All the Things You Are

by Declan Hughes

  Claire takes a sip of whiskey, grimaces and looks at Dee, who is midway through her third without any apparent ill effect. Dee with her sallow skin and black eyes and corkscrew curls, raven feathers skeined with silver now, Dee with her velvet and leather and lace, her bangles and beads and hoop earrings, Dee working her Californian gypsy rock chick thing. Dee landed in Madison because the guy she met and married in LA when she was nineteen ran an antiques business here. Before he was killed in a traffic accident a couple of years later, he set her up in her own hair and beauty salon on Dayton.

  They met when Dee cut Claire’s hair the Christmas of her second year at university. They’ve been friends ever since. Maybe it’s on account of Claire having no family outside Dan and the kids (even her adoptive parents are dead, and she has no step-siblings) that Dee gets bumped up the ranks and accorded family status. And Dee has no family either, just a flaky mom who shows up beween husbands for sympathy and understanding which she doesn’t deserve, but invariably gets. They are effectively sisters and, as with sisters, love can quickly turn to hate, usually within the time it takes to empty a glass.

  The brashness, the outspoken, loudest-girl-in-the-class quality that Claire loves about Dee (because Claire may have worked in the theater, but in manner she is anything but theatrical) can in an instant appear crass or gauche. The constant stream of sexual innuendo and inquisitiveness runs sour and desperate. And even though Dee does seem to have sex on her mind at all times, there’s something, not quite prissy or repressed, but, for all the flirting with wine waiters and bell hops, a tangibly non-sexual, almost other-worldly vibe about her. Maybe it’s the sacred and profane Californian divide – in the mountains, the quest for the spiritual, the lure of every new pseudo-religion and cult; in the valleys, the all-night debauch of movies and pornography – hence the ability to be naive and cynical, idealistic and venal, pure and lecherous. Claire can imagine her in school, the bossier girl in the group who knew what dirty words meant first, found her mom’s boyfriend’s porn, was brash and forward with boys and actually turned out to be a bit prudish and was the last to lose it. Turned out, beneath it all, she was a bit frightened and uncertain.

  But that could be Claire applying an actor’s technique to real life: confidence is always a front for some kind of insecurity or neurosis; the talkative person is blustering to cover some up some guilty secret; the sexy girl will be a lousy lay. It could as easily be the other way round: that Dee’s sassy-girl-with-a-dirty-mouth act is just that: a routine, a burlesque got up to pass the time, or to conceal the real her, or even – and Claire can totally identify with this – to stand in for a personality she’s not sure she possesses. Claire felt that way about acting – sure she liked to show off, to be the center of attention, but she also needed for sustained periods of time to pretend to be someone else. It was so much easier than pretending to be yourself.

  ‘All right, sweetheart,’ Dee says, in her talking-the-suicide-down-from-the-ledge voice. ‘Look at it another way. Can you think of any reason he might have done this? According to your account of it, married life has not been the most exciting for the last stretch, but storming out after a row and crashing in a hotel for a couple nights usually works for most people.’

  ‘No. I can’t think of any reason he might have done this.’

  ‘No little amour you might have confessed to him?’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘Money worries?’

  ‘The business is booming, far as I can tell. There was no real hit from the recession, not in Brogan’s. And Danny owns the freehold. And there’s no mortgage on the house. So, you know, there’s no major overheads, there’s a limit to how exposed we could be.’

  ‘No investments that went wrong?’

  Deep breath, Claire.

  ‘Well … since you mention it … we had some money … the girls’ college fund, basically … with Jonathan Glatt.’

  Blame it on my Youth

  When Dee hears Jonathan Glatt’s name, she does her Edvard Munch The Scream face, and Claire feels like doing it right back. Jonathan Glatt was indicted last year for wire fraud and money laundering and is currently being held without bail at the Federal Prison Camp in Oxford, WI. What he did was what Bernie Madoff did, using one client’s investment to pay off another, except Glatt only needed twenty million for his expenses, and his clients were mainly middle-class families with college funds who were tempted by his ability to get a substantially higher return on their money.

  Danny met him through an old school friend of his, Gene Peterson. Claire and Danny then had dinner with Glatt and his then-wife, and they were everything she expected a financial advisor and his wife to be: earnest and faintly humorless, discreetly but expensively dressed, full of small talk about golfing breaks and ski lodges and a discussion about retirement plans Claire thought would never end. Claire felt they deserved the extras for that evening alone. And the thing about it was, it never really felt like greed, because it was a friend of a friend, and being in the right place at the right time, but of course greed is almost certainly what it was.

  When they began to read in the newspapers that Glatt’s marriage had broken down and he was to be seen around Milwaukee in the company of a cosmetically enhanced stripper and ‘adult entertainment performer’, the ex-girlfriend of a Green Bay Packers linebacker, they felt this was not a reassuring sign. When he was arrested in a house near the UW Milwaukee campus in possession of a bag of hydroponic marijuana and three grams of cocaine, in the company of three partially dressed UW undergraduates, the writing was on the wall. Within twenty-four hours, the bulk of Glatt’s clients had demanded their money; within forty-eight, his attorney had summoned them to a meeting at the Pfister Hotel on Wisconsin Avenue, where he read a short statement from his client to the effect that he had been borrowing from Peter to pay Paul – or at least, to pay Paul a higher return than the market would allow – and now Peter’s money was all gone. And so was Paul’s. And none of the other apostles were doing too good either.

  ‘Oh. My. God. And … does that not mean you guys are in trouble?’

  Claire shrugs and shakes her head, almost embarrassed to admit it.

  ‘Not really. I mean, yes, OK, we’re broke, we have pretty much no savings. We’ve got to start again in terms of the college fund. But we can, I guess. We have income. We’re not under pressure otherwise, financially, I mean. Or any other way. At least, that’s what I thought.’

  ‘Are you thinking again?’

  ‘No. Danny let me know … I know it sounds stupid, but … there’s a picture and an ornament downstairs …’

  And Claire takes her through it, Mirabell and Millamant and The Way of the World, the ornament of the lovers from The Palm Beach Story and how it’s a sign that all is well, the laptop packed away on which there may be an email. As she explains it, each piece of reasoning sounds even more lame than the last. Dee nods her way through it all as if she’s agreeing, then tips her head from side to side to weigh it up.

  ‘So why is there no message on your phone?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Why not leave a note under the ornament, or up here?’

  ‘He was in a rush?’

  ‘If he had time to leave the ornament and hang the picture, he had time to write a note, even a scribbled “Don’t worry, love Dan” on the back of an envelope.’

  ‘I don’t know. In case someone found it?’

  ‘Someone else? Who? Whoever killed the dog?’

  ‘No. No, the dog was a sick Halloween prank.’

  Claire shows Dee the werewolf mask, which seems to freak Dee, and the postcard, which seems to freak her even more. The picture on the postcard, which Claire hadn’t registered until now, is a blurry painting of what looks like two faces staring out of a window, glowing red flames all around them. Let’s hope that’s not supposed to be a clue.

  ‘Kids, on drugs,’ Claire says. ‘It probably had nothing to do with everything else.’

&
nbsp; ‘But you can’t be sure.’

  ‘I can’t be sure about anything. But that’s what my guess is. That’s what I would tell the cops. Except I don’t want to call them.’

  ‘Because …’

  ‘Because I’ve always trusted Danny. And he’s never let me down. And he has to have had a good reason for what he’s done. And if he’s in trouble, I don’t want to make more for him.’

  ‘Do you think there’s someone pursuing him? And that’s why he had to get out so fast?’

  ‘There could be. I don’t know why, but … there could be.’

  ‘Is there a Halloween connection? Trick or Treat, this says.’

  ‘I told you, it’s probably kids.’

  ‘Say it isn’t. Say it’s all connected.’

  Claire flashes on their Halloween party of a week ago, the last time she saw Danny. The guy in the Death cowl who appeared at the Arboretum gate, Danny pocketing a chef’s knife before going down to see him. She can’t tell Dee about that, not yet.

  ‘I don’t know. Ask me something else.’

  ‘Why take your laptop, which presumably was up here, but nothing else?’

  ‘I don’t know. Wait. No, it wasn’t up here, it was in the kitchen, I used it to check if there were any delays at the airport before the flight. I left it on the kitchen table. So he didn’t come up here; he just, I don’t know, left things as they were.’

  ‘All right. What about your email, you can get it on your phone, right? Have you not checked it yet?’

  Claire shakes her head. ‘I don’t have my phone set up to get email.’

  Dee looks at her with eyebrows raised, as if she’d said she didn’t have a cell phone, or that she didn’t believe in the Internet. Dee upgrades her laptop as soon as a new model appears. She has waited in line for an iPod, iPhone, an iPad. Dee has over seven hundred friends on Facebook, yet there were only seven people at her fortieth birthday dinner, five of them her employees. Dee has signed Claire up for Facebook too, and recruited friends on her behalf, but Claire has no interest in visiting the site, considers it some kind of bizarre high-school regression mechanism, even though everyone she knows seems to be on it, all the moms at school, the women in her book club, the theater people. And what about that woman in England who said she was going to commit suicide, and all her twelve hundred or so friends did was sneer and laugh at the prospect, not one of them tried to stop her. And she went through with it. Brave New World. Without Claire in it.

  She’s not a complete luddite. She does use email (but email is so last century, Dee says) and obviously if she wants to book a flight, or buy a book – although she’d still much rather go to a store like Mystery to Me or Avol – but she doesn’t want to view the sex tape of some celebrity she’s never heard of, or make contact with someone she didn’t even like when she was at school and who fate intended she never meet again, and quite right too. So why does Claire always feel the need to justify herself and her own lack of interest in technology? Because, of course, at this stage of the twenty-first century, Claire, the tech-refusenik, who doesn’t want to be connected to everyone all the time, is emphatically the odd one out. There used to be a time when being the odd one out was cool. Not any more.

  ‘I … never really saw the need,’ Claire continues. ‘I mean, it’s not as if I’m in business or anything. No one is sending me an email so vital I have to answer it when I’m in line at Target or somewhere. It’s always only an hour or two until I’m home.’

  Dee makes her patience-of-a-(medieval)-saint face and extends her palm without a word. Claire places her cell phone in it.

  ‘I think I have all your details, except your password. Mind if I go ahead?’

  ‘Please.’

  Claire stands and walks to the window, unable to bear the seizure of pleasure that animates Dee’s features as she gets to grips with the iPhone Claire only has because Dee insisted she upgrade from the battered old Nokia she actually liked, and understood how to operate.

  ‘I think my password is—’

  ‘Barbara1,’ Dee trills. ‘I tried Barbara, and then added the numeral; it’s the obvious choice if you want a mix of letters and numbers but need to make it easy to remember. Nine out of ten moms pick the eldest child.’

  Claire knows she shouldn’t really feel as irritated as she does. Dee is only trying to help, actually is helping. She has constructed a website for Claire as well, listing all of her stage triumphs, with photographs and a résumé that starts off bright and busy and then tails off into idleness. The most recent entries were a couple of days as a special extra on CSI: Miami and Law and Order, engineered by an old friend working in television to help her get back in the swing after Barbara was born and she was freaking out about the life sentence that is motherhood. But she didn’t get back in the swing. She didn’t like the obsession with her looks she had contracted, the panic over aging, the absence, however fleeting, from her baby. Maybe if the parts had been substantial, had been actual parts. But ‘Four dollars, please’ and ‘Take the back stairs and it’s on your left’ didn’t mean more to her because she was saying them on TV than they would if it had been real life. She knew she was supposed to look at them as somewhere between a refresher course and a new beginning. But for her, they served as the opposite. And then she got pregnant with Irene and that was the end of that. The last entry in her online résumé is:

  Acting Teacher, Madison School of Dramatic Art, 2004–Present.

  It’s not just that she doesn’t use her website: she avoids it.

  She looks out across the backyard to the oak prairies of the Arboretum. There’s just enough light in the sky now to make out the leafy outlines of the trees, just enough days shy of the first big wind of fall for the leaves still to cling. She has lost herself for hours on end at this window, staring out at the heavy old oaks, listening for the lapping sound of the waters of Lake Wingra. She didn’t question that this was where they should live when Danny suggested it, even though he didn’t seem particularly keen; she grew up close to woods and a lake herself. But often over the years she has felt it might have been better for him if they had found somewhere with no trace of his family or his past; somewhere to start afresh. Better for them both.

  ‘Here you are, babe, forty-eight new messages,’ Dee says, passing the phone to Claire.

  She scrolls quickly through them. None is from Danny. She shakes her head.

  Dee does her scrunched-up you-may-not-like-what-I’m-going-to-say-but-I’ll-say-it-anyway face.

  ‘The other thing to consider, maybe, sweetheart, is that Danny got some notion about what you were up to in Chicago, and went there – and forgive me if I’m, like, fishing, but you know I’m dying to know – found out something he wasn’t supposed to, and went off the deep end and has gone on the lam like a spurned and betrayed Lothario. Care to comment? Paul Casey? Miss Taylor?’

  And Claire, looking at the white filigree of dog hair that coats the floor and feeling her spirits flag, begins faintly to nod her head, thinking of Chicago, yes, Chicago a week ago, that reunion of middle-aged people who were once going to be somebody and only succeeded, if at all, in becoming themselves. It might have looked, if you didn’t know for sure, like something did happen between her and Paul Casey, and she’s not one hundred percent sure something didn’t, although it doesn’t matter a damn now.

  But she’s also thinking of Chicago fifteen years ago, when she and Paul got around, and did things they don’t do any more, and met a lot of people she ordinarily wouldn’t have met, including a) one of Danny’s oldest friends, and b) the only people she’s ever met in her life who could have done what somebody did to Mr Smith, or ordered it done, could have, and would have, without a second thought. And now Claire wonders for the first time if what has happened may in fact be her fault.

  III Wind

  Claire is usually good, perhaps too good, at locating the detached place inside her head, the one that supplies her with apt wisecracks and quotations from bo
oks, plays and films, usually at inappropriate moments, just to make reality that bit easier to bear. But the simultaneous arrival, at seven a.m. on Monday morning, of two deputies from the Dane County Sheriff’s office, there to serve her a reminder notice (a reminder notice) that the property she is standing in must be vacated within the next thirty-one days, as per the terms of the court-ordered foreclosure against the house three months previously, so as to enable free and vacant possession for its auction one calendar month from now, and two detectives from the Madison Police Department, there for reasons they have yet to disclose, stretches her to the limit. Some vague formulation about a sitcom written by David Lynch scuttles across the shore of her brain, but she’s pretty sure it’s second-hand.

  She’s standing, literally shaking (she can see she’s shaking because the notice to quit in her hand is flapping in the air) in the doorway of the house as the deputies depart and the detectives move in. Claire knows they are detectives because they show her their badges, and because she knows they are detectives. Who else would come this early in the morning, dressed in suits that don’t entirely fit them, the man’s gray and shiny at the seams, sagging and loose at the shoulders, the woman’s navy and new, bulging between the two buttons of the two-button coat?

  The woman, who is in her thirties and not really overweight, eight pounds tops (maybe the suit was a stretch to begin with) looks at the paper in Claire’s hand and raises her eyebrows in, not quite sympathy, that would be unprofessional, but what-are-you-gonna-do empathy, or so it seems to Claire, and bats it towards her partner, who is brown-eyed and fleshy faced and has eighties hair in a side parting, and does not look like he is in the empathy business this morning.

  ‘Ms Taylor?’ he says.

  ‘Mrs Brogan. Ms Taylor, yes.’

  ‘Detective Fowler, of the Madison Police Department. This is Detective Fox. We’d like you to come take a look at something in your backyard.’