by Jonathan Dee
“Does such a list exist?” Helen asked Father Clement, who was the archbishop’s PR liaison.
“Isn’t it easier for you to do your job,” Father Clement said, “if you assume that the answer is no?”
Helen blinked a few times while trying to think what to say next. “If it helps you,” she said, “think of me as your lawyer. I need to know the truth in order to do my job. While of course the notion of confidentiality is technically not legally binding around here, we do, actually, consider it”—she lost steam as she neared the end of this speech she had delivered to clients a hundred times before—“sacred.”
Father Clement just smiled. “I understand,” he said. “In that case, just between us: yes, while it does not preclude the likelihood that this reporter may be bluffing or exaggerating or making things up, a list of that sort exists.”
“Well, then, Father,” she said, aware that she was speaking with a touch less patience than she might have if there were fewer other things on her mind, “my crisis management advice is very simple—simpler in this case than in most, because presumably I don’t have to explain the concept to you.”
He smiled at her interrogatively.
“Confess,” she said.
His smile broadened until she saw the condescension in it. “To whom?” he said. “To you? To the New York Post? I am gratified that you’re looking out for our spiritual well-being. But we are pretty well taken care of on that plane. We come to you precisely because we are also living and operating in your realm, and, like any other institution, we need to keep moving forward.” They spoke like that for another twenty minutes, and then Helen, nettled and distracted and checking her phone, got on the Brooklyn-bound subway by mistake. She didn’t realize it until she felt her ears pop when the train was under the East River. By then it was too late to get back to the office by close of business anyway, so she consulted a subway map on the platform to figure out the simplest route home.
Her relationship with her daughter was now so cordial and businesslike that Sara had a vague sense of having broken something. Her mother hadn’t so much as asked her a question in days. She worked longer hours than usual, or maybe something else was going on, for when Sara called her at Malloy at four in the afternoon to ask about dinner, she was told that Ms. Armstead had already left for the day. When Helen finally did get home, around six, she seemed immensely distracted, but not in a good way. Maybe that Hamilton Barth dude had broken her heart. Exceedingly hard to imagine, but that was how all the signs read.
And then, after two days in which Sara was relieved to hear nothing, Cutter had started popping up on her Facebook wall again. She’d missed a day and a half of school, and now there were only three more perfunctory, movie-watching days left in the school year. She was ashamed to catch herself looking forward to having to deal with Cutter only on the phone or online. But when he wasn’t in school Wednesday, and she didn’t hear from him, Sara got up the nerve to ask her former friend Tracy if she’d seen him.
“Very funny,” Tracy said; then, catching the look in Sara’s eyes, her interest grew, vengefully. “You really don’t know?” she said. She told the story from her own perspective, as if that mattered to anyone: on Tuesday morning she had been running down the hall, trying not to be late for homeroom even though it was the last week of school so who would care, only to find the doorway blocked by cops, real cops. Apparently Cutter had gotten into an argument with Mr. Hartford, his American History teacher—not for the first time, Sara knew—that had ended with Cutter punching Mr. Hartford in the eye. So Cutter was gone and not coming back, that much was obvious, but past that point it was all ignorant speculation, about jail and lawsuits and whatever else, in which Tracy indulged gleefully.
Sara felt the water closing over her head. She hated herself for wanting to be free of him, for her weak and desperate hope that he would not try to contact her. She thought she might be in the clear after checking Facebook one last time before bed that same Wednesday night. Then on Thursday morning she had twenty-seven new posts on her wall, and they were all from him. The final one was a photo of her, taken on the sidewalk outside her building, in which she was wearing the clothes she wore yesterday.
She took down the posts and blocked him. He’s only trying to scare you, she said to herself; but guess what, it was working. She went to the front door, and a good thing too—her mother had forgotten to lock it. It must be nice, Sara thought tearfully, just to live in your own little bubble, without it occurring to you that something bad might happen to you or to anyone else.
Helen, meanwhile, lost more and more confidence in the situation in Rensselaer Valley. The fact that she communicated with Ben mostly by text, since she still felt a surge of anger and embarrassment whenever she spoke to him, naturally contributed to the clipped and ominously terse quality of his status reports to her. Still, the situation could only be decaying. You just could not take two men of that nature, ask them to do nothing, go nowhere, talk to no one but each other, and expect that request to be honored indefinitely; but that’s what she had done, that was her only plan. What r we waiting 4? was one of his last messages, followed a minute later by Literally? They were waiting for proof of Bettina’s continued existence on this earth, proof that was turning out to be maddeningly, alarmingly, expensively elusive. That night Helen nervously floated with Sara the notion that she might take another quick trip up to Rensselaer Valley after work on Friday, just for an hour or two, to check on Hamilton. She made it clear that there was no need for Sara herself to come; but Sara insisted that she would.
Ben had taken the risk of leaving Hamilton by himself once or twice by then, just to go to Bonifacio’s office for a couple of hours, and there hadn’t been any incident. He wasn’t a bad guy, Ben thought. A little self-absorbed, maybe. In the evenings they watched TV and drank. On their fourth night together, a Friday, there was a good old-fashioned, window-shaking thunderstorm, and about ten minutes later the cable, installed earlier that day, went out.
“That’s it,” Ben said. “It’s a sign. We have got to get out of here. I am trying so hard to do this for Helen, but it’s too much, it’s too open-ended. They are going to find us dead together in here and no one will ever know why.”
“You know, that brings up an interesting point,” Hamilton said. His eyes were glassy. “You two are divorced, right? I’ve never been divorced myself, but doesn’t it sort of mean you don’t have to do what she tells you anymore?”
Ben turned off the hissing TV. “It’s complicated,” he said. “I owe her something. I’m not sure even this is going to pay it off, actually.”
“What did you do?” Hamilton asked somberly.
Ben had an idea. He swirled the ice cubes in his glass. “I’ll tell you what I did,” he said, “if you tell me what you did.”
Hamilton considered it. “Okay, man,” he said. “Only fair. But you may regret asking. It may raise the stakes for you a little bit.”
“All right,” Ben said. He was excited now; he figured Hamilton had maybe slept with some producer’s girlfriend, like in The Godfather. “But not here. Seriously, we need a change of venue.”
“No bars,” Hamilton said warily. “I don’t mind saying or doing something stupid in front of you, but if we are out I’ll get recognized, and then we’re both screwed.”
Ben nodded. “Plus the nearest real bar is probably in New Castle, which is like ten miles from here, and if I get nicked for DWI again, it’s back to jail for moi.” Hamilton’s eyebrows rose. “Okay, I have an idea. It’s a little offbeat, but safe, at least. It doesn’t matter where we go, you said, right?”
“I think you were the one who said that, but yeah, it doesn’t matter to me.”
“Anywhere but this house. Okay. Do me a favor and go grab the vodka.”
Ben drove into town at about fifteen miles per hour and parked in the lot behind the hardware store. They stumbled up the steps and he opened the door with his key. “This is where I work,�
�� he whispered. “Don’t worry, there’s ice. I’m going to turn on the light, count to three, and then turn it off again, because it would not be cool if anyone were to see us up here. Ready?”
He flicked the switch, and together they took in the tiny office, which, like any office, looked unfamiliar and slightly malicious when empty: the cheap, pocked desk, the noisy filing cabinets, the chair pulled up to the window so he could rest his feet on the sill, the water-stained curtains, the potted plant. Realizing he’d forgotten to start counting, Ben slapped at the switch again and they returned to darkness, a degree or two darker than before. “Now I forget where the chair was,” Hamilton said.
Ben’s cellphone chimed again, and he jumped. Without looking at the incoming number—he knew it anyway—he turned the phone off.
Helen had been trying to reach him for more than an hour, ever since she got out of that day’s meeting—another stalemate—with the Catholics; she’d dialed Hamilton’s number as well, but he rarely answered his phone even under the best circumstances. Her next call was to the accursed Hertz outpost near her apartment. She had a premonition something was wrong. Her messages and texts left no room for misunderstanding in terms of the need to check in with her right away: if Ben didn’t reply immediately, her last message had said, she was going to assume the worst and head up there. She picked up the car, called Sara to tell her to be ready in half an hour, and then drove to the pay phone outside Carl Schurz Park to make one more call that had been on her mind.
Not only had there been nothing in the papers or on the Internet about Hamilton Barth’s disappearance but she had actually come across a Hollywood Reporter item that claimed he had been at a gallery opening three nights ago in Venice Beach. They were good, those people, but if they were already going to the trouble of planting items, they must have been in a full-blown panic. Hamilton’s agent was someone named Kyle Stine—she’d looked it up—and with a prepaid phone card she’d bought at Duane Reade, she called his office from the lonely pay phone.
“No,” she had to say to three different people, “I’m not calling for information about Hamilton Barth. I’m calling with information about Hamilton Barth. Please just give that message to Mr. Stine, and I’ll hold.” Hold she did, for almost ten minutes. She could see the doorman behind the glass wall of the building across the street, sitting at his desk, in the glow of the security-camera monitors.
“This is Kyle Stine,” said a hostile voice.
Helen swallowed. “I’m a friend of Hamilton’s,” she said quickly, “and I know you probably haven’t heard from him in a while, and I just wanted to let you know he’s fine—”
“Where is he?” Stine said, in a tone whose attempt at calm could not have been more frightening.
“I can’t tell you that,” Helen said, “but I can tell you that he’s okay, he’s perfectly safe—”
“What the fuck do you mean, he’s safe?” the voice thundered. “Who is this? Listen to me. You tell me where you have him right now.”
“He’s fine,” Helen said. “He will be back in touch when he’s ready.”
“Do you have any notion of the interests you are fucking with? What, have you kidnapped him or something?”
“Oh God, no. I’m trying to help him.”
But the voice formed its own judgment. “You are committing all kinds of crimes right now, you psychotic cunt, and if you think there is anything that I wouldn’t do in order to track you down and eliminate every last trace of you, you are really fucking mistaken. Do you have any idea what’s at stake here? What are you, some fan, you think he’s got some kind of special connection with you? Some relationship? Do you have any idea how pathetic you are? There will not be enough left of you to form a fucking stain on my bootheel, if anything happens to him. Do you have any idea of the forces that are closing in on you right now?”
Red-faced, Helen hung up. The doorman was now standing and staring at her through the glass wall. She drove home and found Sara sitting in the lobby, staring at her cellphone, her purple duffel bag at her feet.
“What’s that for?” Helen said. “We’re not spending the night.”
“I’m not coming back with you,” Sara said. “I was going to take the train up tomorrow anyway, but this is better. I need to go home and be with Dad. I do not feel safe here. I do not feel safe with a totally checked-out mother who has no interest at all in her daughter’s life.”
“What about homework?” Helen said reflexively.
“I don’t have any more homework. School ended today, thanks for noticing. Your job has turned you into some kind of zombie, apparently, but whatever, I choose to be with Dad now.”
“It’s not your choice,” Helen said.
“Want to test me?” said Sara.
And, God help her, the thought flashed through Helen’s mind that, if Sara were up there at the house with her father and Hamilton, it would be easier to keep them indoors, it would be harder for them to go out. Ten minutes later Sara had her earphones in and Helen drove in angry, agonized, private silence up the floodlit West Side Highway.
Ben still wasn’t answering his phone, but now that bit of childishness on his part just made her laugh with anticipatory pleasure: oh, you wanted some warning that you were about to become a full-time parent again? Try checking your goddamn voice mail once in a while. When they got to the house on Meadow Close, every light in it was blazing, seeping around the closed shutters as if some sort of industrial hellfire was burning in there. Helen knocked on the door and then pushed it open, Sara two steps behind her. No one was home. She could not make the brazen fact of it sink in right away. Red-faced, she ran in and out of every room, each of which now looked like some half-assed warehouse full of unmatched new furniture.
“What’s going on?” Sara said.
“I can’t believe it,” Helen said. “I literally cannot believe it. How stupid could I be?”
A mile and a half away, Ben and Hamilton sat with their eyes accustomed to the dark of Bonifacio’s second-floor law office. Ben had stressed the need for quiet, which was why his phone was turned off. It was also true, of course, that he knew he was now much too drunk to pull off a non-alarming phone conversation with Helen anyway. The vodka was nearly gone, and they’d run out of ice half an hour ago.
“This is the first time I’ve been drunk since rehab, if you please,” Ben said, in a voice just above a whisper. “I mean, don’t worry, it was fake rehab. Real problems, fake rehab.”
“I know lots of guys who have done that,” Hamilton said.
“So look,” Ben said, “can I ask you something? You’re a fucking movie star. Men want to be you, women want to be with you, or however that expression goes. What the hell is that like? Is it just incredibly great? Because I have to say, when I hear people complain about it, like boo hoo I have no privacy or whatever, I just think, what pussies.”
“Yeah?” said Hamilton idly. “You think you’d like that kind of life? Guys with cameras in your face everywhere you go, lies about you in the paper and on TV all the time? The true stuff is worse than the lies, actually.”
“Yes,” Ben said. “I think I might have liked it. I mean at least it’s a big life. At least it’s a consequential life. At least you’re at the center of your own life, not on the periphery of it.” He swirled the vodka in his glass and looked out the window at the streetlight. “Periphery,” he pronounced slowly.
“See,” Hamilton said, “you think that. People think that. But when you’re in it, it’s more like you’re a character in a story. You try to be the one telling it, but you’re not. And then you can try to get out of it, but when you do it’s like the story was already one step ahead of you anyway. It’s like Pirandello. Ever read Pirandello, man?”
“What?” Ben said. “No. What are you talking about? I mean look, let’s get down to brass tacks, man-wise. These four days or whatever it is that you’ve been living under my roof, that’s probably the longest you’ve ever gone without getting la
id since like high school, right?”
Ben expected to bond over this bit of flattery and maybe to hear some good stories; but instead he seemed to have pushed a button. Hamilton put his drink down on the floor and placed his hands over his eyes. “I have this reputation as a very serious person,” he said. “And I used to be. I mean even when I wasn’t acting, in my downtime I painted, I wrote poetry. I actually published a couple of books. People liked to make fun of it because of who I was, but it was actually not that bad. But then I became less serious. Why is that? Older, and yet less serious. Why? Older, closer to death, less serious. It doesn’t make any sense. Anyway, that’s when I really started fucking a lot of chicks I didn’t know. I’d say like over the last six, eight years. I mean it became really important to me. I never really knew what all that was about while I was doing it, what it was all pointing towards, but now I do know, man, now it’s obviously clear, but too late.”
“Right,” Ben said. “Wait, what? What do you mean, now you know?”
“I told you all this,” Hamilton said.
“You haven’t told me shit!”
“I killed a girl,” Hamilton said, and then that sentence hung there in the darkness for a while.
Ben felt the adrenaline cutting through his buzz. “What?” he said softly. “How?”
“I don’t know. Funny that’s your first question, though.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know that either, except that it apparently was in me, and something in her woke it up. All those years of getting away with murder. So to speak. It’s emptied me out.”