by Ed Gorman
I was impotent for the next three months. Every time I tried to touch my wife, all I could think of was her in bed with Chad. She reminded me that this was how she’d felt after learning about my nurse.
The worst thing was, of course, that she was in love with him. I’d catch her staring at the phone, or looking out the window, or losing attention while we watched TV, and I knew who she was thinking of. One day I came home early and found her sitting in the kitchen, her eyes red from crying. It was raining. They were alike about rain, how it made them so melancholy.
One night, after coming home from the Cineplex, we made love in the car, her climbing on top of me in the front seat as we’d done back in our college days. And then we started making love again a few times a week. I just hoped she didn’t close her eyes and imagine I was Chad.
Summer came, and then autumn, and the emptiness was still there. Somehow, we’d never found a life rhythm again after Chad disappeared. There were too many silences, too many nights when we went to bed and lay there silent and isolate, her dreaming of Chad, I supposed, me dreaming of the wife she’d once been.
We heard about Chad’s car accident through a mutual friend. Three weeks in the hospital, we were told, and a decided limp for the rest of his life. And depression. Chad had gone back to psychotherapy.
I saw him first. This was on a winter morning, all the downtown display windows rimed with frost, and he was just leaving the medical arcade. He had a limp, all right, and he had the pallor of a sick man.
Before I could turn and hurry away, he saw me and waved. I didn’t have a hell of a lot of choice.
“God, it’s good to see you,” he said.
“I heard about your car accident.”
“You know the worst thing about running into that tree?” he said, trying to make it a joke. “I was sober.” Then: “I really miss you people. I shouldn’t ever have—done what I did. I’m really sorry, and I hope you believe me.”
“I accept your apology, Chad. But I still don’t want you in my house.”
“Not in your house, then.”
“What?”
“We’ll see each other, the three of us, but not in your house. We’ll go out. I’ve got a new woman and I really want you to meet her. I know you won’t believe this but I think she’s the one.”
“That means you haven’t broken her heart yet. As soon as you do—”
“No,” he said. “While I was healing up, I thought about a lot of things. It’s time I settle down. It really is. Her name is Anne.”
That was how it started up again, having dinner, the four of us, in a restaurant. Within a few weeks Chad and Anne were dropping by our house, and within a few weeks after that Tish and Anne were having the occasional lunch and the Saturday shopping afternoon. Just as they did “girl” things, Chad got me to do a few “boy” things, like helping him pick out a new boat for impending summer, or helping him decide which riverside cabin was best to buy.
Human TV didn’t start again until he began coming over a night or two a week by himself. He was careful to make sure I was there when he came.
At first, I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear any of it, but gradually the soap operatics of it all started to draw me in. Anne, quite a stylish if not exactly beautiful, woman, had been dumped three times in the past and wasn’t sure that she ever wanted to get serious with anybody again. While Chad was wildly serious, she was cautious. She wanted her own life—nights out with her female friends, taking a night school course in fine arts, and keeping separate houses.
Tish’s theory was that Anne knew Chad was a heartbreaker and was therefore wary of getting any closer to him. My theory was that she was just what she seemed—a very bright and independent woman who didn’t want to move in with Chad. Or marry him.
I didn’t realize how serious any of this was until I came home one night to hear Tish screaming from inside.
I ran in the back door to find Chad slumped over the kitchen table. He’d slashed his left wrist with my safety razor. Blood was pooled around his arm.
“You can’t let him die,” she said. “You can’t let him die.”
I’d been wondering if Tish had gotten over Chad and now I had my answer. In her hysteria, I saw how much she loved him, how sacred he was to her.
I wrapped a towel around his wrist and carried him to the car and drove through several red lights to reach the nearest hospital.
They stitched him up and gave him three different kinds of white pills.
That night, at Tish’s insistence, Chad moved into our guest room. Given his psychiatric history, I supposed it was a humane idea. But I also knew that now I’d never get my wife back again.
Anne changed. His suicide attempt softened her. She no longer seemed quite so sharp-edged or independent. This made me assume that she was going to give in to Chad and marry him. But no, she wasn’t.
“She’s all I can think of,” Chad said night after night at our dinner table. It was like having a badly depressed son around the house. “I won’t ever be able to love anybody else again.”
She watched him, Tish did, constantly, love-sick as he was himself. As long as Anne was around, Chad would never love her. I’m sure she realized that.
“What do you think I should do?” he said to me one night as we were having dessert.
“I think you have to break if off,” I said.
“That’s easy for you to say.”
“You asked for my advice, Chad,” I said. “So I’m giving it to you.”
In the old days, Human TV had been such fun.
“What he means,” Tish said, “is that you should be with somebody who understands you and loves you and wants to be with you the rest of your life.”
She couldn’t help herself. She got so emotional during her little speech that she put her hand on his.
Chad looked first at her hand and then at me. He looked afraid that I’d punch him again.
I just sat there.
It became quite a saga, the thing with Anne. They even went to see a counselor together. But Anne wouldn’t change her mind. There would be no moving in, no marriage.
He took to sobbing late at night, and Tish took to going in and comforting him. I tried not to think about what was happening in our guest room as the moon waned near dawn, and their voices fell to whispers.
But one night they weren’t whispering at all. They were shouting at each other.
I ran in in my pajama bottoms to see what was wrong.
“I won’t do it,” he said. “That’s crazy.”
“It’s the only way you’ll ever be free,” she said. “I’m only saying this for your own sake. Look what your life’s become because of her. You need to be with somebody who loves you, Chad. Who venerates you the way I do.” Then: “Haven’t I always given you good advice, Chad?”
I’m not even sure they saw me peek past the dark door I’d just opened, not sure they heard me at all.
I wondered what sort of advice she’d given him. Whatever it was, it had shaken him badly. Just as their shouting had shaken me. I was as hopelessly in love with Tish as Tish was with Chad.
Sixteen nights later, Anne’s naked and badly mutilated body was found in a shallow woods. She’d been dead for two days.
Chad was the first and foremost suspect. A homicide detective named Haney was at our house the night following the discovery of the murder.
He took Chad out on the deck and they talked just as sweet spring winds came up from the woods.
Tish found me in the TV room.
“I was just talking with Detective Haney,” she said.
I looked at her, leaned close so I could whisper. “He killed her, Tish. Our Chad killed her.”
“I told him that Chad didn’t leave the house the night she died.”
When I heard about Anne’s death, my first thought was selfish: Chad will be out of our lives for good now.
“But he did go out,” I said. “And he did kill her.”
“
That doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t?” I smiled sadly. “You got what you wanted, didn’t you, Tish? Anne’s dead, and Chad’s all yours. All you had to do was convince him to kill her.”
“If you want to stay my husband,” she said, “you’ll tell the police the same thing I did.”
Which I did.
Haney must have dropped in on us ten times over the next few weeks. He didn’t believe us; he was angry; he even hinted that he might charge us as accomplices. But he couldn’t get us to change our story. By summer’s end, they were making love again, Tish and Chad. At least they were sensitive enough to use the guest room, rather than our bedroom. My first impulse was to get angry, of course, and go to the police and tell them that our alibi had been false. But I would lose Tish forever. My second impulse was to confront Chad. But he was so psychologically beleaguered—he talked to himself; he had terrible nightmares; he was constantly asking Tish to check in the closets to make sure monsters weren’t hiding in there—that I couldn’t say anything without looking like a terrible bully, even to myself.
Not long after that, Chad had his little experience of running down our nice quiet residential street without any clothes on.
He was in the sanitarium for four months this time. He went into deep analysis, he received several experimental drugs for depression, and he took more than two dozen electroshock treatments. His psychiatrist kept the police at bay, allowing them only occasional visits. The detectives still wanted to prove that Chad had murdered Anne.
And then Chad had the sort of luck Chad always had. The police took into custody the serial killer they’d been looking for the past three years. His specialty was women in their mid-twenties. Beautiful women in their mid-twenties. Like Anne. They charged him with eleven homicides, so what was one more? They blamed him for Anne’s death, too, and closed the case.
Two weeks before Chad left the sanitarium, he told us about Molly. She was a ballet dancer who’d had a complete breakdown and had been in the asylum for more than four years. He’d fallen in love with her. And she was in love with him. There would be no games this time, on either side. Within a few months, they’d be married. There would be children, and a nice normal life. He was sure of it. But for all he told us about her—that sense of candor he always had— I sensed that there was something about her past he was holding back. Why had she been put in the sanitarium, anyway? Chad never told us.
After his release, Chad moved back in with us. On that first Saturday night, Molly came to dinner at our place for the first time. She was lovely in a delicate, troubled way; she was all wonderful facial bones and tiny tics of eye and mouth, and she was so wrapped up in Chad it was almost painful to see. Because it was clear, at least to me, that Chad was already losing interest in her. I’d overheard him on the phone the other day, using his best seductive tones. He’d found somebody else to play with on the side.
Tish, too, must have sensed that Chad was already bored. She didn’t resent Molly the way she had Anne. She was friendly to the woman in an almost sisterly way.
Molly came around many times, of course. She ate dinner at our place probably three or four times a week. The more she talked about their marriage, the less Chad even bothered to look at her. He’d taken to going out late at night. Obviously, he had another woman. And just as obviously, Tish was angry about this other woman. I was awakened one dawn by Tish and Chad arguing bitterly in the living room. When I came out to see what was going on, Tish fled from the room in tears. Chad sat up late in his room playing “Famous Blue Raincoat” again and again.
The next day, I started inquiring about Molly Stevenson. I did it very discreetly, of course, with the help of a friend I had at the credit bureau. They can find out virtually anything about you in a very short period of time.
Spring came, and so I thought it would be nice to have my first lunch with Molly outdoors, at an open-air café next to the river. She was startled when I called, and not really all that enthusiastic about going, but I hinted that there was something important about Chad we needed to discuss.
We liked each other, and I think she was surprised. I was able to make her laugh a lot and she seemed to appreciate that a great deal. I told her how much I liked her, and I also told her that I didn’t want to see her get hurt. And I started giving her little warning hints about Chad. He hadn’t, it seemed, mentioned most of the women in his background.
There were many more lunches filled with laughter and tics of eye and mouth. She took tranquilizers constantly and sometimes suffered little moments of shuddering, as if she were about to have a seizure of some kind.
A month into these lunches, I told her about Tish and Chad sleeping together. I also told her that I thought it was still going on, and that Chad couldn’t even be faithful to Tish. He was also seeing another mystery woman on the side. I emphasized that I wouldn’t be telling her any of these things if I didn’t care for her so much.
She smashed her wineglass against the edge of the table and then picked up a jagged piece of glass and slashed it down her very lovely cheek. Then she put her head down on the table and wept.
The call came two weeks later, late in the night.
Tish, who was still up waiting for Chad, no doubt, took the call and then let out a scream. I padded out to the living room and took her into my arms. I’d never heard her sob that way. She seemed to be having convulsions of some kind.
Chad’s lawyer asked us to handle all the funeral arrangements and I was happy to.
The District Attorney put Molly back into the hospital, until he could decide if he was going to agree with her lawyer that she wasn’t competent to stand trial.
Tish started sleeping with me again. Not making love, you understand. I assumed that was a ways off as yet. The memory of Chad would be too fresh and painful. But she did let me hold her, and I was grateful enough to let her use me as she wished, as father and brother and friend rather than husband and lover.
One night, when the past seemed to aggrieve her particularly, she lay next to me in the moonlight and said, “I just wish Chad had known about her background. God, he never would have gone out with her if he had. I mean, the way she killed her first husband when she found out he’d been unfaithful to her.” Then she fell to sobbing again.
You really can find out an awful lot about people from the credit bureau.
I always think about this when I go to visit Molly in the sanitarium. This time, she’s up on the third floor where the violent patients are.
The last time I saw her, she said, “I really want to thank you for telling me the truth about him. I really do want to thank you. I was making a fool of myself over him.”
Some nights, Tish plays “Famous Blue Raincoat” again and again. Those are the hardest nights of all to take because the song is a measure of how distant she still is from me. And every time the song plays, the distance is just that much greater.
A few weeks ago, I had a couple of drinks after work with the nurse I had the affair with.
We ended up late that night out in her car, wrestling around like high schoolers on the back seat.
But when the moment came, I just sat there with my head hung low, and felt nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.
INTENT TO DECEIVE
1
On Tuesday morning, the dead girl stopped by and asked Delancy if he could give her some help. She was pretty damned good looking for a dead girl and she seemed bright and pleasant besides. But for just a moment…
The first time he saw her she was sitting in the reception area of the Mayor’s Community Affairs office, pretty without fuss, silken dark hair, dark melancholy eyes, slender figure flattered by the inexpensive cotton dress, which was some sort of riff on the color emerald.
She wore no nylons, of course. Everywhere you went being plastered with signs begging women to turn in their nylons, the material vital to making parachutes. There was, after all, a war on.
She had slim white legs. A lot
of women colored their legs with this goop that was supposed to look like nylon. But this girl knew better.
When she heard Delancy come out of his office door, she set aside the American magazine she’d been reading. It was, like most magazines, filled with inspirational tales of how well the war was going for the Yanks.
But, as she could see for herself, Nick Delancy’s limp was proof that the contrary was true.
“I’m sorry to bother you.”
“You’re not bothering me at all.”
“But your door was closed so you were probably hard at work and—”
He took the final steps toward her, still self-conscious about his infirmity. The docs all told him he’d get used to it. He should’ve asked them for a guaranteed date as to when that would happen.
“Are you all right, Mr. Delancy?”
The wince. Sometimes when the edge of the prosthetic cut into the bone and flesh of his knee, he winced. He was rarely aware of his wince though obviously other people were.
He smiled, not a handsome man but one with an open, freckled prairie-boy face that people trusted. “I’m fine. Still getting used to my new leg, I guess.”
The twenty-three-year-old had enlisted three days after Pearl Harbor, leaving his job as a police detective. In August, he was involved in one of the first raids on Japanese-held islands near the Solomons. For his trouble a machine gunner he’d charged took off his leg below his left knee.
He’d spent almost three months in a Michigan military hospital learning to walk on his prosthetic. He still hadn’t mastered it and was embarrassed now as he approached the woman.
“The war,” she said. “The damned war.” Then shook her head with solemn disgust.
Only when he was closer to her and saw her face in the golden glow of Indian summer sunlight coming through the wide window behind her did he see that she wasn’t the dead girl he remembered from her autopsy photo. She was either older sister or mother.
She offered a slight hand and after they shook, she said, “I should’ve called for an appointment. I’m sorry. But I just decided I needed to talk to somebody responsible. Somebody said you were a good man to talk to. So I just thought I’d try and slip in.”