Crooked Heart

by Cristina Sumners

  To this Ms. Clyde said nothing. God, talk about pulling teeth, Holder thought. He soldiered on. “How did you get to know about it?”

  “Mrs. Stanley asked me to cancel it.”

  “You canceled it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You made the phone call to California?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that was this morning?”

  “No. Early afternoon.”

  “And when,” said Holder with the persistence of water dripping on stone, “had Mrs. Stanley asked you to do this?”

  “At the same time.”

  “Oh, you mean she asked you and you did it immediately.”

  “Yes.”

  “But she didn’t tell you to make other reservations for her somewhere else?”

  “No.”

  “Was she still intending to go to San Francisco?”

  “Yes.”

  Holder swore mentally but kept at it. Eventually he gathered that Carolyn Stanley had come back to the office after lunch and before she went to the airport; she had asked Patricia Clyde to call the Mark Hopkins and cancel her reservation, said she hadn’t decided where she would stay, and promised to let Ms. Clyde know when she arrived there. It took him five minutes to get that, and he wasn’t even sure if it was true. It was clear that Ms. Clyde regarded him as the enemy.

  “So she hasn’t called yet?” he asked.

  “No,” said Ms. Clyde, and then, surprisingly voluble, added, “She wouldn’t call tonight because she knows I go to bed early.” There was an unmistakable edge to her voice.

  Holder kept his irritation hidden. He said politely, “Well, I’m sorry we had to bother you. When you hear from her, let us know, would you? As soon as possible?”

  “Yes,” said Ms. Clyde, lapsing back into the monosyllabic.

  And that was the last useful thing Tom Holder heard on Monday night.

  CHAPTER 8

  i

  There was no one in line at the reception desk. Was it an odd hour to be checking into a hotel? Would she be conspicuous? She told herself not to be paranoid. No one in the elegant lobby could see the clouds of guilt, the nightmare visions that clung to her.

  She had done very little thinking on the long flight west; so little had gone through her mind, in fact, that the destination arrived as a surprise. One of the effects of shock, she supposed. But one thing she had decided, and that was to go to the Mark Hopkins despite the cancellation. She would just tell them she’d changed her mind. No, better: She’d pretend to know nothing about it, insist they’d made a mistake. Insist they give her a room anyway. She stepped up to the desk and opened her handbag to take out the folder from the travel agent.

  “Good evening, ma’am,” said the desk clerk with a smile.

  “Good evening,” she replied, although she was unable to summon a smile in return. She extracted from the folder a typed confirmation of the reservation and handed it to the man behind the desk.

  “Thank you,” he said pleasantly, and tapped a few keys on his computer. After a few seconds he stared at the screen in some puzzlement. He tapped some more keys and waited, still looking puzzled. “This is funny,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Well, it looks like there’s been a little mix-up here. The computer says this reservation was canceled.”

  “Canceled? There must be some mistake.”

  “Yes, there must be,” he agreed lightly. “But never mind, it’s no problem.” He glanced again at the confirmation slip, tapped at his keyboard once more, and consulted a rank of keys behind him. “Here we are,” he said, plucking one like a ripe fruit. “This is a nice room, has a wonderful view of the city. Would you like this on your credit card, Mrs. Stanley?”

  “Yes, please,” she said, opening a slim folder of white snakeskin and extracting a gold American Express card.

  The clerk ran the card through his machine and handed it back to her, lifting his other hand to signal a bellhop. “Thank you, Mrs. Stanley. Enjoy your stay with us.”

  “Thank you,” she replied automatically, and followed the bellhop up to the room with the wonderful view of the city, which she failed to notice. The bellhop had watched her at the reception desk, and being wise beyond his years, did not attempt any chatty remarks.

  Once in the room, she actually remembered that bellhops expect to be tipped, so she tipped him, and thanked him, and he left. She stood motionless in the center of the room. She realized suddenly that she had no idea what to do next. Up until then it had all been fairly straightforward; the path, so to speak, had been marked. But now what?

  She stood for several minutes, until she noticed she was standing. Then she sat down in a chair by the window. She turned her face toward the glass because it seemed like the thing to do, but she did not bother to focus her eyes on the impressive sea of fog-blurred lights below her.

  She had always thought of herself as a good person. Not a saint, of course. Definitely not a saint! But she had always thought her sins had been minor, forgivable. Like most people, she believed in God but had never done much about it; God was a presence somewhere in the background of life, vaguely in charge of right and wrong. She had always felt that he did not disapprove of her too seriously. The unhappiness she had known in her life had been her own stupid fault; it would never have occurred to her to consider it as some sort of punishment from above.

  But now that things had gone so horribly, disastrously wrong, divine punishment began to look like a real possibility. Not that she was afraid of going to hell, it wasn’t that. The punishment wasn’t coming in the future, it was happening now. The disaster itself was the punishment. It was as though God had been sly, luring her into thinking her little sins were negligible in the great scheme of things, then without warning stunning her with consequences so dire that she could not bear to think of herself as having contributed to them. God seemed suddenly sneaky, and mean. Always before, a distant but benign presence. Now an enemy. A shattering transformation.

  Bill, too, had undergone a shattering transformation. He, too, had been a benign presence—though hardly distant. She had thought of herself as a good person, but she had always thought of Bill as a better one. So kind. So true. She had trusted him absolutely. She had been wrong.

  Beneath the shock, beneath the unbearable guilt, another emotion had been growing in her so imperceptibly that she was only then becoming aware of it. Anger. She was angry at him. How could he have done this thing? How could he have done this to the love they had shared? How could he have committed this appalling betrayal? More than anything else, she discovered, she was angry at him for deceiving her about the kind of man he was. Had he not deceived her so badly, none of this would have happened. Had she known what he was really like, she could have stopped it all before it had begun. She remembered kneeling by the body in the kitchen, staring at his hands. There had been no trace of red on them, but now in her emotional memory she saw them covered with blood.

  She had put a vast distance between herself and him, which is what she had intended to do when she caught the plane. Now she realized with dismay that it wasn’t enough. He was still with her. Covered all in blood, he was part of her, inside her. His presence occupied her like a hostile army, filling her, too, with blood. She felt contaminated, defiled. She couldn’t stand the thought of him. She couldn’t stand the thought of herself.

  She stood up, left the room, and went looking for the hotel bar.

  ii

  The service had started normally enough. The Rector was rushing the congregation, as he always did, through the Nicene Creed, but people were getting more and more behind and it was getting pretty messy. Kathryn was trying to strike a compromise, but more people were coming up from the sacristy to the altar and things were getting out of control. Some of them were people from that afternoon’s festival committee meeting, and they were still carrying on, with scrupulous politeness, the squabbles they’d had in the meeting. There didn’t seem to be a congregati
on at all at this point; everyone was up by the altar and they were all priests. Kathryn found herself listening to Miss Amalie and Carson Strothers, who were once again failing, at great length, to communicate. She began to lose her temper, and was just choosing the words she would use to let them both know what self-important buffoons they were, when the Rector caught her by the arm and tugged her back to reprimand her. They argued heatedly, while Tom Holder (also vested as a priest) kept intervening, whether to arbitrate or to keep score, Kathryn wasn’t sure. By this time it was Tom, not the Rector, who was gripping her arm, and he was urging her to sit down in one of the choir pews. The pew was deeply cushioned, and the hymnal racks were full of large, beautiful volumes of Chaucer. She took one of these out and opened it, but instead of the expected medieval handwriting that she could have read easily, the manuscript was written in a seventeenth-century script she could not make out at all. She asked Tom Holder to help her, and handed the book to him. He began to read The Canterbury Tales to her, at first from the book, and then the book was no longer there but he was still quoting Chaucer, and she was sinking into the cushions. Her vestments had come open, and she was wearing only her underwear. Then she felt the buckle of his belt bite into the soft flesh of her abdomen, and she realized he was on top of her.

  Now she was in familiar territory. Now she knew what was happening, what was going to happen. She explained, as she always did, that this would have to be a matter of holding and being held, no more, but when she finished the explanation she found that he was kissing her breasts. This was exciting to her and for a moment she thought she would let him make love to her. Then she remembered he was married, and she began, as she always did, to protest that they shouldn’t be doing this. But all the while she was letting him kiss her breasts, and move his pelvis rhythmically against hers, and she felt the orgasm coming. It came, and as always, it almost waked her for a moment; for an instant she was alone in her own bed, then the dream pulled her back again. Now he was trying to enter her, and she began to fight him, crying that they couldn’t, they shouldn’t, he was married, it was wrong. Finally she broke free of him and ran—out of his living room, out of his house, across his yard. And now here were the roses. She ran into the thorny branches, battling to get through them; they dragged at her as they always did, they tore her skin, and then some of the branches became his hands, pulling at her, tearing at her, until finally from her silent throat she produced a real cry, and awoke.

  Shit, she thought. What did I do to deserve that? She was accustomed to thinking of the dream as a sort of punishment, as she always dreamed it when she had permitted herself to become attracted to a man to whom she had no business being attracted. And it was that man, the one who was making her feel guilty, who usually appeared in the dream. Unless it was the man, the original man, the one in that dreadful encounter that was the original source of the dream. But to the best of her knowledge, she wasn’t particularly interested in anybody just now. She most certainly wasn’t interested in Tom Holder. The Rector had also been in the dream, of course, and she did think the Rector a very agreeable man with a sharp wit and a gorgeous profile. If he had been the man she had almost made love to, the dream would perhaps be understandable.

  But the star spot had been occupied by Tom Holder, and Kathryn thought Tom Holder was about as sexy as Donald Duck. It wasn’t so much that he was middle-aged as that he was middle-aged gone to seed; overweight and balding and shabbily dressed, he looked like a man who had given up on himself as a sexual animal twenty years ago. Well, given the woman he was married to, perhaps that wasn’t to be wondered at.

  But the point was that Kathryn wasn’t attracted to Tom. So she hadn’t done anything to deserve the dream. Like a child wrongfully punished, she felt a burst of righteous resentment toward the erring authority figure. This aggravation, mingled with the sour emotional aftertaste of fear, provoked a wordless grumble in the general direction of the Deity as she rolled over and burrowed deeper into her pillow. The prayer was wordless because if she’d been forced to articulate it, it would have come perilously close to “I don’t know what the hell you think you’re doing,” and even for Kathryn that would have been a bit egregious.

  Kathryn bestirred herself just enough to rise up on one elbow and take a sip of water from the glass on the bedside table. The dimly illuminated dial of her alarm clock told her it was just a few minutes past one. Plenty of time left to get a decent night’s sleep. But don’t do that to me, she prayed angrily, when I haven’t done anything to provoke it!

  iii

  The conventioneers, after the manner of their kind, had taken over the bar. Clusters of men with name tags on their lapels shouted shop at one another and vied for the attention of a scattering of name-tagged females. Explosions of laughter became more frequent, and the hunt expanded to the other unescorted women in the bar. The last lingering traces of the day’s business having been washed away with the second round, preparations were being made, with the third, for the business of the night. Women who were not interested beat a strategic retreat; women who were began the delicate process of conveying that information to the men of their choice.

  There remained at a corner table one woman alone, oblivious alike to the retreat of her fastidious sisters and to the surrender of the more willing; oblivious, even, to the seemingly unignorable clamor that filled the room.

  She was no longer young, but it was not for that reason that she remained unapproached by any of the conventioneers. She would be called beautiful at sixty; at forty-six she could stir the blood of any man past adolescence. Among the roisterers at the other tables there would be, from time to time, the nudge of a manly elbow and the lift of a knowing brow, a sideways glance and a murmur of appreciation. But not the most intoxicated man in the room ventured into her impregnable solitude.

  Her armor was neither scorn nor indifference, but something harder and colder than either. One of the conventioneers, more sensitive or less drunk than his fellows, was struck by a sudden fancy. It’s grief, he thought. One does not, however, confess to one’s drinking buddies that one is lapsing into psychology; he shook off the thought and turned his attention to the man from Ohio, who was recounting the peculiar history of the call girl and the left-handed bus driver.

  The woman finished her third drink and seemed to decide it was enough. She signaled the waitress, signed the check that was presented to her, and rose somewhat unsteadily to her feet. Bar drinks were stronger than the occasional drinks she had at home, and she never had three. Very carefully, she walked out of the din of the bar into the more subdued noises of the hotel lobby. The night, she knew, would be dank and uninviting; she decided to go for a walk.

  The doorman’s offer to call a taxi was refused with the automatic courtesy that clings to some people under any circumstances whatsoever. (It is said that Marie Antoinette, stepping up to the guillotine, accidentally trod on the headsman’s toe, and murmured, “Pardon me.”) From his post at the curb the doorman watched the woman as she walked slowly away from the hotel, and wondered whether her husband had left her, or she had left him.

  The city was submerged in an all-enveloping fog. The streetlamps were soft, subaqueous moons in the moist gray air; lighted windows shone from invisible buildings, rectangles of diffuse light floating in the darkness. Headlights of cars swam past her with the sibilant sound of tires on wet streets.

  For some reason she was glad of the damp, the chill, the featureless sky. If it had been a lovely evening—crisp air, shining stars—she would not have been able to endure it. As it was, she had walked into the shrouded dark as if it were a friend. A quotation stirred in her memory, something about being one with the night. A cliché, of course. Bill would know.

  The sudden recollection of Bill as a lover of literature—not a violent stranger—struck her with a pain so fierce that she actually staggered. Or was it just the alcohol? What a fool she was! Had she really thought that scotch would do it? Would wash him away? Would dr
ive him out of her?

  In all of this she was in her own world, oblivious to the small stir of activity in her wake.

  Her sympathetic observer, the conventioneer who had sensed that the cold wall around her was grief, had seen her leave the bar, and in a spurt of unaccustomed madness had followed her out into the lobby. He saw her walk toward the entrance and go out. He cudgeled his brain, ducked back into the bar for a minute, and emerged with a borrowed cigarette lighter.

  Out at the curb he looked around for her, certain that he could catch up with her. It did not even occur to him that she might have taken a taxi, because her whole attitude bespoke a person who has nowhere to go and nothing to do. Sure enough, there she was; she had gone only about thirty yards. “Excuse me,” he called, sprinting after her. “Hello, ma’am?” He had to get almost within arm’s reach of her before she seemed to discover that the shouts were addressed to her. She turned and looked at him inquiringly, saying nothing. Christ, he thought, doesn’t she talk? He made much of pretending to huff and puff a bit, as if trying to catch his breath before speaking. “I don’t usually do a quick run after two vodka tonics,” he said, laughing. “I’m sorry to yell at you like that, but I thought you’d probably forgive me. You dropped this in the lobby.” Confidently, he held out to her a slender gold Cartier lighter.

  She took it from him, peering at it in the darkness. “No, I’m sorry,” she said, giving it back to him. “It’s not mine.”

  He was incredulous. “Not yours? But I could have sworn— Are you positive?”

  “Quite,” she replied flatly. “I don’t own one. I don’t smoke.”

  “Oh,” he said, apparently crestfallen. “I could have sworn— Well, I guess I’d better turn it in to somebody.”

  As if aware that she had sounded ungracious, she added, “But thank you for, well, for the thought. It was kind of you to come after me.”

  “Oh, no problem. I was coming out for a walk anyway. The bar was getting pretty unbearable, all that smoke.” He smiled. “I don’t smoke, either,” he said, trying to make it sound like a bond between them. And then, when she did not respond to him in any way, he asked desperately, “Do you mind if I walk with you?”