The Unwitting (24 page)

“It’s absurd,” Elliot said. “We’re spending millions of dollars to court these countries to keep them out of the communist camp. Then we turn around and insult their leaders.”

He had decided to put foundation money behind an effort to ensure better treatment of diplomats from newly formed African nations.

“An admirable endeavor,” I said.

“I detect a note of sarcasm.”

“No, it is admirable. I just wonder about all the American negroes who don’t have diplomatic immunity and can’t get a glass of water on the road from Washington to New York.”

He shook his head. “I can’t win for losing.”

SHORTLY AFTER OUR
conversation about the African diplomats, I went to bed with a man named Nicholas Selden, whom I met at a party at Sonia’s. He was an expat novelist living in Rome and in New York for a few days to see his publisher. I was fairly sure I wouldn’t run into him again for some time, if ever, and Orchid was staying with Abby, because I had known I’d be late. I did not break down in sobs in Nicholas Selden’s bed, which was really a bed in the apartment of the friend with whom he was staying. My body turned out to be still in working order. The next morning I was not sorry I had gone home with him, though I was glad that by then I was back in my own bed. He had wanted me to spend the night, but I’d told him I had left my daughter with a babysitter and
had to get home. I was ready for sex, but not for morning-after intimacies.

I lay in my own bed, feeling smug and satisfied. The tight spring that my body had become had uncoiled, and Nicholas Selden’s face and body were already fading. I crossed my arms behind my head and stretched. I had gone to bed with someone who was not Charlie without betraying Charlie.

During the next few months, I repeated the experience with two other men, though not as successfully. The second turned out to have a penchant for shouting scatological words during the act and, what was worse, begging me to shout them in return. That should have turned me off casual sex, but I was afraid that if I stopped with him, I’d never be able to start again, so I risked another encounter with another man, but afterward, when I got up out of a strange bed, put on my clothes, and went down to the late-night street to hail a cab—no, I told him, no need to get up; I can take care of myself—I decided it was time to stop. I had proved I could function physically, but I feared I was beginning to fray around the emotional edges.

The problem was that as soon as I stopped going to bed with other men, the hum Elliot gave off grew louder. Sometimes it screamed like the cicadas at nightfall at his house in the country. That was why what happened with him happened, why things began to go right, before they went so abysmally wrong.

Seventeen

T
HINGS BEGAN TO
go right between Elliot and me the night of the antiwar march on Washington. We disagreed about that too. I did not understand how any right-thinking individual could refuse to go. He could not comprehend how I could risk—
risk
was his word, not mine—taking Abby.

“It’s a Saturday, she doesn’t have school, and she’s dying to go.”

“Of course, she’s dying to go. She’s your daughter. But she’s also twelve years old. You’re supposed to have more sense.”

“Charlie and I took her to the civil rights march. You should hear her chant
Free at last, free at last
.”

He hesitated, and I guessed what he was thinking, but he knew better than to criticize Charlie or his judgment to me.

“I’ve heard her chant, thank you, and, while it’s admirable, I think she should expand her repertory. Why don’t I get two tickets to the matinee of
Man of La Mancha
and take her to that while you go to Washington to save the world?”

“That’s a great idea. Let’s all forget the unjust imperialist war and go to the theater.” I started to hum “The Impossible Dream.”

“It’s better than spending the day shuffling around the capital with a bunch of hippies, who’re smoking god knows what. You want to subject Abby to that?”

I started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“That you think a bunch of kids with long hair and ratty clothes, chanting about peace, are dangerous. In that case, come with us. We’ll need all the protection we can get. And maybe you’ll see the light of day.”

Nonetheless, I did ask Abby if she’d prefer to go to the theater with Elliot. “No way,” she said. “This’ll be just like the civil rights march you and Daddy took me to.”

Elliot did not go to Washington with us, but there were plenty of familiar faces on the train. Sonia was along with her television producer beau Miles, though they would not be returning with us. After the march they planned to lock themselves in a room at the Willard Hotel to celebrate their first anniversary as a couple. Wally Dryer wasn’t there, but the rest of the staff of
Compass
was. Frank Tucker was on the train with a girl who bore an uncanny resemblance to the Tenniel illustrations of Alice in Wonderland, though that may have merely been the tangled mass of yellow hair. Under her parka, she wore a long dress of a thin flowered material and, it became evident when she took off the jacket, nothing else. An aura of high spirits, camaraderie, and self-righteous virtue floated in the air like the dust and soot of the old railroad cars.

As it turned out, little in the demonstration would have offended Elliot. A few young people, who carried an aroma stronger than their self-righteous virtue, brandished Viet Cong flags, but most of the signs were less abrasive.

STOP THE BOMBING
HONOR PEACE
WAR ERODES THE GREAT SOCIETY

Some were even polite. One little girl in a stroller carried a placard not much bigger than an oversize lollipop.
PEACE IN VIETNAM
,
PLEASE
. The chants of “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” were still in the future.

We milled around the White House, freshly laundered by an early-morning shower. We sat on the grass in front of the Washington Monument under a brassy November sun and listened to speeches. We trooped back to Union Station, bone tired and pleased as punch. We had spent ourselves for a good cause.

Abby slept on the way back to New York. When the train pulled into Penn Station, I had to shake her awake. We gathered our things and jostled our way up the stairs with the other hollow-eyed, exhausted, self-styled Good Samaritans.

At the top of the steps, the new concourse surprised me again. I still expected the old soaring steel-and-glass space. That station had made entering the city an occasion. This ugly, harshly lit building made arrival feel furtive and sleazy. I wondered how long the taxi queue was going to be. Then I saw him.

Elliot was standing a little away from the gate, an obstruction in the stream of rumpled humanity flowing out of the stairwell. His face had a smooth freshly shaved glow, and his tweed jacket and flannel trousers looked as if he’d just taken them off the hanger. Beneath my tired sweater and wrinkled jacket, I felt a pang of gratitude mixed with disappointment. If he could come to the station to meet us, why couldn’t he march with us to stop the war? Charlie used to tease me that I was that classic left-wing cliché, a woman who loved mankind in the abstract but was impatient of her fellow man, and woman, in the flesh. Elliot was the opposite. He didn’t seem to be incensed about people killing and dying halfway around the world, but he was concerned about how Abby and I would get uptown.

We were in front of him before he picked us out of the crowd.

“Taking down names for the CIA?” I asked.

“Only if they’re carrying Viet Cong flags.” He turned to Abby. “How was it?”

“Far out.” She grinned. “You would have hated it.”

“That’s why I didn’t go.” He turned back to me. “I have a car waiting on Seventh Avenue.”

“You’re going to get your just rewards for this in heaven.”

“I was hoping I wouldn’t have to wait that long,” he said as we started toward the exit. I was surprised. He was not usually flirtatious.

We had left that morning in a mild drizzle, but a new front had come through, and a cold wind worked us over as we came out of the station. Abby hugged herself. Elliot put his arm around her and rubbed her shoulders.

“This is no way to come home from a peace march,” I said when I saw the driver sitting in the long black town car.

“On the contrary. If you have to go to a peace march, this is the only way to come home from it.”

“Uncle Elliot’s right, Mom. Lighten up.” She looked up at him and grinned, and I was grateful again. I did not want her growing up as I had, in a stifling hothouse where two women, their roots tangled in the arid soil, gasped for the same meager supply of air and sun and water.

Abby dozed off again in the car. This time her head fell on Elliot’s shoulder. When we reached our building, he shook her awake gently. Later, I would come to doubt almost everything about Elliot except his affection for Abby.

He got out of the car and walked us to the door of the building. Abby mumbled good night sleepily and started inside. I was exhausted, but it didn’t seem right not to ask him up for a drink after he’d gone to the trouble of hiring a car and coming down to the station to meet us.

“Do you want to come up? I have just enough energy left for one drink.”

“You could have fooled me. Get some sleep. I’ll take a rain check.”

On my way up in the elevator I told myself I was relieved. We had
left the apartment before six that morning. It was after midnight. The last thing I wanted was to sit around making polite conversation. But I couldn’t help thinking he should have wanted me to.

THE NEXT EVENING
, Elliot called to ask if I’d like to have dinner that week. “Just the grown-ups,” he added. I said I would.

On Wednesday evening, Abby wandered into my room while I was getting dressed. “So I guess this is a date.”

“Of course it’s not a date.”

She leaned against the doorframe with her hands jammed in the back pockets of her jeans. “Sure looks like one from where I stand.”

“Then maybe you ought to move to get a new perspective.”

“Amanda has a stepdad.”

“Amanda’s parents are divorced.”

“That’s what I mean. It doesn’t seem fair for her to have a dad and a stepdad when I don’t have either. You’re the one who’s always talking about the redistribution of wealth.”

“That’s what I get for reading you
A Child’s Guide to Karl Marx
in your crib.”

She crossed the room and came up behind me. “Your tag’s sticking out,” she said as she tucked it in. Then she met my eyes in the mirror. “You look cool. Really.”

ELLIOT HAD GIVEN
me a choice of restaurants, Grenouille, “21,” or an Italian spot that was still a couple of cuts above checked tablecloths and Chianti bottle candlesticks. I opted for the last. This was going to be awkward enough without swank. I kept thinking about the scatological shouter. What if the hum masked strange predilections or repellent tics? No matter how well you knew a man, or a woman for that matter, sex was uncharted territory, until you were lost in it, and then it was too late.

He was standing at the bar when I arrived, leaning on it with one elbow, his hand curled around a drink, a picture of composure until
he saw me. The smile he pasted on his face was so thin I could see through it. He knew as well as I that this was a mistake.

He asked me if I wanted a drink there or at the table. Later I wondered if he would have broken the news at the bar if I’d said I wanted a drink there. I doubt it. He knew how I would react, and he wouldn’t have wanted other people listening.

I followed the maître d’ through the labyrinth of tables to one in the corner. I can’t remember what we talked about while we waited for my drink. Nothing consequential, I’m sure. We were both too uneasy, though as it turned out for different reasons. The timing, we would agree later, was terrible.

“Remember the reporter who tracked down the police blotter that won Randall White a new trial?” he asked after the waiter had brought my drink and left.

I wasn’t likely to forget him. I took a swallow of my drink and waited.

“I got a call just before I left the office. Apparently, he was working on another crime story and turned up some new evidence about Charlie’s death.”

I put down my drink, then picked it up again. I wanted no more investigations, no more trials, no more endless replays of those obscene events.

“What’s the new evidence?” I forced myself to ask.

He shook his head, as if in apology. He did not want to tell this story any more than I wanted to hear it.

The police had arrested a drug dealer for the murder of a rival drug dealer. In hope of leniency, the suspect offered to give them the name of the killer in the Umpire Rock murder case.

I had been staring at the table as he talked. Now my eyes flew up to his face. “The what?”

“I’m sorry, I thought you knew. That’s what the newspapers called it. They found the body near Umpire Rock.”