The Douglas Kennedy Collection #2

by Douglas Kennedy

  “Now please don’t tell me that you can love somebody all the time?”

  “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for my daughter.”

  “Even though she won’t speak with you now?”

  “Did I tell you that?”

  “Harry, you always sound so shocked when I infer something about your life. But it’s not as if I have psychic powers. It’s just . . .”

  “My story is so banal and obvious?”

  “All lives are extraordinary. All lives are simultaneously banal and obvious. From what you’ve told me so far, it’s not hard to deduce certain things about you and your situation from a few hints you’ve dropped here and there. But as you don’t want to talk about it . . .”

  “Any more than you want to talk about what happened to your daughter . . .”

  “My daughter died.”

  “How?”

  “Do you really want to hear this story?” she asked.

  “Yes, I do.”

  She turned her gaze away from me, focusing her eyes on the window near her bed. After several long drags on her cigarette, she began talking.

  “On June 22, 1980, Zoltan took our daughter Judit—who was just seven—for a walk in the Jardin du Luxembourg. I remember telling him, as he left this apartment, that I was planning to have dinner ready in an hour, and wouldn’t it be easier if they spent time across the road in the Jardin des Plantes. But Judit was very insistent about riding the carousel in the Luxembourg, and Zoltan—who so adored Judit he would give in to anything she asked—told me, ‘We’ll take a taxi there and back. Anyway, it’s midsummer’s night, so why don’t you come with us? We can splurge and go to a restaurant, and maybe even take Judit to see Fantasia afterward.’ But I had already started cooking a spaghetti sauce, and I was rather inflexible back then about changing our domestic schedule once it had been planned for the evening. So I insisted that they come back within an hour, no more. Zoltan told me I was being rigid, ‘comme d’habitude.’ I lashed back, saying that somebody had to be disciplined around here, in order to keep everything afloat. That’s when he called me a bitch, and Judit got upset and asked why we had to fight all the time, and Zoltan said it was because I needed to control everything, and I told my husband that the only thing that was keeping me in this marriage was our little girl, because he was such a complete waste of time. Judit started to cry, and Zoltan yelled that he was sick of this marriage, and he grabbed Judit and told me that they would eat elsewhere tonight, and as far as he was concerned, I could drown in my fucking spaghetti sauce, and the door slammed behind them, and . . .”

  She fell silent. Then, “Hours went by. Three, four, five hours. I figured that, after they had gotten something to eat, they’d gone to the movie. But the cinema was only ten minutes from our apartment by foot. When eleven PM arrived, I was worried. By midnight, I was scared. By one AM, totally panicked—and I started inventing scenarios in my head, telling myself that, in a fit of anger, he’d decided to check them into a hotel for the night . . . and that he wasn’t letting me know their whereabouts to punish me for being such a bitch. But I knew that Zoltan would never do something so extreme. He mightn’t have had much in the way of ambition, but he still didn’t have a mean streak . . . something I always loved about him, even though I was often so stupidly critical about so much to do with him. It’s terrible, isn’t it, how we lash out at the most important people in our lives—often against our better judgment, but just because we are frustrated in our own lives and—”

  She broke off again. Another long drag on her cigarette.

  “The police arrived just before two. When I heard the voices on the stairs, I realized immediately that . . .”

  Silence.

  “The police were very quiet, very solicitous. They told me there had been an accident, and would I please accompany them to the Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière. I became immediately hysterical and demanded to know what had happened. ‘Un accident, madame,’ one of them said, also explaining that they weren’t able to discuss the circumstances of the incident or the condition of my husband and daughter. As the gendarme told me this, his colleague put his hand on my shoulder, as if to steady me. That’s when I knew they were dead.

  “I remember feeling as if I had walked into an empty elevator shaft—a long free fall. My legs buckled, but I somehow managed to make it into the bathroom and empty my stomach in the toilet. At that moment I wanted to stick my head into the vomit-filled water and not pull it out again. Death seemed like the only option. One of the policemen came into the bathroom and stood over me as I was sick. I sensed he knew I might do something self-destructive—and once, when I dipped my head in the bowl, he gripped my shoulder and said, ‘You must somehow stay strong.’

  “I finished getting sick. The policeman helped me up. I remember flushing the toilet and going to the sink and filling it with cold water and plunging my head into it and the policeman getting a towel and wrapping it around my head, and shouting something to his colleague, and being helped into my coat and down the stairs, and into the back of their car.

  “At the hospital, they brought me into this small room. We waited almost a quarter of an hour for the ‘officials’ to arrive—but I didn’t care. I knew that the longer ‘they’ stayed away, the longer I wouldn’t have to face . . .”

  She stopped in mid-sentence to light up another cigarette.

  “I must have gone through six cigarettes in that fifteen minutes. Then the door swung open and two men walked in. They were both middle-aged, chubby, grim-faced. One of them wore a white coat, the other a suit. A doctor and a police inspector. The doctor pulled up a chair beside me. The cop hovered by the door, watching me with dark, middle-of-the-night eyes. The doctor forced himself to make eye contact with me. When he started to say, ‘Madame, I regret to inform you . . .’ I lost the fight I had been waging ever since the police had knocked on my apartment door. I must have cried for at least ten minutes—howling like some wounded animal. The doctor tried to take me by the hands to steady me, but I pushed him away. He offered something to calm me down. I screamed that nothing would deaden the pain. Eventually the doctor started explaining, ‘Hit-and-run . . . killed while crossing a street . . . they were at a pedestrian crossing when the driver struck them both . . . your husband killed instantly, your daughter died just fifteen minutes ago . . . we tried everything we could to save her, but her neck was broken, her other internal injuries too severe . . .’

  “The police inspector then began to speak, telling me that a passer-by had taken down the number of the car—a black Jaguar—and that they expected to trace the vehicle and apprehend the driver within the next twenty-four hours. ‘We are treating this as accidental manslaughter . . . but I must ask you: Did your husband have any enemies who might have wanted him . . .?’ I started screaming again, telling him that Zoltan had been a wonderful dreamy layabout with no ambition whatsoever, so why would anyone want him dead? ‘Très bien, madame,’ the inspector said. ‘I am sorry to have posed such a difficult question at this time.’

  “ ‘I want to see them,’ I started screaming. But they refused, informing me that their injuries were too severe. My screaming intensified. ‘I don’t care what they look like, I will see them.’ But they still said no, the doctor telling me it would be too traumatic . . . that Zoltan’s skull had been crushed by the wheels of the car and Judit had been dragged for several meters by the car, and her face . . .

  “That’s when I went crazy—kicking the desk, overturning the chairs, clawing at my face with my nails, and then trying to smash my head against the walls. I remember the policeman and the inspector attempting to hold me down, and me fighting against them, and the doctor running out of the room, and returning with a nurse, and me now shrieking that I wanted to die, and someone forcing my jacket off me and a needle penetrating my arm and the world going dark and . . .

  “When I came back into consciousness, I was strapped down to a bed in the hospital’s psycho wing. The nurs
e on duty said that I had been sedated for the past two days. She also told me the police wanted to speak with me. A few hours later, the inspector showed up. By this point, one of the doctors on call had decided I was calm enough to be freed from my restraints, so I was sitting up in bed, still being fed intravenously, as I refused all offers of food. The inspector was all business.

  “ ‘Madame, we have apprehended the driver . . .’ he said. The man’s name was Henri Dupré. He was an executive with a big pharmaceutical company and lived in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. They were certain that he was very drunk when he killed my husband and daughter—because when they arrested him the next morning at his house, the blood test showed he was still way over the limit . . . which meant that when he had struck them, he must have been completely bourré. Smashed beyond reason.

  “The inspector also said that one of our neighbors had identified the bodies, and that they had been released to a mortician who had reconstructed their faces, and if I wanted to view them now . . .

  “But I told the inspector that I didn’t want to see them dead. Because I couldn’t face . . .”

  Silence.

  “We didn’t have many friends in Paris. But my businessman lover, Monsieur Corty, did come and see me. I was still being sedated, still under ‘suicide watch,’ but I could nonetheless tell that he was shocked by my appearance. His kindness was extraordinary. He spoke in a very quiet voice and told me that he would be taking care of all funeral expenses, and that he had spoken with the mortician and that he could hold off for a week or so with the burial until I was well enough to leave the hospital.

  “But I said that I didn’t want to be present at the funeral . . . that I couldn’t bear the sight of their bodies . . . that they should burn them straightaway. I didn’t care what they did with the ashes, because they were just fucking ashes and had no meaning now that my daughter and husband were dead. Monsieur Corty tried to reason with me, but I would hear none of it. ‘Burn them now,’ I hissed, and eventually Monsieur Corty nodded quietly and said that, with regret, he would carry out my wishes.

  “A few days later, I was discharged from the hospital. Monsieur Corty sent a car for me. I went home to an empty apartment—yet one in which everything seemed completely frozen in that moment in time just before they died. The spaghetti sauce I had been making was coagulated in the pot on top of the stove. Judit’s drawing books and dolls were scattered in front of the fireplace. Zoltan’s reading glasses were still balanced on the arm of the easy chair where he always sat. So too was the book he was reading: a Hungarian translation of Moravia’s Contempt. Do you know the novel?”

  “Of course,” I said. “It was filmed by Godard.”

  “We saw it when our marriage was in a happier place. When things started to go wrong, Zoltan became obsessed with both the film and the novel. Because he identified with the central character. Like Moravia’s protagonist, he had lost the respect of his wife. Until he was dead—and every moment of every day was spent mourning him and my wonderful daughter.”

  “You felt guilt?”

  “Of course. Especially when, a few days after being released from the hospital, I was called into the commissariat de police of the Sixth arrondissement. The inspector needed to formally interview me for the dossier of the case. That’s when I found out that the same bystander who managed to get the vehicle’s registration number had also seen Zoltan and Judit right before the accident. Zoltan had seen a taxi on the far side of the road, and ran across with Judit to hail it. Halfway there . . .”

  “Surely you didn’t blame yourself for . . .”

  “Of course I fucking blamed myself. If it hadn’t been for me insisting that they rush home for dinner . . .”

  “That’s absurd, and you know it.”

  “Don’t tell me what’s absurd. Had I been more flexible about things, about my stupid spaghetti sauce . . .”

  Another silence, only this time I didn’t dare fill it. Finally she said, “It’s time you left.”

  “OK.”

  “You think me rigid, don’t you?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No—but I know you hate the fact I shoo you out of here after a few hours and insist that I only see you every three days.”

  “It’s OK, Margit.”

  “Liar. It’s not OK. You tolerate it, but you don’t like it.”

  “Well . . . if this is the way it has to be . . .”

  “Stop being so reasonable . . . especially when I know it’s an act.”

  “Everyone acts in relationships . . . especially ones as strange as this one.”

  “There! You said it. A strange relationship. So if you find it so strange, why don’t you abandon it? Tell me I’m a rigid, controlling bitch and . . .”

  “What happens after I leave here?”

  “I work.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Believe what you want.”

  “So what are you translating right now?”

  “That’s my business.”

  “In other words, nothing.”

  “What I do after you leave is my business.”

  “Is there another guy?”

  “You think me that energetic?”

  “No, just completely cryptic.”

  “Do yourself a favor, Harry. Walk out of here now and don’t come back.”

  “Why the melodrama?”

  “Because it won’t end well. It never does with me.”

  “Maybe that’s because you’ve never been able to get over—”

  “Don’t play the psychiatrist here. You know nothing about me. Nothing.”

  “I know . . . what you just told me . . . that terrible story . . .”

  “What? It ‘touched your heart.’ Or maybe it brought out your long-dormant protective instincts which you didn’t extend to your wife and daughter—”

  “That was a shitty thing to say.”

  “So leave and don’t come back.”

  “That was the point of that comment, right? See if you could really alienate me and make me never want to come back here. But maybe if you stopped blaming yourself—”

  “That’s it!” she said, standing up. “Get dressed and get out.”

  But I grabbed her and violently yanked her back onto the bed. When she struggled, I pinned both her arms down and climbed on top of her legs.

  “Now you can answer two questions for me.”

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  “That scar on your throat . . .”

  She spat in my face. I ignored that and increased my pressure on her hands and legs.

  “That scar on your throat. Tell me . . .”

  “A botched suicide. Happy now?”

  I let her arms go. They lay motionless on the bed.

  “Did you try to kill yourself right after you were released from the hospital?”

  “Two days later. In the apartment where I fucked Monsieur Corty.”

  “He asked you to fuck him forty-eight hours after . . .?”

  “No. I proposed the idea. He was hesitant, telling me there was no need to rush things. But I insisted. After he’d given me his usual two-minute in-and-out, I excused myself and went into the kitchen and grabbed a bread knife and . . .”

  “You really wanted to punish him, didn’t you?”

  “Absolutely—even though he was always so good to me. Or as good as anyone could be to a whore.”

  “But the very fact you did it when he was in the next room . . .”

  “No, it wasn’t a cry for help. If you cut your throat the right way, you die on the spot. I botched it . . . and Monsieur Corty somehow managed to stop the bleeding and call an ambulance and . . .”

  “You lived.”

  “Unfortunately . . . yes.”

  “And Monsieur Corty?”

  “He visited me twice in the hospital, then sent me a check for ten thousand francs—a small fortune back then—with a short note, wishing me well in the future. I never heard from him again.”
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br />   “And the driver of the car?”

  “He was a man with many connections—so he managed to keep everything out of the papers, and the magistrate investigating the case somehow decided to drop the charges from manslaughter to something punishable by a slap on the wrist and a fine. His people offered me compensation. Fifty thousand francs. I refused the offer—until my lawyer reasoned with me and said that I would be spiting myself if I didn’t take his money . . . especially as he could get it increased by fifty percent. Which he did.”

  “So you accepted the payment?”

  “Seventy-five thousand francs for the lives of the two people who meant most to me in the world.”

  “And the driver just vanished from view?”

  “Not exactly. The world sometimes works in strange ways. Three weeks after the accident, there was an attempted burglary at the home of Henri Dupré. It was the middle of the night, Dupré surprised the burglar, there was a tussle, and Dupré was stabbed in the heart. Fatally.”

  “And you felt avenged?”

  “It counted for something, I suppose—especially as Dupré showed little remorse for the murder of my family. His lawyers did all the dirty work for him—but I never even received a card apologizing for the terrible thing he had done. All I received was a check.”

  “So revenge has its virtues?”

  “The standard moral line on revenge is that it leaves you feeling hollow. What bullshit. Everyone wants the wrongs against them redressed. Everyone wants to ‘get even.’ Everyone wants what you Americans call ‘payback.’ And why not? Had Dupré not been killed, I would have lived my life thinking that he’d gotten away with it. That burglar did me a huge favor: he ended a life that was worth ending. And I was grateful to him.”

  “But did it in any way balm the wound?”

  “Hardly. You might come to terms with the loss of a husband—no matter how much you miss him—but you never get over the death of a child. Never. Dupré’s death didn’t mollify my grief—but it did give me some grim satisfaction. And I’m certain that shocks you.”

  “Part of me wants to say, ‘Yes, I am appalled . . .’ ”