Roger put the boot down, aligned the pair neatly. He went into the kitchen. Francie’s purse lay on the table. He looked through it: wallet, with driver’s license, credit cards, forty-two dollars; zinc lozenges, tissues, vitamin C, a key ring. Key ring. Not like her. She always left her keys in the ignition when she parked in the garage, no matter what he said.
There were seven keys on the ring: car key; two house keys, front and back; a key to her locker at the tennis club—he had had one just like it—a small key that would be for luggage; and two he couldn’t identify. These two he removed from the ring and laid on the table.
Roger went to Francie’s kitchen desk, found paper and a pencil. He placed the keys on the paper and traced their patterns. Then he pocketed the paper, put the keys back on the ring, left the purse the way he’d found it, went downstairs to his basement room. The crossword waited, unfinished. One down, nine letters: loss. That would be
ruination
.
7
“G
ood show this afternoon, Ned,” said Kira Chang, vice president of Total Entertainment Syndication, raising her glass. “Here’s to
Intimately Yours
.”
Sitting at the table in Ned’s dining room, they drank to the show: Anne, at the far end; Trevor, Ned’s producer, on her right; Lucy, the director, next to him; Ned at the end; Kira Chang on his right; Trevor’s assistant next to her. Ned didn’t like the wine at all, wished that Anne could have done a little better. And he wished she could have done better with the whole dinner, despite the late notice.
Ned had called at 3: 30, and Anne had said, “I wasn’t planning any dinner at all—isn’t it Thursday?”
For a moment he found himself holding his breath. “Meaning what?” he said.
“Thursday, Ned. When you stay late to plan the shows.”
“Yes. Normally. But Kira Chang’s in town.”
“Who’s she?”
“I told you. Sweetheart. The syndicator.”
“I thought that was next week.”
“The meeting’s next week, but she happened to be in town today and she dropped in. Trevor says it’s a good sign, so we should take advantage of it.”
“I’ll do my best,” Anne said.
Her best: the oyster stew, the lemon chicken with snow peas, the tiramisu from Lippo’s. And this marooncolored wine, possibly Romanian—he couldn’t read the fine print on the label.
“Delicious, Anne,” said Kira Chang. “And I hear you’re quite a tennis player, too.”
Anne smiled nervously. The light in the dining room was a little too strong; it made her look washed out, or was that just the effect of Kira’s presence?
Trevor refilled his glass—not for the first time—and said, “One thing we’ve never discussed, Kira, is the name of the show. What do you think of it?”
Kira looked at Trevor across the table. “There’s only one answer to questions like that—I’ll let you know after we poll the audience.”
“To see what
it
thinks, you mean?”
“That’s right.”
“Isn’t that leading by following?”
Kira smiled at him. “This isn’t art, Trevor. It isn’t even politics. It’s just entertainment.”
“Total entertainment,” said Ned.
Kira laughed. “Bingo.”
She left soon after. Ned walked her out to the waiting taxi. A cold wind blew down the street, ruffling her glossy hair. She turned to him.
“Thanks for dinner,” she said. “And don’t forget to thank Anne again for me. I hope I didn’t upset your routine.”
“Not at all,” Ned said. Their eyes met. He said what was on his mind. “Did you really like the show today?”
“Not much,” Kira replied. “But that’s what I like, right there. The way you asked that question. You’re good with women, Ned. That’s your strength. And it goes a long way in this business.”
“But the show?”
“Too early to say. I hope you understand that when we green-light something like this we often bring in our own people on the production side.”
“The show was Trevor’s idea in the first place.”
“The cast-iron sincerity in your tone—that’s part of the appeal, for sure,” she said, opening the door of the taxi. “But the metaphor to keep in mind, if you want to make it big in broadcasting, in anything, is the multistage rocket.”
“Meaning the booster falls away?”
“Good night,” she said, closing the door. The taxi drove off.
“Did it go all right?” Anne asked when they were in bed.
“Fine.”
“What a relief. She made me so uncomfortable.”
“How?”
“She’s so poised, so . . . everything I’m not.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ned said. The booster falls away: that meant ruthlessness, and he wasn’t the ruthless type. He rolled over and tried to sleep; the headache awoke over his right eye, unfolding like a flower.
“Francie?”
Francie opened her eyes. Roger was standing by the bed, looking down at her. A jolt of adrenaline rushed through her, washing away decaying fragments of terrible dreams.
“Hope I didn’t scare you,” he said with a smile. “Not going in today?”
Francie started to speak, but her mouth was too dry, her throat, her whole body, hurting. She tried again. “What time is it?”
“Nine-thirty. You slept through the alarm.”
Francie glanced at the clock radio.
“I shut it off,” Roger said. “How can you bear that station?” He smiled again. “Coffee?”
“You’ve made coffee?”
“Should be just about done.” He reached out as though to pat her knee under the covers, thought better of it, went out. Francie sat up, saw her damp clothes lying in the corner. She rose, aching in every muscle, kicked the clothes under the bed, got back in just as Roger returned with a tray: buttered toast, marmalade, steaming coffee.
“You should stay home,” he said. “You don’t look at all well.”
“I’m fine.”
Roger pulled up a chair, watched her sip the coffee. “Working late last night?” he said.
“Yes.”
He nodded. “I hope you’re appreciated,” he said. “Some
especially
important project, is it?”
“I don’t know what you mean by especially important. The acquisitions committee meets next week—it’s always a busy time.”
“Seen anything you like recently?”
“What do you mean?”
“Objets d’art. What else could I be referring to?”
“Nothing.” But it had been years since he had discussed her work. “I’m recommending a few pieces.”
“Such as?”
“There’s a photographer in Providence. She does old people under streetlights, in black-and-white. Mostly black.”
“Any paintings?”
“No paintings,” Francie said.
* * *
Roger dressed warmly: turtleneck, chamois shirt, thick corduroy pants, ski hat, Gore-Tex gloves, his L. L. Bean boots. He went into the garage, opened Francie’s car, looked in the glove box, found a wrinkled envelope with a map drawn on it jammed at the back, as he’d been sure he would—he knew her, and nothing she did could change that.
Directions to B
.
’s,
she’d written in her neat hand. He studied the map for a minute or so, replaced it. Then, putting a shovel in the back of his car, he drove to a hardware store. The clerk made keys from the two patterns. Roger filled his tank and headed west, out of the city. His car had four-wheel drive and good tires, but the sky was low and dark and snow was in the forecast. He switched on his headlights and set the cruise control prudently to fifty-five.
Snow was falling by the time Roger stopped in front of Brenda’s gate—marked
wrought-iron g
. on the map, as he recalled—falling, but falling hard enough to have obliterated any trace of tread marks? Roger’s eyes followed the track that rose up the hill beyond the gate, white, smooth, unbroken. He had his first moment of doubt.
The gate was padlocked. Roger got out of his car, took out the two keys. The first one worked. He drove through, his wheels spinning slightly as he came to the top of the hill, and cautiously down the other side, foot on the brake the whole way.
He parked by a stone jetty, covered in snow, and looked out at the island in the river. Snow, clean and pure, lay deep on everything: the trees, the roof of the cottage, the river. Roger remembered going out in the Adirondack woods as a boy to cut down a Christmas tree with his father’s man, as they called him, Len; how Len had pretended to chop off his own foot, having brought along a Baggie of ketchup to complete the illusion: red stains in the snow, Len laughing his toothless laugh, a drop of mucus quivering from the tip of his hairy nose. Roger’s father had fired Len that very day for putting such a scare into the boy.
Roger stepped onto the jetty, saw no sign of tracks across the river. Doubt again. Was he seeing ketchup and thinking blood? He gazed down onto two dinghies, filled with snow. It was falling harder now, the flakes bigger. Roger reached into the nearest dinghy, picked up an oar, and jabbed it on the river ice. Solid. He lowered himself onto the river and started across, testing the ice with the oar at every step.
Roger walked onto the island, past the giant elms, also reminding him of his boyhood, up to the front door of the cottage. Snow on the porch, snow on the glider, even a little mound of it clinging to the upper hemisphere of the doorknob. Doubt. He took out the remaining key. It worked. Roger went inside.
He closed the door, took off his boots, took off his gloves. Kitchen: a wine bottle on the table, half full. Roger reached for it, stopped.
Flake of dandruff falls off
your head, you fry
. Strange, how the mind worked. He put on the gloves, drew the cork, tilted the bottle to his lips, not quite touching, and tasted the wine. Still good, although not much of a wine. He stuck the cork back in, left the bottle in the same spot on the table.
Roger opened the refrigerator, empty, and the cupboards: dishes, glasses, the expected. He went into the living room, ran his eyes over the books, mounted the stairs. He glanced into a bedroom with a bare mattress on the bed, moved into the bathroom: bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo in the shower. He picked up the shampoo with his gloved hand. Principessa was the brand, and the writing on the bottle was Italian. A towel hung over the rail; he could see it was dry.
Roger went into the last room, another bedroom, this one made up. He checked the closet: two life jackets and a terry-cloth robe on the rail, something silver glinting on the high shelf at the back. He reached for it, a box, a silvery slippery box that he almost dropped. Lancôme face powder: would have been messy. He put it back. Then he knelt, peered under the bed, saw dustballs. He pulled back the duvet, checked under the pillows, stared at the sheets. White sheets, spotless. He bent over the center of the bed until his nose was almost touching the bottom sheet and sniffed. He smelled nothing.
Ketchup, instead of blood. Had he built a huge construction on a foundation of nothing? Then, straightening, Roger saw brown-tipped flowers in a glass vase by the window, dying but not dead. Irises? Yes, but even if they were, what then? Nothing certain. A foundation of very little. If he had made one mistake in his life, in his work, it was letting his brilliance speed him along too quickly.
Homo sapiens
was a jealous species.
Roger smoothed the duvet, went downstairs. He stood in the kitchen for some time, watching the snow fall. Then he put on his boots and went out, making sure the door was locked behind him.
Roger walked back across the river, poking ahead automatically with the oar, his brain rearranging the few pieces—irises, wine, wet boots, call-in show—and projecting the shapes of missing ones that might not even exist. He almost didn’t notice the bump in all the white smoothness of the river, a protrusion like driftwood covered in snow.
Bending over it, Roger dusted off the snow. Underneath he saw not driftwood but a brown-paper-wrapped package, frozen stiff. He got his hands on it, pulled; the package didn’t budge. Clearing away more snow with the blade of the oar, he saw that the package, tilted at a forty-five-degree angle, was stuck in the ice.
Roger went to his car, returned with the shovel, chipped away carefully. After a few minutes, the package came free. Then he was down on his hands and knees, tearing at the frozen paper.
A painting. One half blurred and damaged, all murky brown and green. But the other half showed a crumbling plinth, a few dangling red grapes, the front wheels of a skateboard.
The wind began to blow at the wrapping paper. Roger scrambled around, gathering it up. He came upon a white envelope, threw off his gloves, ripped it open. Inside a note:
To Ned, with all my love, Francie
.
Roger stood in the middle of the river, snow falling harder, wind whipping icy flakes at him from different directions. His mind was the same—a turmoil of thoughts, racing by too fast for even him to examine.
Must clear,
must clear, must clear,
he thought, and with great effort he forced his brain to stop, his mind to go blank. He stood panting, his head empty, feeling nothing, not cold, snow, wind.
And into this calm, a meditational calm, although he’d always despised the idea of meditation, came a first brief thought, or rather, memory.
A perfect crime: it’s got to be
absolutely unconnected—a penny drops off the Empire
State Building, goes right through your skull
.
8
R
oger drove back to the city, still at a prudent fifty-five, but his mind was racing. He was used to the speed of his mind, had known it to run far ahead of him before, but never in this supercharged way. His whole body was shaking slightly, like a shell that could barely contain the forces within.
Hold on to one thought,
he instructed it, or at most a single train of thought. He settled on one right away, a simple syllogism. Major premise: F tries to make a fool of R. Minor premise: R is not a fool and will not bear it. Conclusion: question mark.
Not quite a question mark, because he knew that some action was required. She had come into their house—his house, his ancestral house—with another man’s sperm inside her, perhaps many, many times. Another man’s sperm: a vulgar, dirty, contemptuous betrayal, almost slimy, like a plot development in one of those movies about alien beings in human shape. Another man’s sperm—what a primitive fixation she had with the substance, on reflection—inside her, and she talking and smiling away at him. Smile and be a villain, Francie. There was no fixing anything now, no going back. And what was society’s answer? No-fault divorce. If this were Sicily, or Iran, countless other places, he could now—what?
Kill her with impunity
. A crime of passion, almost expected. Divorce implied nothing more than absence of affection, lack of feeling. Therefore divorce did not apply. He felt. He felt the opposite of everything husband should feel for wife. She was his enemy, had proved him wrong in one of the basic decisions of life, whom to marry. What action was appropriate? Question mark.
Not quite a question mark. Deep in his mind, did he not already know the answer must be related to that penny dropping off the Empire State Building?
Yes
. The conclusion awaited, long before the thinking was done. But slow: this was not Sicily or Iran. America, land that had deteriorated so much as he grew older, had failed him so badly. Slow: there would be many steps along the way, down and down toward that coppery glint. And every step must be a careful step, all planning, all preparation thought and rethought.
For example, on the front seat beside him sat the damaged painting and Francie’s note.
To Ned, with all my
love, Francie
. His mind writhed away from the words.
Get back on track, one thought, one thought
. The painting, the note. Too risky to hide them in the house and he no longer had an office. Was there any other space over which he held exclusive control? The answer came at once, probably because of the morning’s business with the keys: his locker at the tennis club.
Step one, then. There were two kinds of lockers at the club: full-size metal ones in the locker room, and half-size wooden ones lining the thickly carpeted hall that led to the courts. Because of his dislike for showering at the club, Roger had taken a locker in the hall. He walked to it now, the painting wrapped in the scraps of brown paper he’d salvaged, note tucked inside, and unlocked the door with his key. Inside he found equipment he’d forgotten about—racquets, cans of balls, tennis shoes, towels. No room for the painting. He put the painting down, the brown paper unfurling, glanced around, saw no one, took everything out of the locker, picked up the painting, rewrapped it imperfectly, one corner protruding, and was just placing it inside when a female voice spoke right behind him. “Roger?”
He slammed the door shut, wheeled around, saw a big woman in a purple warm-up suit, a pair of racquets slung over her shoulder. “Oh. Nora.” Not very smooth, perhaps, possibly lacking in friendliness, so he added, “Hello. Nice to see you.”
“Likewise. I didn’t know you were playing again.”
“Playing again?” How to handle this situation? He looked at her: only Nora, after all, a jock, not very bright; he’d never understood what Francie saw in her. “Thinking about it, in any case,” he said. “Come to reintroduce myself to the gear. Shake hands with my racquet.” A witticism—shaking hands with the racquet was the age-old introduction to the forehand grip. He laughed.
Nora didn’t. Her brow, in no way noble, or even intelligent, wrinkled.
Must I explain the goddamned joke?
Roger was thinking, when three women came down the hall on their way to the courts, talking woman-talk. “Say hi to Francie,” Nora said, joining them.
“Will do,” said Roger with a smile, turning the key in his locker, then trying the handle twice to make sure it was locked.
Driving home, Roger fought the urge to stamp down on the gas, to smash the cars around him.
On track, stay
on track, use your brain
. He used it to think about crime.
Roger knew that people sometimes got away with crime, but did any of them
necessarily
do so? Or did they simply rely, tacitly or explicitly, on sloppy police work, nonexistent police work, luck? He considered luck. A person could be taken on a cruise ship, for example, invited for a glass of champagne on a deserted stern deck at night, pushed over the rail. It might work, but was it teleologically guaranteed to do so? Of course not. Someone might be sitting in the shadows, obscured by a lifeboat, and witness the whole thing. Or the falling person might cry out, attract a quick glance through a porthole or from someone on a lower deck, leading to alarms, searchlights, rubber boats crisscrossing the wake. The person might even fall unnoticed but then happen on a piece of driftwood, cling to it until dawn, be rescued by a fishing boat. Therefore the cruise ship scenario, attractive because no body and therefore no evidence is found, required luck, would not succeed of necessity, was far from perfect.
Calmer now, Roger was in no way downcast by the negative result of this speculation. Quite the opposite, if anything, for all at once he was hungry and thirsty, his appetite keener than it had been for a long time. He pulled into a suburban steakhouse, the kind of place he would never enter—wagon wheel by the door, cowboy pictures on the wall—and ordered a big steak and a double Scotch on the rocks. What was this strange feeling bubbling up inside him, strange but not quite forgotten? He put a name to it: enthusiasm. And in the next moment he realized with a shock—ironic, unsettling, but finally pleasant—that he had found a job at last.
“I’ll have another,” he said to the waitress.
“Another drink, sir?”
“Another of everything.”
“Including the garlic bread?”
“Pourquoi pas?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Yes, garlic bread by all means.”
Accidents, he thought, chewing his food with relish, trying to keep pace with his mind. Tampering with brakes, with steering rods, with ovens, with furnaces, with ski bindings all required technical knowledge; all carried the risk that evidence of tampering might remain. And if tampering was suspected, the first suspect would be the spouse.
Roger removed the round paper napkin from under his glass, wrote on it:
poison—no—expertise, traces
contract killer—no—in his power
arson (house)—no—evidence—accelerant
infection (injection?) with some disease—
“Care for anything else, sir?”
Roger slid his hand over the napkin. “Just the check.”
The waitress went off. Roger raised his hand slightly to peek at the napkin, like a poker player checking his hole card. The disease idea. Pro: like an accident, it provided a credible noncriminal explanation for death. Con: it required expertise, a disease not readily contagious yet fast-acting and certain.
No,
he wrote beside it, but reluctantly. He paid his bill, went into the bathroom, tore up the napkin, flushed the shreds down the toilet, got in his car, started home. He had gone a few blocks when he made a sudden U-turn and sped back to the restaurant. What if some scrap of the napkin was still floating in the toilet bowl? He hurried inside—“anything the matter, sir?” said the waitress—strode into the bathroom, peered into the toilet. Nothing but water; he flushed it again anyway, just to be safe.
“Francie?” he called, entering the house on Beacon Hill; their house, under the laws of the Commonwealth, but his by moral right, since he had inherited it from his grandparents. No answer. He went into the kitchen, saw her purse still on the table and a stack of mail, some opened, on the desk. He riffled through it, found a letter from Tad Wagner:
Please find a copy of your coverage
statement
.
Once again, thanks so much, and if I can be . . .
Roger checked the coverage statement. Amount: $500,000. Beneficiary: himself. Yes, he had found a job, and it came with a suitable performance bonus. Had his mind somehow known about Francie even then when he’d first thought of Tad and arranged to run into him on the street? A reunion that had led to a drink, talk of Francie’s success, proud exhibition of the
Globe
clipping—but no explicit discussion of her possible insurance needs, unnecessary with the Tads of the world. The human mind had unplumbed powers, his especially. He heard Francie moving about upstairs, left the desk the way he’d found it.
Roger was putting cookies on a tray when Francie came into the room: the sight of her. Her face, once such an appealing mix of elements—bright eyes, strong features, soft skin—was nothing but a mask. How clearly he saw that now. Despite all the thinking he had done that day, despite the need for long and careful preparation, despite that glinting coppery goal sometime in the future, he wanted to beat her head in, then and there. “Care for a cookie?” he said, offering the tray.
“No thanks,” she said.
“Feeling better?”
“Yes.”
She was wearing a coat: an old one, he noticed, unworn for a year or two. “Going somewhere?”
“Didn’t I tell you? I’m playing in the tournament.”
“Mixed?” he asked.
“Women’s doubles, Roger,” said Francie, taking her purse and moving toward the door that led down to the garage.
“Good luck, then.” She went out. He waited until he felt the vibration of the opening garage door under his feet before calling, “Don’t forget to bend your fucking knees.”
“God, what fun,” said Anne. Still sweating slightly, they sat at a corner table of the tennis club bar, overlooking the courts. Seven-five, two-six, seven-five: they’d knocked the number one seeds out of the tournament. “That backhand down the line you hit at five all ad out—unbelievable. I wouldn’t have the guts to try that, not in a million years.”
Francie just smiled.
“And then your two best serves of the night, right after. Bang bang. I could have kissed you.” Beer came, and water, lots of water. Pink with exertion and victory, Anne talked on and on, reliving the match, her words sometimes tripping over themselves. Francie hadn’t seen her like this, suspected it didn’t happen often. She wondered about Anne’s husband.
Anne paused for breath, took a big drink of water. “Was it Jimmy Connors who said that tennis is better than sex?”
“Maybe his tennis,” Francie said. “Not ours.”
Anne glanced at her, and in that glance Francie saw her realizing she’d been talking too much, at least in terms of some inner code. Her mood changed, the blood draining from her face, leaving her pale. Her eyes took on an inward look: something was on her mind, something unrelated to tennis. She tried some beer, started to speak, stopped, and finally said, “Can I ask you something, Francie? I hate to be too personal, but the truth is I find you so easy to be with—like someone I’ve known for a long time.”
“Ask away,” said Francie.
Anne said, “Are you a good cook?”
“That’s the question?”
Anne nodded.
“I have two surefire appetizers, two surefire entrées, one dessert,” said Francie. “The rest is silence.”
Anne smiled, an admiring smile that made Francie a little uncomfortable. “I thought my lemon chicken was surefire, too,” she said, “but I guess I was wrong.” The inward look again. Francie waited. “Does your husband ever bring people home for dinner at the last minute?” Anne asked.
“He’s actually been doing the cooking lately,” Francie said.
“Aren’t you lucky.”
Anne added something else that Francie didn’t catch. She was thinking of their own dining room, and the happy sounds that used to fill it. At one time she and Roger had entertained a lot, then less, and since the loss of his job, not at all. Plotted on a graph, she wondered, would those dinners track the health of their marriage? Down, down, down, with upturns here and there: a stunted marriage, like a tree growing in the face of an impossible wind.
“Thursday of all days,” Anne was saying, “when he usually works late. It was going to be a McDonald’s night, and then boom. So I threw together the lemon chicken, but they hardly touched it. And I suppose the wine wasn’t very good either, although that didn’t stop them from drinking plenty of it. I’d read an article on Romanian wine, goddamn it.” Was Francie imagining it, or had Anne’s eyes filled with tears? Tears, yes: and Anne saw that she saw, and tried to explain. “He cares so much about his career. The least I can do is put a decent meal on the table.”
Francie could imagine Nora at this point, saying,
Your
husband sounds like a jerk
. She toned that down. “I don’t see the connection. And if he’s any good at his job, a failed lemon chicken won’t make any difference.”
“You think? He’s so ambitious.”
“I do. Lighten up, for God’s sake.”
Anne’s eyes cleared. “I’m sure you’re right,” she said. “You’re so clearheaded, Francie, so in control.”
Francie, suddenly picturing herself under the ice at Brenda’s cottage, her breath escaping in silver-and-black bubbles, said nothing.
“Can I ask you a favor?” Anne said.
“But first do me one,” Francie said. “Stop asking if you can ask and just ask.”
Anne laughed. “With pleasure.” She reached across the table, touched Francie’s hand. “Give me one of those surefire recipes of yours.”
Francie took the paper napkin from under her glass and wrote:
Francie’s Roast Lamb, serves 8
7 cloves garlic, 1 halved, rest chopped
2 pounds baking potatoes, peeled and . . .
She came to the end, added the reminder to keep the gratin warm while waiting to carve the lamb, handed the napkin to Anne. “Enjoy.”