by James, Terry
How unlikely it was, then—by his own admission—that Mr. Fletcher, a man jealous of his own shadow, should find himself that rare object of her favored attentions. It happened one night at … No. I can’t be bothered to reconstruct that tedious scene. What matters is this: within a month of meeting Gordon Fletcher she was married to him, and Heidi Malone was a thing of the past. She was now Mrs. Gordon Fletcher, with all the privileges and duties incumbent upon that moniker.
From that point in Mr. Fletcher’s narrative he was less than forthcoming about the challenges his new wife presented to his congenital insecurity. I can only assume that he sat her down on some velvet wingback chair in his library, placed himself on the matching ottoman, looked into those indigo eyes of hers and told her the truth. It was probably the first time she had ever witnessed such sincerity in a man, and it must have moved her. I can see the scene all too clearly. Having married this man for money and found true love instead, she must have sobbed for joy. And Mr. Fletcher, to have finally realized after a lifetime of quiet suffering that so much pain could have been avoided by placing what he most feared directly into the hands of the one who could destroy him—what an awakening that must have been.
But he wouldn’t have been sitting there meekly on the other side of my desk if all was well in paradise. Lately certain disquieting rumors from reputable quarters had been finding their way to Mr. Fletcher’s ears, fanning his smoldering neurosis into flames. Her car had been spotted on several occasions in broad daylight in insalubrious parts of town. A slip of the tongue from one of the servants revealed mysterious telephone calls in the night. Worst of all, and hardest for Mr. Fletcher to admit, she had flinched from his touch yesterday morning after breakfast.
“I want you to keep an eye on her,” he said.
I’ve worked plenty of jealous husband jobs and they aren’t my cup of tea. It’s hard work following a woman around the city, watching her spend two hours trying to decide which purse, the green tortoise shell or the black chenille, goes best with her peep-toe alligator heels; standing on the other side of a lamppost listening to her make mincemeat of her dear dear friends with a dear dear friend; or worst of all, doing nothing at all for unbelievably long expanses of time. They are bored and boring rich women because their husbands, the only sort with money to burn on a private detective, are bored and boring rich men. These Chairmen of the Bored, courting the romance of scandal, convince themselves that their wives are cheating on them and hire me to prove it. They get irate with me when I have nothing to show for it. The worst of them eventually get desperate and suggest that I test her faithfulness myself, an exercise in futility considering that they forbid me to follow through should she fall for me. The last time one of these jokers accused me of sleeping with his wife and threatened to break me I vowed never to do business with a jealous husband again.
Why then did I accept this job? Had Mr. Fletcher’s openness about his jealousies somehow endeared him to me? Was it a desire to see this goddess in the flesh? Maybe it was just the money. Whatever my motives, I felt I had no choice but to take the job. He wasted no time providing me with the relevant details. I told him my rate. Unsurprisingly he didn’t insist on doubling it.
After he had gone, I locked up, returned to my apartment, and went back to bed.
3
THE NEXT MORNING, bright and early, I drove over to Palladian Hills. After the great conflagration of 1904, the smoking ruins of what until then had simply been called the Western District were transformed by a cabal of politicians and businessmen backed by the Greek mining magnate Nicanor Stigmatias into a neo-Hellenic fantasy. Shepherd Hill was renamed Olympus, the old fort there demolished and turned into Cronos Park, replete with follies of temple ruins and statues of Hermes and Aphrodite prancing about the olive groves. To this day, among the potsherds around the duck pond, you can still find progeny of the rock snails Stigmatias imported from Naxos for his Epiphany feasts.
If not exactly with gold, the streets of Palladian Hills were paved with the silkiest tar and bitumen known to man. It wouldn’t have surprised me in the least to have rounded one of the bends in that maze of mansions to find a covey of society ladies playing shuffleboard across the macadam. Where not walled and gated off from the hazards of such frictionless streets, the homes were buffered by lawns so immense that even the most tenacious salesman wouldn’t cross them without adequate provisions.
The Fletcher estate was on Thebes Way, up past Corinth Drive. Add the columns and the pediment, and the house might have doubled for the White House. All the driveway lacked was an air traffic control tower. Welded into the arching cast-iron gateway over the entrance to the drive were the words: THESEUS HOUSE.
I drove slowly past the property, continued up to Argos Lane, turned around at what, judging by the savage glare of a three-headed dog, must have been the gate to Hades, then drove back beyond the turn-in to the Fletcher place and parked in the shade of the row of cypresses that bordered the property. There I waited for an hour and a half, thinking among other things about a woman who called herself Brandy. A few choice images returned to me. Chiefly, her standing before me in nothing but my holster.
It was nearly eleven by the time Mrs. Morris’s car, a silver ‘39 Morgan Sphinx convertible, finally appeared in my rearview mirror. It was a stunning machine, all the more so for the way it slinked out from behind the cypresses like the stockinged foot of a showgirl teasing the limelight before taking the stage. True to its namesake, it tapered in bold curves from a regal front end to an almost comically diminutive rear, the muscular front fenders calling to mind the powerful breasts of that mythical winged lioness. The blue of the sky, the green of the trees, the warm gray of the street pooled and swirled over its opalescent silver skin. The top was down. As Mrs. Fletcher turned the plump whitewalls out into the street and drove past me, I watched from the cover of my tilted brim to catch a blur of soft cheek below a cream-colored cloche. I waited until she had rounded the curve before setting out.
She wasn’t in my sights for more than a few seconds at a time until we were out of the labyrinth and cruising down the coast road. Traffic was sparse at that time of morning, so I kept my distance. Along the scrubby sandbanks off to the left, a few late joggers were comfortably outpacing death. Beyond them lay the granite slab of the ocean under a woolen haze. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been over to the west side, and I had to admit, with the cool sea breeze blowing through my hair, that I was long overdue. I felt a million miles away from the dirty sheets and empty bottles of my apartment. It is in moments like these, under the spell of space and light and fresh air, that I often fall prey to the dream of a different life. In it I am normal, easy in the company of my fellow man. I am employed at something creative, part of a team producing useful things. I work regular hours, partake of wholesome forms of recreation, enjoy a diet consisting of more than steaks and fries. I don’t drink. Of course there is a loving woman somewhere in the picture, with a curvaceous figure and dark eyes. Even fleeting visions of children—two of them, a boy and a girl, running in slow motion towards me across a field, sunshine haloing their heads.
She stuck to the coast road, past Shepherd Beach and the western flank of Prospect Park, in no apparent rush to get where she was going. As we neared the Seapoint grade, which curved steeply around the wave-battered cliffs leading to Preston Avenue and on to Spring Valley, I figured she must be on her way to the 15th Street boutiques. Instead, at the base of the grade, she turned into the parking lot of Clifton Baths. The lot was virtually empty. She could have parked right next to the entrance. Instead she drove on to the far end of the lot and parked there, facing the ocean. I put a little time between us then pulled into the lot and parked at the opposite end. I watched her in the rearview. She sat in the car for a while, staring out at the sea. Finally the door opened and she stepped out.
She was wearing a light tan cotton summer dress that ended just below her knees, no stockings, a delicate avocado gr
een cashmere sweater, matching pumps, and the aforementioned cloche hat. From the crook of her right elbow hung a tote bag of some kind of woven reed material. Altogether a very modest, tasteful ensemble, befitting her social status, though something of her supposedly wild youth survived in the play of her hips as she made her way across the lot and to the doors.
I waited until she had nearly reached the building before I got out and followed her. I bought a paper from the box outside the entrance and made my way in.
I hadn’t been to Clifton Baths since I was a kid, at least thirty years ago, but the moment I stepped through the door and smelled the salty ocean water and felt the wet blanket of humidity close around me and absorbed the heavenly sea green light of water and girders and glass and a thousand other things still the same, I was instantly transported back to my childhood. Less a specific point in time than a pervading mood of loneliness. The cries of children echoed enchantingtly from the glass and girders, raining down on me from all directions. I looked around but didn’t see Mrs. Fletcher.
The cashier was so old that he could very well have been the same surly chap who used to man the till.
“One adult, please,” I said.
“Twenty-five cents.” His voice was nothing but wind.
I placed the quarter on the counter and drifted in dreamy nostalgia down the Grand Staircase to the observation theater. I took a seat and had a look at the paper while I waited for Mrs. Fletcher to reappear.
You could hardly call it an obituary. Down below the usual cast of characters—the ancient local judge, the old baseball player, the former Broadway actress—was one Walter Morris, “a.k.a. Baxter Conway, crime novelist, 62.” No mention of how he had died. He was survived by his wife, Imogen Morris. No mention of any children or grandchildren.
I glanced up from the paper to see Mrs. Fletcher in a white one-piece, with swimming cap and goggles. To what god did I owe the privilege of being paid to watch Mrs. Fletcher’s long, shapely legs carry her out of the ladies changing room, down the sandstone steps to the Grand Tank, and propel her in a graceful dive into the water? After a few seconds under water, she surfaced and glided out to the middle of the tank with an effortless sidestroke.
By the time I finished with the rest of the paper, all of my initial nostalgia at being back in Clifton Baths had worn off, and I was eager to get out of that swampy cavern of diffused light. Mrs. Fletcher finally emerged from the tank around one o’clock, released her perfectly sculpted hair from the swimming cap, and dried herself off with a towel that, since I hadn’t noticed her placing it there, seemed to represent the grace of some higher power. In a more cynical mood I might have thought that the towel wasn’t hers at all, that she had merely grabbed the nearest one at hand, and that now someone else would have to emerge to a cold, towelless world. But I was feeling strangely peaceful, generous, benevolent even. I must have been coming down with something.
That evening, back in my apartment—Mrs. Fletcher went straight home and did not emerge for the remainder of the day—my earlier reaction to the serendipity of the towel returned to me. Now the towel itself, at the time too distant for details, expanded in my mind until all other thoughts were wiped away. It came to me in a state of purity no real towel has ever known. Dry, warm, fluffy, this towel was nothing less than a perfect abstraction of the very idea towel. So white was its whiteness that I can think of no similes to match it. It seemed to be absorbing every cell of my brain. I sat in the recliner for a long time, eyes glazed, meditating on the bathing towel.
As night began to fall, I got up and changed out of my suit and flicked on the radio and poured myself a glass of Old Grand-Dad. They were playing Tad Wilmott and the Chicago Five: the snarl of Ray Gutshank’s trombone, the comedy of Dexter Hines’s muted trumpet, the slurred speech of Freddy Ortega’s banjo—these were my companions on the rare nights when I was home for more than a few hours. I was defenseless to the rhythms of this music. It would start as a tapping of my left shoe, always the left, while I sat in the recliner sipping my bourbon. Around the third sip my left hand, the one not holding the glass, would join the plodding bass line of my foot with the rat-a-tat-tat of eighths and sixteenths. At a less predictable point along the way, I would realize that my head was making half-circles, around and back, back and around. Downing the last swallow, I’d be out of the chair, propelled to the middle of the room, dancing with the slack limbs of a marionette. On fire. Burning up my humble abode. And then, somewhere near sundown, a cymbal roll would break the rhythm and all the horns would melt into the dreamy bog of a love song: “This is for all you lovers out there tonight. For all your yesterdays and all your tomorrows. …” Flick—off the radio would go, and once again I would be in my native domain. Solitude.
In through the window drifted the small sounds of the day’s dying, the last honks of the office dwellers heading home in their Dodges and Fords, the melancholy call of the evening paper boy, the seagulls giving the sun a noisy sendoff, the low murmur of the tired city. The radiance of that first drink warming my face, I placed my hands on either side of the window frame—over the years the paint on the wall where I place my hands has grown duller than the surrounding paint—and gazed out at the city and the sky. I don’t consider myself a spiritual man, but those few moments I spend at the window of an evening always give me a sense of the divine, for lack of a better word. I see myself standing there, perhaps as a pigeon on the ledge sees me. My face ablaze with the fire of the sunset. My five o’clock shadow an hour late. My eyes—which I’m told are sad—seem on the verge of penetrating the heart of some grander mystery than the identity of a killer. No longer distracted by a million tiny details, I am seeing pure geometry and energy. Squares and circles. Space divided into color and shape. Blocks of blue shadow wedded to swatches of tinted light. Broad flat swathes of earth and sky. Nothing static. Everything, even the bricks, radiating life. Clumps of dark specks swooping and circling through the air. Down in the channels below, orderly progression of rectilinear forms, moving, stopping. This accumulation of motive and motion seemingly—and why this gives me solace I do not know—without purpose.
That night, around eight o’clock, I emerged from my porous trance with the odd sensation that I was in someone else’s apartment, so unfamiliar did the objects of my own dwelling strike me. I stood up and looked around at this place I call home, this place, it seemed, I had always lived in and always would. On the back of the door hung a two-year-old City Zoo calendar, open to May, featuring an aqua-tinted Zebra. It had been so long since this calendar had registered on my consciousness that I had no recollection whatsoever of how it had come to be there.
Another forgotten item that puzzled me, over on the lamp table beside the recliner, was a King James Bible. The puzzling thing wasn’t where it had come from—I had bought it from a traveling salesman several months ago—but why I had bought it in the first place. He wasn’t a particularly good salesman. When I had finally answered the door after his third and increasingly louder round of knocking, he had scolded me for not answering more promptly. He was a squirrelly young guy in a threadbare collage of garments intended to pass for a suit. Hanging from a white-knuckled fist was a big brown case with a white cross crudely painted on the side. He recited rather woodenly a Psalm rewritten as a sales pitch for Bibles, and then said something like, “Want one?” I did not want one. Nor did I feel sorry for the guy. The only reason I can think of why I shelled out two bucks for the thing was to get rid of him.
I picked it up and opened it for the first time. There was an inscription on the inside cover: “To my son on your eleventh birthday. May you always be, above all else, a man of God. Love, Mother. December 7, 1952.”
My first thought was that the salesman had sold me a stolen Bible. But I couldn’t help but find the inscription touching. I wondered who this woman and her son were. Before I knew it I had imagined an entire scenario: tracking the mother down only to learn that she was dead, hunting for the son, finding hi
m in some halfway house in the Silage, handing him the Bible in dramatic fashion, his tears of gratitude anointing his path to recovery.
That moving little matinee prompted me to skim through the Bible in search of further clues. Near the end (Revelation, chapter 6), I did find something interesting: an old photograph of a woman, two by three, head and shoulders only. She looked to be in her early to mid-thirties. There was something in her features—a hardness in the bones of her face, a tightness in the collar of her dark dress, a severity in the containment of her hair—which gave me the feeling of mild remorse one sometimes gets in museums when imagining a once-living hand holding the hairbrush relegated to a glass display case. My guess from her clothing and hairstyle, and from the apparent age of the photograph itself, was that the picture had been taken sometime in the late twenties or early thirties.
I turned the photo over, but nothing was written on the back. Of course she could have been anyone, but once an idea is planted in your mind it’s hard to uproot it. For me, she was the mother. The Bible in my hands was her gift to her beloved son. Had he honored her desire and become a man of God? Considering the provenance of the Bible, it didn’t look good. I stared at the photo for a while, wondering if she was still alive, then I returned her to the apocalypse and set the Bible back on the lamp table.
The discovery of these three overlooked objects—the calendar, the Bible, and the photograph within it—in the space of a few minutes indicated to me that when it came to my own life I wasn’t very observant at all. This wasn’t the first time it had happened. Every six months or so I would look up from my work and notice some object whose origin, for the life of me, I could not fathom. Lately it seemed to be happening more frequently. That this sudden perceptiveness to my immediate surroundings was somehow linked to my earlier ruminations, for lack of a better word, on the towel that may or may not have been Mrs. Fletcher’s seemed an unavoidable conclusion. More perplexing was the fact that I was thinking about these trifling matters at all.
