Another You (39 page)

“I’m sorry?”

“You don’t know?” Genuine surprise was mixed with her weariness.

“He left the motel before I woke up. He left a note saying he was going to your house to talk to you.”

“Ah,” she said. On the TV, someone got off a round of gunfire. Then: “So he did.”

He listened to the confusion of her house, as if, by focussing, he could sort through that and determine whether she might have said
what he thought she’d said. He could almost see it: the children, excited, taking the opportunity of Mom’s being on the phone to act up, quarrel, change channels, slam doors.

“I would never have recognized him,” she said. “Handsome Jack McCallum. Now he’s underfed and has such a haunted look. I think he’s haunted himself, if you know what I mean.” She put her hand over the phone, spoke inaudibly to whoever was speaking to her. “His injuries are quite serious, though I could have done without seeing the gash in his side.” She cleared her throat. “Would you like to come over?” she said. “Might as well talk about this face-to-face.”

He looked at the highway. Across the street was a discount boot store. A large pink neon boot repeatedly kicked a falling star. Next to that was a liquor store with an unlit neon sign of a huge martini glass tipped almost on its side. At the base of the sign was a tangle of pink and orange bougainvillea. “I’m in Islamorada,” he said.

“Then I guess you wouldn’t like to come over,” she said. “I don’t find that many people do come over, including my husband.”

Marshall decided to ignore that remark. It was as if flames leaped from it. “He said he’d known you years ago at camp,” Marshall said hollowly.

She laughed. A small dry laugh, or a cough—he couldn’t be sure.

Why was it, he wondered, that involving himself in any aspect of McCallum’s life always made him perplexed and vulnerable? “Perplexed” was too mild a word. He was so shocked by McCallum, so often, that now he was trying to quell his reactions by downplaying what his emotions really were. Yet again, McCallum had omitted significant information. He and Cheryl were together, in Lexington, Virginia. This was what Cheryl’s mother had just said, surely it was what she had just said. He looked at the ground, at the asphalt strewn with dropped blossoms and crushed cigarettes. Across the highway, the star descended toward the boot’s pointed toe. He was standing at a phone outside a seafood restaurant in Islamorada.

“I won’t keep you,” he said. “If you see him, tell him I called to see how he was doing,” he added lamely.

“Did you think I might be having them to Sunday dinner?”

“Excuse me?”

“Jack and Cheryl. Did you think I might roast a chicken and have them for Sunday dinner?” She covered the receiver again, but this
time her words were audible: everyone in the room was going to go straight to bed if there was any more fighting over Nintendo. He imagined her there, stuck in the chaos of her life, a woman who had just gotten the information that her ex-boyfriend from about thirty years ago was now her daughter’s lover. “Hang on. I have to switch to the extension,” she said.

As he waited, he thought of hanging up. He was embarrassed that he was both too shocked and too curious to do it. What a story he would have to tell Sonja when he next spoke to her. He could imagine no way to tell her this on the phone.

“Hang it up, Richard,” Janet Lanier hollered.

The phone was hung up. When she spoke to him, the absence of background noise was stunning, almost surreal, like trees becoming still in the wake of a storm.

“I assumed you knew. Cheryl said you knew she’d been raped—how would she not have told you about her great savior Jack? Did you know Cheryl had been raped?”

“She told me,” he said.

“By one of the nicest people, I thought, I’d ever known. I have to believe her. I wish she’d said something at the time. But now I find that I was the last to know.” She cleared her throat. “Of course, I have to believe her,” she said again.

It was incredibly perplexing. So Cheryl had known McCallum all along? Known him when Livan Baker made her accusation? Known that he had come to be with her the night she came into Dolly’s restaurant, and that was why she was so troubled when she discovered both that Marshall was present and also that he meant to contact her mother? McCallum had instigated this trip knowing he’d jump ship in Virginia. Why hadn’t he just flown there? Why had it been necessary to involve him, to mislead him by saying the rendezvous with Cheryl was for his sake, too?

“You knew that he arranged financial aid for Cheryl, didn’t you?” Janet Lanier said. “All those years we kept in touch, and he was so helpful. So ‘supportive,’ I believe the current term is. He sent me so many letters years ago. Do you know, I began to fantasize we’d get together when he finished college. We’d get married, we’d have nice lust instead of backseat lust. All these years later, suddenly there’s Jack, standing in my kitchen. The two of them, come to set me
straight about what I didn’t know. And the worst thing is, I forgive her. She’s foolish, but I’m stupid. Do you know what I thought as they stood there, my Cheryl so brazen, trying to change the conversation by blaming me for having her baptized and naming her a godfather, as if those things were the same as arranging to have her raped? I thought: He’ll stop at nothing. A boy from summer camp, who once taught me to swim. He used to stand out there in the water, hollering instructions, blowing his whistle, and then before we got out of the water he’d always do the same thing: the dead man’s float. He could hold his breath so long, we’d all race for him in a panic. I can still see him in the pond, not moving a muscle. Then he comes to Buena Vista and takes my daughter’s hand, claiming to be in love with her. Whatever she thinks she’s doing, I know he’s still doing the dead man’s float. What does he think he’s going to do to support her? He’ll have to take her back to New Hampshire. Is that what’s going to happen? Is she going to live with him down the street from you?”

“I don’t live anywhere near him,” he said. He was grateful that there was finally something he could say.

“A thought like this doesn’t even cross your mind. It reminds me that most murder victims know their murderer. Or is that an old wives’ tale? I think they know them, that they’re lovers or aunts or uncles or whatever they are. The same way so many people get broken bones from accidents right in their own house. People walk fine when they’re outside, then they slip in the tub. Have you heard this, or am I imagining it?”

He said, “I have heard that.” He wanted to get off the phone. He had called someone who was drunk, whose life was a mess, who had been deceived all her life and then slapped in the face.

“And to think: I used to write her letters asking if she had dates. I thought she might be at dances, or going to parties and building snowmen—the pictures I’d seen in the Benson College catalog. Are you sure you don’t want to come by so we can cry on each other’s shoulders? You don’t exactly seem to be holding up your end of the conversation.”

“I’m eleven hundred miles away,” he said.

“You are? Where are you?”

“Islamorada,” he told her again. He wouldn’t blame her for not believing him; it sounded like an invented name for an invented place.
Islamorada. How about Uranus? Just some strange point on the planet where he was standing in a parking lot, talking on the phone. Why? Why had he not learned that McCallum and everything associated with McCallum did nothing but cause him pain. He was a compulsive liar. Dangerous, probably. Set on a trajectory he sucked people into, tossing them aside at his convenience. He felt humiliated for both of them—for himself, and for Janet Lanier. To know McCallum was to be humiliated by your own vulnerabilities.

In the parking lot, a windblown couple got out of an old Olds-mobile convertible, the woman taking off her visor and running her fingers through her hair, the man in a tank top and white Bermuda shorts bending forward and backward to stretch himself. Though the lot was mostly empty, it held quite an assortment of cars: a blue Miata with New Mexico plates that read
GOERNER
; a Jeep; Toyotas; BMWs. There were window boxes filled with bright pink flowers and drips of dark green ivy. Over one of the window boxes a monarch butterfly hovered. Two monarch butterflies. He thought of a photograph he had once seen of Vladimir Nabokov running with his butterfly net. He thought of
Lolita
. What a second-rate Lolita Cheryl Lanier had been—not particularly pretty, but most of all, distinct from Lolita in that she had not been genuinely needy; she was just another person who wanted things.

“Do you believe me when I tell you I didn’t have the slightest idea that McCallum and your daughter—”

“That makes two of us,” she said. “I’m glad to know it doesn’t have something to do with my lack of sophistication.”

“Sophistication,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a lack of sophistication. It’s just not possible to keep up with him.”

“You get thrown off by people who go to great lengths to explain themselves,” she said. “What I mean is, you take what they say to be explanations. I kept his letters explaining himself from the end of that summer until about 1975. I got rid of most of them when we moved. While I was packing boxes I reread them, and you know what? I was a grown woman by then, and I didn’t believe any longer I’d been the great love of his life, but I believed he still missed me. That I was special.”

“I’m sorry,” Marshall said. It sounded lame, inconclusive. It was probably the last time he would speak to Janet Lanier.

The man in white Bermudas came out carrying a bag of takeout food. The woman in the visor held his hand.
An ordinary couple
, he thought. Then he immediately wondered if there was such a thing as an ordinary couple.

“Your husband,” he said to Janet Lanier. “Is it true he’s got a girlfriend in Michigan?”

“True,” she said.

Why had he asked? He stared after the couple, the woman giving a little skip as she leaned into him and appeared to be saying something joking. He could not remember the last time he and Sonja had seemed close—close and casual about the closeness. They had let too many things from outside influence their moods: the routine of their jobs; Evie’s illness. Then he had an image of Cheryl Lanier, appearing like an apparition in the snowstorm, his pulling over to give her a ride, the moment when he involved himself in something from which he felt he was still trying to retreat.

“Why do you ask?” she said.

“Because I can’t believe anything either of them has ever told me. I wondered—generally, I sort of wondered whether you’re going to be all right,” he said.

Were those awkward words really the ones that came out of his mouth: “generally, I sort of wondered”?

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

“I’m sorry I’m so far from Buena Vista,” he said. “Right now, I think I’m probably the only person who could understand exactly what you’re saying, and you’re the only person who could understand—”

“That’ll change,” she said, a little abruptly. “Your wife will be very sympathetic about the hoops you’ve had to jump through.”

“We’ve had some trouble lately,” he said. “But you’re right, of course. She won’t believe the continuation of this story. Which I don’t think we’ve probably heard the end of, have we?”

“No. I can’t imagine we have.”

“Your husband,” he said. “You aren’t worried about being physically harmed, are you?”

“What would make you ask that?”

“Well, clearly not intuition,” he said. “I don’t seem to have any of that.”

“Men don’t have it the way women do,” she said. “That’s true. But don’t blame yourself for not understanding Jack. Jack has to have an audience. He always did. He always finds it, too. Even if it takes doing the dead man’s float.”

“You were kids,” he said.

He and Janet Lanier had so clearly been an audience for McCallum’s madness. But he had been the audience for other things, too: if he stood behind a lectern and lectured on literature, he was still only speaking publicly about works for which he had been a passive, willing audience. As a child, he had followed instead of leading. It was always someone else—his mother, that night in the living room; Sonja, in a discussion he thought had been only that, an exchange of ideas, dropping the bomb about Tony; all the way back to Gordon, who had explained things, like Sherlock Holmes to the young Dr. Watson. He would have believed anything his older brother said. It was as if things were not real until Gordon discussed them. He could remember, with slight humiliation now, asking Gordon whether it was true it was going to rain the next day.

He said goodbye to Janet Lanier, vaguely aware that she had not answered his earlier question, but taking her evasion as a dismissal of his concerns. Cheryl had seemed so protective of her mother, but in thinking it over, maybe what she said, even about her mother’s physical appearance, had been untrue. Maybe she knew her mother was still pretty, but she wanted to pretend otherwise because she feared McCallum’s affections might waver. Maybe her hair was attractively gray, but Cheryl had needed to emphasize her mother’s age, as opposed to her own youthfulness. She was a seductive girl. He remembered sitting with her in the restaurant, her drinking his drink while he was on the phone. There he had been, telling a white lie to Sonja about whom he was with, while she had probably spent the day fucking Tony Hembley.

Everywhere he looked, there were couples in the restaurant. Couples in booths, everyone with someone else, only a few tables filled with people clustered together who seemed to be friends: the odd man out, the unaccompanied woman. The customers seemed happy, smiling, and tan, vacationers taking time out, intent on having a good time.

The waitress handed him the menu and a list of specials. He ordered
a scotch and water, changed it to a gin and tonic before the waitress walked away. It seemed more tropical. He was somewhere called Islamorada. Out the window he saw the window boxes, the pink pansies, the monarchs, he saw now, plastic butterflies on springs, bobbing in the breeze.

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