“Did Gault deserve to die, in your opinion?” Anna then asks.
“Some people would say he forfeited his right to be in this world and we’re all better off now that he’s gone. But my God, I wouldn’t have chosen to be the one who carried out the sentence, Anna. Never, never. Blood was spurting through his fingers. I saw fear in his eyes, terror, panic, the evil in him gone. He was just a human being dying. And I’d caused it. And he was crying and begging me to make his bleeding stop.” I have stopped rocking. I feel Anna’s full attention on me. “Yes,” I finally say. “Yes, it was awful. Just awful. Sometimes I dream about him. Because I killed him, he will forever be part of me. That’s the price I pay.”
“And Jean-Baptiste Chandonne?”
“I don’t want to hurt anybody anymore.” I stare at the dying fire.
“At least he is alive?”
“I take no comfort in that. How can I? People like him don’t stop hurting others, even after they’re locked up. The evil lives on. That is my conundrum. I don’t want them killed, but I know the damage they do while they’re alive. Lose-lose, any way you look at it,” I tell Anna.
Anna says nothing. It is her method to offer silences more than opinions. Grief throbs in my chest and my heart beats in a staccato of fear. “I suppose I’d be punished if I’d killed Chandonne,” I add. “Without question I’ll be punished because I didn’t.”
“You could not save Benton’s life.” Anna’s voice fills the space between us. I shake my head as tears fill my eyes. “Do you feel you should have been able to defend him, too?” she asks. I swallow and spasms of that agonizing loss rob me of my ability to speak. “Did you fail him, Kay? And now it is your penance to eradicate other monsters, perhaps? To do it for Benton, because you let monsters murder him? You did not save him?”
My helplessness, my outrage boil over. “He didn’t save himself, goddamn it. Benton wandered into his murder like a dog or cat wandering off to die, because it was time. Jesus!” I am out with it. “Jesus. Benton was always complaining about wrinkles and sagging and aches and pains, even during the early years of our relationship. As you know, he was older than I. Maybe aging threatened him more for that reason. I don’t know. But when he reached his mid-forties, he couldn’t look in the mirror without shaking his head and griping. ‘I don’t want to get old, Kay.’ That’s what he would say.
“I remember late one afternoon we were taking a bath together and he was complaining about his body. ‘Nobody wants to get old,’ I finally said to him. ‘But I really don’t—don’t to the point that I don’t think I can survive it,’ was his reply. ‘We have to survive it. It’s selfish not to, Benton,’ I said. ‘And besides, we survived being young, didn’t we?’ Ha! He thought I was being ironic. I wasn’t. I asked him how many days of your youth were spent waiting for tomorrow? Because somehow tomorrow is going to be better? He thought about this for a moment as he pulled me closer in the tub, touching and fondling me beneath the steamy cover of hot water scented with lavender. He knew exactly how to play me back in those days when our cells came alive instantly on contact. Back then, when it was good. ‘Yeah,’ he considered, ‘it’s true. I’ve always waited for tomorrow, thinking tomorrow’s going to be better. That’s survival, Kay. If you don’t think tomorrow or next year or the year after that will be better, why bother?’ ”
I stop for a moment, rocking. I tell Anna, “Well, he stopped bothering. Benton died because he no longer believed what was ahead was better than what was past. It doesn’t matter that it was another person who took his life. Benton was the one who decided.” My tears have dried and I feel hollow inside, defeated and furious. Feeble light touches my face as I stare into the afterglow of fire. “Fuck you, Benton,” I mutter to smoking coals. “Fuck you for giving up.”
“Is that why you had sex with Jay Talley?” Anna asks. “To fuck Benton? To pay him back for leaving you, for dying?”
“If so, it wasn’t conscious.”
“What do you feel?”
I try to feel. “Dead. After Benton was murdered . . . ?” I consider this. “Dead,” I decide. “I felt dead. I couldn’t feel anything. I think I had sex with Jay . . .”
“Not what you think. What you feel,” she gently reminds me.
“Yes. That was the whole thing. Wanting to feel, desperate to feel something, anything,” I tell her.
“Did making love with Jay help you feel something, anything?”
“I think it made me feel cheap,” I reply.
“Not what you think,” she reminds me again.
“I felt hunger, lust, anger, ego, freedom. Oh yes, freedom.”
“Freedom from Benton’s death, or perhaps from Benton? He was somewhat repressed, wasn’t he? He was safe. He had a very powerful superego. Benton Wesley was a man who did things properly. What was sex like with him? Was it proper?” Anna wants to know.
“Thoughtful,” I say. “Gentle and sensitive.”
“Ah. Thoughtful. Well, there is something to be said for that,” Anna says with a hint of irony that draws attention to what I have just revealed.
“It was never hungry enough, never purely erotic.” I am more open about it. “I have to admit that many times I was thinking while we were having sex. It’s bad enough to think while talking to you, Anna, but one shouldn’t think while making love. There should be no thoughts, just unbearable pleasure.”
“Do you like sex?”
I laugh in surprise. No one has ever asked me such a thing. “Oh yes, but it varies. I’ve had very good sex, good sex, okay sex, boring sex, bad sex. Sex is a strange creature. I’m not even sure what I think of sex. But I hope I’ve not had the premier grand cru of sex.” I allude to superior Bordeaux. Sex is very much like wine, and if the truth be told, my encounters with lovers usually end up in the village section of the vineyard: low on the slope, fairly common and modestly priced—nothing special, really. “I don’t believe I’ve had my best sex yet, my deepest, most erotic sexual harmony with another person. I haven’t, not yet, not at all.” I am rambling, speaking in stops and starts as I try to figure it out and argue with myself about whether I even want to figure it out. “I don’t know. Well, I guess I wonder how important it should be, how important it is.”
“Considering what you do for a living, Kay, you should know how important sex is. It is power. It is life and death,” Anna states. “Of course, in what you see, mainly we are talking about power that has been terribly abused. Chandonne is a good example. He gets sexual gratification from overpowering, from causing suffering, from playing God and deciding who lives and who dies and how.”
“Of course.”
“Power sexually excites him. It does most people,” Anna says.
“The greatest aphrodisiac,” I agree. “If people are honest about it.”
“Diane Bray is another example. A beautiful, provocative woman who used her sex appeal to overpower, to control others. At least this is the impression I have,” Anna says.
“It’s the impression she gave,” I reply.
“Do you think she was sexually attracted to you?” Anna asks me.
I evaluate this clinically. Uncomfortable with the idea, I hold it away from me and study it like an organ I am dissecting. “That never entered my mind,” I decide. “So it probably wasn’t there or I would have picked up the signals.” Anna doesn’t answer me. “Possibly,” I equivocate.
Anna isn’t buying it. “Didn’t you tell me she had tried to use Marino to get to know you?” she reminds me. “That she wanted to have lunch with you, socialize, get to know you, and tried to arrange this through him?”
“That’s what Marino told me,” I reply.
“Because she was sexually attracted to you, possibly? That would have been the ultimate overpowering of you, wouldn’t it? If she not only ruined your career, but helped herself to your body in the process and therefore appropriated every aspect of your existence? Isn’t that what Chandonne and others of his type do? They must feel attracti
on, too. It is simply that they act it out differently from the rest of us. And we know what you did to him when he tried to act out his attraction to you. His big mistake, no? He looked at you with lust and you blinded him. At least temporarily.” She pauses, her chin resting on her finger, her eyes steady on me.
I am looking directly at her now. I have that feeling again. I would almost describe it as a warning. I just can’t put a name to it.
“What might you have done had Diane Bray tried to act out her sexual attraction to you, saying it was there? If she had hit on you?” Anna keeps digging.
“I have ways of deflecting unwanted advances,” I reply.
“From women, too?”
“From anyone.”
“Then women have made advances.”
“Now and then, over the years.” It is an obvious question with an obvious answer. I don’t live in a cave. “Yes, I’ve certainly been around women who show interest I can’t reciprocate,” I say.
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Either.”
“And how does it make you feel when it is a woman who desires you? Any different than if it is a man?”
“Are you trying to find out if I’m homophobic, Anna?”
“Are you?”
I consider this. I reach as deep as I can to see if I am uncomfortable with homosexuality. I have always been quick to assure Lucy that I have no problem with same-sex relationships beyond the hardships they bring. “I’m okay with it,” I answer Anna. “Really and truly. It simply isn’t my preference. It’s not my choice.”
“People choose?”
“In a sense.” Of this I am certain. “And I say so because I believe people feel many attractions that aren’t what they would be most comfortable with, and so they don’t act on them. I can understand Lucy. I have seen her with her lovers and in a way envy their closeness, because although they have the difficulty of going against the majority, they also have the advantage of the special friendships women are capable of having with each other. It’s harder for men and women to be soul mates, deep friends. I’ll admit that much. But I think the significant difference between Lucy and me is I don’t expect to be a man’s soul mate, and men make her feel overpowered. And true intimacy can’t occur without a balance of power between the individuals. So because I don’t feel overpowered by men, I choose them physically.” Anna says nothing. “That’s probably as much as I’ll ever figure it out,” I add. “Not everything can be explained. Lucy and her attractions and needs can’t be completely explained. Nor can mine.”
“You really don’t think you can be a man’s soul mate? Then maybe your expectations are too low? Possible?”
“Very possible.” I almost laugh. “If anyone has low expectations, I deserve to after all of the relationships I’ve fucked up,” I add.
“Have you ever felt attracted to a woman?” Anna finally gets to this. I figured she would.
“I have found some women very compelling,” I admit. “I remember getting crushes on teachers when I was growing up.”
“By crushes, you mean sexual feelings.”
“Crushes include sexual feelings. Innocent and naïve as they may be. A lot of girls get crushes on their female teachers, especially if you’re in a parochial school and are taught exclusively by women.”
“Nuns.”
I smile. “Yes, imagine getting a crush on a nun.”
“I imagine some of those nuns got crushes on each other, too,” Anna remarks.
A spreading dark cloud of uncertainty and uneasiness encroaches on me and a warning taps at the back of my awareness. I don’t know why Anna is so focused on sex, particularly homosexual sex, and I entertain the possibility that she is a lesbian and this is why she never married, or maybe she is testing me to see how I might react if she finally, after all these years, tells me the truth about herself. It hurts to think she might have, out of fear, withheld such an important detail from me.
“You told me you moved to Richmond for love.” It is my turn to probe. “And the person proved a waste of time. Why didn’t you go back to Germany? Why did you stay in Richmond, Anna?”
“I went to medical school in Vienna and am from Austria, not Germany,” she tells me. “I grew up in a Schloss, a castle, that had been in the family for hundreds of years, near Linz on the Danube River, and during the war the Nazis lived in the house with us. My mother, my father, two older sisters and my younger brother. And from the windows I could see the smoke from the crematorium some ten miles away, at Mauthausen, a very notorious concentration camp, a huge quarry where prisoners were forced to mine the granite, carrying huge blocks of it up hundreds of steps, and if they faltered, they were beaten or pushed into the abyss. Jews, Spanish Republicans, Russians, homosexuals.
“Day in and day out, dark clouds of death stained the horizon, and I would catch my father staring off and sighing when he thought no one was looking. I could feel his deep pain and shame. Because we could do nothing about what was happening, it was easy to slip into denial. Most Austrians were into denial about what was happening in our beautiful little country. This was unforgivable to me but could not be helped. My father had much wealth and influence, but to go against the Nazis was to end up in a camp or to be shot on the spot. I can still hear laughter and the clink of glasses in my house, as if those monsters were our best friends. One of them started coming into my bedroom at night. I was seventeen. This went on for two years. I never said a word because I knew my father could do nothing, and I suspect he was aware of what was going on. Oh yes, I am sure of it. I worried the same thing was happening to my sisters, and am quite certain it was. After the war, I finished my education and met an American music student in Vienna. He was a very fine violinist, very dashing and witty, and I came back to the States with him. Mainly, because I could not live in Austria anymore. I could not live with what my family had averted its conscience from, and even now, when I see the countryside of my homeland, the image is stained with that dark, ominous smoke. I see it in my mind always. Always.”
Anna’s living room is chilled, and fire-scattered embers look like dozens of irregular eyes glowing in the dark. “What happened with the American musician?” I ask her.
“I suppose reality introduced itself.” Her voice is touched by sadness. “It was one thing for him to fall in love with a young female Austrian psychiatrist in one of the most beautiful, romantic cities in the world. Quite another to bring her back to Virginia, to the former capital of the Confederacy where people still have Confederate flags all over the place. I began my residency at MCV, and James played with the Richmond symphony for several years. Then he moved to Washington and we parted. I am grateful we never married. At least I did not have that complication, that or children.”
“And your family?” I ask.
“My sisters are dead. I have a brother in Vienna. Like my father, he is involved in banking. We should get some sleep,” Anna says.
I shiver when I first slide beneath the covers, and I draw up my legs and tuck a pillow beneath my broken arm. Talking to Anna has begun to unsettle me around the edges, like the earth about to cave in. I feel phantom pains in parts of me that are past, gone, and my spirit is heavy from the added burden of the story she has told about her own life. Of course, she would not volunteer her past to most people. A Nazi association is a terrible stigma, even now, and to consider that fact causes me to paint her demeanor and her privileged lifestyle on a very different canvas. It doesn’t matter that Anna no more had a choice about who stayed in her family home than she had a say about whom she had sex with when she was seventeen. She would not be forgiven if others knew. “My God,” I mutter, staring up at the ceiling in Anna’s dark guest room. “Dear God.”
I get back up and make my way down the dark hallway, passing through the living room again and into the east wing of the house. The master bedroom is at the end the hallway, and Anna’s door is open, thin moonlight seeping through windows and softly outlining her shape beneath t
he covers. “Anna?” I speak quietly. “Are you awake?”
She stirs, then sits up. I can barely make out her face as I come closer. Her white hair is down around her shoulders. She looks a hundred years old. “Is everything all right?” she asks groggily and with a trace of alarm.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I can’t tell you enough how sorry I am. Anna, I’ve been a terrible friend.”
“You have been my most trusted friend.” She reaches for my hand and squeezes it, and her bones feel small and fragile beneath soft, loose skin, as if she has suddenly become ancient and vulnerable, not the titan I have always envisioned. Perhaps it is because I now know her story.
“You’ve suffered so much, carried so much all alone,” I whisper. “I’m sorry I’ve not been there for you. I’m just so sorry,” I tell her again. I bend over and hug her awkwardly, cast and all, and kiss her cheek.
CHAPTER 8
EVEN DURING MY most burdened, distracted moments, I appreciate where I work. I am always aware that the medical examiner system I head is probably the finest in the country, if not the world, and that I co-direct the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine, the first training academy of its kind. I am able to do all of this in one of the most advanced forensic facilities I have ever seen.
Our new thirty-million-dollar, one-hundred-and-thirty-thousand-square-foot building is called Biotech II and is the center of the Biotechnology Research Park, which has stunningly transformed downtown Richmond by relentlessly replacing abandoned department stores and other boarded-up shells with elegant buildings of brick masonry and glass. Biotech has reclaimed a city that continued to be bullied long after those Northern aggressors fired their last shot.
When I moved here in the late eighties, Richmond consistently topped the list of cities with the highest homicide rate per capita in the United States. Businesses fled to neighboring counties. Virtually no one went downtown after hours. That can be said no more. Remarkably, Richmond is on its way to becoming a city of science and enlightenment, and I confess I never thought it possible. I confess, I hated Richmond when I first moved here for reasons that reach far deeper than Marino’s nastiness to me or what I missed about Miami.
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