Who Killed Dorian Gray?

by Carole Elizabeth Buggé

  “Uh, yes—briefly, in the hall.”

  Billy’s eyes met hers and Claire smiled.

  “I enjoyed that cartoon you put up in the kitchen,” she said.

  Billy looked at her as though she had just uttered a sentence in Urdu. He blinked, his eyelids heavy. “It’s a well-stocked kitchen,” he said, his hooded eyes already restless. Claire turned to Gary for help, but he had already struck up a conversation with Evelyn Gardner, who was gesturing dramatically, her voice rising and falling as she related some anecdote.

  Claire stood holding her plate of vegetables, wanting to move away but unable to think of an excuse. She had the impression that Billy found the cartoon remark somehow embarrassing, that it had been the wrong thing to say.

  “It’s a wonderful house, isn’t it?” she said a little desperately, suddenly uncomfortably aware of the sound of her own voice.

  Billy cocked his head back and studied the curtain rods. “I can’t imagine what it’s like up here in the winter,” he said, swinging his head slowly from side to side.

  “Oh, I’ll bet it gets really cold and snows all the time,” Claire said too eagerly, a dip of panic in her stomach.

  Billy stopped his head oscillations and sighed heavily.

  Claire’s left palm began to itch. She felt as though Billy was launching a series of conversational boats that she kept missing.

  After a few more minutes with Billy Trimble, Claire concluded that he came at conversation from an oblique angle: no matter what you said to him, his reply invariably bore only a vague relationship to your remark, so that you weren’t sure he had heard you correctly. But the most disconcerting thing about him was his eyes, which wandered about the room as if searching for someone more scintillating to talk to. Standing there, Claire had the feeling that she didn’t have his full attention; it was as if he were a sailboat tacking madly at angles to avoid sailing into the conversational wind. His lazy, laconic way of talking reinforced the feeling that you were an insufficient source of stimulation.

  Suddenly she saw her escape: Maya Sorenson glided into view across the room, and Claire decided to make a run for it.

  “Oh, there’s Maya!” she chirped. “Will you excuse me? I have to talk to her about something.”

  Billy nodded in his heavy-lidded way, dismissing her, and Claire fled. She pushed her way through the crowd and touched Maya’s arm.

  “Oh, hello, Klar,” said Maya, a bright smile on her elegant face. She had evidently had a few drinks, and her accent had thickened as a result. “Have you met Rogare Gardeener?” she said, turning to a short man standing next to her.

  “Oh, you must be Evelyn’s husband,” said Claire.

  “Yes; nice to meet you,” he replied, offering his hand. Roger Gardner was pink and balding, with a high squeaky voice and skin as smooth as a eunuch’s.

  “Ve war just talking about yoo,” Maya continued gaily, “weren’t we, Rogare?”

  Roger Gardner nodded emphatically. “Yes; Maya was just saying how helpful your talk was today. I was telling her that I don’t know how you writers do it—keeping all those characters straight. And all those words; it would drive me crazy!”

  “That’s why you’re a banker, seely,” Maya said, tapping him playfully on the shoulder. Claire wondered if there was something between them.

  “Well, I just think it’s incredible, that’s all.”

  “And vhat about yoo bankers—all those numbers all day long! Now, that would drive me crazy!”

  Roger shrugged and studied his perfectly manicured fingernails. “You get used to it. At least numbers are predictable, unlike people.”

  Maya threw her head back and emitted a high tinkling laugh. Claire glanced over at Evelyn Gardner to see if she was watching, but Evelyn had cornered Gary Robinson and was heavily involved in acting out some incident, her arms flailing; Claire could make out her words even from across the room.

  “And then you wouldn’t believe what he said!” Evelyn bellowed dramatically.

  Roger must have noticed Claire looking at his wife, because he laughed softly. “I see Evelyn is giving another one of her performances.”

  “Is she—was she an actress?” Claire said.

  Roger shook his smooth pink head. “Once, long ago, she briefly tried a career on the stage, but like so many before her, she abandoned it in frustration.” He looked over at his wife’s gesticulations. “She claims she was too tall, but between you and me, I think she probably wasn’t very good.”

  “Even if she was good, it’s awfully hard to make a living at it,” Maya said graciously.

  “That’s true,” Claire agreed.

  “I’m sure it is,” said Roger. “Now she participates in the artistic life vicariously, as it were, through the Guild.”

  “Well, without a Guild there would be no Ravenscroft,” said Claire. “The world needs people like her.”

  “And the world needs people like me,” Roger said quietly, “but all the same I suspect there’s a would-be actress lurking in the heart of every Guild lady, and a would-be novelist inside every banker.”

  “Really?” said Maya, her eyes dewy. “Yoo really think so?”

  Roger shrugged. “I don’t know . . . I suspect it’s true that those of us in the ‘mundane’ professions envy the life of an artist.”

  Maya shook her head. “Really? There’s nothing so glamorous about it. Every profession is tedious in one way or another. Even journalism—”

  Roger swiveled his upper body toward her, the candlelight shining off his bald head. “You’re a journalist?”

  “Vell, I’m trying to branch out into fiction writing; that’s why I’m here.”

  “Actually, you’re here to drive us all wild.”

  Claire turned to see Jack Mulligan standing behind her, a drink in his hand.

  “Hello, Jack,” said Maya.

  “Hi, I’m Roger Gardner,” Roger said, offering his hand, which Jack shook heartily. It was only then that Claire noticed the index and third fingers of Jack’s right hand were missing.

  “Tell me, Mr. Gardner,” he began.

  “Call me Roger, please.”

  “Roger, then—tell me, have you ever seen such Nordic perfection?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Such a classic profile, like a Norse goddess—”

  “Stop it, Jack, it’s embarrassing,” said Maya, her color deepening in the dim light.

  “Oh, come on, now; don’t tell me no one’s ever told you you were beautiful before!”

  “Really, Jack—I’m sure Klar and Rogare don’t want to hear about it.”

  Jack turned to Claire, his ruddy face flushed. “You’re aristocratic looking yourself,” he said, looking her over. “I’ll bet you have some Viking blood in you, with that auburn hair,” he continued, flicking a strand of hair from Claire’s shoulder. He turned to Roger. “Roger. I’m sure you appreciate a fine-looking woman; otherwise, you wouldn’t be standing with two of them.”

  A rush of crimson crept up Roger’s neck, turning his already pink face a darker shade of red. “Well, I . . . I suppose no man is immune to female beauty—”

  “Except faggots?”

  Claire stared at Jack, momentarily unable to believe she had heard him correctly. Across the room, she saw Gary Robinson’s head turn toward them.

  “Jack, that’s not a nice word,” Maya said softly.

  “Sorry; what word would you prefer I use? Homosexual? Nancy boy? Gay?”

  “Look, Jack—” Maya began, but Jack shook his head.

  “Do me a favor; don’t lecture me right now,” he said. “I know I’m not ‘politically correct,’ but I just don’t understand how a man could not appreciate a woman’s beauty—”

  “Well, I don’t exactly understand it either,” said Roger gently, “but that doesn’t mean that—”

  Jack laughed a big, hearty laugh, and it occurred to Claire that maybe he was just putting them on, testing them. He clapped Roger on t
he back. “Don’t worry, Roger, your secret is safe with me.”

  Claire wondered what he meant by that, but just then Liza appeared with a tray of food.

  “Hors d’oeuvres?”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” said Jack, popping a tiny, hot soufflé into his mouth. Smiling broadly, he swallowed it in a single gulp, and Claire was reminded of the cat that ate the canary.

  Chapter 5

  The party went on until after midnight. The artists disappeared first, creeping off to bed one by one as the evening wore on. Finally, the writers began to retire, until only four of them remained. Claire sat on the couch next to Liza, with Sherry sitting on the rug at Liza’s feet, while Camille sprawled out in the tattered grey armchair. Evelyn and Roger had just left, and with their departure Liza heaved a sigh and flopped onto the couch.

  “God, I thought she’d never leave!”

  “What’s with that husband of hers?” said Sherry, leaning back so that her head rested on a couch cushion.

  “Who knows?” Liza ran her fingers through Sherry’s silky black hair. “Looks like a banker, though, doesn’t he?”

  “Does he have money?” Camille asked.

  Liza shook her head. “I don’t know . . . I think she might, actually.”

  Sherry closed her eyes and yawned. “I wonder what the deal is there? I mean, do they have sex, and if so, who’s in charge?”

  “There’s no use trying to define the dynamics of other people’s relationships,” said Camille. She held an unlit cigarette in her mouth, and it made her speech sound slurred. “I mean, there’s an essential inscrutability about couples—even to themselves, I think.”

  “Oh, I’m not sure I agree with that,” asked Liza. “After all, isn’t that what you’re trying to do as a writer, figure people out?”

  Camille sighed. “Maybe. I think you try, but I’m not sure you ever really succeed. I mean, I don’t think I ever quite figured out things between me and my ex-husband.”

  “I didn’t know you were married,” said Claire.

  “Oh, yes—to an Englishman. That’s why I lived in London for so long.”

  Suddenly reminded of Robert, Claire shuddered. Even now it was hard to believe that she could have been so deceived by him for almost three months. In retrospect, of course, the signs were all there, except that at the time she was blind to them until it was almost too late.

  “But isn’t half the fun trying to figure people out?” said Sherry.

  Liza stretched herself and yawned. “Half the fun for me would be being in bed right now.”

  “So why don’t you go?” said Sherry.

  “Because the postmortem is the best part of the party,” Camille said, laughing her smoky laugh. Claire held her breath, waiting for a coughing fit, but thankfully one did not arrive.

  “That makes it sound so morbid,” Sherry said, shivering. “Postmortem . . . like someone died or something.”

  Camille shrugged. “it’s just a term.”

  “Well, I’m going to die if I don’t go to bed soon,” said Liza, rising from the couch. “Come on, pumpkin, let’s go.”

  “Good night,” Camille called from her armchair.

  “Good night. ’Night, Claire.”

  “Thanks for a wonderful party,” Claire said, hugging Liza, whose hair smelled of peppermint shampoo.

  “Oh, glad to do it. I needed to throw a little bash anyway, and your arrival was as good an excuse as any.”

  When Sherry and Liza were gone, there was a silence, and Claire could hear the floorboards of the old house creaking and groaning underneath footsteps upstairs.

  “Are you okay?” Camille asked after a few moments.

  “Sure—why?”

  Camille shrugged. “I don’t know. I just had a sense a few minutes ago that there was something bothering you . . . I’m not sure exactly why.”

  Claire stared at the cold, empty grate in the fireplace. Maybe she would talk about Robert; maybe she would tell Camille the whole thing sometime, but not now—not yet. It was still too fresh, too raw to be related to someone she hardly knew. Still, she didn’t want to lie about it to Camille; of all the people at Ravenscroft, Claire felt the most drawn to her.

  “It’s a long story,” she said slowly, then she laughed. “But then, what isn’t?”

  Later, in bed, Claire lay there thinking of Robert, of waking up with his hands around her neck, her breath being choked out of her body. She could still feel the tightness in her throat, the roughness of his hands against her skin, the awful suffocating feeling that was like the fulfillment of so many nightmares. She had always had an unreasonable fear of being trapped—and that was exactly what it had been like, waking with that terrible feeling that his face was the last thing she would ever see and his voice the last sound she would ever hear.

  Put out the light, then put out the light.

  She lay there a long time staring into the darkness, trying to turn her mind to Wally, the touch and smell of him, the gentleness of his hands upon her body, but all she could think of was Robert. Finally she sat up in bed, thinking maybe a bath would help. When she was a child and couldn’t sleep, her mother would give her a hot bath and that usually did the trick. Liza had pointed out Ravenscroft’s only bathtub earlier in the day, located in a little bathroom attached to the side of the house, along the wooden catwalk leading out to the artists’ studios.

  Claire crept downstairs and out the side door. As she left the house she saw someone walking along the catwalk toward the house. As the light on the side of the house fell on her blond hair, Claire recognized Maya Sorenson. She was dressed in a bathrobe and carried a plastic soap dish and shampoo.

  “Hello, Klar,” she said softly as they approached each other. “Having a bath?”

  “I think so,” Claire answered.

  “You should; I just had one, it’s lovely,” Maya said, and stepped into the house, leaving Claire alone on the catwalk. Claire opened the first door on her right and saw that it was indeed a large, old-fashioned bathroom, complete with a shower stall in one corner and a lion’s-paw bathtub along the opposite wall. The entire room—the scrubbed hardwood floor and heavy, old-fashioned sink, the wonderful bathtub—reminded her of her childhood years at Millmorr Farm, and she felt the sweet stab of nostalgia. Each of the three bathrooms at Millmorr Farm had a lion’s-paw tub, and Claire and her brother loved them. Hanging her towel on the rack, she turned on the taps. The bare wooden floor was cold under her feet, and she stood upon the pink cotton throw rug to undress. The tub filled quickly; at Millmorr Farm, she remembered, the tubs took forever to fill, and bath time had to be planned in advance.

  Claire stepped into the steaming water and let the vapors envelop her, sinking gratefully into the depths of smooth white porcelain. She closed her eyes and leaned her head on the rim of the tub, feeling her limbs surrender to the pull of hot water. She remembered her first bath with Wally, how shy he was, and how she had to coax him into letting go and enjoying himself. He had hidden so much away, storing his hopes along with his pain, that getting to know him was like walking down a long hall of locked doors, trying to find the key to each one. It was as if he were afraid enjoyment itself would bring disaster, that if he kept his feelings tightly under control, nothing bad would happen—at least nothing as bad as the death of his wife.

  “I know it’s magical thinking,” he said one day while they were having dinner at The Parlour, Claire’s favorite local restaurant since Patzo’s had closed.

  “I mean, intellectually I know it wasn’t my fault, that it wasn’t the result of anything I said or thought or felt, and yet…” He shook his head, his basset-hound eyes drooping sadly. “Emotionally, it’s a whole different story. There’s this need to control what happens to me, to head off any other horrible things…I know this sounds stupid and corny, but I feel as though we were too happy, and so we had to be taught a lesson.”

  Claire remembered how her stomach tightened as she felt a stab of jealousy at these
words. We were too happy. She sensed an implicit challenge in his words: could she make him that happy? But then again, why was the onus on her? Wasn’t it just as much his responsibility? And why should happiness be a challenge, a competition? Wally’s first wife was dead, and that was the bleak fact of it: she could never compete with a dead woman.

  But now, lying in the hot water, she felt her limbs drain of tension and even her memories of Robert began to lose their terror.

  That night Claire dreamed deeply. To her ears, used to the whoosh of traffic, the sound of crickets was deafening at first. However, she quickly sank into the rhythms of the woods, no less insistent than those of the city, but with a different kind of mystery: the stillness that was no stillness at all, but the quiet presence of nature, as indifferent to her presence as a glacier. After life in New York, where everything mattered, where you were constantly being assessed and judged and interpreted, Claire found this indifference, this impartiality, oddly comforting.

  She woke early the next day, refreshed and full of a sense of anticipation. She made a pot of coffee and took a cup out to the porch. There was no sign of any of the other residents.

  Sitting on the porch listening to the thrumming of bees in the bushes, Claire felt happiness creeping up her spine like a vine. It was like a splash of cold water in her face: she realized how little time she had made in her life for this kind of happiness, how her life had sunk into a series of routines and tasks to be accomplished—that for her, doing had taken over being.

  Now, away from phones and desks and appointment books, she saw that her life had become a tyranny of accomplishment. Perhaps it was an illusion, but living here on the side of the mountain, everything seemed so simple, so uncomplicated. Living with nature all around—not the version of nature that the city supplies, but the real thing—Claire could sit and watch the trees turn with perfect contentment. Suddenly there was nothing at stake, and instead of feeling adrift and purposeless, Claire felt herself slipping seamlessly into the calm regularity of life at Ravenscroft. Nothing here had an agenda; the trees, the vines—even the busy moths that fluttered their dun brown wings in the evening, scattering the glow of lamplight—seemed to have no goal other than to exist.