About the Author (19 page)

And so, upon dropping Les off at the airport, I continued on into the city of Burlington. At the corner of Main and St. Paul Streets, I visited a bank (not my own) and opened an account with the check. The manager, a crook-backed man with sandy hair and glasses, a Mr. Willows, informed me that it would be several days before the check cleared. I inquired about when, exactly, twenty-five thousand dollars would be available. He consulted the small desk calendar in front of him. Thursday.

So I returned to the bank on Thursday and was once again ushered into Willows’s office. I sat in the straight-backed armchair facing his desk and proceeded to reel off the same story that I had told Brenda a week earlier. I wanted to withdraw twenty-five thousand dollars in cash to present to my wife for our first wedding anniversary. Willows, like Brenda, blanched a little at the request. But like his predecessor, he eventually caved in. The requisite forms were presented and filled out. And some minutes later, I left the bank with my briefcase stocked with fifty-dollar bills.

Two days later, on the eve of our wedding anniversary, I cracked open a bottle of champagne and presented to Janet a gift-wrapped box that might have contained, say, a new dress, but that, when opened, revealed an amazing bounty: a pile of crisp bills embowered in semitransparent blue tissue paper. I could see that Janet was trying to look pleased, but something in her face and manner showed that she thought this prank a little out of character. After glancing at the money, she pushed away the box, saying that I had better get the money into the bank first thing in the morning. I promised her I would, then reached into my breast pocket and pulled out her real present. I passed her a small envelope containing two plane tickets.

The next morning, I entered the New Halcyon Bank carrying my well-stuffed cowhide briefcase. Brenda seemed relieved to see me. And the money.

“So, Cal,” she said, after the bills had been safely borne away to the vault, and her suspicions with them, “what did you get for Janet’s
actual
present?”

“Well, Brenda,” I said, “school’s out in a few weeks. Then Janet and I are going to Paris.”

It was an extravagance. But the publication of
Almost Like Suicide
had robbed us of a proper honeymoon a year earlier, and more to the point, I feared, with the dreadful fatalism that had settled over me, that this trip might well be my last chance to do anything special with Janet. On a still more quotidian level, I was damned if I was going to fork over all that money to Les and deny my wife a spree.

I only wish that I could devote the rest of these notes to a detailed description of our weeklong Paris sojourn, to the painting of verbal aquarelles of misty blue bridges and pink triumphal arches, of wedding-cake apartment buildings and their impressionistic representations in the Jeu de Paume art gallery, of broad boulevards and flowering fountains, pigeons wheeling, the city “rawly waking,” puckered Gallic faces with trimmed mustaches and actual berets. But I do not have that luxury. It’s not just the deadline I’m working under (for I am on deadline here). What I lack is the
moral
luxury of dwelling on past happiness. Try as I may to bend my story toward romance, it will not yield. A horror as richly veined as any gothic nightmare is taking shape beneath my pen; to stall in its telling would just be one more act of cowardice and dishonesty.

On the other hand, the trip did prove a remarkably good palliative. During our time in Paris, I was actually unable to call Les’s features to mind. Distance had drawn a veil over her face, dissolved her nearly to transparency, and for much of the time I was even able to forget the threat she posed to my life. I was still cocooned within this state of anesthetized unconcern on our return flight home. Janet had fallen asleep against my shoulder. I felt the warm, reassuring pressure of her head; I listened to the hum of the jet’s engines and the snores of our fellow passengers. As I sat there, I allowed myself to believe that perhaps everything was going to be all right after all. Maybe paying off Les would prove to be a mere inconvenience, like the monthly payments on our home-improvement loan. Perhaps by sending off my regular dose of hush money to Les in New York, I could keep my life with Janet in New Halcyon inviolate.

I was still buoyed by such thoughts as we were herded through Customs to the baggage claim at the Burlington Airport. After collecting our luggage, we made for the automatic sliding doors that gave onto a stretch of sidewalk where people awaiting taxis had formed a long line. We joined the end, and I stepped out onto the curb and turned to look down the queue, trying to gauge how long a wait we had ahead of us. And that was when I saw her.

At first, I dismissed the sight as a hallucination. Then I looked again. No—it was her. She was standing some distance down the sidewalk, about halfway down the line. In profile to me, she was staring straight ahead, her eyes shielded by a huge pair of black sunglasses that seemed to obscure all but the tip of her nose and her fat lips, which were set in a grim, down-curving line. She looked even paler than usual, and there was a large, obviously brand-new aeropack lying at her feet. I whirled on my heel before she could see us.

I grabbed Janet’s arm. “C’mon,” I said. “Let’s get a limo.”

“A
limo
? A taxi is fine.”

But I was dragging her off the line now, toward the sliding doors. “A taxi?” I said. “
It’s our honeymoon
.”

Finally Janet relented, and we headed back inside. I located the limo rental desk, where a woman in a navy-blue uniform arranged for a car to pick us up at the curb outside. I waited until I saw the limousine pull up before I hustled Janet out to the waiting car. Before climbing into the backseat, I snuck a quick glance at the taxi stand. Les was still several slots away from the front of the line. That was good. I needed the head start. I settled back into the car’s swanky leather seat. “Wow, you’re
sweating
,” Janet said when she took my hand. “Just hot,” I replied, as we proceeded, through the dwindling evening sunlight, home.

At the house, Janet moved from room to room, turning on the lights.

“This plant has about had it.” She sighed, fingering the brownish, curled leaves of the potted ivy on the kitchen windowsill. “I knew we should have had Chopper up to water.”

I, meanwhile, was convinced that Les was about to arrive, any second, at our door. Yet circumstances dictated that I amble about the house with the slow, relaxed air of a man deeply rested after his holiday. I decided that I would have to intercept her before she got to the house. And so, feigning a languorous stretch, I announced that I felt like eating something thoroughly American after all those croissants.

“An ice cream cone,” I said. “Chocolate-dipped. With sprinkles. Feel like one?”

“Ugh, no, I
couldn’t
,” Janet said, as expected. “After all those rich sauces we ate this week! I’m sure I gained ten pounds.”

“Well, I’ve got a craving, and it can’t be denied.” I glanced at my watch. It was getting on to nine-thirty now. “I think I can just catch the Snak Shak before it closes.”

“Really?” Janet said. “You want one that badly?”

“I won’t be gone long.”

And so, feeling very much like a married man slinking out to an amorous assignation, I hurried out to the car, then drove down the hill, expecting at any moment to see a taxi’s approaching headlights stab the leafy darkness ahead of me on the ballpark road. But no such car appeared. I cruised down onto the main road, past the uneasy lake, then rolled at a walking pace through the town. Ernie’s window reflected my prowling sedan. I pulled up at the curb near the turnoff for Cliffwood Road. If the girl was to arrive by cab (and how else was she going to travel?), she would have to come this way.

I waited perhaps ten minutes. When no car appeared, I decided that I had been mistaken, that the girl had never planned to storm our house. I realized where she must be. I put the car in gear and headed off.

“I’m here to see Sally Monroe,” I told the desk clerk—the same stolid woman who had manned the desk on my two prior visits. She peered at the book, then said, “Room Twenty-three.” I bounded up the stairs, hustled down the glaring hallway, and knocked on the door.

I heard a rustling from inside. “Who’s there?” she demanded. It sounded as if her lips were just inches from the door.

“It’s me.”

There was a pause. “Say your name.” Her voice had a congested quality, a muffled nasal timbre, as if she’d been crying.

I said my name. Then came the sound of a lock’s being turned, and she opened the door a crack. The safety chain was on. She was still wearing her oversize sunglasses. She looked at me, unhooked the chain, and let me in.

By now the accommodations were highly familiar to me: turquoise walls; framed print; white bedspread. Functional, antiseptic, but with a hint of suppressed filth just out of view.

“How did you know I was here?” she said, snapping the lock shut behind me and rehooking the chain.

I was about to tell her the truth—that I had seen her at the airport arrivals—but I caught myself. I did not want her to know anything more about my private life than she already knew.

“I was at the Snak Shak,” I said. “I saw you go by in a cab.”

She crossed quickly to the bed and sat on its edge, placing her clenched hands between her knees. She had not removed her leather jacket. The aeropack lay, zipped up, on the bed. She seemed to be shivering, though it wasn’t cold.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

She turned her face toward me and carefully removed her sunglasses, peeling them away from her face slowly, as if the action caused her some pain. It no doubt did. Her battered eyes looked like two overripe plums, the taut, shiny, blue-black surfaces of the bloated skin bisected by a pair of horizontal, yellow-edged cracks through which a wet, reddish glimpse of her pupils was just visible.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Who did this to you?”

She dabbed with a tissue at the corner of one of her leaking eyes. “Who else?” she said. “New York’s finest.”

“The
police
?” I said. “They beat you
up
?”

“You’re surprised?” She put her glasses back on and affected a tough-moll insouciance. “They’d’ve killed me. If I hadn’t got away.” She produced a miserable little laugh that made her wince.

“Why did they beat you up? What did you do?”

“Like it’s any of
your
business. The deal is, I gotta stay out of New York. I gotta lay low for a while.”

“Lay low,” I echoed. “You mean,
here
?”

“They’ll never look for me here,” she said.

I had the sensation of falling, of dropping soundlessly into a deep pit. I would never be rid of her. Not until we both hit bottom.

“Please,” I said. “Please don’t do this. I can find you a place in Maine, or Massachusetts. Anywhere but here.”

“And don’t even
think
about siccing the cops on me,” she said, as if reading my mind. “I’ll blow the whistle on you. I’ll use the shit I got on you to bargain down my plea. I got everything to gain. You got everything to lose.”

If Stewart had been in a position to dream up torments for me, he could not have done better than to install this girl in New Halcyon. She was the serpent invading my Paradise, bearing not an apple but an Apple Powerbook, fruit of the terrible knowledge that would, if sampled, destroy me
. For in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die
. And yet what could I do to stop her?

Of all the cottages and houses in New Halcyon, none had as bleak a history as the one known, simply, as the Yellow House. Set on the very tip of Blueberry Point—a finger of land that extended into Lake Sylvan about five miles from town—the Yellow House had once been a cheerful place of distinctive canary-colored clapboard visible from virtually any vantage point on the lake. For years, the house had been owned by Charlie Blakeson, a poet and scholar who lived there with his wife, Marissa, also a poet, and their two beautiful sons, Skylar and Shane. Although this all long predated my arrival in New Halcyon, tales of the blissfully happy, bohemian Blakeson clan in their Yellow House were legend. The legend had, however, turned dark when Charlie was, in the mid-1970s, killed in a freak boating accident on the lake. Widowed Marissa, left with debts and a bit of a drinking problem, had been determined to live on, with her growing sons, in the Yellow House, but she had been unable to keep up with the repairs. In time, the place had become something of a Havishamian ruin, as Marissa and the boys had hung on there, trying to retain some of the magic of their former life. Then tragedy again struck. The first of Marissa’s sons, Skylar, died in a car wreck on Cliffwood Road; Shane passed on a year later, the victim of a bad dose of heroin. Marissa, inconsolable and broke, had moved in with an unmarried sister in Burlington, and put the Yellow House up for rent. The sorry state of the premises (the house had deteriorated badly over the previous twenty years of neglect), plus her rather steep asking price, had scared away all comers. That is, until Les happened along, seeking somewhere simply to “lay low.” She pronounced the place perfect. And why not? She was hardly a discerning renter, and it wasn’t her money that was paying for the place. She moved in on July 1.

Almost immediately, the town was buzzing with reports of the parties that rocked the Yellow House. The house lights, visible from the town, blazed every night into the gray dawn hours; hard-core death-metal music jackhammered from the front lawn, where huge bonfires often burned. The ordinarily quiet road that ran through the village came alive with cars, motorcycles, and pickups heading to Les’s place in an endless stream. At meetings of the Village Improvement Society, the little old ladies fussed and fretted over the unimaginable immoralities no doubt taking place there; the yuppies mumbled gravely about declining property values; the sundry other busybodies raised dark questions about how the young woman was paying the $800-a-month rent. “Do you suppose she’s selling
drugs
?” someone asked at one meeting. I naturally remained silent, since it was, of course,
I
who was funding those low-rent Gatsbyesque revels.