She has never been at ease with one-night stands. Sexuality has never seemed that casual. Nothing feels quite so vulnerably intimate as sharing her naked body with a man: it’s just not the sort of thing she can do comfortably with a stranger.
She’s thinking now of Charlie. His burly gentle power. No longer a stranger; a father, a flyer, a barbecue cook. A friend; and the sensual pull is strong—clearly he feels it as much as she does.
But she knows another thing as well: that in a few days she’ll be turning her back on him.
The thought stirs a restless unease. She should not have accepted his invitation. Dinner in San Francisco inevitably will lead to an invitation to his hotel room.
In the dusk she looks at herself in the mirror of her compact. The dark new coloring, the hairdo—is it enough? She’s been scanning the newspapers for two weeks now, looking for Graeme’s byline, expecting every day to see a blown-up telephoto picture of herself and a caption, Do You Know This Woman?
No one knows this woman, she thinks. Not even me.
But she knows someone else. Or at least she knows him this well: Charlie’s no more easy with one-nighters than she is.
Whatever we might do, it would mean something.
It wouldn’t be the kind of thing we could just forget.
I like you, Charlie. I really do. But I don’t know what the hell to do about it.
37 In twilight the teenage lovers depart. The temperature drops quickly. She is startled when several people materialize from various nearby hidden pockets and climb the few yards to the road.
With the shore to herself she begins to feel chilled but it takes energy to move. This is such a lazy place. A sense of peace: something she hasn’t felt in God knows how long.
Thinking reluctantly about stirring, she delays her ascent to watch ribbons of pink dwindle to grey, on the horizon.
She feels very tired. So many things to make sure of. What has she overlooked?
She holds the steno pad against her knee and moves the pencil down the margin.
The diamonds? Check them off the list. Transferred to a safety deposit box in Capistrano Beach. In the name of Dorothy Holder.
Previous car? Sold for cash in Calexico. If Graeme’s curiosity leads him that far perhaps it will give him the notion she was on her way out of the country into Mexico.
Back-up identity? Initiated ten days ago. Took an early plane to Salt Lake City. Obtained a birth certificate for Carole A. Fry. Applied the same day for a Social Security card and a Utah license.
She knows the drill now; she knows what lies to tell; they sound natural on her tongue—an advancement in glibness that pleases her perversely. She knows she ought to feel ashamed of herself. But it’s far down the list of concerns.
God help me now—how many times am I going to have to go through this? Is Ellen going to have to grow up in a new town every year—a new school and new friends every season and a new name to get used to?
Stop it. Got to assume there’s room for hope. Must behave as if it’s going to work this time.
Back to the list in the notebook: pay attention now. Hard to read in this bad light …
Jennifer’s two apartments? Check; check. Both landlords notified of departure. One security deposit forfeited.
Bills? Current and paid. Nothing outstanding.
All this is important because it would be stupid to attract the attention of bill collectors or skip-tracers.
Doyle and Marian? That’s taken care of, at least for a while. On the phone to them last week she contrived to sound breathless and a bit incoherent: babbling about going back to her ex-husband, a trial reconciliation, a long trip together to the Orient and the South Seas to see if they can’t patch it up and get it working again—got to run now; got to catch the plane.… My investment in the bookstore? Let it ride, good friends, and keep me on the books and if you make any money put my share in an account. I’ll be in touch when we get back—oh, it may be months, six months, eight, hell I don’t know. Love you both. Must absolutely run …
A patchwork solution but it’ll have to do for the moment; at least it’ll keep them from calling out the Missing Persons squad.
And when they repeat the story to Graeme—as Marian inexorably will do—it won’t give him leads to follow. What’s he going to do, hunt all over Asia and the islands?
Must remember tonight or tomorrow to reserve a rental car in Plattsburgh. Have to do it in the name of Jennifer Hartman because it would be suicidal to leave traces of Dorothy Holder that close to the lion’s den. Put it on Jennifer’s Visa card and remember to send in a money order to cover it because you’ll never receive the bill.
The car must be something with four-wheel drive.
Better do it tonight.
What else?
The hardest part has been making sure she wasn’t followed during the three days in Los Angeles when she drove from bank to bank, clearing out Jennifer Hartman’s accounts, taking the money in cash. Every last account emptied—even the retirement account, although the man gave her a look of stern disapproval and warned her of dire consequences from Internal Revenue.
Now the money is redistributed around this new city and its cluster of satellite towns. Jennifer Hartman’s assets are gone: liquidated and untraceable.
It’s so difficult to create a life—and so easy to destroy it. All it takes is a few signatures. Or a bullet.
A bullet …
She flashes on an image: Bert with his gun collection. Unlocking the chain, taking down a revolver, showing it to her, trying to explain its operation. His exasperation when she doesn’t seem to want to understand it.
“What is this—Victorian times or something? It’s not a feminine thing to do? What’s this crap you’re giving me? Come on. Your old man was in the military. What are you going into a swoon for?”
“I just don’t like the damn things, Bert.”
“Fine. Sometimes you need things you don’t like. Suppose some creep breaks in here, comes at you with a knife?”
“I’d probably shoot myself in the foot.”
“I’m talking about the baby now. I’m talking about protecting my kid.”
“Bert, the baby’s not even due yet for nearly six months.”
“People in our position, the world’s full of creeps looking to put the snatch on rich kids. They bury infant babies alive out in the woods someplace and they come after you for two million dollars ransom. You understand? Now pay attention. You get a good grip on the thing and you hold it in both hands—here, like this …”
So she let him teach her how to load it, how to aim it, how to shoot. At Fort Keene, five months pregnant, she was pressed into accompanying Bert and four of his friends on their venison safari. There was Jack Sertic, togged out in professional white-hunter khakis, and the helicopter pilot who was a crack shot, and two guests from Bert’s growing show business coterie of chums. One of them was an actor who three years ago had been modeling in designer jeans commercials and subsequently had become the beefcake star of a hit TV action series; the other was a fat comedian from New York and Las Vegas who had the filthiest mouth she’d ever heard. She’d complained to Bert about it and Bert had agreed with her. “But he’s a funny son of a bitch, you’ve got to admit.”
She did—with reluctance. All the same she found it hard to hide her amusement at the ludicrously grim seriousness with which these presumably grown men crept stealthily through the trees on their sponge-soled boots, stalking in grim slow silence like little boys playing Steal-the-Bacon, behaving remarkably like smirking renegade villains prowling toward their sinister ambush in some horrid silent movie melodrama.
She had a rifle. She knew how to use it. She saw a buck deer—bolt upright and staring right at her—and she just watched it until it wheeled and darted away, the signal spots of alarm showing white on its rump—and Bert came clambering out of the trees to gape in astonishment. “You had him. You let him go. For God’s sake, why?”
; She looked him in the eye. “I hate the taste of venison. Didn’t I tell you?” And walked away.
“Jesus H. Christ.” He came after her: gripped her arm and turned her. “Hey,” he said in a different voice.
Then he dropped his rifle and pulled her into the circle of his embrace. “Hey,” he murmured. Then his gentle smile became a sybaritic leer.
It was one of the last times she can recall laughing with him.
An hour or so later she watched him fire a high-powered bullet that tossed a smallish buck right into the air and brought it down in a hideous somersault against the bole of a birch tree with force enough to shake the ground.
She saw the avid excitement in Bert’s face—“Hey, hey guys, you see that? You see that?”—and she turned away.
As she walked off she heard the comedian say, “You sure that ain’t somebody’s cow? Fucker goes hunting, comes up to this dumb-ass farmer, fucker says I’m sorry I killed your cow, man, can I replace it? Dumb-ass farmer goes, I don’t know, fucker, how much milk can you give?”
Male laughter.
She didn’t laugh. She made the excuse of fatigue and made her way back to the cabin, leaning back in that ungainly way to balance her expanding abdomen.
She was changing into another person all the while. It was possible now to look back and see what must have been happening then. Even at the time there was a sense that day by day her life was becoming different but she attributed this to the baby that was growing inside her.
It’s more than that, though. Perhaps it’s a kind of growing up.
From a reasonably strait-laced upbringing she shifted as a young woman, without ever marking the transitions, to a life of self-centered trivialities and meaningless cosmetic surfaces.
Amazing how we fall into traps: how we begin to care—simply because other people, superficial people, purport to care—about so many things that don’t matter. What’s In—what’s Out. Who’s U—who’s non-U. A Triumph? But my dear, that was last year’s car. Wouldn’t be caught dead with a man who drives anything but a Datsun 260Z.
And then she’d gone beyond that into Bert’s world of hedonistic luxury with its power trips and billygoat morality—aspects of which she was only beginning to discover.
In fact, thinking back now, she is distressed by the vastness of her ignorance about Bert in those days. They had been married more than a year. She shared his bed and his life. She didn’t like most of his friends but she knew them—she believed she knew all of them.
She believed she was married to a construction magnate.
It wasn’t until later—less than a year ago—that she found out about the rest of his business operations.
Troubled by her naivete of those days she has tried to reason it out:
I’m not an innocent … I didn’t just parachute in yesterday … How the hell could I remain oblivious for so long? There must have been plenty of evidence. Clues all around …
You don’t see what you want not to see. It’s partly that. And it’s partly that Bert has a compulsive way of compartmentalizing everything in his life. There was always that remoteness in him, right from the beginning: he made you aware that you were only seeing as much of him as he wanted you to see.
For a long time it was more than enough. Living with Bert was exciting: it was like watching a performance by a great actor—the unpredictably explosive kind who radiates danger. There’ve been times when he’s put her in mind of Brando, of Robert Duvall—even when he’s at rest there’s an electric menace that hangs in suspension around him like heat lightning ready to strike.
You never knew whether a night in bed with Bert would be a seduction or a rape.
Not that he ever actually treated her roughly. Once they were married he behaved toward her in an Old World manner that was simultaneously reverential and condescending; always he was a conscientiously generous lover. Yet there was always the feeling that at any moment he might explode.
She remembers Jack Sertic, his mind a stagnant pond, saying to her more than once, “Al lives at the edge. Right at the razor edge.”
She might have been a crystal statuette—an image that defined not only her status but the extent of her influence over Bert’s decisions.
And the longer she lived with him the more she realized how little she actually knew about the nature and range of those decisions.
There were entire compartments of his life about which she knew absolutely nothing. When she first stumbled across clues to the hidden compartments she ignored them; when they persisted she became troubled; finally it was no longer possible to pretend they didn’t exist. There was a world of evil—perhaps Bert inhabited it only part of the time but it dominated him, it described the way he was—it defined who he was. And the more she learned about it the more she feared him for the child’s sake.
By the time the baby was born she knew it was no good: it was out of kilter. As the bureaucrats might say, this was not a suitable environment in which to raise a child.
The baby was hardly a day old when for the first time she saw Ellen in Bert’s arms and the decision grenaded into her mind: I have got to take her away from him.
38 Monday morning she flies all the way to Texas to make telephone calls. At the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, watching automated tram cars move silently in and out of their stations like boats piloted by invisible Charons, she dials the number of the Third Avenue apartment and listens to it ring three times before the machine picks it up.
He hasn’t changed the recording. The voice is still her own: “This is seven six six two. There’s no one near the phone right now but please listen for the sound of the beep and then leave your name and number on the answering machine tape. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can.”
She hangs up without leaving a message.
At least he hasn’t changed the number. Maybe he’s still hoping she’ll get in touch.
It was worth a try but the result is worthless. If he’d answered the phone himself she’d have known at least that he was in the city. If the nurse had answered it would have suggested that Ellen was there in the apartment. That’s assuming the same nurse still works for him. But this way? Nothing.
She dials the number of the cabin at Fort Keene. It rings twice; a man’s guarded voice answers: “Five four six one.” She recognizes the soft bass growl—Philip Quirini’s voice. She’s hoping to hear background sounds—other voices—but nothing comes through. She hangs up on him. With luck he’ll dismiss it as a wrong number.
Damn. Philip would be at the cabin anyway; he’s there all summer, he and his bovine wife in charge of the household. So you still don’t know a thing, really.
You know you can’t put it off any longer. This is the call you knew all along you were going to have to make. Come on—get it over with.
She places the call.
“Hello?”
“Diane? This is Madeleine.”
“You’re kidding me.” Then: “Matty?”
“Yes dear. The same. The very same.”
“Matty—are you all right?”
“I’m getting along.”
A stretch of silence. “Well. Well, well.” Then: “Where on earth are you calling from?”
“Just say it’s long distance. How’ve you been?”
“Me? I’m all right. A little tennis elbow. Al and—we got wiped out last week in doubles.”
“It’s all right. You can mention his girlfriend’s name if you want. I assume he has a new girl?”
“Several. You know Al—”
She can picture Diane: dark, long-limbed, tan, big brown eyes flashing with excited speculation.
“Matty, what the hell happened to you? Where are you? My God, if you knew the—”
“I can imagine. I’m all right. I’m fine. I won’t go into detail. He earned it, you know. He asked for it.”
“Al?”
“Of course. Who else?”
“He was awful mad, honey. He didn’t say it but you
could see—”
“That’s hardly surprising. Nobody bugs out on Albert LaCasse. I walked off with his pride. How are the boys?”
“Fine, fine.” Diane is nervous; her laugh is off key. “You know teenagers. The last week before school starts again. They’re staying with a rowdy crowd in one of those grouper beach houses on Fire Island. Screwing all the girls and drinking all the beer. My God—you remember when we all first met, out in the Hamptons? Jesus. Think how much things change.”
“How’s Jack?”
“Jack’s all right. Up at the cabin right now with Al. I guess they’ve been shooting venison for the freezer.”
Bingo.
Passengers hurry by; she can’t help smiling at them. Into the phone she says, “Nothing’s changed much, I gather,” and watches a uniformed steward push an old man in a wheelchair toward the boarding gates. The old man is listening to a Walkman and conducting an invisible orchestra—sealed in a private world of music that no one else can hear. A loudspeaker blares: “Mr. Emil Schnarf, Mr. Emil Schnarf, please pick up a white courtesy telephone.”
In as casual a voice as she can manage she says to Diane, “How’s Ellen? Have you seen her?”
“Not lately. He’s had her up in the mountains all summer. I guess they’re coming back to the city next week. Good grief”—Diane’s voice soars and squeaks—“you’ve got to tell me what you’re up to. Where you are. What you’ve been doing. I’m just dying to know. Come on—give!”
“I’m doing fine, dear. I’ve made a new life for myself down south here. You wouldn’t believe it but I’ve been going with a cop. Big enough to dismantle Bert by hand. But a real gentleman all the same.”
“Hey, hey. Tell me more!”
She pictures Diane in her big apartment on Central Park West—probably wearing a designer outfit that’s the ultimate in summer’s day brevity, surrounded by her collections of porcelain figurines and miniature paintings, some of them hardly an inch square and painted with a one-hair brush. Acquisitive Diane with the fullest acreage of clothes closets you’ve ever seen.
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