Are Snakes Necessary?

by Brian De Palma

  There isn’t a lot to do here. Elizabeth has begun to read. Detective novels mostly. She takes long walks. It’s a hike to the store where she goes every day to buy groceries. Then she makes herself nice meals which she enjoys by candlelight in the front room of her cottage. Time is a luxury.

  Elizabeth looks out at the water. She would like to be more useful to the Dear Dottie gang. How could she do that? She noodles over the question as she walks up the rocky Maine coast.

  The last detective novel she read gives her an idea. What if she injected herself into the lives of the Desperate-and-Not-Long-to-Live? Just a little. Or a lot. Maybe she could teach these sad letter writers how to take a little more control of their fate. Or better yet, maybe she could show them.

  Dear Dottie,

  My husband beats me. I got out of the hospital last week. My husband greeted me with a phone book. He smashed it over my head. This doesn’t leave marks. But it sure knocks you out. I’m actually worried my brain is damaged. It’s hard to think straight. I’d like to go, but I have two kids and my husband will kill me—or them—if I try to leave. What do I do? I don’t have a job and there is little money as is and it all comes from my husband’s work as a deliveryman.

  Deliver Me Please

  Dear Deliver Me Please,

  You’re still asking good questions, ones like “What should I do?” So your brain’s not damaged, yet.

  Here’s a tip. Call 911. Give them the 411.

  Your monster husband should be behind bars.

  If that doesn’t work, find a pipe.

  Show your husband what a good smashing is all about. Maybe when he’s sleeping.

  A little self-defense goes a long way.

  Legally and otherwise.

  I’m rooting for you,

  Dottie

  Elizabeth is surprisingly sad after she hits the “send” key on this one. It is hard to believe there’s a happy ending in store for Deliver Me Please. Or that Dottie’s letter has contributed much to it.

  Elizabeth’s skill at mimicry and self-invention directs a week-long research project. Lots of people have applied themselves to the subject of the perfect murder and how to commit it. It’s not hard to find ideas online and Elizabeth has all the time in the world.

  The research provides a little light. The letters can be a real downer on sunny afternoons. Even the harmless ones get old fast.

  Dear Dottie:

  My ex-boyfriend may be coming to visit soon. But I doubt it. In any case, he hasn’t let me know. He doesn’t initiate contact either, although he responds when I do. I hoped we could have a friendship, but aren’t friends supposed to care about one another? Why isn’t he curious about me? Can old lovers be friends? I know his circumstances are tough these days, so should I be patient? Am I being selfish or narcissistic in my expectations? Do I even want this friendship?

  Signed,

  I Wonder

  Dear I Wonder,

  Yep, your ex-boyfriend may be coming to visit soon. He might arrive on a white horse and shower you with kisses and ride you off into a sunset where he will make passionate love to you until you beg for mercy.

  Also, monkeys may fly out of my butt.

  Seems just as likely.

  In a word, I Wonder, no. You don’t want this “friendship.” But even if you do want it, it ain’t happening.

  Dottie

  Dear Dottie,

  My husband is an abrasive prick. He’s a cheat. I found the emails. But then he broke his leg. He couldn’t walk. He’s the father of my child so I stayed with him and nursed him back to health. As soon as he recovered, he left me for the other woman. How could I be so dumb? Did I get my just desserts?

  Dear Just Desserts,

  Yeah, you are dumb. Get smart.

  Better yet, get a hatchet.

  Take that bum leg off—and then his head.

  Fondly,

  Dottie

  Clickety-clack, hit “send.” Elizabeth stretches out her long legs. My goodness, she thinks practically every one of these letters is an invitation to murder.

  CHAPTER 41

  Nick is in bed. He’s surfing the web, a little aimlessly. TMZ, the New York Post, the Las Vegas Light.

  He’s link-hopping through the tabloids when a familiar face flashes past. The face, which is attached to a sexy girl in tight jeans and a sweater, belongs to Fanny.

  The headline on the news item says Rogers Offers Reward for Info About Missing Intern. The article goes on to explain that she’s been missing for a week and that, at a press conference, the senator offered a $10,000 reward for information regarding her whereabouts. She was last seen at his town-house, but he swears there was no improper or romantic involvement. He just has ordinary concern for a staff member’s well-being.

  Nick is interested. How could he not be, given that Fanny is in his bathroom at this very moment? He clicks on the story. It comes complete with a quote from Rogers.

  “Fanny is a wonderful young lady with so much potential, and we pray she’s safe and sound.”

  Safe and sound. Hmm. That’s definitely how Fanny seemed to Nick when he saw her last.

  He pulls himself out of bed and marches over to the hotel room’s little kitchen. A total mess, of course. He takes down two bowls and a box of Muesli and starts making coffee, for two.

  He props his iPad—and the news item about the missing intern—up against the Muesli box. Then he waits.

  It doesn’t take long before Fanny, wearing the same jeans she has on in the photo and a blue French-striped cotton top, ambles into the kitchen.

  “Hi! What are you up to?” she says. Then she sees the iPad on the table.

  She moves closer and reads the item. “Oh my god! My mom must be worried to death. I’ve got to call her.”

  The caffeine hasn’t yet hit. Nick looks at Fanny skeptically. “Just friends?”

  Fanny rummages through her bag looking for her cell phone. “Well…not exactly.”

  “No one knows you’re here?”

  “You know.”

  “No one in your life, though.”

  Fanny shakes her head. It’s half in response to Nick and half because she’s found her cell phone and it has no service. Of course not. Why would it, five thousand miles from home? It’s a miracle it even has any battery left.

  “ ‘No improper or romantic involvement,’ ” Nick quotes.

  “Well. I don’t think it’s improper,” Fanny says. “I think it’s the most proper thing in the world.”

  “You’re sleeping with him?”

  Fanny nods. “We’re in love.”

  “In love.”

  “Very much.”

  She drops the phone back in her purse. It’s beginning to dawn on her that the whole Rogers thing has just taken on a whole new life.

  “What about his wife?” Nick smells the coffee.

  “He said he was going to tell her after the election.”

  “Then why the vanishing act?”

  “Big disaster. First, I’m thrown off the campaign. His manager, this guy Barton Brock, can’t stand having me around. Then Lee planned a trip for us to Paris. Suddenly his wife decides she wants to come. I’m dumped again.”

  Barton Brock. Isn’t he the guy in Elizabeth’s story, the one who chased her out of town? Elizabeth mentioned something like this to Nick once, after she’d knocked back a few too many.

  Barton Brock.

  Nick is sure it’s the same guy. And now he’s playing a similar role in the life of the sloshed kid who wound up sharing Nick’s hotel room.

  “What are the odds?” That’s what Katie Couric said, on national TV, when the second plane hit the World Trade Center on 9/11. What are the odds, Katie?

  And yet. This character Brock who played a role in his last girlfriend’s life turns up pulling the strings in a senatorial campaign involving a guy who’s feasting on Miss Fanny Cours.

  Nick makes a mental note to hit the web and check out what this Cagliostro looks li
ke.

  He reels his thoughts back from the outer banks. A paroxysm of brotherly concern washes over him.

  “Listen, kid, let’s go sit in the sunshine and have a little chat.”

  Fanny is game. “Maybe I should call my mom first,” she says. But she senses a kind of polite urgency from Nick and doesn’t want to slow things up.

  Nick knows the ideal café. He orders a double espresso. His French is good. French remains completely beyond Fanny. “Café au lait,” she says in perfect English.

  The waitress, thin in the astonishing way French women are (meaning that, despite her teensy little waist, she has nice round breasts that go nicely with her perfectly round bottom), brings the coffee. Nick looks pensive.

  “Hey, kid, what are you doing with this guy? The senator guy?”

  “Look,” says Fanny. “I know. I know. It seems crazy. But there’s something between us. Not just sex. But something. Something that matters a lot to me. Something I don’t think you find every day.”

  Nick is skeptical. “Maybe,” he says.

  It really is too bad he doesn’t smoke. If he did, this would be a perfect time to inhale.

  “The thing is, even if there is something real here, this isn’t going to end well.”

  Nick looks genuinely concerned. And also very attractive.

  Fanny protests. But in her heart she knows Nick is right, at least partly.

  “I mean, what are you going to do, run off into the sunset or something? And then wake up in the morning as Mr. and Mrs. Senator and film some videos and host a lot of A-list Washington parties? I don’t know, Fan, I don’t see it.”

  Nick doesn’t get it, Fanny thinks. But he definitely gets something. No, Fanny can’t see herself having tea with a bunch of Pamela Harriman types or anything like that. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something real—a sweet hot light connection—between her and Lee Rogers.

  “Tell me about you,” says Fanny. She wants to change the subject, just for a minute while she thinks things over.

  Fanny wants to know Nick’s story. Not because she’s interested in Nick. She is. Just not in that way.

  He’s definitely appealing. In lots of ways. And it’s not like he’s trying to smother her or prey on her or anything like that. Fanny could use a big brother. And this guy, in his crisp white shirt with the double espresso, is the closest thing around right now.

  “I had a thing with someone who was married too. Didn’t end well. Didn’t even end.”

  Fanny doesn’t know how to describe the look in Nick’s eye. Not dreamy exactly, more like lost.

  He looks out into the plaza, past all the people going back and forth to who knows where, past the ice cream sellers and the tourists with their maps, but he doesn’t seem to find whatever he’s looking for.

  “What do you mean it didn’t end?”

  Nick says, “She was tall and blonde. A real knockout. She had an awful marriage to some rich Vegas guy. Saved her when she was in trouble, rescued her from some bad shit. I loved her right away. Met her on a plane. Ever hear that song with the line ‘Love is an angel disguised as lust’? That’s what happened here. Real heat melted into real love.”

  Fanny is interested. She wonders if this is what happened with her and Lee. “Then what happened?” she asks.

  “She felt the same way. We were just so together. The marriage made no sense. She couldn’t sustain it anymore. There was a dust-up. Nasty. When it was over, she told him the marriage was over too, she was leaving. We drove away in her car. She had this little tiny overnight bag. She said she didn’t need anything but me and a t-shirt or two.” Nick smiles at the memory.

  Fanny gives him a go on look.

  “We drove to this hotel the husband owned. She went inside to get something, a painting that was worth a lot of money. And…she never came back.”

  “What do you mean she never came back? Where did she go?”

  “No idea. She disappeared.”

  “Did she go back to her husband?”

  “No. I know he looked for her, too. Didn’t find her.”

  “What? How could that be? Were police involved?”

  “For a while, I guess. There was a burned-out car at the edge of the desert, they thought she might have died in that—there wasn’t a body, but in the desert there wouldn’t be, necessarily. Scavengers. They investigated the husband. He had a motive. But they turned up jack. No trace. Ever.”

  They turned up jack. No trace. Ever.

  Nick is surprised to find he feels slightly nauseous as he tells Fanny his tale. How can someone just disappear like that? Did she have another boyfriend? Or, or, or… Who disappears? Makes no sense.

  “Here’s a thing I know, Fanny. You’re in bed or you’re in love with someone and it feels real and solid and it’s just you two and the rest of the world melts away, but the thing is the rest of the world doesn’t melt away. Not really. The angry crazed husband, the campaign manager, they’re there, behind the scenes, moving things around in ways you don’t see but that change everything, rearrange the basic facts of your own life. That sounds paranoid, maybe, but it’s true.

  “After the whole thing with Elizabeth, I was kind of lost, as you might imagine. I wanted her. I wanted to find her so badly my body ached for weeks. After a while I just wanted an answer: where was she? The constant wondering was terrible: Where is she? Where is she? If I don’t charge my phone, will I miss her call? If I leave the house will I miss her? Is the husband fucking with me? Does he know where she is? Where the fuck is she? I’m a photographer, right. So I started taking pictures, places she might be, places we’d been together. And I had a ton of photos of her, of course. I put together a proposal for a book. But I can’t find an ending. And shooting pictures didn’t stop the questions: Where is she? Where did she go? It was driving me nuts.

  “After a while, I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to get away. Away from the phone that didn’t ring, the questions I couldn’t answer, the photographs that had no ending.”

  “So you came here?”

  Nick takes a sip of espresso. “Yeah. Took this job as a set photographer and…” He stops himself, returns to Fanny and her tale.

  “Listen, kid, if Barton Brock got you kicked off the campaign, you can bet that at this point in what is now a big scandal, he’ll want you to keep disappeared.”

  “What do you mean, ‘keep disappeared’?”

  “Probably everybody already thinks Rogers was having an affair with you and that’s somehow connected with your disappearance, but there’s a difference between thinking it and knowing it. What happens if you just turn up? How are you going to explain where you were?”

  “I don’t know. Tell them the truth?”

  “Uh, Fan, I don’t think that will get you the senator. But it will end his political career. That’s not exactly in your interest, babe.”

  “I don’t want it to happen!”

  “He doesn’t know that.”

  “When it turns out I’m alive and well, why would the rest of it come out at all? I mean who cares?”

  “People care when senators sleep with their staffers.”

  Hell. Fanny knows he’s right. And is it really true that she doesn’t want to end Rogers’ career? She wants to end his marriage, that’s for sure. She wants Lee Rogers to love her more than he loves anyone else. And to act accordingly. That’s what she wants.

  She honestly doesn’t care about the rest, the press, the Senate, whatever.

  “I just want him,” Fanny says. “That’s all I want.” And her voice is so plaintive and earnest that Nick swallows his comeback, which would’ve been, Well you can’t have him. Is there some way she could? And if so, could this be his story? Instead of boy meets girl, it’s girl meets boy—only it’s girl meets married senator. Then, of course, girl loses married senator. And the ending is…girl gets married senator? But how?

  “He’s never going to acknowledge you unless you force him to,” Nick says. “H
e just won’t. He’s got too much to lose.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  Nick raises a hand. “Just hear me out. He’s got too much to lose, so he won’t take the first step. It’s too risky. But if you take the first step and cost him his career, he’ll hate you for it. So that’s no good either. But what if the media does it for you?” He nods towards the camera hanging by its strap from the back of his chair. “You said he was planning a trip to Paris with you, but then he decided he’d bring his wife instead. Okay. So that means he’s going to be here soon. Meanwhile, you’ve been missing for more than a week, the media’s been playing it up. They’re eager for any news about you. Let’s say you’re snapped on a sidewalk in Paris. Just before your senator shows up in Paris. I have a friend, a paparazzi, who’ll know the right places. You’re seen coming out of a building that’s known for clandestine assignations. See what I mean?”

  “There are entire buildings known for ‘clandestine assignations’?” Fanny asks.

  “In Paris? There are entire streets.”

  But Fanny is shaking her head. “I don’t accept your premise,” she says with the finality of the high school debater she was not so very long ago. “That he won’t acknowledge me. He loves me.”

  Nick swallows his first reaction again. “We’ll see,” he says.

  “Hey,” Fanny says, putting a hand on Nick’s arm. “I meant to ask, can I use your phone?” He raises an eyebrow. “I really need to call my mom. This whole thing has got to be torture for her.”

  “Will you tell her where you are?” That would be one way to set his plan in motion. Mom would surely tell someone, and every news bureau covering the missing intern story would instantly direct their attention to Paris.

  But she says, “No, just that I’m okay.”

  He sighs, hands over his iPhone, watches as she enters the number.

  They wait.

  It rings and rings and rings.

  CHAPTER 42

  Why should Elizabeth Diamond, aka Dear Dottie, trouble the surface of her very pleasant (if quiet) life to engage in other people’s dramas, especially if she amps up the stakes with criminal activity?