If You Could See Me Now (8 page)

I sat dumbly at my desk, unable to summon even a single coherent thought about D. H. Lawrence. I realized that I had never liked more than two of his novels. If I actually published a book about Lawrence, I was chained to talking about him for the rest of my life. In any case, I could not work while imagining that guilt-inducing woman shifting herself about through Duane's furniture. I bent my head and rested it on the desk for a moment. I felt Alison's photograph shedding light on the top of my head. My hands had begun to tremble, and a vein in my neck pulsed wildly. I bathed in that melting, embracing warmth. Application of you know what. When I got up and went back downstairs, I found that my knees were shaking.

Tuta Sunderson peeked at me from the corners of her eyes where she knelt before a pail of water as I went wordlessly by. Understandably, she looked as though she expected me
to aim a kick at her backside. “Oh, a letter came for you,” she uttered. “I forgot to tell you before.” She gestured weakly toward a glass-fronted chest and I snatched up the envelope as I went out.

My name was written in a flowing hand on the creamy outside of the envelope. After I got into the baking interior of the VW I ripped open the letter. I pulled out a sheet of stationery. I turned it over. Confused, I turned it over again. It was blank. I groaned. When I grabbed the envelope up from the floor of the car I saw that it bore no return address, and had been posted the night before in Arden.

I shot backward out of the driveway, not really caring if another vehicle were coming. At the sound of my tires squealing, Duane far off in the field turned his head. I sped away as if from a murder, the blank page and envelope lying on the seat beside me. The car's engine began to sputter, lights flashed as if the hand of Spirit had momentarily thrust in and touched them; by instinct I looked up across the fields to the woods. No one stood there. No figure not a hunter but a wolf. If it was a trick, a worthless joke, who? An old enemy in Arden? I wasn't sure I still had any; but I hadn't expected Andy's wife still to carry hostility toward me like a raised knife. If a sign, of what? Of some future message? I grabbed the envelope again and held it clamped to the wheel with both hands. “Damn,” I muttered, and dropped it back on the other seat as I floored the accelerator.

It was from this moment that all began to go wrong, askew. My mistake with Tuta Sunderson, the maddening letter—perhaps I would have acted more rationally if the threatening scene in the Plainview diner had never occurred. Yet I think I knew
what I was going to do in Arden long before it was a conscious thought. My old response to stress. And I thought I might know the handwriting on that envelope.

Speeding, I recklessly zoomed up the twisting hilly road to Arden. I nearly forced a tractor off the road. Bunny Is Good Bread; Surge Milking Machines; This Is Holsum Country; Nutrea Feeds; Highway 93; DeKalb Corn (orange words on green wings); Broiler Days: the billboards and roadsigns flashed by. At the crest of the long hill where the road opens into a view like that in Italian paintings, endless green and varied distance dotted with white buildings and thick random groups of trees, a tall sign with a painted thermometer and pointer announced that the goal of the Arden Community Chest was $4,500. I switched on the radio and heard the hollow, spurious voice of Michael Moose. “…report no progress in the shocking—” I turned the dial and let loud rock music assail me because I hated it.

An area of frame Andy Hardy houses, the R-D-N Motel, and I was going down Main Street, past the high school, where Arden lay at the bottom of the last hill. Pigeons were circling over the brick fortress of the courthouse and town hall, and in the odd quiet of the moment I could hear their wings beating after I had swung into a parking space before the Coast To Coast Store and shut off the motor. Wingbeats filled and agitated the air like drumming; when I got out of the car I saw that the birds had wheeled away from the courthouse–town hall and bannered out over Main Street. Apart from an old man sitting on the steps to Freebo's Bar, they were the only visible living things. A tin sign clacked and banged somewhere behind me. It was as though some evil visitation had drawn everyone in Arden inside behind locked doors.

I went into the store and picked up enough groceries for a week; the two women in the aisle looked at me oddly, and would not meet my eye. The atmosphere in the grocery seemed almost ostentatiously hostile, almost theatrical—those women glanced at me, then quickly lowered their eyes, then pierced me with covert glances from the sides of their eyes.
Who are you and what are you doing here?
It was as though they had spoken. I counted my money down onto the counter and went hurriedly back outside and locked the grocery bags in the VW. I had to get a bottle of whisky.

Down the street, just passing the corner of the Annex Hotel and the Angler's Bar, walking toward me with his hunched bustling walk, accompanied by his sour-looking wife, was Pastor Bertilsson. He was my least favorite clergyman. He had not yet seen me. I looked around in panic. Across the street was a two-story building labeled Zumgo, a name I recalled having heard before. It was where Duane had said Paul Kant was working. I turned my back on the Bertilssons and hurried across the street.

Unlike the Plainview diner, Zumgo's had resisted any efforts to bring it up-to-date, and my first response was to relish the old-fashioned fittings of the store—change was sent, enclosed in metal cylinders, racketing down on wires from an office suspended below the ceiling, the counters were wooden, the floors of boards worn smooth and sent rippling by time. A moment afterward I noticed the threadbare, depressed look of the place: most of the tables were only scantily covered by goods, and the salesladies—even now staring at me with displeasure—were aged shabby horrors with rouge enameling their cheeks. A few overweight women desultorily picked at underwear strewn across a table. I could not imagine Paul Kant at work in such a place.

The woman I approached seemed to share my attitude. She drew her lips back over false teeth and smiled. “Paul? You a friend of Paul's?”

“I just said, where is he working? I want to see him.”

“Well, he isn't working. Are you a friend of his?”

“You mean he doesn't work here?”

“When he's in he does, I guess. He's home sick. Least that's what he told Miss Nord. Said he couldn't come in today. Looks funny, I think. You a friend of his?”

“Yes. I used to be, at least.”

For some reason, this caused her canine, hungry interest in me to become merriment. She gave me a glimpse of her plastic-coated gums and called to another woman behind the counter. “He's a friend of Paul's. Says he doesn't know where he is.” The other woman joined her laughter. “A friend of Paul's?”

“Christ,” I muttered, turning away. I went back to ask, “Do you know if he will be in tomorrow?” and got only malicious staring eyes for my answer. I noticed that two or three of the customers were staring at me. Auntie Rinn's advice came back to me. Certainly some of the women seemed to resent the presence of a stranger.

Baffled, still angry, I paced around the store until even the first old woman had ceased to giggle and gossip about me with her partner. I had a purpose I did not then wish to admit to myself. I examined unspeakable clothing; I regarded sad toys and dusty envelopes and yards of material best suited to the backs of horses. The old response to stress became conscious: I took a five-dollar bill and folded it into my palm.

I was helpless before my own advice to
get out
.

On the second floor I spun a rack of paperback books. One of the jackets and titles snagged my attention. My Ph.D. supervisor, a famous scholar, had written it. It was Maccabee's most
popular book,
The Enchanted Dream
. Actually a mechanical treatise on nineteenth-century poets, it had been tricked out with a jazzy cover showing a long-haired young man apparently inhaling an illegal substance while a slightly less beautiful nude maiden coiled lambent legs and tendrils of hair about him. Unable to control the impulse which was my purpose—I hadn't thought of such amazing luck—I took the book off the rack and slid it into my jacket pocket. It had been Maccabee who had suggested I write on Lawrence. Then I turned cautiously around (when it was too late for caution) and saw that no one had witnessed my theft. My chest thumped with relief; the book hung unobtrusively in my pocket. I twitched the pocket flap up over the top of the book. When I passed the cash register I dropped the bill on the counter and continued out onto the street.

And nearly into the arms of Bertilsson. That hypocritical pink moonface and wet smile were directed, I swear, toward the pocket with Maccabee's book before Bertilsson decided he wished to favor my face with them. Balder and fatter, he was even more repulsive than I remembered him. His wife, several inches taller than he, stood stock-still beside him, her posture suggesting that I might be expected at any moment to commit an act of disgusting perversity.

As I suppose I had, in her eyes. When Joan and I were married, Bertilsson had taken pains to incorporate into his homiletic address some allusions to my past misdeeds; later, on a drunken night during our honeymoon, I wrote him an abusive letter and posted it on the spot. I think I said that he did not deserve to wear his collar.

Perhaps the recollection of that statement was what put the malicious icy chips in his eyes, far behind the sanctimony, when he greeted me. “Young Miles. What have we here? Young Miles.”

“We heard you were back,” said his wife.

“I'll expect you at tomorrow's services.”

“That's interesting. Well, I must—”

“I was grieved to hear of your divorce. Most of my marriages are of the enduring kind. But then few of the couples it is my privilege to unite are as sophisticated as you and your—Judy, was it? Few of them write notes of thanks as distinctive as yours.”

“Her name was Joan. We never did get divorced in the sense you mean. She was killed.”

His wife swallowed, but Bertilsson, for all his oiliness, was no coward. He continued to look straight at me, the malice behind the sanctimony undimmed. “I
am
sorry. Truly sorry for you, Miles. Perhaps it's a blessing that your grandmother did not live to see how you…” He shrugged.

“How I what?”

“Seem to have a tragic propensity for being nearby when young women are lost to life.”

“I wasn't even in town when that Olson girl was killed,” I said. “And Joan was anything but nearby when she died.”

I might as well have been speaking to a bronze Buddha. He smiled. “I see I must apologize. I did not intend my remark in that way. No, not in the least. But in fact, since you bring up the matter, Mrs. Bertilsson and I are in Arden on a related mission, a mission of mercy I think I may describe it, of the Lord's mercy, related to an event of which you seem to be in ignorance.”

He had long ago begun to speak in the cadences of his tedious sermons, but usually it was possible to figure out what he was talking about. “Look. I'm sorry, but I have to get going.”

“We were just with the parents.” He was still smiling, but now the smile expressed great sad meretricious gravity.

My God, how could he think that I had not heard of that?

“Oh, yes.”

“So you do know about it? You have heard?”

“I don't know what I've heard. I'll be going now.”

For the first time, his wife spoke. “You'd be wise to keep going until you get back where you came from, Miles. We don't think much of you around here. You left too many bad memories.” Her husband kept that grave, falsely humble smile on his face.

“So write me another blank letter,” I said, and left them. I recrossed the street and stepped over the nodding drunk into Freebo's Bar. After a few drinks consumed while listening to a half-audible Michael Moose compete with the mumbled conversation of men who conspicuously avoided catching my eye, I had a few more drinks and attracted a little attention by dismembering Maccabee's book on the bar, at first ripping out one page at a time and then seizing handfuls of paper and tearing them out. When the barman came up to object I told him, “I wrote this book and I just decided it's terrible.” I shredded the cover so that he could not read Maccabee's name. “Can't a man even tear up his own book in this bar?”

“Maybe you'd better go, Mr. Teagarden,” the bartender said. “You can come back tomorrow.” I hadn't realized that he knew my name.

“Can tear up my own book if I want to, can't I?”

“Look, Mr. Teagarden,” he said. “Another girl was murdered last night. Her name was Jenny Strand. We all knew that girl. We're all a little upset around here.”

It happened like this:

A girl of thirteen, Jenny Strand, had been to the Arden cinema with four of her friends to see a Woody Allen
movie,
Love and Death
. Her parents had forbidden her to see it: they did not want their daughter to receive her sex education from Hollywood, and the title made them uneasy. She was an only daughter among three boys, and while her father thought the boys could pick things up for themselves, he wanted Jenny to be taught in some way that would preserve her innocence. He thought his wife should be responsible: she was waiting for Pastor Bertilsson to suggest something.

Because of the death of Gwen Olson, they had been unusually protective when Jenny said that she wanted to see a friend, Jo Slavitt, after dinner.—Be back by ten, her father said.—Sure, she agreed. The picture would be over an hour before that. Their objections were silly, and she had no intention of being restricted by anyone's silliness.

It did not bother her that she and Gwen Olson had looked enough alike to be taken, in a larger town—one where everyone's family was not known—for sisters. Jenny had never been able to see the resemblance, though several teachers had mentioned it. She was not flattered. Gwen Olson had been a year younger, a farm girl, in another set. A tramp had killed her—everybody said that. You still saw tramps, bums, gypsies, whatever they were, hanging around town a day or two and then going wherever they went. Gwen Olson had been dumb enough to go wandering alone by the river at night, out of the sight of the town.

She met Jo at her house and they walked five blocks in sunshine to the theater. The other girls were waiting. The five of them sat in the last row, ritually eating candy.—My parents think this is a dirty movie, she whispered
to Jo Slavitt. Jo put her hand to her mouth, pretending to be shocked. In fact they all thought the movie was boring.

When it was over, they stood on the sidewalk, empty of comment. As always, there was nowhere to go. They began to drift up Main Street toward the river.

—I get scared just thinking about Gwen, said Marilyn Hicks, a girl with thin fair hair and braces on her teeth.

—So don't think about her, snapped Jenny. It was a typical Marilyn Hicks comment.

—What do you think happened to her?

—You know what happened to her, said Jenny, who was less innocent than her parents supposed.

—It could have been anyone, said another girl in a shuddery voice.

—Like Billy Hummel and his friends over there? said Jenny, ridiculing the other girl. She was looking across the street, where some of the older boys from A.H.S., football players, were wasting time hanging around the telephone company building. It was getting darker, and she could see the white flock of the letters on their team jackets reflected in the big phone company window. In ten minutes the boys would be sick of watching themselves in the window and would drift off down the street.

—My dad says the police better watch someone real close.

—I know who he means, said Jo. They all knew whom Marilyn's father meant.

—I'm hungry again. Let's go to the drive-in.

They began to trudge up the road. The boys took no notice of them.

—The food at the drive-in is junk, said Jenny. They put garbage in it.

—Sourpuss. Look at ole sourpuss.

—And that movie was dumb.

—Sourpuss. Just because Billy Hummel didn't look at you.

—Well, at least I don't think he murdered anyone.

Suddenly she had had enough of them. They were standing in a circle around her, waiting for her to move, their shoulders slumping, their faces empty. Billy Hummel and the other boys in team jackets were walking the other way, back into town. She was tired and disappointed—with the boys, with the movie, with her friends. For a moment she wished passionately that she were grown up.—I'm fed up with the drive-in, she said, I'm going home. I'm supposed to be home in half an hour anyway.—Awcomeonnn, moaned Marilyn. The whine in her voice was enough to make Jenny turn decisively away from them and begin to walk quickly down the street.

Because she could feel them staring at her she turned into the first side street. Let them gawk at an empty street, she thought, let them my goodness! one another.

She walked straight down the middle of the unlighted street. Windows shone in the houses on either side. Someone was waiting up ahead, just a shape on the grassy sidewalk, a man washing his car or getting cool evening air. Or a woman getting away from the kids.

At that moment she nearly saved her life, because she realized that she was hungry after all, and almost turned around to go back to her friends. But that was not possible. So she put her head down and walked up
to the next corner, vaguely planning a route that would take most of the half hour she had of freedom. When she went past the shape on the sidewalk, she half-noticed that it was not a man but a fat bush.

The next street was shabbier, with two vacant lots between the mean houses like vast blots of darkness. Trees towered and loomed overhead, black and without definition. She heard slow steps behind her. But this was Arden and she did not begin to be fearful until something hard and blunt touched her back. She jumped and whirled around and when she saw the face looking at her she knew that the worst moments of her life were beginning.