“I am in psychotherapy trying to learn how to be trustworthy. I am in psychotherapy trying to learn how not to screw things up with Ophelia. I am trying to learn how to not screw things up with my son. And his mother. I am trying to learn how to not screw things with my partner. And, no, not that kind of partner.
“I am trying to learn how to not screw things up with my friend.
“I don’t want to screw up ever again in a way that might lead me to fear prison. I am in therapy to make sure I stay out of prison this time.” He blinked. “That’s where I was the night Big Elias died. I was at a friggin’ psychotherapy appointment. Happy?” Sam slammed back his drink and poured another.
We were quiet for a good while. I wasn’t confident that the interlude was about Sam offering me permission or opportunity to respond. I didn’t respond.
I thought the evening might end where it was.
But Sam said, “I am trying to learn how not to be a self-interested prick like Big Elias Contopo. I don’t want to die being crushed to death by horses. If you know what I mean.” I didn’t. “And I don’t want to die thinking that most of the people who knew me well would be saying ‘good riddance.’”
“You’re nothing like Big Elias. You are—”
My phone began to vibrate before I completed the sentence. I bet it was Amy; it felt like her knack for timing. But it could have been one of the kids. I had to look. I checked the screen. Sam had guessed already. He said, “The fucking beguiler?”
“Yep. The fucking beguiler,” I said.
I held out the phone so he could see the text. It was a seconds-old photo of Amy and another woman beside an outdoor fire at the Little Nell. Small table. Big smiles. A few empties.
Sam said, “She’s a damn ten. I don’t remember her being that hot the last time I saw her.”
I could have reminded Sam that Amy was unconscious the last time he saw her. Most of us yield an involuntary point or two on the ten-scale during unconsciousness.
“Did you sleep with her?” he asked me. “That night in Tarzana?”
It wasn’t a prurient query. Well, not only a prurient query. I knew why he was asking. My mind was busy making connections the way my mind does. Sam had just called Amy a ten. I recalled that he’d once described Raoul as a ten. I couldn’t remember anyone else of either gender that had ever earned that designation from my friend. Wait. Maybe Gibbs Storey, an ex-patient of mine. Sam had most definitely been infatuated with her.
I said, “She crawled into my bed. Naked. I came this close.” I pinched the tip of my index finger and the pad of my thumb together. “But I did not sleep with her.”
Sam lowered his voice. He made it so low that even through the tin walls of the cheap doublewide an eavesdropping Ophelia could not have heard his whisper. He said, “That night in the Valley?” He took a deep breath before he went on, his eyes on the photo on my phone. “If that woman had crawled into my bed naked? The honest-to-God truth? I would have said ‘fuck it.’ And then I would have.” He sighed. “Fucked it.
“And that is why I am in therapy, Alan. I can’t be that guy anymore. I can’t be the guy that people can’t know when to trust.”
“… when to trust.”
When to trust. Oh my God, I thought. Oh my God.
I didn’t recall getting to my feet.
I didn’t recall stepping from the deck, or walking, or running, toward my house.
But I was far from the doublewide, literally as well as figuratively, when I heard Sam call out, “Alan, are you okay? Alan? Alan? Are you sick?”
51
I HAD BEEN REMEMBERING THAT morning incorrectly.
Incompletely would be more accurate.
The ego defense at work? Suppression. Or denial. Maybe denial and suppression in consort. Or perhaps it wasn’t an ego defense at all. Maybe I just forgot what Lauren said. That can happen, too. During times of acute stress especially.
That morning had been a time of acute stress. Especially.
That morning, after she heard my belated admission that I had neither informed her that Sam had murdered the woman in Frederick nor that I had been involved after the fact, I had heard Lauren say, “You should have trusted me.”
Those words—you should have trusted me—admonished me. They hurt me. I had replayed the memory a hundred or a thousand times. Not once had I not felt the sting of her cryptic appraisal of my failure to trust her.
But that was not the entirety of what she said in that sentence. It was only the part that I had been able to remember. Sam’s words—when to trust—triggered my recall of the remainder.
Lauren had also included a preface to her rebuke, a contextual phrase. A limiting phrase. A phrase that, for me, changed almost everything.
The complete sentence she uttered that morning was, “About this, you should have trusted me.” About this …
When Sam said I can’t be the guy that people can’t know when to trust I finally remembered Lauren’s qualifying phrase. Standing alone on the lane, in the dark, I recast the entire moment in my memory. Lauren’s about this had been obscured. But remembering it allowed the totality of what Lauren was telling me that morning to become as clear as the purple in her luminous eyes.
Drunk and bewildered, vertiginous from alcohol and unsettling truth, I replayed the recovered moment and I replayed it and I replayed it. Testing it for accuracy. But not a frame changed, not a syllable was altered with the replays. My memory was clear. I could see the moment in its entirety. My eyes had been on Lauren’s face, on her lips, as they formed the two words that changed everything.
Lauren had said, “About this, you should have trusted me.”
From that morning until the instant on Ophelia’s deck—after the spicy rye, the icy Kumamotos, the white Tyvek on Tatonka Trail, the death-defying legends of Ivy Baldwin, and after Sam’s admission about what he needed to do in psychotherapy—I had been living in the fog of Lauren’s reproach. I had been blinded by her admonishment about not trusting her. In my world I had been hearing the echoes of Lauren’s nearly final words as her last measure of her disappointment in me.
By the end—of her life, of our marriage—I was predisposed to hear her words as admonishments. I knew that was mostly on me, not on her. But that morning, I’d heard her tell me that the failure to trust—you should have trusted me—had been mine. I’d survived that morning’s trauma believing that our failure as a couple was about my failure to trust her.
Since the original sin had been mine, the secondary sin had to be mine, too. Venial mine. Mortal mine. The sins of our marriage, all mine.
But with the refreshed memory and the two new words I realized that my wife wasn’t only expressing her disappointment that I had not trusted her, she was also making a clear admission to me that she had not been deserving of my trust about something else.
With the fresh memory I felt myself on a knife’s edge, aware of a certain yin/yang synchronicity that was—finally—a balancing of what had always felt unbalanced. For us.
Us.
52
LAUREN AND I had not been a couple certain we would marry.
We embraced the certainty of our uncertainty. It made everything more tender for us as we approached “I do.”
I didn’t recognize it then—it didn’t come into focus until after her death—but our mutual reticence about marrying was a marriage of our individual reticences.
I never considered that our reticence was due to a lack of love. I didn’t doubt her love. I would find it hard to believe she doubted mine. So what was the doubt?
Lauren was reticent about us—the future married us—because she didn’t feel she was good enough for me. Her childhood? Her divorce? Her illness? I never understood the genesis. But her self-doubt dined with us at almost every meal, slept with us almost every night, and joined us for occasional threesomes in the marital bed.
I too was reticent about us—the future married us—because I feared that I wasn’t good enough fo
r her. Was that because of the secrets I’d kept? Or the hidden damage from keeping them? My doubts doubledated with Lauren’s doubts long before we said our “I do’s” and long after.
Together, though? We moved forward. Sometimes well. Sometimes not. We proceeded as though our reticences balanced us. That crazy yin/yang thing.
Amid all the shared reticence, though, I felt there existed a persistent verity about how we perceived our personal failings in the marriage.
About this … you should have trusted me. My suppression of the about this from my memory of that last morning illuminated that stubborn truth about our respective character differences in a way that permitted me to see something I had not previously been able to recognize.
My half-drunken insight was this: Lauren had spent our marriage trying to prove that her thesis—that she wasn’t good enough for me—was right. That is what Joost—her echo tryst in Holland—had been about. That is what Raoul—and the Louboutins and the back-seam silk stockings—was about.
My goal had always been different. I woke each morning of our marriage determined to prove that my thesis—that I wasn’t good enough for her—was wrong. I was intent on proving the antithetical hypothesis that I was good enough for her.
That is what my restraint with Amy, the fucking beguiler, had been about. And the same for a woman named Ottavia who’d offered me a holiday from my vows. And that is what my resistance to the temptations of Sawyer—a prodigal ex—had been about.
Was Lauren’s affair with Raoul chicken, or was it egg? Was it Lauren’s failing, or was it her response to her perception of my failing? I didn’t know. Perhaps if I had paid more attention to our reticence at the beginning, and in the middle, I would have been able to muster more clarity about our foggy end.
The irony that slapped at me in the dark, on the lane? Lauren and I had each always wanted to be right. And that morning, the morning of the beginning of our end, we were somehow both right.
My original fear—that I wasn’t good enough for her—was proven correct. I had failed her in myriad ways. In the many days since that morning I had come to believe that she needed and wanted me to fail her.
How was Lauren right? Her original fear—that she wasn’t good enough for me—was proven correct, too. I tried to convince myself that the reason she ended up not good enough was because of her weakness. I wanted to believe that Joost, and Raoul, and maybe unknown and unnumbered other men who might have shared her bed, were all evidence she was accumulating so that she could prosecute her own failings.
I was even tempted to seek craven comfort by wrapping myself in the horsehair of that conclusion. But I knew any comfort would be illusory. Or just bullshit.
Why was that true? Because I wasn’t a better spouse than Lauren. She wasn’t a worse spouse than I was. We had entered into the marital equation with different proofs to solve. As a couple we never confronted those differences. We didn’t let our doubts bring us together. The doubts divided us before they split us.
In the end we failed together.
One of the stray facts rattling in my brain from Sam’s telling of the legend of Ivy Baldwin was that Ivy had called his act on the high wire the “greatest poison in the world. One drop could kill you.”
That felt right to me. That was the balance of the unbalanced. That had been my marriage.
SAM’S VOICE INTRUDED. He wanted to know if I was all right. I spotted headlights from the north. A car coming. I held my breath, waiting for the shape of the vehicle to emerge from the dark. I was thinking Carl Luppo.
The approaching headlights blinded me and focused me.
Lauren? That I can rationalize why you’ve hurt me and betrayed me doesn’t change a thing. So fuck you anyway.
I looked over my shoulder at Sam.
I want to believe you about not killing Big Elias. And about being in therapy. But I don’t. Wishing won’t make that true.
I turned away from him.
I didn’t tell Sam I was okay.
The night I had planned was, after all, about the truth.
53
THE CAR WAS KIRSTEN’S. I waited on the steps of the front porch as she killed the engine. To my right, up the lane, Sam stood on the deck of the doublewide, his arms folded across his chest the way big men cross their arms. Not quite all the way.
Were I in Sam’s position on Ophelia’s deck observing Kirsten’s arrival—were I cognizant, as Sam was, of the texts from the fucking beguiler in Aspen—I might have been sorting prurient assumptions about late-night booty calls and alcohol-impaired judgment.
In fact, if my earlier suppositions about the object of Sam’s affections were true, Sam might also have been wondering what the hell his current secondary squeeze was doing within steps of his primary squeeze’s insubstantial front door so late at night.
Sam appeared to be wavering—as in going back and forth in a horizontal plane in my less-than-rock-solid vision—but I was nearly certain that if Sam thought Kirsten’s arrival had carnal implications, at least for me, he was in error. Hers was no booty call.
The right conclusion? I would discover that soon enough.
She exited her car without even a cursory glance toward Sam. He retrieved the platter with the oyster shells and carried it inside the doublewide.
Kirsten sat next to me on the cedar stoop. “You’re up,” she said. Pause. “And you’ve been drinking.”
“Does a man good on occasion.”
“This was one of those occasions?”
“Had a heart-to-heart with a friend. Did some thinking, too.”
“Boy friend or girl friend?”
I thought that an interesting question. “Boy.”
“Thinking was about Lauren?”
“How did you know?”
“I’ve been there, Alan. I was widowed the way you were widowed. I know what it’s like, after. I know about the reruns. The over and over and overs. That’s what my daughter used to call my ruminations. My what-ifs. The over and over and overs.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I was doing some of that.”
“I knew Lauren, too,” Kirsten said. “Don’t pretend. You knew she was unhappy. Not just with you. You can’t go back and change that.”
It wasn’t a question. I said, “Yeah.”
“Your over and over and over is what? That Lauren was unhappy with you?”
“She was.”
“Maybe. Even assuredly. But that wasn’t all. Lauren was unhappy with her life. That she’d failed to maximize her opportunities. By her illness, by fate, by choices she made. You couldn’t fix that.”
I didn’t know what to say. I felt like I should argue the point. To defend a woman for whom I felt fury. And love. But my heart wasn’t in the debate.
In that moment I needed Lauren to stay buried. So that my rage could stay buried, too.
“She may have wanted you to fix all that. But she knew you couldn’t. And”—Kirsten leaned forward until I looked at her eyes—“she knew she wouldn’t let you try.”
“I did try.”
She touched my knee. “That’s marriage,” Kirsten said. “That’s love.”
“She let other men try, too.”
“She let other men comfort her. Distract her.”
Pleasure her. I sighed.
I hoped Kirsten was upwind; my sigh tasted of bivalves and whiskey.
Kirsten said, “That was Sam over there by that trailer?”
“He’s become attached to the woman who bought the property after the house fire. It’s temporary, I think. The trailer, not their relationship.” I watched Kirsten’s eyes for shimmers of dismay at the news of Sam’s attachment. I saw nothing. She either had a therapist face—one that could go all–Mount Rushmore in reaction to surprising news—or I had rye-impaired vision. Or the fact that Sam had a girlfriend wasn’t news to her.
Or meant nothing to her. I was sober enough to recognize that I was drunk enough not to be at my discerning best.
She said, �
��I didn’t want to have this conversation on the phone. Nor did I think it prudent to wait.” She paused. “Since you have your meeting in Denver tomorrow. I’m in a position to save you and your new lawyer some important hours and days.”
“I understand.” I didn’t understand but indicating that we were on the same page seemed an agreeable thing to do. I had to come to terms with the rage. It felt raw. I would need to spend a few sleepless nights with the anger to see if I could tame it.
Kirsten asked, “You haven’t read the contents of the Elliot envelope?”
Oh, that’s what this is about. “No. I remain reluctant.”
She leaned forward again. She pulled my chin toward her so that our eyes met. I guessed she was assessing my sobriety. She said, “I did read the pages.”
My brain was soft from the whiskey and distracted by the view of my marriage I had in my rearview mirror, but I had enough mental wattage to perceive that Kirsten was sketching out new dots for me to connect.
“I figured that’s why you came.” I hadn’t figured that but it seemed like another agreeable thing to say. “The pages? You deemed them worthy”—I found deemed them worthy quite difficult to enunciate—“of a drive across town late at night?”
“I did.” She glanced in the direction of the doublewide. “Can we go in?”
We went in. The dogs did their greeting thing before I led Kirsten to the bar stools at the kitchen counter. “No,” she said. She took my hand and tugged me toward the sofa that was perched in just the right location in the family room so that it seemed to float above the twinkling carpet of Boulder Valley like an infinity pool. From prior drunk experience I knew that if I put my bare feet on the coffee table in just the right spot I could divide up the urban street grid with my toes.
I considered sharing that fact with Kirsten, but recognized that another time would be better. In that consideration and that decision I saw evidence that I was more inebriated than I thought and that I was less inebriated than I thought.
I sat first. She sat beside me, one knee pulled up so that she could face me. She said, “Lauren was collecting information about Elliot. Had been for years. She seemed interested in why he planted his flag in Boulder. Do you know what that was about?”
Compound Fractures Page 28
