by David R. Dow
It took me a moment to get past the shock. In college I knew some polygamists, and their lifestyle baffled me. I said to Tieresse, I’m not missing anything. What is important in my life is to be with someone I love and care for, and I don’t much want to have sex with anyone who doesn’t fit that bill.
She said, Not now you don’t. I’ve discovered things can change.
I sensed this conversation was not going to end until I conceded. To get it to conclude, I said, Whatever.
After that conversation, nothing changed. Unless I was too tired or had had too much to drink, I would go to her house after we’d cleaned and closed, arriving around twelve thirty or one. Half the time she’d be awake reading in bed, and we’d talk about the news or how things had gone at dinner service, or how she was liking her book. The other half the time she’d be sound asleep, and I would find a note on my pillow wishing me sweet dreams.
On a Friday evening in early May, a bachelorette party of sixteen twenty-somethings took up half my tables and stayed until we closed. They were still there after we’d cleaned all the other tables and swept the floor. Finally all but one departed in two stretch limos. The one came upstairs with me. When I put her in a cab at three thirty, she handed me her business card and said, Thanks for the nightcap. I felt shame.
I suspect Tieresse knew right away because my hair was still damp from the shower I did not customarily take before driving myself to her house. As I sunk into the bed beside her, my heart racing, guilt churning in my belly and bowels, she ran her fingers across the top of my head, and from deep down in her slumber she said to me, I love you.
Like all sins, it was easier the next time. People in the restaurant industry sleep around. Before Tieresse died, I had sex with four other women, including Britanny. I did not tell them, or anyone else, about my license. It wasn’t their business. If they deemed me a lout, they had good reason. I did still feel guilty, I will admit that, but I did not think I was doing anything wrong. I’ve had years to puzzle over that paradox. If there’s a solution, I’m not smart enough to see it.
Tieresse liked to come to the restaurant in the late afternoons and sample the dishes for that evening with the waitstaff. As the early diners arrived, she would move to the bar and drink a snifter of cognac or a dirty martini. Two or three nights a week she would go to some social or philanthropic event. Once she said to me, I’m not going to ask you to accompany me to these horrid evenings because I do not want to pressure you to go somewhere you’d be bored and unhappy.
I said, How do you know I wouldn’t enjoy it?
She raised her eyebrows and smiled.
She said, Do you want to test me?
Two nights later I went with her to a reception to raise money for somebody running for the US Senate in Missouri. The price of admission was more than I earned in a year. Not counting me and the people serving alcohol and hors d’oeuvres, everybody there was white, except for one Asian woman. All the men were dressed like they shopped at the same place: dark suits, white shirts, mostly solid red or blue ties, American flag lapel pins.
About fifteen minutes into it I brushed back Tieresse’s hair, put my lips next to her right ear, and whispered, Uncle. I surrender. You were right.
She smiled and said, Then let’s get out of here.
We went to a soul-food dive in the Third Ward and ate fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, and collard greens while still dressed in our fancy clothes. It was a favorite spot of mine, and I couldn’t believe she knew anything about it.
I said, How on earth did you know I love this place?
She said, Do you mean to tell me you haven’t googled me?
She smiled. I had, of course, but I was worried she would think I was creepy if I said so.
She said, You revealed all your secrets in the interview you gave to the paper last year.
I had forgotten I gave that interview.
I said, Of course I’ve googled you, beginning the day we met.
No matter the bedtime, Tieresse was an early riser. In the mornings she would go to the gym while I was still asleep. When she got home we’d play tennis in her backyard or float in her pool. We saw movies that started before noon. She was on the board at the museums, and so we had VIP tours of new exhibitions the day before they opened. La Ventana was dark on Sundays and Mondays. We usually ate out on one and stayed in and cooked on the other.
I’d always thought the woman I loved would be the only person I ever had sex with, not the one person with whom I never did. It was not a life I had either pictured or planned. Tieresse had a painting hanging above her fireplace. It was a young woman looking into a mirror. The side of her face was scarred, but the image in the mirror was not. Tieresse had said, The difference between the life you have and the life you envision is equal to the distance between perfection and reality. I had said, Did you make that up? She’d said, It’s what Reinhardt said when he saw the painting. I’ve never forgotten it. I looked at the woman in the painting the morning after I betrayed Tieresse for the first time, and I saw myself.
The night we ducked out of the fund-raiser she said, I’m ahead by one in the contest of who knows whom.
I said, True.
She said, So your job is to take me somewhere I think I am going to hate but that you know I won’t. Think you’re up to it?
I smiled and said, No doubt.
* * *
• • •
We’d been seeing each other for six months when I told her I was playing my move. I invited her on a road trip. She asked where we were going and I told her to pack light and for the outdoors.
She said, That’s all the information I’m getting?
I said, Yes, it is.
I picked her up and we drove to a hangar west of Houston adjacent to a three-thousand-foot grass strip where a friend of mine kept a plane he let me fly.
I said, You are going to love this place.
She had never been in a small plane and seemed nervous. I said, There’s nothing to worry about.
She said, You’re mistaking excitement for anxiety. I can’t wait. You’ve already won. Can you teach me to fly?
We climbed past five thousand feet, high enough to be safe, low enough to see the countryside. Her face was glued to the window. Just north of Oklahoma she asked if she could fly, and she gently steered us through a series of S-turns as we followed the Cimarron River mostly north. She asked where we were going and I told her we were almost there. I turned toward that spot in northeast Kansas and landed on the same driveway where I’d made an emergency landing more than four years before. She had already unlatched her door before we came to a stop.
She said, This place is amazing.
We walked around the forest hand in hand and had a late, light lunch sitting by the creek. Later we put on swimsuits and went canoeing on the Delaware River. Early that evening, eating a picnic of ribs and Shiraz beneath the shade of a massive cottonwood just outside Ozawkie, she said to me, Kansas City barbeque isn’t as good as Texas, but it sure ain’t bad.
I said, Listen to you, saying ain’t.
She said, Is the property where we landed for sale?
I said, I have no idea.
She said, If it is, let’s buy it and get married.
I said, What?
She said, It’s beautiful here, a combination of very remote and also manageable. What can I say? The geometry of the Midwest has always appealed to me. All these perfect right angles. I built my first subdivision near Lincoln, Nebraska.
I said, I was talking about the marriage part.
She said, Oh that. Quit being so damn Germanic already. Aren’t you Latin men supposed to be impulsive?
Tieresse opened her tablet, spent five minutes doing some research, then reached for her phone. She asked three questions and after each said, Yes, I see. Before she hung up, she offered to buy t
he place with cash.
She said, I bought it, now close your eyes.
I said, Seriously?
She said, I mean it. Close them.
I went along. She said, You can open your eyes now, and when I did, she was holding out two rings she had fashioned from a half dozen pine needles she’d braided into a strand and tied in a loop. She said, We can buy something more substantial when we get back to Houston. Now give me your hand. I closed my eyes again, and she said, Now what are you doing? I said, I’m making sure this is real.
After that day, it became a private game of ours. If I was feeling stressed or down, she would say, Close your eyes, amor, and once I had she would place her hand on my face and say, Now when I tell you to open, the world will be a better place. It worked every time.
We spent the night in a cheap motel and began to sketch the house we planned to build on the back of an envelope. Tieresse hired an architect from Houston to move up to Kansas for half a year and supervise the construction.
At the end of the driveway we installed a prefabricated hangar and bought a single-engine turboprop plane for Tieresse’s lessons. Leading west from the hangar, a covered path extended fifty meters to the spot where we built a three-thousand-square-foot rectangular house with a bedroom, living area, exercise room, library, and chef’s kitchen. It had a porch that wrapped all the way around, well water, solar panels covering the roof, and a fireplace that doubled as a wood-burning oven. Across the garden was a small guesthouse just in case.
Tieresse was ready to move there, but I was scared. I worried about how La Ventana would survive. She said, De Gaulle used to say the graveyards are full of indispensable men. I wanted to change the subject. I said, That’s pretty sexist, don’t you think? She said, Seriously, amor, your creation can run without your being there constantly. I said, If you want to know the truth, what I’m worried about is your running off if you have to be constantly with me. And it was true. I was never someone who was falsely modest. I was simply aware she was too smart and too interesting not to get bored with me. She said, For the first guy in his family to go to college, you appear to know nothing.
She liked to take long walks around the property at dawn and dusk, cutting trails through the forest. In the late winter, Tieresse spread wildflower seeds in the pasture, and in late June and early July we had an explosion of bird’s-foot violets and purple poppy mallows.
It was the first and last flower season she spent there.
* * *
• • •
She sold all her houses except for the places in Houston and Kansas and put the profits straight into her charitable foundation. The only indulgence she couldn’t bear to surrender was air travel. Tieresse said to me, The very thought of these TSA agents passing around pictures of my bum gives me the willies. I said, I don’t think they do that. She said, Ah, Rafa, your naïveté charms me, and she kissed my nose, then my mouth. No matter where we went together, a private car took us to the airport, and a private jet flew us to our destination. Soon after our engagement, she wanted to watch Reinhardt defend his doctoral dissertation, so we headed off to Boston.
He looked nothing like the computer geek I expected. He looked instead like the middleweight college wrestler he had been. He said, Nice to meet you, and he shook my hand with a palm as calloused as my papá’s had been. I said to Tieresse, Why didn’t you tell me he was an NCAA champion? She said, Because if you brag about too many qualities of those you love, other people will think you are either lying or delusional. It’s the same reason I tell everyone you cook better than Escoffier, but I never say you’re more handsome than George Clooney. The two hours we spent listening to Reinhardt discuss international financial security measures with four women and three men was like watching a movie in Urdu without subtitles. As we walked out I said, I have no idea what I just observed. He said, What you just observed is a silly monastic ritual. I hope it was not insufferable. Let’s go get pizza and beer. At dinner we discovered we both love baseball and found ourselves debating which team was better, the 1939 Yankees or the 1908 Cubs. He said, But best is not the same as favorite. For me, the 1978 Reds are it. I said, Ah yes, the Big Red Machine, and Tieresse said, I’m begging you both. Can we please talk about anything else?
It helped that he was baby-faced and had the body of a high school athlete. It helped, too, that he knew so much about a feature of our world I associated with youngsters, and of course that we had baseball in common. But whatever the explanation, despite my worries, the fact that I was as close in age to him as I was to his mother caused no awkwardness. He walked us to our hotel that evening and brought bagels to our suite for breakfast in the morning. On the way back to Texas I said to Tieresse, I didn’t want to say anything before, but I was nervous about meeting Reinhardt. Now I feel silly. He put me completely at ease. I really like him. Tieresse said, Before Reinhardt was old enough to talk, he already knew when I was happy. I said, How do you know he wasn’t sensing me?
One Sunday evening we were at her house. She was sitting at the counter drinking a glass of wine while I cooked risotto. She said, What’s the matter? I was singing an Otis Redding song when she asked. I said, Some dogs have such a great sense of smell they know whether their masters will be in a good mood or a bad one while they are still sleeping. She said, Nice try. Now, spill it. Resistance and denial would be futile. So I told her it had been bothering me that she knew all my friends, they all worked at La Ventana, but I did not know any of hers. I told her it made me feel like she was embarrassed.
She said, Rafa, I have acquaintances, scores, maybe hundreds of acquaintances, but they are not friends. My friends are Reinhardt and you.
I said, I think it’s interesting that you had a shitty relationship with your parents and now have a wonderful relationship with your son, whereas I adored my mamá and papá and have no children at all.
She stared at me. I said, What? Did I say something wrong?
She said, I don’t think you have any idea how smart you are.
The next night was the party for Britanny’s going away.
* * *
• • •
Two detectives came to the restaurant at one. I was in the kitchen when Benita told me they were there. One of them, a fit-looking Navy SEAL type wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, introduced himself as Detective Pisarro and asked me whether I could answer a few questions. I said, About what?
They drove me across the bayou to the central station and left me in a windowless room. I lost track of time. I called Tieresse and got her voice mail. I called her again and again. I placed the phone on the table and kept my thumb on redial. To this day I do not know how many messages I left. The prosecutor would later say it was all a charade.
Pisarro’s partner, Detective Cole, finally came into the room, apparently to play the role of bad cop. In time I would find out it was no act. He was wearing a cotton knit squared-off tie, which he loosened as he plopped himself down in the interview room’s other chair. He must have been spying on me from outside.
He said, It’s a little late for an alibi.
I said, What?
Pisarro came back in. Good cop. He must have been spying too. He was looking right at me when he said to Cole, Maybe he’s being sincere. Maybe he’s repressed it. It happens.
I said, What in the world are you two talking about?
Cole said, We know you killed your wife.
That’s when I fainted. I obviously do not remember being unconscious, but I have watched the videotape of the interrogation many times. I simply collapsed, like a tent whose poles snap in the wind. Pisarro walks out and only Cole is there when I come to. Pisarro walks back in and hands me a glass of water. I asked them where she was killed and how she died and who found her and when, my questions crowded together in too small a space. I said I wanted to see her. I said she had no enemies, everybody adored her.
Cole said, Not everybody, and I wanted to hurt him. They asked me questions about her life and her routine, her friends and her work. Then Cole asked where I had been.
My legs were shaking so hard the chair I was sitting in bounced and scratched. At some point Cole gave me a pen and a pad and asked me to put down my cell number, and I couldn’t write.
I said, I am going to call a lawyer.
Cole said, You don’t need a lawyer. Just tell us what happened.
I said, I have no idea what happened. I’m going home.
They did not try to stop me. Cole said, Her house is a crime scene. You can’t enter. It’s too late for you to clean up.
I said, She’s my wife. It is our house.
Cole said, You’ll feel better if you tell us what happened.
I said, Fuck you.
It was one A.M. I drove without intention or destination. I crept down Navigation, then Wayside. I turned west and went by La Ventana, surprised to see it clean and locked. I looked at my watch and remembered the time. I drove all night, circling the city on Loop 610. The eastern sky began to lighten. I went to Tieresse’s house. Cole hadn’t been lying. There was yellow tape blocking the yard and the door, and a squad car parked out front. I called Reinhardt.
I said, I am sorry to call so late. Or so early. I’m sorry. Your mother is dead. Tieresse is dead. Somebody killed her.
He asked how, and I told him what I knew, which was basically nothing. For a long moment the line was quiet. He said, I will fly down tomorrow.
I met him at the airport the next morning and told him what I had read in the paper earlier that day.
The housekeeper arrived at nine fifteen, her usual time. She saw that Tieresse had not squeezed juice, which was unusual, and the coffeepot was still full. She noted my car was not in the porte cochere, which was not unheard of. She called out to Tieresse and got no reply. A Modigliani hanging on the wall in the foyer to the parlor and bedroom was askew. The housekeeper went over to straighten it. Lying on the floor next to the desk was Tieresse, wearing her bathrobe, a damp towel on the floor beside her. The housekeeper screamed, dialed 911, and started to do CPR, until she realized Tieresse was already gone.
