We are too concerned with the surface of things. Accumulation for accumulations sake. We fail to see what lies beneath. We move from thing to thing, person to person, belief to belief. Materialism is the spirituality of the New Age, cloaked in self-help, in psychology, in a pan-religious Unitarianism that ignores the real demons within.
To fill that emptiness, the writers concluded, we consume. Not just objects, but each other as well.
Nonsense, of course. I’m sure you agree.
The kind of babble you might expect from a freelance journalist in the Sunday supplement. Nonetheless, the writers were still here, scribbling away, and we were impressed by their presence. Elizabeth’s testimony continued. Jamie asked her about a night she and Minor had gotten together at Golden Hinde, not long after I was brought in for questioning.
“What was the subject of that conversation?”
“Minor was worried. The evidence against Jake, he said it looked pretty bad.”
“What was your reaction?”
“I didn’t know what to think.”
“Did it ever occur to you that he was trying to remove your husband as a rival?”
She hesitated. “No.”
“Did you believe the case against your husband, when Minor first told you?”
“Not at first.”
“But later you did?”
“I began to wonder.”
“In other words, the more intimate you became with Minor Robinson, the more you doubted your husband’s innocence.”
Sabel jumped to his feet. “Leading the witness.”
“Sustained,” said the judge.
Elizabeth’s composure had diminished. Her blush had begun to deepen but it wasn’t a pretty blush. It made her face look raw. She still had her beauty, more or less—but her white hair under the courtroom light had lost its platinum sheen. It no longer seemed dramatic but rather colorless and frayed. She touched the pearls about her neck. It was a small gesture, one that I’d seen many times—a simple flourish, the kind that wealthy girls make, with bluing in their blood—but at the moment the elegance was gone and she seemed fragile and a little bit old.
“Mrs. Danser,” Jamie asked, “did it ever occur to you in regard to Mr. Robinson, that your friendship—as you refer to it—and his role as prosecutor, that these two things might put him into conflict?”
“It made for a conflict in us both, I think.”
“Yet you continued to see him, even though he was prosecuting your husband.”
“He came by the house a couple of times. To talk.”
“About what?”
I could sense her weakening. If I could have gone to her then and erased everything that happened—and returned to that moment in her convertible, to that halting look in her blue eyes—I might have done so. “After the lab evidence came in, Minor was more and more convinced that Jake was the killer. He was worried for me. He was concerned, about what Jake might do.”
“Were you in love with Mr. Robinson?”
“We had friendship that went back a number of years.”
“Friendship?” Jamie’s voice inflected higher, and her face lit up. “Was it this friendship that inspired him to come out to Golden Hinde on the evening of the 29th? The evening he was shot and killed.”
Elizabeth’s lips quivered and her eyes misted and I thought for a moment she might collapse into tears.
“Come now, the police have cleared you of all charges. Tell us what happened.”
“Jake had disappeared,” she said. “Minor was worried he might come by the house. He was concerned for my safety.” They went over the evening again, detail by detail. Minor knocking on the door. The scuffling in the shadows. The gun on the carpet. How Elizabeth, in the darkness, could not recognize for certain which of us was which.
“When you shot Mr. Robinson, who did you think he was?”
“I didn’t know.”
“Please, Mrs. Danser. You must have had some thoughts in your mind. When you pointed that gun, you had two figures to choose from.”
“I was confused,” she said. “Minor and my husband, they have similar builds. Minor had taken off his coat, but I didn’t know that. All I saw was the white shirt. I thought maybe Jake, or someone else, I don’t know who, had broken in somehow. And when I saw the man in the white shirt, pressing the other man against the wall—when I heard him cry out, I fired.”
“So you shot him?”
“Yes.”
“And when it turned out you were mistaken, and you saw Minor Robinson on the floor, and your husband emerged from the shadows, what did you do?”
Elizabeth looked resigned. She was undone. Jamie had gotten her to pay for my defense, then double-crossed her, releasing information about her and Minor, turning her life into a tabloid affair for the sake of my defense. Now Jamie sought to humiliate her in the courtroom.
“I shot him,” she said, with the faintest of smiles. “Twice. But as you can see, he refuses to die.”
There was laughter in the courtroom. I might have laughed, too—if it had been some other man’s wife up there, and she were talking about someone other than myself.
“Mrs. Danser, were you having an affair with Minor Robinson?”
“Objection.”
“Overruled. The witness will answer the question.” Elizabeth glanced at me as if from the bottom of the sea, her eyes glassy, remote. The truth was going to come out now. I had been cuckolded. I saw sorrow in her aging face, and grief—and a dark expectancy, too.
The judged prodded her again. Jamie repeated the question.
“Were you having an affair with Minor Robinson?”
“Yes,” she said at last.
She said it proudly, and with malice, and her expression reminded me of how she had looked that day out on the cliff when I’d realized she meant to end it between us. My affair with Sara, she meant to hold it bitterly in her heart. I felt my own anger now. Maybe it was not reasonable, but I could not help feeling that if she had not pushed me away, that night at the Wilders’ party, I would not have pursued Sara. This trial would never have taken place.
I am innocent.
Queen Jamie pressed on. She had the angle she wanted. She puffed herself up, slatternly with indignation.
“Are you telling me, Mrs. Danser, that you were sleeping with the prosecuting attorney. The man who was manipulating evidence against your husband—”
“Objection! Leading the witness.”
“Sustained.”
“The same man who went back to the arbor to gather the silk tie.”
“Objection!”
The judged rapped his gavel. “Order!” he snapped.
“The same man who—”
“Objection!”
The judge gaveled her down. “Ms. Kaufman, be quiet! And stay quiet! Or I will cite you for contempt!”
Finally Queen Jamie obeyed. The judge ordered her last remarks stricken from the official record. Jamie stood chafing, pacing, angry, but it was all calculated, part of the show. She had accomplished what she had meant to accomplish. The jury knew what she wanted them to know. The former prosecutor had been sleeping with the defendant’s wife. And all the evidence against me was tainted by this simple fact.
What follows, it seems like a dream, and in that dream, I see the last days of the trial, and the faces of the jury, and feel again the swings of emotion. I see Sabel, too, delivering his final statement, repeating the evidence in his slow, methodical way, building towards the moment when he would point in my direction, and ask the jury to convict me for the murder of Sara Johnson. Then it was Jamie’s turn, summarizing our case, explaining again how I had walked out to the arbor that night, and made love to Sara, and left behind my tie. I was an innocent man, guilty of indiscretions, yes, she admitted, but were these any worse than the indiscretions committed by the deceased prosecutor? Whose hands were all over the evidence, guilty of the baldest of manipulations, for the basest of motives? How could you trust the evidence
gathered by Mrs. Danser’s illicit lover? What kind of justice is this? she asked, and at some point in this memory, this dream, I see the jury file out. I am alone in my cell. My heart races. The walls are gray, and I can see myself disappearing into that grayness, down long corridors into days that are yet more gray and in that grayness the jury returns. The foreman stands, reading the crimes of which I am accused. A woman on the jury gives me an unhappy smile. Then the verdict itself, the rush of noise, the gargled cry of Sara’s boyfriend, the disbelieving sobs of her relatives, cries of injustice—Jamie embracing me meanwhile, an embrace like the devils, spider-like and cold—and the video strobe in my face. On the courthouse steps, Jamie speaks for me, pushing back the crowd, insisting I am too exhausted to make a statement, saying this has been very hard on me, but now is the time for healing, and at this I bow my head, moving toward the waiting car, but not before a smile washes over my face, and the tears well up, and ten thousand shutters snap all at once—and it is that picture I see the next day on the tabloid, the smile together with the gleam in the eye, the smirk, that photo underneath the headline: PSYCHO SHRINK GOES FREE
Epilogue
38.
I have rebuilt my life. I know there are people whose blood curdles at the thought. Who believe I have gotten away with murder. Not just of Sara but also of Angela Mori. And others, they say now, compiling a growing list. Blaming me for every corpse in a wayside ditch.
After the trial, I tried to stay on in Marin, but I was too much recognized. Vilified in convenience stores. Spat upon by women with remade breasts and dyed blonde hair. People would slow down their white sedans and point at me as I walked under the pepper trees. It was a hard bit of ignominy, but there were others also who sought me out. Men who clapped me upon the back and women who, when they saw me in the supermarket aisle, suddenly became wide-eyed and flirty.
I was photographed in nightclubs. I was seen dancing, drinking, dating. There are those who say I stayed in my old haunts to rub my nose in the justice system, to pose in front of the cameras, to mock. To torment poor Elizabeth. But that is unkind. I’m aware that there were those, after the trial, who wanted to reopen the case against her. For the death of Minor Robinson, for my shooting. But the DA’s office declined—it was too great a reversal to go after her now. I am aware, too, of the fact that Elizabeth moved from the area, and of what happened to her afterwards. Or of the stories anyway. The house on Tomales Spit. The abandoned dinghy. The man who rented it, under an assumed name, and disappeared.
Some people are cursed. There are people whom the devil follows. Given all that has happened, I suppose it is inevitable that certain rumors would circulate. That these rumors would say I was the unidentified man. The one people saw in the darkness that day, on the waterfront, up there on the sand on Tomales.
The truth is, I had resettled long before her disappearance. I lived an itinerant life for a while, I admit. I changed my name, my looks. I took up residence in old hotels, but eventually I found a new life, in a new town. I pulled myself together.
For obvious reasons, I cannot tell you the name of that town. I do not want my alleged crimes to haunt me. I can tell you, though, that in many ways—the most important ways, perhaps—the place where I live now is not so far from where I lived before. I can create for you the general shape of my life now, the truth of things, even if in the interest of this truth there are certain details I must alter. Such is often the way with truth. The facts are not wide enough to contain it.
I don’t think I risk my identity too much if I tell you I am remarried. In the town where I am living, there is a college nearby. I have found myself a new career, lecturing to students, undergraduates in the field of psychology. I have always been able to speak well, and though I started out as an adjunct, it wasn’t too long before I had earned myself a small place on the faculty here. I should tell you, too, that the years have not been unkind to me. I am a decade older—and I have thickened as men do—but though my face carries the marks of its hardship, it carries, too, the look of experience. I have grown into my new role, taking on the look of a college professor, with my jacket, my glasses and my well-trimmed beard.
I still, sometimes, wear my hair in a pony.
I have stepped into my new life as onto a stage, I admit, but I enjoy it. I enjoy, too, those young eyes watching me at the lectern, as I pose and ponder, as I remove my jacket, roll up my sleeves, write on the blackboard the name of the class:
The psychology of the self.
I look about earnestly, and the earnest young eyes look at me full of expectation.
This new existence, I have not achieved it alone. It wasn’t too long after I found my way here that I met up with my new wife. She is a beautiful woman, and there are times when it seems this is the only life I have ever lived. She has just turned the comer on fifty, and I am not so far behind. She has three children who are grown. Her clothes are stylish and her hair is colored in such a way as to resemble a sun-drenched version of its former self. On the refrigerator there are pictures of the two of us together, on vacations to the kind of places people like us go. Tuscany, maybe. Or Sao Paulo. Or one of those beaches on the backside of the Big Island, away from the tourists. We lounge in our polo shirts and our shorts, mug for the camera, put our hands around each other’s waists. We smile. Also, on that same refrigerator, are the pictures of her kids and their families, children and grandchildren. They are like my own now. A couple of times a year, they make it home, gathering around the table for the feast, and the children grab me about the knees and call me grandpa.
So I have left the past behind as well as I could. Part of it lives there in the darkness, in my memory, but those memories are for me alone. If my wife wonders about my life before we married, she doesn’t ask—just as I don’t ask her. She has her photographs in her albums, of course, but they are but thin manifestations, images between bound covers there on the bottom shelf.
In many ways my life perhaps is not so different than yours. I have my routine, my work to do. I drive down our tree-lined street, through the neighborhood, across town. I walk across campus. My office is lined with books, with Freud and Hillman and Jung and Rank, case studies of this and that, deviance, brain disease, sexual insatiability, and when my students come to visit they glance about at all these books as if they are doorways into the unknown. I linger in the halls here. I talk to my colleagues. (I am well-liked, but there is one here who despises me. There is always one. He fought my appointment, cast aspersions on my scholarship, resists my promotions. The simple explanation: he is envious of my success. Of my wife, too, I suspect. But, as I said, there is always one like him, one such shadow.) I go about my business. I walk down the hall to the class where the light comes pouring through the windows like something in a sunlit dream.
I write on the board:
Who are you?
I smile, and the kids look about at each other, confused. Then I explain to them. It is a game. I invite the kids to play, to peel back the onion, all of our multiple selves, until eventually we come to that frightening part that lives in each of us. I look at a young woman in the front row, leaning on her elbows, hanging on to every word. Sometimes she comes up to me after class. I have seen her lingering—off the main path, in the daffodils, in her plaid skirt, her white blouse, her black boots.
In every life there are certain patterns, certain things that get repeated,
A while ago, I contacted Nate Jackson, the private detective. He was surprised to hear from me, but he talked in the old congenial way. His daughter had had more trouble, it seemed—and had moved to Europe, across the sea.
“That’s too bad,” I said. “There’s a small matter, I wanted to clear up. The tape.”
“Oh, I got it, doc. It was right where you said.”
“Good, good. It turns out, there’s a duplicate.”
There was silence now, a little awkward. I heard that breathing of his, and imagined his wide cheeks. Did he think I had wi
thheld it on purpose? I didn’t want him to believe this. So I told him I’d be glad to send it to him. There was just a small favor he could do.
Go out into the marsh. To the wooden pier. Take five steps east. Then dig.
He obliged me. It’s funny the ties that bind us to people you would not expect.
As soon as I received the box, I took it down into the basement. The lock was rusted, and I had to break it—but the contents were pretty much unchanged. I looked through it all. The button of a skirt. A debutante’s ring. The earring I had taken from Sara on our last meeting. A dozen items like this, two dozen. Collected over time.
All of these were things I had once hoped to bury, but now I realized the folly of it. Because there is always one more thing to bury. We are never done. The reason I wanted the box, I had some mementos to add. New things I won’t mention—another earring, perhaps, a skirtband—but also a certain necklace, with pearls the size of a child’s teeth. So when the box came, I took it downstairs. There was a loose stone—a brick to pull out, and I put new memories inside that little box, and shoved the entire collection into the damp hole behind that loose brick. I go back on occasion, down to the basement, and fumble longingly. Maybe add something more.
Elizabeth, I think, My poor Elizabeth.
I go upstairs. Mary, I see, is waiting. She has her hands on her hips, but she gives me a kiss. Somewhat reluctantly, I admit. We are no longer in that phase of our marriage where we touch and fondle at the slightest impulse. Today she looks at me with something like skepticism. Our ardor for one another has cooled. It is inevitable, I guess.
“Where were you?” she asks.
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