I Am No One You Know (19 page)

She smiled suddenly at an old memory. How, when they were children, Harvey and two friends had terrorized other neighborhood children, playing at jungle warfare along the banks of the ravine. The boys had carried sharpened spears decorated with black turkey vulture feathers. Harvey, ten years old, the chieftain, had striped his cheeks with red clay from the ravine. He’d been a husky, sly kid. Very smart, but rebellious at school. His gang had spared little Vivie because she was his sister. The reign of terror had ended after a boy nearly
drowned in ditch water in the ravine, shoved and kicked over the side by Harvey and his gang…

Now Harvey West, thirty-eight, was a responsible adult, an investor in the successful Shop-Rite Mall at the edge of Perrysburg, a member of the Chamber of Commerce and the Rotarians. He’d followed their father’s lead in investing in real estate and, Vivian supposed, he’d made some money. Always Harvey had been close-mouthed about his private affairs, including his love affairs. So she couldn’t be certain.

Now the insurance money will come to us? Jointly?
The thought was an unpleasant one: she didn’t want to profit from her father’s death. She didn’t want an ounce of happiness, of pleasure, from an elderly man’s suffering and death.

She didn’t want Harvey to profit from it, either.

As she was waiting for the last of the Polaroids to develop, watching as mysterious shapes, lines, faint colors emerged out of a chemical-smelling void, the thought came to her: Maybe Harvey had set the fire?

The Boathouse. The Roostertail. Davy Deezz Gent’s Club. Café a Go-Go. The Starboard. Good Times. First & Ten Sports Club. Mitch’s Tavern & Bowling Lanes.
Cruising Perrysburg’s riverfront district as dusk came swiftly on. There was a shabbily romantic cocktail lounge called
Blue Guitar
in one of the downtown hotels, she seemed to remember. She’d been taken there years ago by a man whose name she couldn’t now recall or didn’t wish to recall though she recalled vividly that he’d been a married man, and she’d liked that: the thrill of trespassing, of taking something belonging to another. If only temporarily.

She never found
Blue Guitar.
But there was
Firs Inn & Marina
on the river. Near downtown police headquarters, it was said to be a popular hangout for off-duty cops. Neon flashed in every window. Behind the inn was the marina. A flotilla of sailboats. Flags on their tall masts whipped in the wind. Speedboats, yachts, rocked with the waves. In the vestibule of the inn, warm, smelly air rushed at her as if out of the past. Her heart quickened. How relieved she was to be here. To have avoided the relatives. The funeral luncheon given by a
younger sister of her father’s. There the relatives murmured, scolding, Now where’s Vivian? And Harvey would repeat, She’s in shock. I told you, let her alone.

Harvey loved her. Harvey, her big brother. Harvey would protect Vivie even from himself.

Vivian stepped into the dimly lighted bar and quickly calculated where to sit: at the bar, or in one of the booths. A booth was always a prudent idea. But at the bar she could catch fugitive glimpses of her face in the mirror behind rows of glittering bottles. In her thirties, somehow she’d become a woman who looked her best in tawdry lights. Flashing neon like a fevered pulse. She was relaxed, she was prone to laughter. Even when she’d been a serious graduate student in English literature, even when she’d been a promising assistant professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton she’d rewarded herself for bad times by visiting such places.

Vivian sat at the bar. Except for an amorous couple, the girl in a leather miniskirt and fishnet stockings, bouffant hair, the other eight or nine patrons at the bar were men. She ordered a scotch on the rocks. The bartender was trying not to be curious about her, she hoped to Christ she hadn’t gone to Perrysburg High with him.

Drinking clarified. Confusion dissolved. She smiled to think that from a certain perspective all of that day of her father’s funeral including the vision of light flashing out from the closed casket had been leading to this moment of grace: Vivian’s first serious drink in months.

She wanted to be alone, she would have said. When a husky bearded man with a familiar face, seated a few stools away, leaned over to say hello, asked if she was Vivie West, Vivian shook her head without engaging him. But a while later, when she was about to order a second drink, another man drifted past, carrying his drink, she glanced up and their eyes locked and he asked, O.K. if I join you? and Vivian indicated yes, it was O.K. The man was no one she knew, she was certain. He was about forty years old. He looked married, but he wasn’t wearing a ring. He slid onto the stool beside her, brushing against her arm. He squinted at her, seeing a melancholy face. A very pale face. She’d penciled in dark boldly defined eyebrows. She’d outlined her eyes in black mascara like eyes in a Matisse painting. Her mouth was fleshy, pouting. In her car, before coming inside, she’d removed her
wedding ring. Her companion was saying, “Some people, some women, don’t like cops so I’ll tell you right off: I’m with the PPD.”

Vivian laughed. “I’m not ‘some women.’ ”

They exchanged first names. They even shook hands. He was a plainclothes office, a detective. Desire coursed through her suddenly like an electric current.

“I
DON’T KNOW
him. I don’t trust him. I adore him.”

It was her brother Harvey she spoke of, to herself. For driving to Perrysburg on the occasion of her father’s terrible death was also driving to Perrysburg to meet with Harvey. Always Vivian’s heart stirred with urgency, part tenderness, part dread, when she thought of her brother.

Through childhood he’d been Vivie’s protector. Through much of her girlhood. Her girlfriends had envied her an older brother; an older brother with such swaggering style. When you’re a girl in public school to have a brother three years older means being spared the gauntlet of boys’ rude appraising stares, sniggering remarks and innuendos, muffled laughter. When a boy took Vivie West out on a date he was taking out Harvey West’s younger sister. “I was treated with respect because of you,” Vivian told Harvey once they were adults, and spoke calmly of the past. “Maybe you never realized that.”

Harvey said, “Sure I knew it. Any guy who looked at you cross-eyed, I’d have punched him out.”

They laughed together, startled. As if excited by the prospect.

In recent years, as their widower-father aged, Vivian and Harvey, his only children, were more in contact with each other of necessity. Harvey, who lived in Perrysburg, took on responsibilities he might not have anticipated as a younger man; Vivian, living ninety miles away in Rochester, returned more frequently to Perrysburg, and spoke more frequently on the phone with her father and with Harvey. A noose tightening, she’d felt it.

But no. She loved her father. And she loved Harvey, if at a distance.

Harvey had been reporting to Vivian how forgetful their father was becoming, and how furious he was if you brought up the subject. Harvey had said, laughing over the phone, “I’m getting afraid of the old man. He’s got a sting like a hornet.” Vivian too had noted the accumulating
dirt in the household. A smell of stale, unwashed things. And her father’s personal odor, of which she would no more speak than she would have uttered an obscenity in his presence. Vivian and Harvey discussed the possibility of hiring, over their father’s objections, a younger, more reliable cleaning woman, but finally decided, no. “Not just Dad would be so angry, but Mrs. Lunt”—always they spoke of the heavyset black woman by her formal name, respectfully, as they’d been taught—“would be broken up. And her sons…” Harvey’s voice trailed off irresolutely. Vivian thought: Is he afraid of them? Of what they might do to Dad?

After the fire Vivian would wonder if Mrs. Lunt’s sons had anything to do with it. While she and Harvey still lived at home there had been talk of Mrs. Lunt’s several sons in trouble with police; they’d spent time in juvenile facilities, and eventually in prison.

But when Vivian brought this possibility up to Harvey he’d responded with annoyance. “Look, Viv. The police chief said he thought it was probably the wiring, or a space heater. Remember that antiquated space heater of Dad’s? Don’t fantasize about this accident. And don’t start thinking
race.
”

Vivian felt her face burn, so rebuked.

Still she thought: Dr. West had believed that the neighborhood revered him, which may have been true, generally. But there had been break-ins, acts of vandalism, over the years. Harvey had had the burglar alarm installed after someone broke into their father’s office looking for drugs and cash. “Dad wanted to think everyone loved him but maybe not everyone did. It would only have taken one. Maybe the fire was to cover up a burglary, maybe to cover up an assault…” Vivian spoke quietly. She refrained from saying
a murder.

Harvey shrugged. The subject offended him, clearly. He told again of how forgetful their father was becoming, and how he’d allowed stacks of medical journals and other magazines to accumulate in the downstairs, rear rooms of the house. Harvey had questioned the wisdom of their father saving, for instance, copies of
Science
and
The New England Journal of Medicine
dating back to the seventies. The seventies! Thirty years! “ ‘How can I throw anything away without having read it thoroughly?’ Dad asked me, like he was explaining something to a
moron, ‘and if I’ve read it, underlined and annotated it, and it’s valuable, how can I throw it away?’ ”

They laughed uneasily together, Harvey had so perfectly mimicked their dead father’s voice.

It wasn’t at that moment that Vivian first thought
Did you set the fire, Harvey? I would hate you if you had. But I would never betray you.
This thought came to her afterward, as she stared at the Polaroid image of a barricaded doorway and blackened stucco materializing slowly before her eyes.

H
E WAS EXPLAINING
to her that arson is usually easy to detect, if set by an amateur.

“A legitimate fire is an accident. It takes time to spread. It smolders, half the time it goes out. It moves unevenly through a house, erratically. Not like a fire started with an accelerant, like kerosene, lighter fluid, that moves in a direct line, and fast. And hot. An accidental fire begins low and moves up, in a room I mean. And in a house. Of course, if it begins in an upstairs room or an attic, that’s different. And if there’s combustible material. But most accidental fires it’s bad wiring, space heaters too near curtains or they get knocked over by kids, candles that fall over, sparks out of a chimney, somebody’s smoking in bed and falls asleep, or, this happens with old people, they put a kettle on the stove, walk away and forget it…Each fire has its own history, they say. Like the family it happens to.” He was speaking matter-of-factly, professionally. Vivian was listening in a way that might be described as professional. No interruptions, no evident emotion. She’d told him why she was in Perrysburg: a relative’s death by fire. That terrible fire on Church Street. Sure, he knew about it. Possibly he guessed that Vivian was the elderly doctor’s daughter but he was a tactful man, he let that go. If they saw each other again, she’d tell him then. Or maybe.

They’d moved from the bar to one of the booths. Where their conversation could be more private. They were on their third drinks. He was paying, somehow he’d finessed the move. Vivian who’d told him only her first name was thinking she wanted to take the man’s dense, curly hair in her hands; wanted to embrace him, tight; because
she didn’t know him, he was all potential, mystery. His first name was Arnold—his friends called him Arne. “Arne.” Vivian spoke the name as if testing it.
Arne. I want to make love with you.

No, it wouldn’t work. Vivian didn’t want to make love with any man, even a plainclothes detective with the Perrysburg PD, whose name was Arne.

His last name, she’d later learn, was Malinski, Malinowski. She wouldn’t ask him to repeat it or spell it. She wouldn’t ask if he was married. Probably yes, but he was separated from his wife and feeling the strain, the loneliness, heavy-hearted, anxious about his children (for obviously there’d be children), and she hoped he wouldn’t be bitter, angry at women because he was angry at a woman. Though if that was true she couldn’t blame him, could she?

Roll a drum upon the blue guitar.
Vivian smiled.

Her companion told her that there were fires, every winter especially, in the Church Street neighborhood, because of the old houses, and too many people living in some of them. “Usually it’s small children who die. Single mothers, and they can’t save them.” Vivian nodded as if subtly rebuked. She liked this man’s manner. He had authority but he wasn’t a bully. He had knowledge inaccessible to her but he didn’t flaunt it. He was allowing her to know: accidents happen, people die in fires, and some of these are young children, not elderly men.

And maybe he hadn’t wanted to live, maybe at the end of his life that had been his secret.
Vivian didn’t want to think so.

Vivian asked the detective how he’d come to be such an expert on fires, it was the kind of remark a woman made to a man for whom she felt an attraction, not a serious remark entirely, though the man could take it seriously, as this man did, saying he wasn’t an expert, what he’d been telling her was common knowledge. He didn’t add
I’m a detective, are you bullshitting me, lady?

Here was a man who didn’t want flattery from a woman. Maybe that meant he’d be honest with her, too.

Which Vivian wasn’t sure she wanted.

The point of picking up a man in a bar, the evening of your father’s funeral, hadn’t that much to do with wanting honesty, sincerity. She’d seen the detective glance at her ring finger, and wondered uneasily
now if it was obvious she’d only just removed a ring; and what that signalled.

From time to time men passed by their booth, and Vivian’s companion smiled and waved at them but didn’t encourage them to linger, his friends, fellow cops. Vivian knew they must be curious about her. Who is Arne with? That woman averting her eyes, casually shielding her face with an uplifted hand. She dreaded someone recognizing her. Harvey had PPD friends. High school buddies. They’d know her as Harvey West’s kid sister, all grown up.