“Yes. I told you that.”
“You wouldn't tell Simon the story you told Hobbs because it was something you could keep from him, something that was yours.”
“Yes.” She nodded. “We talked about this last night, Porter.”
“He threw it in your direction in the building on Eleventh Street, and it smashed against the wall of the elevator, and you didn't bother to pick this piece up.”
She was looking right at me now, and there was everything in her eyes: fear, hatred, amazement, and even, I think, something like love, because I knew her, finally. “Yes,” she said.
I held her gaze then, saying nothing. Then I paid great attention to my omelette, pushing little pieces of green onion onto my fork. Around us came the scrape of silverware on china, the talk and society, the great stage set of Manhattan life.
“Porter?”
I looked up. Then I slid the key across the table.
She stared at it. “A key?”
“The key.”
She stared straight into my face. Blue eyes. Then she touched it with one fingernail, then pinched it between forefinger and thumb, picking it up.
“Hobbs returned this key to me,” I said. “His men hadâ”
“I know, I know.”
The waitress brought me a glass of tomato juice.
“Did you know there was a videotape?” I finally said.
She ate a bite of eggs. “Of what?”
“He wired a little camera into the panel mechanism of the elevator. The actual lens was hidden behind the floor indicator.”
She was just on the edge of figuring it all out.
“On the seventh floor of the building, the elevator stopped, and with the door open, the lens aimed directly into the adjoining space. This was the room whereâ”
“What are you saying?”
“The whole tape is there, Caroline, the whole thing.” I leaned forward so that the people around us would not hear. “Second by second. The argument, the knife, the key.”
She nodded, this time more heavily.
“I believe he asked his father how to wire it, it being an old elevator.”
“I see.”
“I think it was all an act on Simon's part. To see what he'd get on tape.”
“Fooled me.”
I looked at her. “You sure?”
She didn't answer. There was no answer.
“There is the original tape,” I said, “and now, one copy. The original is in a place you do not know about and the copy is here.” I slipped my hand under the table. Her eyes watched carefully. I put the tape on the table and slid it across to her. “Here, this one is yours. You can watch in the privacy of your own home.”
Caroline's fingers touched the videotape.
“All this is a surprise,” I said.
“It was a surprise for me, too.”
“So what's the story?” I asked.
“What?”
“The story Simon wanted so badly to hear.”
“Oh, it's just story I told Hobbs. About when I was a kid.”
“Why?”
“He wanted to know.”
“I don't get it.”
Her face went screwy. “He just understood meâit was the strangest thing. In some kind of way no one ever did. That was what Simon hated so much. You saw the tape, you saw how it drove him crazy.” She looked out the window at the people passing by, and I could feel our whole affair falling away now; it was a matter of half an hour, perhaps even less. “I don't knowâit's not really much of a story really. He just wanted to know what made me strong, and I told him about when I was a little girl.” She had longed for a horse as a girl, she said, but Ron was not interested in giving her one, and her mother was useless at arguing on her daughter's behalf. They had one of those blighted marriages that is a tissue of hatreds. Ron, moreover, was far along in his fixation on Jackie Onassis and had amassed a not insignificant collection of books and magazine articles about her. There was even a small collectors' market in Jackie memorabilia, and he was
an avid buyer, promising his wife that the stuff would be worth a lot of money someday. When she protested, he sometimes hit her. There was more to all of it: drinking, a failing trucking business, a bleeding ulcer. It was conceivable the man had quietly gone over the tapered edge of sanity. And yet the ten-year-old Caroline badgered Ron for a horse, asking that she get it for her birthday in February. He hit her a few times, but he didn't really mean it, she decided, not compared with what he had done to her younger brother the summer beforeâthrown him straight off the motorboat, so that he pinwheeled before hitting the water at thirty miles an hour, breaking his arm. A horse, she wanted a horse. Every day she asked. And so one cold February morning Ron told her to get in the station wagon, we're going for a ride. They drove across the frozen Dakota prairie, saying nothing, a defeated man in his forties in an old black coat that came past his knees and a blonde little girl who was already troubling to look at, and fifty miles and forty minutes later they pulled up to a paddock and a stoved-in barn in the middle of nowhere and Ron got out, slamming the door and crunching across the snow. She followed, and ducked her head under the rail of a fence and kept after the black bulk in the snow in front of her. There were hoofprints and frozen horse shit on the ground, and she saw an old nag off to one side, lifting her feet and trying to stay warm. This was a good sign, she decided, but where was her horse? The nag was too old and broken down for anyone to ride and suffered a disease that was eating away the hooves, yet Ron was walking toward the horse, and so she followed, catching up with him as he reached the horse, who looked too cold even to move. They stood there a moment. She didn't understand. “Happy birthday, Caroline,” Ron said. “This is your horse.” Then he withdrew a large old pistol from his coat, cocked it, and shot the horse in the head. And then again, before she fell. Caroline jumped back as the weight hit the ground, red spreading across the frozen grass.
“That's it,” Caroline told me now. “That was the story.” Her eyes were clear, she was beyond the moment.
“That was what Simon wanted to know?”
“He had taken everything from me already, Porter. I had told him all my stories.”
“You killed him over a story?”
“I don't see it that way, exactly.”
“It's all there on the tape.”
The waitress brought me the bill, and I paid it with cash. There would be no record of our breakfast, ever.
She played with her spoon. “Why did you look for it?” “I think you wanted me to, Caroline.”
She said nothing.
“You wanted to tell somebody.” Her head was down; the part in her hair was perfect. “Sometimes things happen and people have to tell somebody. You never really needed me to find the Hobbs tape. You knew where it was. Basically. All it took was seeing that the estate was paying for something odd. You certainly didn't need me for sex. You needed me for something else, Caroline, and fuck me for not understanding it from the beginning. Jesus, Caroline, you just needed to tell somebody before you married Charlie.”
When she looked up there were tears in her eyes. I didn't believe them.
“I don't want any more of this, you understand?” I told her.
She nodded.
“I have a certainâI felt a certain ⦠but now I can't do that anymore. You never cared for me, but you saw that I might be useful. You could involve me and then let out the story a little at a time. Hobbs was just part of the whole thing.”
She took a regular cigarette out of her purse.
“Miss,” a passing waiter said. “There's no smoking. They made that new law.”
“Yes, yes,” she said in agitation, waving her hand. “I couldn't tell Charlie, you see, and if I married him without straightening it out ⦔ She didn't have to finish. I understood that Charlie would leave her, like that, if he were to know of such a thing; not only would he rightly despise her for not
telling him, but he would also fear that her past would somehow taint his career, and if there was anything he would protect, it was this. And once she married Charlie and took his name, her problems became his. The fact that Hobbs's company received some of its financing through Charlie's bank meant, Caroline figured, that Hobbs could have Charlie removed from the account, perhaps even fired. I understood now why she had chosen Charlie. Here was the perfect man, perfect in his handsome emptiness, his dependable blandness.
“So how could you go to the party that Hobbs threw?”
“I went because I wanted the chance to tell him one more time. I was going to swear to him that I didn't have the tape. That Simon must have done something with it ⦠but I couldn't get to him. All his people were around him. They had people for him to meet and everything. I stood with Charlie but I kept watching ⦠actually, I saw you introduced to Hobbs; I saw them get you and bring you over to him ⦠I recognized you from your picture.”
Looking across the room, Caroline admitted to me, she had seen someone who snooped around in people's lives, though the last thing she wanted was to induce a newspaper story about the video that Hobbs wanted. If she was going to have me try to find the Hobbs tape, then it would have to be because I wanted to do so personally. All this she understood as soon as she glanced up and saw me looking at her. Then she had excused herself from Charlie and his little group of executives and walked over toward me. Within a minute or two of our conversation she knew that she could sleep with me if she wanted. After all, she might have made colossal mistakes, but she knew how to hook a man. Perhaps, she allowed, perhaps she was also attracted to me as well. Not that she had meant to be. She liked the way I gave it back to her in that first conversation, hard, even as I was completely losing what rationality I might have had. She also liked the fact that I was married; it gave her an added measure of control.
Our waitress brought more coffee.
“You want to know if I'm going to give a copy of this tape to the police.”
She looked at me, her eyes haunted. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Here's my answer. If, in any way, you let my wife know what has happened between us, then the police get the tape. God knows what they'll make of it. Did you murder Simon? That's a tough question. Certainly he threatened you. Was it self-defense? Very difficult. That's very difficult, I would say. You
could
have walked into the elevator, tried to get away. You could have refused to kill himâ”
“He was going to kill me.”
“No, he wasn't. He was taping a scene. A sick scene. He wouldn't have gone to the trouble of hiding the camera in the elevator panel if he hadn'tâ”
“I swear he was going to kill me, that very moment.”
“Look at the tape, Caroline. He drops the gun down. There's a long pause. Then you stab him. There it is, on tape.”
“No, that's notâ”
Suddenly I was very tired of myself. “Good-bye, Caroline.”
I stood up and put a few bills on the table for the tip.
“Don't just go. Say something to me.”
I looked at her, and I knew that she didn't care really what I thought, just that when I left she would be alone with herself again, as she always had been. I leaned down and kissed her gently on the cheek. “Be well,” I told her. “As well as you can.”
And then I left, shouldering past the other patrons, not looking back, glad to be leaving, ready to get back onto the street, ready to go at it again. I had a column to write, about the Fellows tape. At the door I thought about looking back and even wanted to, to see Caroline one last time, but I didn't, and when I had turned the corner, I told myself that I felt much better about things.
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The ugliness of it, of who I have been and who I am now, is strongest when I am with my wife and children. As they play at the beach, as we eat dinner together. As I touch Tommy's scar. I could tell my wife about my affair with Caroline and
she would, I think, forgive me in time. Hers is a genuine and true heart. But if she believes in anything, it is family, and, like a teacup that has been repaired, the fracture would always show, would always be there. Perhaps I am only a coward, but I would rather hold my own guilt close to me than force my wife to deal with it.
I have tried to be smart about all this and figure out what could go wrong in the arrangement that Caroline and I have. We both hold a card. We could both destroy each other's lives. I have asked myself if, by not turning her in, I am betraying those who once and still loved Simon Crowley. The question is a difficult one. Mrs. Segal had loved him as only a surrogate mother could. She still ached at his death and would until she died, but, I surmised, perhaps conveniently, the fact of his death seemed not to have surprised her, given the way he lived. What would be gained by telling her that Simon had been killed by his own wife? She seemed old enough that all sorrows had melted in the deeper burden of being human, and I doubted that knowing would have added to her grief, which was already, in itself, complete.