Looking across the room, Caroline admitted to me, she had seen someone who snooped around in people’s lives, though the last thing she wanted was to induce a newspaper story about the video that Hobbs wanted. If she was going to have me try to find the Hobbs tape, then it would have to be because I wanted to do so personally. All this she understood as soon as she glanced up and saw me looking at her. Then she had excused herself from Charlie and his little group of executives and walked over toward me. Within a minute or two of our conversation she knew that she could sleep with me if she wanted. After all, she might have made colossal mistakes, but she knew how to hook a man. Perhaps, she allowed, perhaps she was also attracted to me as well. Not that she had meant to be. She liked the way I gave it back to her in that first conversation, hard, even as I was completely losing what rationality I might have had. She also liked the fact that I was married; it gave her an added measure of control.
Our waitress brought more coffee.
“You want to know if I’m going to give a copy of this tape to the police.”
She looked at me, her eyes haunted. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Here’s my answer. If, in any way, you let my wife know what has happened between us, then the police get the tape. God knows what they’ll make of it. Did you murder Simon? That’s a tough question. Certainly he threatened you. Was it self-defense? Very difficult. That’s very difficult, I would say. You could have walked into the elevator, tried to get away. You could have refused to kill him—”
“He was going to kill me.”
“No, he wasn’t. He was taping a scene. A sick scene. He wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of hiding the camera in the elevator panel if he hadn’t—”
“I swear he was going to kill me, that very moment.”
“Look at the tape, Caroline. He drops the gun down. There’s a long pause. Then you stab him. There it is, on tape.”
“No, that’s not—”
Suddenly I was very tired of myself. “Good-bye, Caroline.”
I stood up and put a few bills on the table for the tip.
“Don’t just go. Say something to me.”
I looked at her, and I knew that she didn’t care really what I thought, just that when I left she would be alone with herself again, as she always had been. I leaned down and kissed her gently on the cheek. “Be well,” I told her. “As well as you can.”
And then I left, shouldering past the other patrons, not looking back, glad to be leaving, ready to get back onto the street, ready to go at it again. I had a column to write, about the Fellows tape. At the door I thought about looking back and even wanted to, to see Caroline one last time, but I didn’t, and when I had turned the corner, I told myself that I felt much better about things.
The ugliness of it, of who I have been and who I am now, is strongest when I am with my wife and children. As they play at the beach, as we eat dinner together. As I touch Tommy’s scar. I could tell my wife about my affair with Caroline and she would, I think, forgive me in time. Hers is a genuine and true heart. But if she believes in anything, it is family, and, like a teacup that has been repaired, the fracture would always show, would always be there. Perhaps I am only a coward, but I would rather hold my own guilt close to me than force my wife to deal with it.
I have tried to be smart about all this and figure out what could go wrong in the arrangement that Caroline and I have. We both hold a card. We could both destroy each other’s lives. I have asked myself if, by not turning her in, I am betraying those who once and still loved Simon Crowley. The question is a difficult one. Mrs. Segal had loved him as only a surrogate mother could. She still ached at his death and would until she died, but, I surmised, perhaps conveniently, the fact of his death seemed not to have surprised her, given the way he lived. What would be gained by telling her that Simon had been killed by his own wife? She seemed old enough that all sorrows had melted in the deeper burden of being human, and I doubted that knowing would have added to her grief, which was already, in itself, complete.
As for Simon’s father, I have no answer. The man I met was ebbing away; what would be gained by attempting to explain it all to him? He had struggled to provide a single clue to his son’s death—is he owed a recognition of this? Or should he be left in peace? He will die anytime now, today or tomorrow or next week—it will be a mercy, if not for him, then for me.
And, as I go over all this, I find I can’t determine where the story begins or really ends. Is it Simon’s story? How a boy became a brilliant filmmaker who became a corpse? Is it the story of what happened because a Korean businessman sued an old Jewish lawyer and his wife in Queens? Is it the story of a hand surgeon who went to the trouble of putting a tuxedo into her husband’s car so that he could go to a business function? The story of a dull boy from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, who grew up to work for a “security” outfit and who, because he shot a bullet through the biceps of an eighteen-month-old boy, the son of the hand surgeon, was—as I eventually tearned—kicked down some stairs by the police three weeks later, breaking both arms and some teeth? (How oddly wretched this made me feel.) Or is it the story of Officer Fellows’ widow, who, after the call came from the detectives telling her they got the man who killed her husband, stood in the kitchen and wept? I know that because I wrote a column about it. Or, last, is it the story of an aging, obese billionaire who confessed his heart to a ravishing woman one night in a hotel room in New York City and came to regret it?
In the words of that old drunk reporter I once knew, it’s all one story, and I suppose it is, but the strand I cannot let go of is Caroline’s, of course, and having reconstructed-it in sequence, it still remains mysterious to me; how, I wonder, does the young girl standing in a South Dakota field over a dead horse become the teenager being raped by Merk, then the woman riding down the elevator in a building about to be destroyed, key in hand, and then the executive’s well-dressed partner on a plane to China? The same question could be asked of me, of course, and although my life is comparatively undramatic, I can’t help but wonder how the quiet boy fishing in the dark hole of a frozen lake came to be, twenty-five years later, the man kissing a murderess good-bye in a Manhattan eatery—the man who let her go unpunished. Caroline and I passed through each other’s lives with crazy speed, with—as Hal Fitzgerald would put it—unmanaged velocity.
Why haven’t I turned Caroline in? It’s not that I care for her, not exactly. It’s that I cannot bear to think of her in prison. Nonetheless, I keep that tape in a safe-deposit box in an obscure New York City bank. I have instructed the bank not to bill me annually; instead I arranged to pay for the next forty years in one sum. The bank clerk thought this odd, but [ pointed out that I was effectively lending the bank a considerable amount of money at no interest, and they found this observation convincing. So the tape of Caroline Crowley killing her husband, Simon, inside 537 East Eleventh Street sits in the Seventh Avenue branch of the Greater New York Savings Bank in Brooklyn, which I chose not because I have my accounts there but because I do not and because I happened to notice, while on a story not long ago, that it was a brand-new bank, and therefore unlikely to soon be torn down or sold; two plastic spools, one spun with videotape, both in a black plastic box, one side labeled, in Simon Crowley’s hand, TAPE 78 (REUSED), the cassette itself wrapped in a plastic bag from a Korean deli, the whole package inside the small metal space. And where is the safe-deposit-box key? Where did I put that? I had to think about this at some length. It’s small—perhaps an inch long, an eighth of an inch thick, and made of brass. I needed to be able to get at it someday, quickly perhaps. But I didn’t want it to be in the house; not only could Lisa or one of the kids find it, but it would be something of an obscenity to have it there. Yet where to put it? I wondered. (Where has Caroline put her key?) Not in another safe-deposit. box, of course; that creates another key. And not at the office; it could be stolen or, more likely, I would lose it. I considered burying it in the garden outside the house, perhaps co
nnected to a piece of copper wire or something, but again I could not bear seeing my children playing in the grass above it. No, the garden was too close. I considered hiding the key somewhere in Manhattan, under a rock in Central Park, perhaps, but this plan didn’t appeal to me either. The island of Manhattan is washed by a human tide each day; anything can happen, and anything does.
It was only by accident that I figured out what to do with the key. One Saturday I was inspecting the gate at the end of the tunnel and noticed not only that the gate needed repainting but that the key might fit in a small gap between two welded bars near the bottom hinge. I retrieved the key and tried it. It wedged between the bars perfectly. Perfectly. Almost as if that old ironworker had known that I might someday need such a tiny space. From any angle the key was invisible. I shut the gate forcefully half a dozen times. The key stayed put. Then I slammed the gate as hard as I could. The key didn’t move. I told Lisa I was going out to the hardware store, and there I bought a quart of Rust-Oleum brand black paint, thick and glossy, and repainted the entire gate, right over the key. When the paint dried, I painted thickly over the key igain, such that now, even upon an unlikely close inspection, it would appear to be part of the gate itself, an imperfection of metal and paint and rust. I check it from time to time; ilways still there. It has become part of the apparatus that keeps the world out, or, rather, keeps me inside mine.
If all goes as planned, at some point in the far future, perhaps when I am in my fifties or sixties, I will retrieve the videotape and destroy it. It will be interesting to see if I want :o view the tape again, assuming that I am able to procure a by-then-antiquated videotape player. I will have wondered if Caroline has kept her copy, and where, and whether she has looked at it ever or more than once, or has shown it to anyone; these are questions that presumably will be unanswerable. A lot of other things are going to happen in the future, and some will not be good. There will come a time, of course, when my family will leave our little hidden apple-tree house. We will move, and our bed will be dismantled and movers will :ake the mattress and box spring down the stairs. The photos on the mantel and the children’s things will have been packed away, along with the dining-room chairs and everything else. [ dread such a day, because it will mean either that calamity has befallen us or that a lot of time, our time, is gone. The house will be empty again, quiet again, until someone else stands there, looking at the windows and walls and floors, mindful perhaps that the last occupants, my wife and children md myself, were only passing through.
Passing through. Those words were to have been my final contemplation of this affair. I wrote them a few months ago, when I was sure that the matter had settled in my heart. But it had not. And so here is my last confession, not as bad as the ones that have gone before it, but indicative, I fear, of the basic weakness in my character, a rotted sentimentality, an inability to let things have their end.
It was just this September, and the story I was working on was, sadly enough, a forgettable triple killing in Spanish Harlem. Two guys with guns holding up a delicatessen. The twist was witnessed by an old woman sprawled on the floor: after emptying the register and executing the deli owner, one of the gunmen fired at the deli’s glass door, thinking the police were coming in. They weren’t—he’d seen his own reflection. Instead he hit his fellow gunman—his brother—killing him instantly. The first gunman, distraught, watched his brother die, then pushed the muzzle of his semiautomatic against his own heart and fired. I logged a good interview the next morning with the grandmother, who listened to Tito Puente records and kept parakeets and remembered the two men as boys. The column was due that afternoon, and as I was driving back down Fifth Avenue with the windows open, I passed the green-and-white-striped awning at Sixty-sixth Street. The remembrance of Caroline came back to me with merciless clarity. I missed her with foolish desperation. The mind is cruel this way. I pulled over next to a fire hydrant and sat in the car, glancing up into the rearview mirror from time to time. I had little doubt that Caroline was no longer living in the apartment house; she was probably married to Charlie now and had moved out of the city. I picked up the new phone in my car and, remembering the neighborhood where Caroline had shown me the picture of the three-story white house, called information and asked for her. There was no Caroline Crowley listed, but there was a listing for Charlie and Caroline Forster, and I got the address.
In a little more than an hour I was there, and I eased along the leafy streets, stopping twice for school buses. Each house sat grandly on its plot; each was beautiful or magnificent. An occasional service van passed, green or red, with the name of the tradesman neatly lettered-on the side. I found the house; it was as it had been pictured: two ancient copper beeches flanking a glassed-in porch, the drive curving up around one side, the lawn a great long rug of grass that ran fifty yards to the street. I stopped. There was a big car in the driveway, but I did not see anyone. Of course I would not drive up to the house. I sat thinking how foolish I was, how idiotic my sentimentality, how dangerous my curiosity. The wind pushed against the leaves of the beeches, shaking them, a sight that would thrill children.
I do not know how long I sat there, musing. The story was large and heavy inside me, and always would be. But then, I told myself, this was something that I had brought upon myself. What an asshole I had been, not even telling Lisa the truth of things after she returned with the kids from California, instead letting the bad time drift downward into the mud of the marriage, hidden beneath a surface of children and work and days. Many evenings Lisa had looked at me waiting for the conversation to begin, and once she had even seemed to start it herself, but I think she finally decided that whatever was in me now was dark and ugly and better left where it was. In this way, for the time being, the marriage is damaged.
Now the wind gusted about me, whirling leaves into the air, and, suddenly desiring the sensation of motion, thinking about the return drive and the column due later in the day, I eased the car forward, and that was when I glimpsed the figure by the rhododendron bushes around the far side of the house—a woman, her blonde hair pinned up, kneeling in gardening clothes with a trowel and a basket. I’d almost missed her. Oh, Caroline. She was intent on her work and did not notice the car. She dug at the earth, plunging the trowel into it, and then reached in her basket. I could only imagine that she was planting bulbs for the next spring. She worked for a few minutes, then sat back and wiped her brow. I could see by the cast of her shoulders that she felt safe and unknown there. We learn more about other people when they don’t realize that we are watching. This was what Simon Crowley knew so well. What a nest of ironies; in his attempt to study his wife and learn who she really might be, Simon Crowley created arguably the best record of who he himself was. It was his final creation and he didn’t even get to see it. Now his former wife, the one who had killed him, the one whom I also had loved in my own foolish way, pulled her gloves back on and set herself to her task; her motion released mine, and as I let my foot rise from the brake, the wheels rolling, I wished then, with a final sweet pain, that despite Caroline’s hard soul, she might yet attempt some act of redemption, that despite my own betrayal of those whom I loved most, I might yet prove worthy of their affections. Better then, I thought, that our respective confessions go unheard, that they fall away into time. There would, I knew, be other questions to worry about, other dark crises of heart and hope; sooner or later life brings to all of us some form of suffering. Would that we were equal to it always.
But perhaps such a thought was merely a sentimental lie. Perhaps we are a society of murderers now—murderers and their accomplices.
The night is the corridor of history, not the history of famous people or great events, but that of the marginal, the ignored, the suppressed, the unacknowledged; the history of vice, of error, of confusion, of fear, of want; the history of intoxication, of vainglory, of delusion, of dissipation, of delirium. It strips off the city’s veneer of progress and modernity and civilization a
nd reveals the wilderness. In New York City it is an accultured wilderness that contains all the accumulated crime of past nights … and it is not an illusion. It is the daytime that is the chimera, that pretends New York is anyplace, maybe with bigger buildings, but just as workaday, with a population that goes about its business and then goes to sleep, a great machine humming away for the benefit of the world. Night reveals this to be a pantomime. In the streets at night, everything kept hidden comes forth, everyone is subject to the rules of chance, everyone is potentially both murderer and victim, everyone is afraid, just as anyone who sets his or her mind to it can inspire fear in others. At night, everyone is naked.
—LUC SANTE, Low Life
About the Author
COLIN HARRISON is the author of seven novels, including Risk, The Finder, Afterburn, and The Havana Room. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, writer Kathryn Harrison, and their three children. You can sign up for author updates here.
Also by Colin Harrison
Risk
The Finder
The Havana Room
Afterburn
Bodies Electric
Break and Enter
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to Michael Daly, the columnist at the Daily News, Peg Tyre and Paul Moses at Newsday, Karen Van Rosen, former librarian at Newsday, and Mark Lasswell; Kristin Juska and Pat Friedman, authors of the note here; Rahul Mehta, Nora Krug, and Hilary Davidson; my colleagues Susan Burton, Clara Jeffery, and Ben Metcalf; Babo Harrison, Jack Hitt, Don Snyder, John Bradford, M.D., Mark Costello, Greg Critser, Tony Earley, Earl Shorris, and Richard Zacks; Kris Dahl, Karen Rinaldi, and Ann Patty.
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