Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  “Yes. And, no, I don’t think so.”

  My wife, looking splendid as always in a robe, glances up and blows me a kiss. “You’ve found her? Your nzinga from the ferry?”

  At first I am nonplussed, thinking that she has somehow discovered my tête-à-tête with Maxine on the Vineyard, but then I see that she is only joking, or maybe hoping.

  “Nothing that interesting.”

  “Too bad.”

  “No, not too bad. I love you, Kimmer.”

  “Yeah, but only because you’re a glutton for punishment.”

  Smiling as she says it, putting me off, not wanting to hear what I am going to say. But I have to make my point and, seeing no way to sugarcoat it, I decide to say it right out.

  “Kimmer, I have to go see Jack Ziegler.”

  The paper closes with a snap. I have all of her attention. When my wife speaks, her voice is dangerously low. “Oh, no, you don’t.”

  “I do.”

  “You don’t.”

  “I would just call him,” I propose, pretending that our disagreement is on a slightly different subject, “but he doesn’t really talk on the telephone much.”

  “Fear of wiretaps, no doubt.”

  “Probably.”

  Kimmer’s gaze is unwavering. “Misha, honey, I love you, and I also trust you, but, in case you’ve forgotten, I am being considered for a seat on the United States Court of Appeals. If my hubby traipses off to visit a Jack Ziegler, it is not going to do my chances any good.”

  “Nobody has to know,” I say, but I am reaching.

  “I think a whole lot of people would know, and most of them happen to work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  I have considered this, of course. “I would clear it with Uncle Mal first.”

  “Oh, goody. Then he can tell everybody else in Washington.”

  “Kimmer, please. You know what’s been going on. Some of it. As much as you’ve let me tell you.” Her eyes widen at that one, but I cannot stop now. “I’ve learned a lot of … of ugly things about my father in the past few weeks. Now I have to know if they are as ugly as I think they are. And I think Jack Ziegler knows.”

  “If the facts are ugly, there’s no question that Jack Ziegler knows them.”

  “Well, that’s why I have to go. People will understand.”

  “People will not understand.”

  “I have to know what’s going on.” But I think of Morris Young and the story of Noah and wonder if I am mistaken.

  “I don’t think there is anything going on, Misha. Not like what you seem to think, anyway.”

  “You’re probably right, darling, but …”

  “If you talk to him, there is going to be more trouble. You know there is.” She does not say from whom, so I suppose it could be a threat.

  “Kimmer, come on.” My tone is gentle. I am concerned that Kimmer will start shouting, as she sometimes does, and wake Bentley. Or the neighbors. Neither of which would be a first. “Come on,” I say again, still softly, hoping Kimmer will be soft in reply.

  “You’re the one who always says Jack Ziegler is a monster.” Her tone is indeed soft, but more in hiss than compromise.

  “I know, but—”

  “He’s a murderer, Msha.”

  “Well, he was never convicted of murder.” She has me sounding like one of Uncle Jack’s countless lawyers now, and I don’t much like it. “Other crimes, but not murder.”

  “Except he killed his wife, right?”

  “Well, there were rumors.” I try to remember the way the Judge answered that one before the Judiciary Committee, for it was that single question from Senator Biden, and my father’s unhelpful response, that cost him more than any other. I don’t judge my friends based on rumors, my father said—something like that. And he folded his arms across his chest in a gesture that even the most incompetent public relations coach could have warned him never, ever, to make on national television. Although understandably angry at what he considered an unfair line of inquiry, my father came off as haughty and disdainful. One columnist wrote that Judge Garland seemed to be dismissing a man’s possible murder of his wife as a triviality—a ridiculous assertion, but one my father invited by losing his temper before tens of millions of viewers. I knew, at that horrible televised instant, that the fight was lost; that, no matter how the Judge might duck and weave, his opponents had backed him into the corner of the ring; that the knockout punch would, at any moment, come flashing into his vision, just before it laid him flat. And I felt a rampant anger, not at the Senate or at the press, but at my father: How could he be so stupid? There were about six thousand possible answers to Biden’s perfectly reasonable question, and the Judge picked the worst of them. Yet now, under Kimmer’s cross-examination, I find myself following my father’s lead.

  “But he was never indicted, darling. He was never even arrested. As far as I know, what happened to his wife was an accident.” Almost letter-perfect, I am sure: exactly what the Judge said to Senator Biden. Except for the darling.

  “She fell off her horse after twenty years of riding and broke her neck by accident?”

  “It’s not a very good way to murder somebody,” I point out. “You could fall off and walk away with a few scratches and live to tell everybody who pushed you.”

  Kimmer gives me a look. “You’re joking, right?”

  “No, I’m serious. I’m saying we don’t know exactly what happened to Jack Ziegler’s wife, but murder doesn’t seem very likely. Am I supposed to hang him on rumors?”

  Oh, I hate this side of myself, I truly do, the same way I hated this side of the Judge, but I cannot seem to stop.

  “Rumors!”

  “Well, since he was never charged …”

  “Oh, Misha, listen to yourself. I mean, how legalistic can you get?” You sound just like your father, she is saying. Which is true.

  “It’s just a visit, Kimmer. One hour, maybe thirty minutes.”

  “He’s a nut, Misha. A dangerous nut. I don’t want us to have anything to do with him.” Her voice is growing louder, and a clear edge of hysteria is creeping in.

  “Kimmer, come on. Look at the facts. Freeman Bishop is dead—”

  “The police say it was drugs—”

  “And Colin Scott impersonated an FBI agent to get information on the Judge, and now he’s dead—”

  “It was an accident!” So much for soft.

  “An accident while he was following me. Following us.”

  “Well, it was still an accident. He got drunk and he drowned and he’s dead now, okay? So you can drop it.”

  “And you don’t think we should be a little bit worried?”

  The wrong thing to say. Absolutely wrong. I know it at once. I feel like a chess player who has just advanced his knight, only to notice, an instant too late, that his queen is about to fall.

  “No, Misha. No, I’m not worried. Why should I be worried? Because I’m married to a man who has gone off the deep end? Whose sister has turned into some kind of … of conspiracy theorist? A man who now thinks that the solution to all his problems lies in flying up to Aspen to drop in on a thug who murdered his wife? Inviting that thug into our life? No, Misha, no, I am most certainly not worried. There is nothing to be worried about.”

  I try to mollify her. “Kimmer, please. The Judge was my father.”

  “And I’m your wife! Remember?” She is holding on to the sides of the doorway as though worried that her anger might blow her away.

  “Yes, but—”

  “Yes, but! You’re the one who always talks about loyalty. Well, be loyal to me for once! I don’t mean loyal like never even looking hard at another woman so you can feel holier than thou. Than me. I mean loyal like you’re doing something for me. Something that makes a difference.”

  “I’ve done plenty for you,” I tell her in the calmest tone I can manage. I like to think I have developed an immunity to my wife’s taunts, but her words sting.

  “The s
tuff you do for me is the stuff you want, not the stuff I want.”

  I am trying to remember how close I felt to Kimmer last night as I held her in my arms, stroking her back, listening to her apologize before she fell asleep.

  Last night. Last year. Last decade. All equally vanished.

  “Kimmer, if—”

  “And it’s not like I’ve never done anything for you!”

  As my wife’s eyes continue to flame, I am astonished by her passion, magnified in the cramped space of the kitchen. Standing there in her bathrobe, her Afro awry, Kimmer remains the most desirable woman I have ever known, yet I have the eerie sense that if I make a move she doesn’t like she will knock me down. This fury has been percolating ever since my return from the Vineyard. Despite the news about Marc Hadley, Kimmer seems to think her chances of appointment are slipping away. I do not know exactly why she believes this; I do know she blames me for it. As she blames me for much else. I have heard the litany a hundred times, a hundred different tales about how Talcott Garland ruined her life. How she married me to please her parents when there were far more exciting men interested in her. How she left her lively practice with one of Washington’s most prestigious firms to follow me to this deadly-dull New England town. How most of our acquaintances (we have few friends here, Kimmer will note accusingly) are university types who look down their noses at her because she isn’t one of them. How she easily earned a partnership at an unimportant law firm that nobody has ever heard of. How she had a baby to make her husband happy without really thinking about what she was getting into and is now stuck in a bad marriage because of it. How her life ever since has been a slow race between boredom and insanity. Kimmer made all the choices. But I take all the blame.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, raising my hands to make peace.

  “Misha, please. For my sake. For the sake of our marriage. Our son. Promise me you will not invite that man into our life. That you won’t visit him. Or call him.”

  And I discern something else, a version of the same screechy timbre I detected in Jack Ziegler’s voice in the cemetery, as unexpected now as it was then: Kimmer is afraid. Not the physical fear of the soul for its fleeting mortal life, nor the desperate protectiveness of mother for child. No, this is her career fear. She is at the edge of what she has always wanted, and does not want Uncle Jack to spoil it for her—and how can I blame her?

  I decide that there is no good reason to feed her fear. Not just now.

  “Okay, darling. Okay. I’ll stay away from Uncle Jack. I won’t do anything to … to cause embarrassment. But … well …”

  “You’re not going to give up looking. Is that what you were going to say?”

  “You have to understand, darling.”

  “Oh, I do, I do.” Her smile is warm again. She comes around the counter and hugs me from behind. We have returned to last night’s intimacy, just like that. “But no Jack Ziegler.”

  “No Jack Ziegler.”

  “Thanks, honey.” Kissing me again, grinning. She hops up to clear the table. I tell her I will do it. She does not object. We talk as though we have no conflict. We have grown quite skillful at pretending that there are no issues between us. So we talk of other things. We decide not to drag Bentley off to his Montessori school today. We will let him sleep late, for once, since I will be at home anyway. She reminds me that we are due for dinner tomorrow night at the home of one of her partners and asks me to confirm the sitter, a Japanese American teen from the next block who enthralls Bentley by playing her flute. I ask her in return if she will swing by the post office on the way in, to drop off two postal chess cards that I finished last night, both of which must be postmarked today. (Each player has three days per move.) When we have completed all the complex negotiations of a typical morning in a two-career family, Kimmer disappears to dress for work. She is back twenty minutes later in a dark chalk-striped suit and blue silk blouse, kisses me again, this time on the cheek, and is off, leaving, as always, promptly at eight-fifteen.

  I watch through the bay window in the living room as the gleaming white BMW hurries off along Hobby Road, swallowed almost at once in the sheets of rain. I put both hands in front of me and lean on the glass. Woody Allen once wrote something, tongue firmly in cheek, about loving the rain because it washes memories away, but I still remember the photograph of Freeman Bishop’s bloody hand. I still remember the face of Special Agent McDermott glaring at me from the pages of the Vineyard Gazette. I see him on a boat with his buddy Foreman, and some disagreement, and McDermott/Scott tossed overboard. I see my father, arguing with a cautious Colin Scott a quartercentury ago, trying to convince him to kill the man who killed his daughter.

  Yet, in the fresh light of day, even a day as rainy as this one, the images are a lot less scary. Not as scary, for instance, as the thought that one day my wife will drive off down Hobby Road and decide to keep on going.

  Gazing out at the empty street, I remember, from a long-ago college course, a snippet from Tadeusz Rozewicz, something about a poet being someone who tries to leave and is unable to leave.

  That is my wife: Kimmer the poet. Only nowadays she keeps all the best lines to herself.

  Or shares them with somebody else.

  CHAPTER 39

  UNEXPECTED VISITORS

  (I)

  MALLORY CORCORAN calls just past ten with the news that Conan Deveaux has decided to plead guilty to a single count of second-degree murder in the death of Freeman Bishop. He and his lawyer looked at the evidence and decided the stack was too high. Under the plea agreement, Conan will escape the needle, but he will remain in prison for the rest of his life. “He’s just nineteen,” Uncle Mal adds gruffly, “so that’s likely to be a very long time.”

  “So he did it,” I whisper, wonderingly. I am at the kitchen counter, where I have been leafing through Chess Life while making hot chocolate for Bentley. How could I have misunderstood Maxine’s hint so badly? A mistake. Could she have meant something else?

  “Probably.”

  “Probably? He just volunteered for fifty years in the penitentiary!”

  Uncle Mal insists on a seasoned lawyer’s pedantry: “If the choice is life in prison or execution, you take what you can get.” Then he is an old friend once more: “But, seriously, Talcott, I’m sure he did it. Please put your mind at rest. From what I hear, the case was a prosecutor’s dream. They had a witness, they had forensics to place him at the scene, they had a print or two, they had him bragging about it later. I know you thought maybe it was a frame-up, one of your sister’s conspiracies or something, but this is a little too much evidence for somebody to manufacture.”

  Still marveling, I say goodbye and carry two mugs of cocoa into the family room, where Bentley is sitting at the computer, playing with a math game in which he collects little pictures of candy if he can zap the numbers that correctly answer the questions dancing around the screen. So we can teach him the virtues of gluttony, greed, and violence all at once, while also improving his score on the math SAT he will have to take in about twelve years.

  Watching him now, so engrossed he does not realize his father is near, I settle myself on the sofa and put the cups down on the coffee table. We all enjoy this room. The furniture is leather, a sofa and a loveseat and a chair, drawn together by a fake Oriental carpet—it is really from Sears. Built-in bookshelves of solid maple, painted white, surround a crumbling fieldstone fireplace; another shelf snuggles beneath the window to the back yard. There are books on politics and books on jazz and books on travel and books on black history and books reflecting our eclectic taste in contemporary fiction: Morrison, Updike, Doctorow, Smiley, Turow. There are children’s books. There is a Bible, the blandly inoffensive New Revised Standard Version, and the Book of Common Prayer. There is a collection of C. S. Lewis. There are home-improvement books and back issues of Architectural Digest. There are a few chess books. There are no law books.

  The telephone rings again.

  Bentley looks up. I
point to the hot chocolate. “Mint, Daddy. Bemmy drink mint.” In a minute, he means.

  The phone is not ringing any more. I realize that I picked up the receiver but, because of the byplay with my son, have not actually put it to my ear. I do so now, and immediately hear the static of a cell phone with a low battery. And a male voice:

  “Kimmer? Kimmer? Hello? You there, baby?”

  “She isn’t home right now.” My tone is as frosty as I know how to make it. “Would you care to leave a message?”

  A long pause. Then a click.

  I close my eyes, swaying a bit on my feet as my skillful son zaps numbers faster and faster. The years peel away, as does my confidence, and most of my hope. How many times over the course of our marriage have I fielded calls like this one—a mysterious man asking for my wife, then hanging up when I answer? Probably fewer than I think, but more than I would like to recall. Oh, Kimmer, how can you do this again!

  You there, baby?

  I fight down a wave of mind-blanking despair. Concentrate, I tell myself. In the first place, the cadence of the voice tells me that it was a black man—in other words, not Gerald Nathanson. A new affair? Two at the same time? Or my mistake, as Dr. Young suggested? No way to tell, not till my wife and I fight this one out, as, sooner or later, we will. I cross to my study, looking for a distraction. The voice was familiar, that’s the other thing. I cannot quite place it, but I know it will come.

  You there, baby?

  Odd the way the immediate concerns about a dying marriage can knock worries about torture and murder and mysterious chess pieces right out of the box, but priorities are funny that way. I plop down in front of my computer. Who would be so arrogant, I wonder, and so stupid as to say the word baby when calling a married woman he is not even sure is home? I shake my head again, the mixture of fury and fear and sheer nerve-racking pain momentarily crowding out every rational thought. I want to scream, I want to throw a tantrum, maybe even break something, but I am a Garland, so I will probably write something instead. I am zipping through my files, trying to decide which unfinished essay to exhume for a little pointless polishing, when my eyes are drawn to a car sitting across the street.