Last Will

by Bryn Greenwood

  “Meda Catherine Amos. You did that on purpose. Do you have any idea how valuable that china is? That’s Limoges. That cup cost more than you’ll make today.”

  I hadn’t done it on purpose, but it was useless to say anything. She knew it was an accident.

  “I ought to fire you. I ought to,” she said, but it was a lie. She couldn’t fire me, for the same reason she wasn’t going to tell Bernie that our next date was off. I was so mad that my hands were shaking when I carried the tea tray into the office. Bernie got up when I came in, and I thought he looked embarrassed while he cleared papers off a corner of the coffee table. It was a good sign. When my boss asked me out and then got embarrassed because I was doing my work, it meant he was getting ready to fire me or lose interest. I hoped he was as nice a guy as he said he was.

  Little Miss Pageantry

  For our second date, Meda suggested a movie in the city, and I appreciated her reasons. At least if we left town, we were substantially less likely to run into a dozen people who knew us. We left Annadore with Mrs. Trentam, who gave me a look I couldn’t quite identify, but she looked at Meda with undisguised disapproval. She suspected some unnamed impropriety.

  We saw yet another American remake of a French romantic comedy, and half an hour into the movie, Meda leaned over to me and said, “You know, a lot of people like to hold hands at the movies.”

  “Really?” I said like a jackass.

  “How is this a date?”

  I reached for her hand and she let me have it rather grudgingly, considering she’d practically demanded that I hold it. Once her feathers were smoothed, she made the obligatory comparison of our hand size. Her hand was not quite small enough to fit entirely in my palm. I am a human cartoon, laughably out of proportion to the rest of the world. She chuckled and then laced her fingers into mine. She didn’t remark at all on the two joints missing from my left pinky, although that was the reason I had hesitated to hold her hand.

  When we returned from our date, Mrs. Trentam was altering a small yellow dress that was four inches deep in lace and ruffles. Half-buried in the dress, Annadore stood unsteadily on a coffee table, her owl-eyed beauty dissipated into baby doll cuteness. It reminded me of a girl I dated in college who later married an acquaintance of mine. I was insufficiently marriage-minded for Caroline’s taste, but Les was willing. At the ceremony, Caroline trawled up the church aisle like some connubial barge. I imagine there are few things more terrifying to a man than seeing the love of his life decked out in a bead and lace bedizened, rustling showboat of a wedding dress. Thirty yards of gleaming white satin, a 12-foot long train in tow, like a giant New Year’s parade float. I suspect it’s the same horror one feels on spying the loved one in a casket, rosy-cheeked, pressed, primped, and primed for the family viewing.

  I was about to make a snide comment to Meda, when a growl escaped from her throat. Dogs usually make the same sound to warn you away, but contrary to that warning, and driven by an instinct I barely recognized, I put my arm around her. She pulled away from me, and went to Annadore.

  “Come on, Baby Girl Amos, it’s time for us to go. We’re going home.”

  “Almost done,” Mrs. Trentam said around a mouthful of pins.

  “No, done.” Meda began unfastening the dress, nearly tearing it in the process. “She’s not going to that pageant. I already told you that.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Meda. Look at her. She’s cute as a button. Couldn’t you just eat her up?” Mrs. Trentham pinched Annadore’s cheek.

  “She’s not going to be in any of those fucking pageants.”

  Back in her play clothes and strapped into her car seat, Annadore was her owlish self again. She squawked fitfully, troubled by her mother’s upset. Meda couldn’t even speak. Riding in the passenger seat, she white-knuckled her hands together as we drove away from the scene of the crime. It was an instructive experience for me; there are more ways to destroy a child’s soul than shutting him up in a dark closet.

  Miss Amos and I lingered in the brittle half-life of Meda’s anger, drinking coffee in the kitchen, pretending we couldn’t hear Meda sobbing in her bedroom. Her grandmother talked about the experiments the aliens conducted on her, discoursing in great detail on nasal probes and the migraines they caused.

  “Did they do experiments on you, too?” she said. It wasn’t morbid curiosity. She was as concerned as the facilitator of a victim support group.

  I sipped my coffee to give myself time to think. “If they did, if you could label it an experiment, then I would say it’s on-going. Data is still being gathered.”

  Miss Amos nodded knowingly.

  It wasn’t a room, just a walk-in closet. Even If I hadn’t been bound hand and foot, I wouldn’t have been able to stretch out full length. I was blindfolded, but not gagged, because of my broken nose. It was days before I could breathe through my nose again, and once I could, I wished my sense of smell was still gone. The carpet smelled artificial like teddy bear fur. There was a nylon sleeping bag that smelled of dust and mothballs. Overpowering those scents was the odor of cork. They had covered the walls and interior of the door with heavy corkboard, rudimentary soundproofing.

  I lay there one hour after another, and when I couldn’t stand the smells anymore, I breathed through my mouth. Then the pounding in my head receded and I felt the coolness of the cuffs on my wrists and the chain that drew them down to my ankles. The light that crept under the blindfold was itself a dilution of the light that managed to sneak through an infinitesimal crack under the door. During the day it was yellowish. At night it had the blue glow of TV.

  I suppose they knew I wouldn’t fight Amy and that’s why they made her feed me and take me to the bathroom. Or maybe it was for the humiliation of having to perform bodily functions in front of her. It was a pendulum that swung between us, because every time she touched me she cried and whispered reassurances in a low, fearful voice. Twice I was brought out of the closet and made to talk into a tape recorder. They wanted me to sound tearful and afraid, but everything was blunted for me, because of the sedative they were giving me. Whereas the violence of the unseen man didn’t work, the sound of Amy crying did. Her fear was real in a way mine wasn’t.

  The second time, after the recording was made, the unseen man said, “I swear, if they want their proof, I’ll cut his little fucking prick off and mail it to them.”

  Joel laughed. The remark was meant to scare me, except I didn’t know what prick meant. They used a pair of bolt cutters on my pinky. I probably screamed or cried when they did it, but all I remember is the sound Amy made. Like a horse with a broken leg, right before someone shoots it. High, terrified, hopeless.

  They didn’t kill me, I suppose, because they believed they were going to get the money out of my grandfather. That was the only reason for the corkboard, the sleeping bag, for me being alive. If they hadn’t believed, I would have been as dead as Bobby Franks.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  GIVING THANKS & THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT

  Working under the misconception that it was a private call, Celeste stepped out of the study while I spoke with my mother. She and I exchanged our usual pleasantries, updating each other about the weather and our extant relatives, a club that grew smaller all the time.

  Toward the end of the call, my mother said, “I do wish you’d come visit for the holidays.” It sounded like some insincerity out of a Victorian novel. I tried briefly to pursue the idea, and couldn’t get any particulars out of her. It was a gesture, not an invitation, and when I extended my own invitation for her to come and have Thanksgiving or Christmas with me, she began a list of reasons that made the suggestion impractical. The reason she didn’t mention was the only one I believed: Boston was a safe place for her. After my father and brother died, she moved back to Boston, to be near her own family, to be among familiar places. I think she wanted to go home and to return to the person she had been. I envied her.

  In keeping with tradition, she took a deep breath
and said, “What else?” That was the signal that the conversation was over.

  I mean always to be fair to her, but I’m aware of the futility of my affection for her. I’m not irrational. I don’t believe she blames me for being kidnapped, but it ruined things for her. It upset her world and made everything less perfect, including her. What came after, my other failures, her other disappointments, they only added insult to the original injury. In my efforts to be fair to her, I’ve done my best to avoid any interpretation of her words or actions. I try not to infer motive from the fact that I can’t remember her visiting me in the hospital. I don’t look for meaning in the calm way she declined to hold my hand at the funeral service for my father and brother. I was seventeen and, when I reached for her hand, she very politely extricated herself. I don’t pretend to know what she was feeling. As for the gauntlet of therapists and psychiatrists she made me run, I believe she wanted to help me, but the thing she wanted didn’t exist. She wanted meaning out of a world of chaos.

  I wonder about the different ways the phrase “benefit of the doubt” can be used: the benefit of doubting what?

  After I hung up with my mother I called and made plans with Aunt Ginny. When she said dinner was at two o’clock, I knew she meant it literally. It wasn’t a gesture.

  Wanting to be nice, I sent everyone home for the whole week of Thanksgiving, but there was danger lurking in solitude. I didn’t see Meda the rest of the week, through my own stupidity. I hadn’t made any plans to see her, I didn’t even know her phone number, and it seemed rude to drop in during a holiday week. The first two nights I was fine, but by Monday I was afraid to go to sleep at night. It wasn’t so much the sleep I feared as the bed, my lobster pot. Instead of sleeping, I found myself watching Bette Davis movies at midnight on public television and infomercials at two a.m.

  Lured into the routine, one night I found myself strangely transfixed by an infomercial for a product called Progenis. I noticed, after staring at the screen for some time, that if the letters r-o-g were removed, the name of the product became Penis. Subliminal marketing. Perhaps it was meant to pass by the average person, to slip into the subconscious mind of the flaccid TV viewer. In the commercial a man distanced himself from a woman who was interested in him. Not because he didn’t return the sentiment, but because he was ashamed of what they labeled his “erectile deficiency.”

  I wondered what Meda thought about my refusal to sleep with her, whether she ascribed my reluctance to some sort of “problem.” My main difficulty in the sexual arena had been a consistent and wholly humiliating history of being unable to ejaculate. Nothing easy to explain like impotence or premature ejaculation. I was the worst kind of failure. I couldn’t even fail within socially acceptable parameters.

  It’s one of the loneliest feelings in the world, being in the intimate embrace of some girl, and thinking that at some point I’m simply going to have to cut my losses. In most cases, she’s there in good faith and I’m there in the best faith I can muster, wanting to be sure she’s enjoying it. I’ve always been keenly interested in the pursuit of other people’s pleasure. All the same, it’s a lonely moment, when I make the decision that it’s time to stop trying.

  As bad as it was not sleeping at night, I was more afraid of sleeping during the day. It was a slippery slope. On Wednesday I got lucky. I lay down in the afternoon and took a nap on the sofa. It was one of those late-afternoon naps that steal the entire day, lasting until the next morning. I got up, showered, shaved, and read a little. There was nothing scary about being alone then, because I knew Aunt Ginny was expecting me. I went a little early and found her house filled with the serenity of a library on a rainy day. The meal was surprisingly casual for a woman I had always seen as my mother’s equal in the pursuit of elegance. Of course, we ate off a staggering assortment of china and crystal, but the food had been prepared beforehand, and we reheated it in the microwave. I found myself on the verge of tears when Aunt Ginny squeezed my hand over the pumpkin pie.

  “This is the nicest Thanksgiving I’ve had in years,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re here this year. I’ve missed seeing you.”

  I worked my jaw, trying to dissipate the nagging catch in my throat so I could say, “I’m glad to be here.”

  I imagined the grim scene of Aunt Ginny and my grandfather in the dining room up at the house. I dismissed it as unlikely, substituting the image of my grandfather in his study, ignoring the holiday, my aunt at the senior activity center, eating an institutional turkey and dressing, trying to steer clear of old men on the prowl for a widow. I was ashamed of myself, because I didn’t know what she’d been doing for the intervening years between funerals. To atone, I suggested we look at the photo albums.

  I was so happy to have everyone back after the holiday—Meda most of all—but even Celeste briefly. I lingered in the kitchen chatting until Mrs. Trentam began working on her to-do list for the week, making it clear that it was time for me to leave them alone.

  Celeste and I went into the study and polished off the rest of the paperwork for some paintings I was donating. Representatives from the Smithsonian were coming out later in the week to look at them, and Celeste wanted to be sure that everything was squared away beforehand. Then we started on the various documents my lawyers had sent about creating a charitable foundation, the only solution I could think of to the money that was piling up. My grandfather had gone on stockpiling and reinvesting. I couldn’t see myself doing the same.

  The horror of horrors was lurking in the mail that had accumulated over the week: a letter from the corporate office telling me that my grandfather was going to be posthumously inducted into some sort of Business Hall of Fame. The Board of Directors at RI wanted me to accept the award. It involved sitting through a presentation about my grandfather’s “entrepreneurial spirit,” the blurb about the event said, and then getting up on the dais and saying a few words. Celeste in her usual freakish way seemed to bask in the reflected glory and made several excited remarks about the award and the ceremony. “I saw the pictures from when Mr. Tveite went last year. It was gorgeous. RI bought two tables and one of the executive assistants got to go to fill space.”

  I wondered if that was hope in her voice, all the while asking myself how fabulous something could be if people had to be invited to “fill space.” There had to be more than enough VP’s and upper managers and their spouses to fill two tables; whither had those cowards slithered when the time came to attend the event?

  After lunch, I did my disappearing act on Celeste and wandered around the house, in search of Meda. I found her in a bedroom, where she was struggling to turn a mattress. She looked embarrassed when I helped her, but nothing worse than that. I asked her if she’d like to go out again on Friday, and she said flippantly, “I am so gonna sue you for sexual harassment.” It killed the words in my mouth, and when she saw that, she started apologizing. “It was a joke, I don’t really think that. I believe you when you say you wouldn’t do anything bad to me. I don’t think you’re harassing me.”

  “No, if you don’t want to go out with me anymore, all you have to do is say so. It’s fine. I won’t take it the wrong way.”

  “Not ‘not anymore,’ but I already have a date on Friday.”

  “What about Saturday?”

  “Sure,” she said and started making the bed. I was dismissed.

  I didn’t know how I felt about Meda’s date. There was competition for her attention. Once I acknowledged there was competition, I realized I was willing to compete. She had planted the seed when she asked me to spend the night. It never would have occurred to me except for that. She needed a friend. I was trying to be her friend. I spent a good hour, pacing around the house, attempting to organize my way of thinking on the topic. To begin with, I tried to address the strange hopefulness I had felt when I went into her house, thinking that she might be pleased to see me. She’d gone on two dates with me. She went on dates with a short guy named Jeff, but she’d asked me to st
ay the night. That was the rat that ate the grain that lay in the house that Jack built.

  Later in the afternoon, the phone rang. After answering it, Celeste put the line on hold and said, “It’s Lionel Petrie.”

  “Tell him I’m not here.”

  She looked at me reproachfully, not upset at being asked to lie, but at my failure to appreciate how wonderful it was to have Lionel Petrie call me. I glared at her.

  “Oh, Mr. Petrie, I’m so sorry. He’s not here right now. Can I take a message?” She didn’t even try to make it sound like the truth. After she hung up, she walked over to my desk and put a pink phone slip on the blotter. While I was out, Lionel Petrie called. I needed to return his call. The box for that line had been checked a bit more thoroughly than was necessary.

  Borrowing the Cadillac

  Meda

  When I told Celeste I needed to talk to Bernie, she gave me a prissy frown. I think it rubbed her the wrong way that I used his first name. She didn’t have a choice, though. I didn’t whisper or anything, and he had to have heard me ask for him, so she let me in.

  “Could you give us a minute?” Bernie said.

  Celeste looked even more miffed, but she went into the library while he and I talked.

  “I’m really sorry. I know I haven’t been a very good employee lately, but Gramma called and said Annadore’s sick, so I need to take her to the doctor this afternoon.” I felt like I was in school again, standing in the principal’s office. That’s what I didn’t like, not being sure how to feel about where he and I stood with each other. He was nice, but he was my boss.

  “It’s okay. You don’t need to apologize. Do you need a ride?” As soon as he said it, I felt stupid for being uncomfortable.

  “It’s just Dr. Hendershot at County Hospital, the doctor I take her to. My car’s okay. Thanks for being so understanding.”