The Drowning Tree (40 page)

Francesca’s tail thumps against my leg; Paolo growls.

I let go of Francesca’s collar and grab Paolo’s instead as I unlock the door, thinking as I do that it’s too late to lock him out.

As Neil steps over the doorway Paolo growls and lunges forward, taking me with him. The phone, which I’m still holding up against my chest, clatters to the floor, and the towel comes loose. Neil catches me, one hand steadying my elbow, the other moving as if to tuck the towel more firmly around my chest but then straying aimlessly in the air. I yell
down
at Paolo until he crouches and whines.

“I knocked,” he says, “on the side door, but when you didn’t answer I climbed up to the roof. I didn’t realize those panels were so thin.” He holds up his hand to show me the gash across his knuckles. I take his hand in mine and start to pick out the glass splinters, but my hands are shaking so much that all I accomplish is to cut my own fingers, the glass sliding from under his skin into mine.

He pulls my hand away and the sleeve of his shirt brushes against my arm like a layer of ice clinging to his skin. His hair is soaking and when I brush it back from his brow the drops that fall are cold as river water. He’s come back to me just as he always does in my dreams—a drowning man—only now when I step up against him I can feel, through his clothes and my damp towel, the warmth of his skin and the heat of his breath as he rests his head against my neck.

Not drowned. Not drowned
.

After the Coast Guard had gotten me and Bea into their boat they had to dive for Neil. By the time they found him he was unconscious—the body they hauled up into the boat as gray and lifeless as the leaden sky
and the surface of the water. While they pounded his chest and tried to breathe life into him I watched his lifeless body and remembered Halcyone—how when she found her husband’s drowned body her grief had turned them both into seabirds and granted them eternal life together. I saw then how grief could do this—turn you into a tree or a stone or a bird—and I thought,
if he’s dead, I want to be dead, too
. I stood up, meaning to throw myself into the water, only I’d forgotten I was still holding Bea. Out of everything that happened that day, that’s what frightened me the most—that I’d been ready to join him—in death, in madness, whatever it took. I gasped out loud when I realized what I’d been about to do and as I did Neil took in a harsh rasping breath, a breath that sounded as if he begrudged it space in his lungs.

Now his breath travels down my neck and over my breasts, warming the flesh with his mouth, drawing a trail of heat across my body the way a soldering iron draws a bead of melted lead along the seams between two pieces of glass to seal them together.

I touch my mouth to his skin, unbuttoning his shirt, his pants, peeling the wet clothes off him to find the warmth underneath, the living part of him underneath the drowning man. The part that’s still him. In my dreams I always knew it was still there underneath the drowned apparition that came to me. The real Neil, not drowned, not crazy.

He wraps himself around me, a vine around a tree, and I press myself into him, Salmacis clutching Hermaphroditus in her sacred pool until her flesh sank into his and they became two spirits in one body. We sink onto the floor as if drifting down through water, our bodies weightless as they press against each other, each taking the weight of the other so that even when we move into the bedroom, it’s as if we’re making love in a still, clear pool of water.

W
HEN
I
WAKE UP IN THE MORNING
I
’M ALONE
. F
OR A MOMENT, LYING ON MY BACK
and staring up at the flawless blue square of skylight, I think it was just another one of my dreams, but when I hold my hands up in the sunlight I see the cuts on my fingertips from when I tried to take the glass out of Neil’s hand. I remember then that he’d woken me up at four to tell me he had to be back at The Beeches before morning or he’d get kicked out of the trial.

“No trial, no Pieridine,” he said, picking up his damp clothes from the living room floor and shaking bits of glass out of them. “But you can still come and sit for me later, right?”

“I have to go into the city,” I told him. I considered lying but I didn’t
want that to be the way we started out—or started over again—whatever it was we were starting. “Detective Falco wants me to look at Christine’s desk before her apartment’s packed up.”

I thought I saw a muscle twitch in his face when I said Falco’s name but he kept buttoning his shirt and when he was dressed he came over to me, drew my hair away from my neck, and brushed his lips against my throat.

“Should I come back here tonight?” he asked.

I told him yes, forgetting Falco’s suggestion that I spend the night in the city and help Amy clean out the apartment.

Oh well, I think, stretching lazily in the sun streaming into the loft from the skylight, I’ll just take the train back tonight and catch the early train into the city tomorrow. I won’t even have to mention it to Falco.

At the thought of the detective I realize I should be getting up and ready for him, but I stay in bed another few minutes, basking in the sun. I lift my arms up over my head and twirl my hands in a light that is stained emerald and violet from the grapevine pattern in the glass. The green light snakes around my arms and, when I look down, I see it has wrapped around the length of my body. Like one of Ovid’s nymphs, I seem to be turning into a tree.

Although I’m down on the street by 9:20, Falco’s already there, leaning against his car and sipping from a blue and white paper coffee cup, looking fresh in neatly pressed khakis and a blue cotton shirt. I’ve showered and put on a nice linen dress but I feel rumpled in comparison, bleary from lack of sleep and unreasonably covetous of his coffee. Before I can build up too much resentment, though, he hands me my own cup and a cinnamon brioche.

“Gosh, Annemarie only makes these by special request. How’d you rate one?”

“I happened to ask Gavin Penrose a few questions about some unpaid bills with local businesspeople and the next day he paid up all his accounts. I have no idea how your cousin decided I was the one to thank but she loaded me down with so many baked goods that I’m afraid I’ll be accused of graft.” Falco brushes some powdered sugar from his shirt and grins. “As you can see I’ve been trying to eat the evidence.”

“And you want to make me an accessory to the cover-up?” I ask, biting
into the warm, sweet bread. Annemarie’s version of a brioche contains pine nuts and currants and, she once confessed, a hint of pepper.

Falco shrugs and opens the passenger side door for me. The whole car is so fragrant with coffee, fresh baked bread, and cinnamon that I feel suddenly light-headed and unreasonably happy. Maybe it’s the night I spent with Neil or just the way the sun reflects off the Hudson as we head south toward the city that makes me feel like I’m back in college on a road trip and that the day offers endless possibilities.

Falco seems in a pretty good mood, too. Maybe the trip reminds him of college as well because instead of talking about the case he spends most of the time reminiscing about his years at John Jay: his classes, some of his more memorable professors, and the friends he made there. It’s only when a few too many of his stories end in a too early death—one in a drug bust in the South Bronx, two heart attacks, and a classmate who died in uniform at the World Trade Center—that his mood shifts. As we cross over the Henry Hudson Bridge into Manhattan we both lapse into silence.

We pass near the entrance to the Cloisters and I remember the winter day Christine and I walked through the snow toward the medieval monastery and I felt like a pilgrim looking for sanctuary. I found Neil instead.

Falco exits the highway on 95th Street and we head south on Riverside Drive. Riverside Park is full of flowers and dog walkers and bicyclists—a bright panorama of city life that fails to revive my mood. When we pull up in front of Christine’s apartment—into a spot that says
NO PARKING—
Falco turns to me before turning off the engine, his face still full of regret not, as it turns out, for his fallen comrades, but for me.

“I didn’t want to point this out to you, but I guess I’d better since I’m not sure you made the connection.”

“What connection?”

“Gavin paying off his debts so quickly. It looks like he mustn’t have real money problems—he just doesn’t bother to pay his bills on time.” He pauses another moment to turn the car off and reach across me to take a laminated permit of some kind out of the glove compartment. “It kind of kills the theory that he needed to marry Joan Shelley for money.”

R
UTH
W
EBB HAS GIVEN
F
ALCO THE KEYS TO HER DAUGHTER’S APARTMENT—AND
permission for me to stay overnight—so after showing the doorman his search warrant we ride the elevator up to the fourteenth floor. As he opens the Yale lock and dead bolt on Christine’s door I still can’t help but feel that I’m somehow invading Christine’s privacy. I’ve only been to the apartment a couple of times in the six years Christine has lived here. It’s so small that whenever I came into the city Christine would usually suggest we meet at a restaurant or a museum. I’d thought that she was embarrassed by living in such a tiny, modest apartment, but now, when I step into the narrow entry hall—made narrower by bookshelves lining both walls—it occurs to me that Christine had become more and more reclusive over the years and that the apartment, with its copious artifacts of her studies, had become a too private manifestation of her obsessions for her to enjoy sharing it with even her best friend.

At the end of the hallway, though, is a reminder that I still had a place in her world. It’s a three-quarter oil portrait of Christine wearing a green Indian kurta and jeans, leaning against a tree. When I pause in front of it Falco says, “Yeah, I keep looking at that, too. I always like to look at pictures of a homicide victim so I picture them alive and not as the corpse I see in the morgue … but this … the girl in this picture looks so young it’s hard to believe she’ll ever grow old, let alone die at thirty-seven. I looked to see who did the painting but there’s only this green stamp in the corner. Some kind of stylized bird. It’s on a bunch of paintings in the apartment. I wondered if they were done by your ex.”

I shake my head. “Neil did use a Japanese style stamp on his paintings, but his was a tree—because he thought his name meant beech forest.” I don’t bother to explain that I’ve also heard that Buchwald means “book forest.” “He made the peacock stamp for me,” I say, lightly touching the green square in the corner and tracing the corona of feathers surrounding the long-necked bird, “because it’s an attribute of Juno.”

“You painted this?” he asks, looking genuinely surprised. I nod. “And these other ones in here?”

I follow him into the tiny living room. Every inch of wall space that hasn’t been taken up by bookshelves has been filled with pictures: watercolors, prints, sketches, oil paintings. Some are reproductions from museums of Christine’s favorite artists but intermixed with the Pre-Raphaelites
and medieval tapestries are dozens of pieces I did—from careless rough charcoal sketches I’d torn out of my sketch pad to throw away to the larger oil paintings I did in my last year of college and that I’d given to Christine when Bea and I moved back in with my father.

I don’t have room for these at my dad’s
, I told her, although we’d both known I just couldn’t live with them anymore. Most of them are of Neil.

“These are really good,” Falco says, pausing in front of an oil painting of several people standing in a rose garden. “Do you still paint?”

I shake my head and turn away from the detective’s gaze. “Christine’s desk is in her bedroom, right?” Without waiting for an answer I turn on my heel and go into an even smaller room, most of which is taken up by a queen-sized platform bed. Christine’s desk—a mission library table that we’d found together at the Poughkeepsie Salvation Army—is fitted into an arched alcove on the wall opposite the foot of the bed.

Immediately I see what Falco meant by the desk being a kind of diorama. The arched alcove frames the desk like a proscenium stage. The stacks of books on either side and leaning against the back wall are like stage sets; the domed glass lamp, when Falco switches it on, reveals a bucolic scene of shepherds and milkmaids that could be a painted scrim for an eighteenth-century farce, the array of postcards thumbtacked to the wall over the desk background scenery.

I look at the postcards first. When I was last here two years ago the postcards were confined to the bulletin board above her desk, but now they’ve spread over the entire wall so that it’s hard to tell where the bulletin board ends and the wall begins. Many are art postcards that Christine collected over the years and reflect the progression of her taste from swooning Pre-Raphaelite beauties to chaste medieval maidens carved in ivory or stitched in silk. Many are reproductions of Penrose’s paintings—the same wan nymphs that decorated her childhood bedroom—although I notice more of the wood nymph variety than the water nymph. Along the top of the wall she’s arranged the pictures that line Forest Hall—all those figures turning into trees: Baucis and Philemon, Daphne, the three paintings of Iole and Dryope, and then the unnamed girl leaning over a pool with her hair hanging in the water, the tips of her hair just beginning to turn into trailing beech leaves, incipient bark creeping up her legs.