“Good. Here. Or should I open it? Do you put it on now or later?”
“Later.”
“Do you do it or do I?”
“Either.”
She looked at it, turned it over, looked at it again, then thrust it toward me. “It looks like it could get tricky, and I don’t have much practice.” She tittered. “None, as it happens.”
“I’ll handle it,” I said, and put the condom on the bedstand.
Ellen looked around the room as though she were the set designer on the remake of Ali Baba. “I’d like the lights on if you don’t mind. A few, at least.” When she looked at my face, she adjusted her demands. “One, if it’s all right. Tom and I were in the back of his car halfway up Mount Diablo. It was dark and cramped. There wasn’t much room for … perspective.”
I turned on the light in the bathroom, closed the door most of the way, then turned off the overhead. “Satisfactory?”
She glanced at the bed. “Perfect.” She blushed again. “I should wash up.” Without waiting for a reply, she disappeared into the bathroom. Which was too bad, because it gave me time to think.
When all was said and done, I almost tossed some cab money onto the bed and left. Fled. Retreated in disarray, all of which I’ve done more than once in similar circumstances, not that the similarity was all that strong. But somehow it wasn’t right. It wasn’t entirely wrong, either, but despite Ellen’s resolutely blasé demeanor, the musk of desperation clogged the room, an aura of ersatz ecstasy, the itch of the cheap thrill.
Given my solitary life, I could empathize with Ellen’s physical desires, and I was egotist enough to approve her choice of partners. What I had trouble with was that to make it right it would have to be more than a physical experience for her, it would have to be transforming. As far as I knew, I hadn’t provoked an epiphany in years, in or out of bed, and I didn’t want to see my failure on this occasion reflected in Ellen’s postcoital eyes. But when the door to the bathroom opened, and Ellen was naked in the doorway with backlight making her curves and hollows glow as if she were freshly glazed and being fired in a spotless kiln, my reservations vanished in the maze of possibilities and nothing beyond that mattered, certainly not a store of half-baked mores that didn’t meet the needs of anyone.
“You’ve changed your mind,” she said when she saw my sartorial status had remained quo.
“Not exactly.”
“You’ve decided I’m a slattern.”
“Not at all.”
“You pity me. You think I’m a tease. You think I’m a sex fiend.”
“None of the above. I just want to make sure you still want this.”
She canted a hip and raised an arm. “What does it look like?”
I tugged at my belt and at whatever else was in the way.
When I was her mate in dishabille and had made my own trip to wash up, I faced her at the foot of the bed. In the crimped light from the bathroom doorway, her body was like soft sculpture, a Venus perfect in proportion, flawless in surface, infinite in opportunity. The difference was, this particular masterpiece was mine for the asking, at least for the evening.
Her skin was unsullied by the sun, her face still free of the etch of age, her breasts as advertised. For a moment, her hand lingered to mask her crotch, then that barrier was whisked away as well, and she waited for me to begin the rite. I reached for her hand and pulled her to me, trying not to notice that the hand was ice-cold.
The embrace was brief, at her insistence. “I want to touch you first,” she said, and did, gently but utterly, as though her sole surviving sense were tactile. “It’s blood that makes it that way, right?”
“Blood plus stimulation.”
“You seem to have the requisite amount of both.”
“No question.”
She paused. “Some women do … things with it, don’t they?”
“Yes.”
She paused again. “I don’t think I can.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I think just the basics, pretty much.”
“The basics are fine.”
“But we can … hug for a while, can’t we? When Tom and I were together, we didn’t take time to—” She caught herself and became abject. “I’m sorry. I won’t talk about that anymore. This isn’t that, this is this.”
“Ms. Simmons and Mr. Tanner.”
Her smile was finally unrestrained. “That’s it, exactly.”
“We’ll hug, and then we’ll do a little more than hug, and then we’ll hug some more.” I bent and kissed a breast.
She responded as though I’d burned her, the reaction so electric it was impossible to tell whether the reflex was grounded in pleasure or pain. I left one breast and kissed the other. This time she clasped my head and kept me at it.
“They are nice, aren’t they?” she said after a while.
I lowered Ellen Simmons to the bed and tried to become what she wanted me to be, which was the reincarnation of Tom Crandall.
TWENTY-SEVEN
It was over before it should have been, of course—when your sex life is as fitful as mine, ejaculation is by definition premature. But Ellen was even more deprived than I, so she rode the wave and crested with me.
When we were finished and cleaned up and back on the bed though not in our clothing, Ellen turned onto her side for a better view. “There’s quite a difference, isn’t there? Before and after.”
“Yep.”
“An amazing mechanism. Hydraulic, almost.”
“As good a metaphor as any.”
“Have you ever not been able to … get it up? Is that the term?”
“That’s one of them.”
“Well?”
“A couple of times.”
“What happened?”
“I apologized, we told each other it didn’t matter and exchanged exceedingly polite farewells. And never saw each other again.”
“What I meant was, why do you think it didn’t work those nights?”
I shrugged. “Guilt. Exhaustion. Intoxication. Boredom. More than one but less than all, probably.”
“It’s difficult for me to think of sex being boring. Frightening. Embarrassing. Disappointing, even. But not boring.”
I looked to see if Ellen intended an implicit critique of my performance, but apparently not. I turned on my side to face her. “The truth is, Ms. Simmons, that the mechanics of my sex life wouldn’t keep an insomniac awake. So why don’t we talk about you.”
She stiffened and flopped over onto her stomach. “The quid pro quo. I hoped you’d forgotten.”
“Private eyes are forbidden to forget. There’s a law on it.”
She rolled away from me. “Since the fun seems to have ended, I’m going to get dressed.”
She disappeared into the bathroom. By the time she returned, I was dressed myself and trying to look businesslike in the chair beside the rumpled bed. Since the chair beside the bed was the only chair in the room, Ellen straightened the spread, fluffed and stacked the pillows, and sat back against them, lips in a matchless pout, arms crossed against my purposes. Her expression was not calculated to make me feel triumphant or even decent.
“Look,” I began. “I’m sorry you’re upset. The transition was too abrupt; I’ll do better next time.”
The last sentence was in the air before its implication registered. When it had, we regarded each other with a newfound shyness. “See that you do,” Ellen said finally, halfway back to brazenness. “When do you suppose the next time will be?”
“How about next week? Dinner Friday night.”
She looked at her watch. “I was thinking more in terms of twenty minutes.”
I laughed. “I’m not a young man, you know. We can give it a try, but you might have to get a little … bawdy at first. Just to get the hydraulics going.”
“I can do that,” she said confidently, then reconsidered. “Can’t I?”
“You’re only as bawdy as you feel.”
“
Then there’s no problem at all.”
I got up and walked to the dresser and looked at Ellen’s reflection in the mirror. “Let’s talk about you and Nicky Crandall.”
Wantonness drained out of her. Hurt, then petulant, she turned away from me again and curled into a ball, knees hugged to her chest, fetal with a vengeance. When she spoke, the words bounced off the plastic headboard and reached me in a brittle timbre.
“You’re right, of course,” she murmured softly. “Something did happen with Nicky.”
“When?”
“About six months after Tom went away.”
“And Nicky had gotten it into his head that you wanted to be his girl.”
“Yes.”
“How did that notion occur to him? Do you know?”
“Not really. Given Nicky’s mental state, it could have been anything—a smile, a greeting—who knows what might have put the idea in his mind? At that age, even normal boys get wrong ideas.”
To put it mildly.
Ellen fell silent, struggling to summon the past with accuracy, to deliver her part of the bargain—the whole truth and nothing but. In my experience, not many people made the effort, and I was flattered that she was making it for me until I decided that, as in the exercise we’d just completed, she was expending her energies for Tom.
“I think maybe Tom asked Nicky to look after me while he was gone,” she went on after a long silence. “And Nicky misinterpreted. God, that was an awful time,” she concluded, misery active in her eyes.
“What exactly happened between you and Nicky?”
She didn’t answer.
“Was it rape?”
Her eyes moved my way with the lethargy of a snake in the sun. “That’s what everyone thought it was.”
“Why?”
“Because I let them.”
“Why?”
“Because I thought that was what would hurt Tom the most when he found out—what would punish him most for deserting me.”
“But rape’s not what it was?”
She shook her head.
“Then what was it?”
She looked at me in turmoil. “Why do you need to know? Why do you have to dig at my troubles with Nicky?”
“Because I think Nicky Crandall may have killed his brother.”
Rather than the surprise I expected, her response was as level as a pool table. “Then it might be of interest if I told you that twenty years ago Nicky tried to kill me.”
At this point, the surprise was mine. “Tell me about it. If you don’t mind.”
Her look was fragile and disconnected. “Oh, I mind. I mind a lot. I’ve tried very hard to erase that night from my memory entirely. But it hasn’t worked, so I’ll tell you what you want to know. That way I’ll have earned my evening.”
“It wasn’t like that, Ellen. You know damned well it wasn’t.”
“If you say so, John.”
I hadn’t been called John in years. That Ellen Simmons didn’t know it made me sad.
Chillingly detached, she spoke as though we were tourists trading anecdotes. “Let’s see. Tom had gone in the army in June. Nick had been put in Dr. Marlin’s clinic about the same time. He got out in, oh, September, maybe. But he wasn’t any better. If anything, he was worse—the tirades, the talking to himself, the odd behavior: The whole town was wondering when he’d do something violent and why no one was doing anything to make sure it couldn’t happen.”
“Had he done anything harmful before this?”
She shook her head. “Not that I know of. But people saw the signs. Some people, at least. I didn’t think he was so bad, myself—odd, certainly, but not dangerous. Until I found out differently.”
“What happened?”
She started talking before I finished the question, as though now that the die was cast, she was impatient to exorcise the nightmare.
“I saw Nicky uptown one night. It was late, after I’d been to a movie and dropped a girlfriend off at home. We waved, and I pulled over and offered him a ride. I didn’t even think about it; I mean, I’d been with him a hundred times before without a problem. But this time he wanted to go to the high school. He said he’d left some books by the tennis court and needed them over the weekend. It wasn’t far, so I drove him over there. When we were in the parking lot, and he could see there was no one else around, he attacked me.”
“Did he have a weapon?”
“No.”
“A knife, a rope—anything?”
Her eyes sparked. “What difference does it make? He had his hands around my throat. I couldn’t breathe, he kept telling me I was going to die. I was afraid he’d rip my eyes out, I—”
I went to the bed and sat beside her and took her hands in mine. “I wasn’t implying it wasn’t a life-threatening situation, I was thinking about Tom. In his case, the murder weapon was unusual—a piece of drug paraphernalia—so if Nicky used an unconventional weapon with you, then it might indicate a pattern.”
Ellen closed her eyes and shook her head. “No weapon. Just Nicky.”
“You’re sure it was attempted murder? Not rape?”
“Definitely. Nicky was trying to kill me.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Not then, not now. In some sense, I don’t think Nicky knew, either.”
“How did you get him to stop?”
“First I tried to reason with him. Then I … begged. Begged him to …”
“What?”
I had to strain to hear her. “Let me be nice to him.” She raised her eyes. “I begged Nicky the way I begged you.”
“You didn’t do anything of the sort with me. We—”
She shook her head to stop me. “You wanted to know about Nicky. So ask about him.”
There were a lot of reasons to console rather than interrogate her, but I did as she requested. “What happened when you told the police about it?”
“Nothing.”
“You mean they didn’t arrest him?”
“I mean I didn’t tell them.”
“Why not?”
“Because everyone told me not to.”
“Who’s everyone?”
“My parents. Mrs. Crandall. Dr. Marlin.”
“Why didn’t they want you to go to the police?”
“My parents didn’t want to endure the scandal; Mrs. Crandall wanted the whole thing to go up in smoke like it always had before; and Dr. Marlin said Nicky wouldn’t survive in prison, that he wouldn’t get the treatment he needed and would be subjected to all sorts of brutality because of his weird behavior. He promised that if I cooperated, he’d put Nicky on medication that would make sure he wouldn’t do that again. To me or anyone.”
Her look turned wretched as she tried to make me understand. “I didn’t realize what was happening until the very end. I mean, when he put his hands on me, I just thought he was … horny. That he would stop when he understood I didn’t like him in that way. Nicky was so weird that all the girls were afraid of him. He didn’t have any dates, and so I was … trying to be gentle with him, I guess, to explain my feelings and at the same time try not to injure his, and all of a sudden he was strangling me. So I told him I’d do what I thought he wanted. I was very specific, as specific as I could be, at least. I tried to make it sound delightful. But that wasn’t what he wanted, it turned out. By the end, I knew absolutely that he wanted me to die.”
“So your … offer … wasn’t what stopped him?”
She shook her head. “Someone pulled into the parking lot. Nicky ran off when he saw him coming.”
She put her hands over her eyes and began to cry. I started to embrace her, but she shook her head. “Just let me be. Please. What else do you want to know?”
“Did he tell you why he was attacking you?”
Ellen looked at me with what looked like gratitude. “No. But it didn’t have to do with me at all. Not really. The person he was actually attacking was Tom.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because the last thing he said before he ran away was for me to tell Tom about it. ‘Tell him what I did to you,’ he said. ‘Tell him this is what happens when you leave people to be captured. Tell him this is what they make you do.
“He thought he was being controlled by outside forces, it sounds like.”
She nodded. “He repeated it several times. How Tom had deserted him. Left him without protection. It was as if the war wasn’t in Vietnam but right here in San Ramon, and the enemy wasn’t communists but some secret band of aliens.” She sighed. “I suppose for Nicky that’s how it was.”
“Did he hurt you badly?”
She shook her head.
“How did Tom react when he heard about all this?”
She looked at me with an expression as bleak as the room. “That very night I wrote to Tom and told him, implying it was rape. And I never heard from him again. Not for a dozen years.”
She started to sob once more. This time I took her in my arms and did what I could to calm her. “Surely he didn’t blame you for what happened.”
She shrugged. “I’m sure he blamed himself. But instead of punishing himself or his brother, he transferred the guilt and punished me. There was a very complex psychology between them; I’m not sure anyone understood it. Not even Dr. Marlin.”
I sighed and shook my head. “When I kissed your breast, I thought you were shuddering with pleasure.”
She smiled bravely. “Not at first.”
“But later?”
“Yes.”
“This was a home remedy you concocted, wasn’t it? It had nothing to do with Tom.”
She looked at me. “Are you mad?”
I shook my head. “Are you sorry?”
She rolled toward me, gave me a quick kiss, then reached for the button on her blouse. “Your twenty minutes are up. But I’m going to need some tips in bawdy, Mr. Tanner.”
“I’ve got a million of ’em, Miss Simmons.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Most of the lawyers I know don’t have wills. Most of the doctors I know never get checkups. Most of the mechanics I know drive rattletraps. Which may be a clue to why a child with a tin shovel could break into my home.
I was tired, and out of sorts, and preoccupied. Part of me still wrestled with the ethics of my participation in Ellen Simmons’ self-help exercise. Another part worried that Richard Sands might make good on his threat to destroy my livelihood if I kept probing for a reason for Tom’s death, that I would be summoned by some regulator or administrator armed with a carefully scripted suspicion and become immersed in a bureaucratic proceeding that would cost all I had to get out of: It doesn’t take much to destroy an innocent man these days, the courts and the media are too willing to become accessories to such a scheme. Yet despite these and other claims on my consciousness, I knew from the moment I opened the door that someone had been inside my apartment.
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