers went rigid. The paper shook. She had a horror of looking further, for fear of where this journey went. There had been no Willis with a J since Jacob, her father. There were no more Willises anywhere, outside of her. She counted herself the last of the line. The starkness of this had staked its ground in her long ago. It was some kind of high offense, therefore, to find somebody playing loose with the old ancestral name. No wonder she’d drifted in as soon as Carl drove off. She had picked up the trace of a rank impostor.
She opened it like a birthday card. She read the printout easily, as if it were a story in outline form. NY/LA, Flight 509F, 3 April, 9:25 AM. Then, on the line below, like a film being threaded in reverse: LA/NY, Flight 14F, 3 April, 9:08 PM. Two coast-to-coasts in a single day. God, what a drag, she thought dully, thrown for a moment by so much wasted time. It read as if this Willis, J. had flown out for something he couldn’t face—and then chickened out at the last minute, and run the other way.
Except the ticket was all typed out in advance. No spur-of-the moment changes written in. This trip was planned to the last detail. Perhaps there was some kind of document, which had to be signed and hand-delivered. She tried to make it sound, in the reasoning out, as dreary and stupefying as the papers stored in the drawers on either side of her. She could chalk up what she didn’t understand to the lunacies of corporate life.
It was no use. Something was out to punish her for coming all this way and feeling nothing. She knew it down in her bones, just as she knew the third of April was the day Jasper died. One whole side of her mind had refused to countenance any intrigue, for no other reason than that Carl was three thousand miles away. That side suffered a sudden change, as if she’d had a minor stroke. Or as if she’d touched a socket with the tip of one wet finger.
Carl had come all the way home, just to kill the man he called his brother.
She thrust the ticket back in the drawer and ran. Banging down the halls as if the noise would bring her to earth again. She was all the way back in the kitchen, standing once more in the ghostly gray refrigerator light, when she recollected the fork. She ran back. She burst into his room and snatched it up. She kept her eyes averted from everything else, for fear of what she yet might see. She’d just closed the door behind her, going out for good, when Artie opened the facing door. Stark naked and half erect, and scratching his fuzzy head.
“What time is it?” he asked sleepily.
“Dinner,” she said, without batting an eye, though her voice was half choked with horror. She held up the fork like a crucifix. “I divided up all the leftovers. I put out three plates, but Carl’s not home.”
“Is that why you’ve been crashing in and out? To tell him dinner’s ready?”
“What do you mean? I’ve only come this once.”
He smiled at her faintly and took his cue: “I guess I must have dreamed it, huh?”
“I’ve got things cooking,” said Vivien, backing away, and he shrugged and let her go.
She knew he didn’t believe her. She couldn’t boil an egg. Didn’t really think to eat unless something was put in front of her, sprigged with parsley and freshly peppered. They’d had another round of saying the most convenient thing. Perhaps they ought to have known that one evasion led to the next. They’d let in so much slack in the line, they might not put it straight again for months. But if it made them sad, they didn’t betray it. If anything, Artie seemed faintly amused as he ducked back into his bedroom. Telling lies, she thought, was played like any other game. He would put down the terror he saw on her face to his having caught her spying at keyholes. Being caught was part of the game as well. It brought them closer together—letting them know just who they were, now that Jasper was dead and buried.
She dialed Greg’s number on the kitchen phone, but he wasn’t home. Then she made up the plates of food she’d lied about, feeling it as a point of pride that her alibi be watertight. She spooned things out of covered dishes, fast as a short-order cook. She slicked each plate with a skin of plastic wrap, laid them side by side on the refrigerator shelf, and retired at last to her room.
Lightheaded, by then. Not the least bit scared, once the shock wore off. There was all the more reason to run away. She had an enemy now, and wrongs to right. The problem with Greg was over, once she could follow it all the way to a murder charge. She could throw in her lot and help him decide where best to take it next. She dialed the number eight times in an hour. She counted.
In the meantime, she unpacked four of her suitcases off the pile. She found an empty overnighter, lifted the lid, and studied the inner space alertly. Then she filled it with just the barest minimum out of the other four. Her economy fairly made her hum a Broadway tune. As she tracked down a two-piece bathing suit, she spun out the number again on the phone, letting it ring and ring. In a little while, she’d put together one of everything she’d need. With a knee on the lid, she fastened the clasp, and then stood back admiringly. She felt like the Swiss Family Robinson.
After that, she called him every other minute, like clockwork, filling each interval between calls with a page of Walden. She paced around the bedroom, the book held up in front of her like a hymnal. At the end of the chapter called “Higher Laws,” a farmer sat in his dooryard, watching the evening fall. Off in the distance, he heard the sound of someone playing a flute. He tried to ignore it. Tried to think only of his work. But Thoreau knew the music went deeper than all the farmer’s desires to be bound by his forty acres. The flute was Walden itself. And the burden of the music floated on the dark, till the farmer could not deny the words it sang:
Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you? Those same stars twinkle over other fields than these.
She let it ring thirty-two times, one for every year, and let it go at that. So what if she couldn’t get through to Greg? Morning was soon enough. As she gathered up her final things, she had a fantasy of herself, arriving at his door at seven A.M. With a bag of croissants, berries and cream, and half a pound of espresso beans. As long as they had to talk murder, they might as well go first class.
For now, she changed for the road. She put on
a sea-green sweater and a putty-colored suit, so as to look a bit like a lady banker—that is, deadly serious. Then she went into the bathroom. She dropped a dozen vials and bottles into a gauzy bag. On an impulse, she pressed the button that opened the wall at the back of the medicine chest. In the secret space behind, her jewels were ranked in dove-gray velvet boxes. She put out a hand for pearls and stopped. Too cold. Then she touched a box of dinner rings—but rings, of course, told tales. She settled at last on one thing only—a leopard-headed bracelet she bought herself at David Webb, once when she couldn’t go on getting all her stones at the whim of sentimental men. She slipped it over her wrist and shut up the rest. She sailed through the bedroom, gathering up the overnighter in one hand, Walden in the other. Altogether, she went out clean.
She stowed her things beside her in the passenger’s seat of the Rolls. The key was in the ignition. She turned it on, hoping Artie was nowhere about. The Rolls was really his, by virtue of all the miles he’d logged. She did not have the same kind of rights in the matter. None of the cars was hers—not the Cord, the Dino, the ’55 T-Bird, the Morgan, or the Jeep, all of which she thought of as Jasper’s toys. Vivien mostly drove cars picked up at the airport.
Backing out into the drive, she wondered if she should go in and pocket the airline ticket. But then, it would only tip him off. She put the car in neutral and headed down the hill. By the time she decided she ought to have it as evidence, risk or not, she had passed the point of her motor skills. No way could she back a car this big up a hill this steep. Only then, as she rounded the last long curve to the gate, did she stop to wonder where she meant to go.
She saw lights in the trees as she came around, but she didn’t connect them up with a car till she suddenly flashed across its path. She shut her eyes and stood on the brake. She missed him by a hairsbreadth.
The bowels of the Rolls shrieked over a bed of stones. When the dust had cleared, she saw she’d run up against the hill and snapped an aspen in half. Through the rear-view mirror she saw the Porsche. Having swerved to the outer rim, it was one wheel over the edge of the drive, above the long embankment into the glen. Their windows went down, and they both leaned out to have a good yell.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he shouted.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just getting out for a breath of air. Don’t panic.”
“You’re going to kill someone!”
“Oh? Who?”
He pulled his head back in and threw open his door. He leapt out. Stormed across the gravel. She rolled her window a third of the way and kept her hand on the handle.
“You can’t drive,” he said in a choke of rage, thumping the palms of his hands on the roof.
“Carl,” she replied, and she sounded so bored it must have driven him crazy, “it isn’t going to do us any good to discuss it. There’s always two sides. Talk to my lawyer, why don’t you?”
“And what’s this shit about Saturday?”
What shit was that? She couldn’t recall.
“Max just told me,” he went on bitterly, seeming to let the accident go. “You’re shipping out with Erika. Don’t you see—his fans’ll lynch you.”
“You saw Max?”
“We just had dinner. Don’t you understand, you’ve got to be here. You want to protect your interests, don’t you?”
“I have no interests,” Vivien said.
“Just remember, you can’t trust everyone. Everyone’s not like me and Artie.”
“Where’d you have dinner?”
“Where?” he choked, dazed at the sudden irrelevance. He shrugged and looked around, as if he’d lost his way on the dark hillside. But after a moment, he seemed to understand it was a social question being asked—by a woman who was a fixture in all the hundred-dollar French cafés. The name of the place would tell her a lot. She would see right away what kind of time they’d had.
“Nowhere,” Carl said flatly. “Just some two-bit diner. We had a burger, for Christ’s sake. Why? You got a heavy date tonight?”
She stared at him fixedly, almost as if she hadn’t heard a word. In fact, she had a very clear picture of it—him and Max, huddled in a booth in a fast-food joint. Max would have finally told him that he knew what Jasper meant to do. They probably made a deal, right on the spot. So the power was shifting quicker than she thought—quicker than she could make a move to leave. Already, it seemed she had to try so hard to pretend that things were the same as ever. They couldn’t even get off a proper gasp of relief, to think they hadn’t collided.
“I’m going out to get magazines,” she said. “I just realized—I don’t have any idea how I look this week.”
“Wait a while, Viv. Don’t leave town. We should have the money settled in a few months’ time. Then maybe you and me and Artie can get away together. Why not, huh? We’ll hire a boat of our own.”
“But Carl—why? It seems like we’ve been together half our lives already. We haven’t had a good time yet.”
She remembered the night Jasper died. When they left the house, there was this same pitch of darkness. The shafts of their headlights swept the trees. And Carl had said: “I’ve been in New York these past five days.” They were just as far out of the world as now, except here there were no lilies.
“It’s irresponsible, that’s what it is,” said Carl in a truculent temper. “You’re acting just like Jasper. You do what you damn well please, and the rest of us can go fuck ourselves.”
“Is that what I want, do you think?” she asked. “A month on the coast of Mexico, with Erika and Felix?” She was angry now, but it came out sad. She couldn’t seem to hate him. Crazy, huh? She’d never had the slightest trouble hating him before. “Why do I bother with magazines, when I’ve got you?”
She went into reverse and came away from the blasted tree. Then into first, with her foot very light on the brake and rolling forward. She glanced at him now to say goodbye. He looked as if he’d caught a chill.
“Remind me to tell you some day what I really want,” she said. “It’ll restore your faith in simple things.”
“You know I’m right,” he seethed in answer, hugging his arms against his chest as if he thought he would burst. “You won’t go now. I’ll bet you money.”
“Bet your ass,” she said with a smile. “It’s cheaper.”
She rolled away like somebody caught on a current, so she never caught the final look she left to twist his face. She swung the last loop to the Steepside gate, which opened automatically. On an impulse, feeling ornery, she hung a left at the boulevard and headed up instead of down.
She climbed a mile up into the mountains, as far as the light at Mulholland Drive. From there, she could see out onto the plain of lights that spread below in the Valley. She veered to the shoulder to take the view. Because the April night was clear, she saw to what seemed like ten or fifteen miles on either hand—as if the whole expanse were one vast printed circuit, or an endless airport where a thousand routes touched down. It was really nowhere at all, of course—just suburb on suburb, flung wide on the desert floor.
She started down the steep and hairpin route. A Willis, she thought, could spend a lifetime in the mountains high above L.A., without ever once descending here to the inland side. She couldn’t recall the last time she had been this way—unless to hook up to Route 134, going out to Pasadena, but who knew anyone there anymore? She could have sworn she’d never passed this stretch of hillside lots before. Two bedrooms, two baths, and a carport, cheek by jowl the whole way down the mountain. Each one worth about as much as the powder-blue Rolls she rode in.
Who lives here? she thought dreamily, as if she’d found the cleft in a wall of solid rock, passing into a great lost city. She realized no one would ever think to look for her anywhere here. She felt an instant sense of relaxation, as if someone had laid a downer on her. She drove like a woman bent on winning, risking more at every curve. The Rolls was fleet as a racehorse. Never the slightest screech, and all the lights were
green.
When at last she reached the level ground, she turned east on Ventura Boulevard, through the heart of Sherman Oaks. Hunching up to the wheel, she read the neon left and right. The chicken stands, the bargain banks and raw motels, the flash-on time and temp. She felt like getting lost in it, though she knew she had other things to do. She tried to focus on murder and nothing else. Like a drunk trying to walk a straight line, she affected a kind of inner squint and lasered in on Carl. She tried not to feel so happy to find herself free in a foreign clime.
Had Greg been right? He swore she’d have it easier, once she could pin it on someone else. Perhaps she was just perverse, she thought, but she wasn’t a bit convinced. Between Carl and Jasper, killer and corpse, it struck her the deal was exclusive. No less so than the deal it seemed to supersede, between Jasper and Harry Dawes. Either way, she didn’t see that she came into it at all.
It was no one else’s business but the duellists’. She wasn’t caught up by a rage of justice. She didn’t think death was wandering loose to seek more victims. Whatever it was was over with. There was no one in any peril, was there? After all, it could have gone the other way, with Carl as dead as Jasper. Jasper would never have been so dumb as not to know a duel was on. He could have struck first.
She turned into the Tower of Pizza’s parking lot. Needless to say, this whole line of argument wasn’t allowed. The widow, she knew, didn’t have the leeway to settle the matter out of court. She could see how the press would distort it, if they knew how she really felt. She sat staring in at the glare of fluorescent light, momentarily paralyzed. The hardness that had gripped her was as true to Jasper as all the decorous sentiments of his fans. But how could she ever explain it?
She slid out and locked the car and wished she didn’t look so overdressed. Worst of all, she thought, she wasn’t even sure that Greg would understand. Perhaps, from here on in, she’d better keep her feelings to herself—the way she’d always done before.
