Last Looks

by Howard Michael Gould

  Once he’d hiked far enough off the main trail that he could no longer hear voices or human footsteps, the thoughts started tumbling. This whole experiment, leaving his property and resuming contact with society, had gone horribly wrong. He was out of practice with humanness; he understood nothing; one morning he wondered if he was falling in love and just a day and a half later intimacy had crumbled into humiliation. The shame pushed him deeper still into the woods.

  How had Alastair known? He said he hadn’t been in touch with her, and his regret seemed genuine. Had he simply foreseen the inevitability of Waldo and Jayne from the first moment, when he’d left the two of them alone in Gaby’s classroom? How could he? He didn’t know Waldo. But he did know her, didn’t he—and not the Jayne Waldo thought he knew, the kindergarten teacher choirgirl; he knew the real Jayne, and when Waldo didn’t return to the house as promised and resurfaced two days later, Alastair had no doubt whom he’d been with, no doubt who’d taken his beard.

  How many other lovers would Alastair have to have known about, to be so certain she’d seduce Waldo too? How many other men had seen that captivating look over her shoulder?

  The real torment, truth be told, was that Alastair had seen it, had experienced her just as Waldo had. And Alastair knowing about Waldo—even before it happened—while he himself had no idea about Alastair made him feel like a dupe.

  Not Alastair’s dupe, though. Jayne’s. How could she not tell him? The facets of the betrayal were too numerous to apprehend all at once. The most charitable explanation—the one that in his belly he desperately wanted to be true—was that her feelings for Waldo were real, that she’d lurched into an involvement with him and then found herself with no way to reveal her history with Alastair without fatally complicating their compelling new connection. But leaving his belly out of it, the explanation didn’t hold. Real feelings hadn’t developed yet that first night when they’d had a drink after her choir practice, a date she’d only drawn him into anyhow by dangling a spurious hint. No, she’d flirted with a purpose and must have seduced him with a purpose, too. But what was it?

  He traipsed through the forest, turning it all round and round in his mind, trying to tease out reason from pain, sense from anger, understanding from jealousy. He wandered that way for hours, and though he couldn’t quite decipher her motive in enchanting him, the rest of the puzzle pieces—even the ones that had seemed to be misfits—were starting to form a picture, albeit a picture that wasn’t easy to look at.

  He heard children’s voices before he realized he’d reached an edge of Fryman Park and that the clearing ahead was someone’s backyard, with three kids playing in a lavish tree fort, a large two-story Tudor beyond. The shadows had grown longer and Waldo decided he’d better find his way back to the main trail before he lost the light. These were not his woods.

  * * *

  —

  The audience thrummed, scores of ampersands and semicolons anticipating the debut performances of their five-year-olds, cell phone videocams at the ready. He took a quick peek inside and noted Alastair sitting by himself on the far aisle, keeping a considerate distance. For all the actor’s proclaimed indifference to the masses, the whispers and ostracism of the other parents had to torture him. It was a measure of his devotion to his daughter that he showed up anyway.

  Waldo didn’t linger in the auditorium. He followed shrieks and chatter to a nearby classroom, where Jayne, dressed for the event in a frilly lavender blouse and dress pants, fussed at the kindergarteners’ costumes. A couple of class moms did the same. Jayne noticed him in the doorway and offered a nervous smile, invitation enough for him to wade carefully through the phalanx of overexcited five-year-olds.

  “I’m glad you came,” she said, fastening a little girl’s bonnet with a bobby pin. “Now, don’t touch that anymore before you go on—okay, Jessie?” The little girl ran off without thanking her.

  Waldo said, “Why didn’t you tell me about Alastair?”

  Jayne studied him a moment before saying, “There’s nothing to tell. He’s a kindergarten dad.” He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but the lie crushed him anew.

  Her cell phone rang. She took it from the pocket of her slacks, looked at the number and went pale.

  Waldo said, “Don’t you want to answer it?”

  With unsteady hands she killed the ring and put the phone back in her pocket. “It’s not important.”

  “Don’t worry—it’s not Alastair,” Waldo said, disorienting her more. “It’s me.” He pulled Alastair’s burner from his own jeans. “I found this at his house, hidden away,” he said quietly, leaning toward her. “Before his wife was killed he texted back and forth with someone, inviting her over.” He nodded toward the phone in her pocket. “Someone.”

  Jayne watched the roomful of kids while Waldo watched her. She inhaled, then checked the wall clock. “Let’s go to my room.” She told one of the moms where she’d be and Waldo followed her out and down the outdoor hallway to her classroom.

  He closed the door behind them. “Did you also have a thing with Leonard Roberson? Swag Doggg?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Jamshidi?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what about Savannah Moon? Are you into women too?”

  “I thought you watched the movie,” she said. Shedding her secrets made her plucky.

  It annoyed him. He said, “And you got pregnant.”

  Ambushed, her self-possession evaporated. After a beat, she confirmed it with a shaky nod.

  “Are you still?”

  She nodded again.

  “Is it Alastair’s?” She swallowed and looked like she might start crying. He asked her the same question again and she nodded a third time. “So that’s it: I’ve been getting threatened and jumped all week, not because of Monica Pinch—because of you. It’s just a bunch of rich people who didn’t want their tawdry affairs with their kid’s teacher found out.”

  “They’re not tawdry.” It was his turn to cock an eyebrow. “What do you want, Waldo? It’s how I’ve made this work.”

  “How you’ve made what work?”

  “This. Teaching fucking kindergarten.” He sat on one of the undersize desks. She kept going, answering the unasked question of how she ended up there in the first place. “My life was messed up, okay? Seriously messed up. I needed stability—and someone wanted to help me and hooked me up with the job.”

  Waldo said, “I can guess who that was.” Someone who had to watch, in pain, from his top-floor corner office as the girl he’d taken into his bed and under his wing carried on with Waldo, and Alastair, and God only knew how many others.

  She said, “Don’t even go there.” There was a fierceness in her warning, a timbre he hadn’t heard from her before; however she’d come to treat Hexter, she was going to protect him, repayment for whatever it was he’d once done to save her. “I mean it: do not bring him into this.” Waldo held up his hands in acquiescence. “The thing is,” she said, softening, “as fucked up as everything was back then? At least it was . . . interesting. Do you know what it’s like to have your whole life be about a roomful of five-year-olds? It was like I’d suddenly gotten old. But then these incredibly successful people started flirting with me, and it was . . . a lifeline. I could have a little excitement, without the whole thing going off the rails again. And then when they started getting out of their minds jealous of each other? Over me? It was a rush.”

  She’d knocked him off his pins again, this time with the straightforwardness of her take on her own life, almost innocent, oblivious to the damage she radiated. He said, “It’s all fun and games until somebody gets her skull bashed in.”

  “Look, after Monica, I backed off, with everybody.”

  “You didn’t back off me.”

  “That was different.”

  “Of course it was. Sleeping with the detecti
ve investigating a death you were involved in? That had to be the biggest rush of all.”

  “Okay, yeah, at the beginning that’s what it was about. But you know it turned into more, Waldo. I really felt something.” She stepped toward him. “You did, too.”

  “Start from the beginning.” His tone stopped her. “And no bullshit.” He wasn’t going to fall for it again. She’d been in the Pinch house the night Monica was killed and he had to know everything she knew. None of the rest mattered. And if Charlie Waldo had proven that he had any talent at all, it was for detaching, and staying detached.

  “Okay,” she said, stepping back, “the night it happened—”

  “Not that beginning. The beginning where you told Alastair you were pregnant.”

  She considered her answer before speaking again. “It was an accident, but I knew who I’d been with and when, and I was sure it was his. Whatever I was going to do, he needed to know about it, and, yes, if I was going to do something, it would have been nice if he’d help me out with the money. This job doesn’t pay a whole lot. But he didn’t even engage—his whole response was to tell me how his wife wanted him to move back to England with her. Like he wasn’t even hearing what I was saying to him. Or didn’t give a shit. After that, total radio silence. On his end. I kept texting him, which made me feel stupid as hell. Finally, like three weeks later, I got this text saying he missed me. And that I should come over and that his wife would be gone all night.”

  It squared with what Waldo had seen on the burner. “What did you do?”

  “I figured he finally wanted to talk about it. Or something, I don’t know, maybe he did just want to see me again. And I wanted to see him. We had a thing, you know? I had his baby inside me. So I drove over. I had to get his address from the school directory, if you can believe that, which made me feel even stupider.

  “Anyway, when I got there, before I could even ring the bell, Monica opened the door. I almost ran right back to my car. But she goes, ‘Come in.’ I didn’t know what was going on—I didn’t know if Alastair told her or something, or if she just came home unexpectedly and the move was for me to try to play it off like I was there for Gaby—the whole thing was so freaky, I wasn’t even thinking straight.

  “Then when I get inside, she’s holding up Alastair’s phone, and almost, like, shaking. She tells me she’s the one that texted me to come over. She goes, ‘Alastair’s upstairs, passed out.’ And she says she found this second phone he has, and they had a fight—”

  “A fight?”

  “An argument, I guess. I guess he told her he got somebody pregnant, but he didn’t say who. And then when he passed out, she decided to figure it out herself. So she sent me that ‘I miss you’ text—and I took the bait.”

  “What happened when she saw it was you?”

  “She went bananas. Her daughter’s teacher?”

  “Bananas how?”

  “The more she talked, the more . . . unhinged she got. She probably was drinking, too. It wasn’t focused on me, it wasn’t even him she was pissed at, it was L.A. She went on and on about what a mistake it was to come here, how the whole city was evil. But she was so intense about it—seriously, I was afraid she was going to get violent. So when I had a clear path to the door, I just ran out to my car, locked the door and drove the fuck away.”

  “That was it?”

  “That was it. The next day it was on the news she was dead.”

  “What did you do when you heard?”

  “I didn’t know what to do. My first thought was to reach out to Alastair, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t want to get him in more trouble by calling that phone.” She indicated Waldo’s pocket. “And I didn’t think I should call his regular cell. One time I did try their home phone from the school office—I figured that was safe—but I got the machine.

  “After a couple days he started driving Gaby again, and I tried to talk to him, but he blew me off. Total asshole. I mean, yeah, I know he’s got problems, but I’m still pregnant, right? You’d think he’d at least not ignore me at pickup.

  “Whatever—I saw that was how it was going to be. So when the chips started falling on him, I figured, fuck it, and just let them fall.” Jayne looked at the clock and said, “The play’s going to start.”

  “Let me ask you one thing first. Two things.” She bounced on her feet, restless. “Do you think he killed her?”

  “What am I supposed to say to that?”

  “Let me put it this way: do you think he could have?”

  “Could have? Sure. Was that the second question?”

  “No, one more: when you said that before, about all these people being out of their minds jealous . . . how jealous? Do you think anybody else might have gone over to Alastair’s that night, because of you?”

  “Because of me . . . ?” It was something she hadn’t considered, but watching her weigh it and seeing the knowing smile sidle across her lips, he could tell it wasn’t out of the question, that it might even have pleased her. He wondered which of the others she was picturing.

  There was a rap at the door and it opened before Jayne could answer. It was one of the moms from the other classroom. “Jayne—we’re ready to start.”

  “Right there,” Jayne said, and the mom left. “I’ve got to go,” she said to Waldo and started toward the door.

  “I’m not done with you.”

  He’d meant it as a warning, but she somehow spun it into an invitation, saying, “I was hoping you weren’t,” then she left him alone, beguiled again despite himself.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  No fool, Gaby’s teacher, casting the progeny of Alastair Pinch in the title role. But even as the girl commanded the stage, Waldo’s attention was elsewhere—in part on that teacher, wondering what she’d left out of her story, and in part on her other lovers and their spouses, scattered about the audience. There was Alastair, enraptured by his daughter’s performance. There were the short and tall Jamshidis; there was Swag Doggg with a woman, presumably the still ampersanded Mrs. Doggg. There was Sarah/Savannah Moskowitz/Moon, whose husband annoyed the rest of the cell phone video crowd by planting himself unapologetically in front of the dozen who’d staked places earlier. There, standing alone against a wall, was Dr. Hexter, paterfamilias and über-impresario, haughty chin at prep school tilt.

  Green eyes darted in every direction. Waldo had been granted full membership in their circle of sexual jealousy and knew that they were as aware of him as he of them. Indeed, more than wicked thoughts and glances might have been flying too, were it not for the conventions of polite society and fear of discovery; surely envy had juiced Savannah’s blows when she had assaulted Waldo in his cabin. Brought back to life like so many of us, Alastair had said, by singular carnal charms. Jayne’s charms were very much on Waldo’s mind right now. They’d juice anybody’s blows.

  Sex, jealousy, violence—had Monica Pinch accidentally gotten caught in the middle of all that somehow? Once again he struggled to tease out the hints and data from the other distractions. Once again, Jayne was jamming his radar.

  After the play ended to a standing ovation, there was a reception in the concrete courtyard outside the auditorium, store-bought baked goods for the kids, little plastic cups of wine for the parents. Waldo canvassed the crowd but didn’t see Jayne. Gaby, still in costume, came running up. “Mr. Lion! Wasn’t I good?”

  “You were excellent.”

  “Next time I want a better part.”

  “You were the star.”

  “Yeah, but I had to play a boy. Next time I want to be a princess.”

  Actors, he thought. “Have you seen your teacher?”

  “Ms. White?” Gaby turned to look around for her but immediately saw something more interesting. “Hey!” she yelled to a kid dressed as a jester on the nearby playground. “Where’d you get the brownie?!” and ran off after him to find o
ut.

  Waldo waited for Jayne, took in the scene. The second Mrs. Jamshidi gave him the stink eye. He’d have liked a minute or two with Swag Doggg, but the rapper had his son riding on his shoulders; any attempt would backfire. He settled for shoulder-bumping Savannah Moon as he brushed past and saying into her ear, “Nice to see you again, Sarah,” just for effect.

  After a while he wandered over to Alastair, by himself, affecting a deep study of the wall of plaques celebrating the school’s original donors. When Waldo approached he said, “The innocents oughtn’t have to shake hands with the leper.”

  “Why don’t you go home?”

  Alastair indicated the playground and Gaby, now atop a jungle gym, lesser cast members surrounding her on the lower levels. “The starlet deserves her night.”

  “You’re a good dad.”

  Alastair snorted.

  “Have you seen Jayne?”

  “Unaccounted for, is she? Not the first time,” he said, smirking. “Take attendance—that may be a clue; who’s missing?” Waldo did a head count: the other parent-lovers and headmaster were all in view. Of course, that didn’t preclude another conquest from beyond the known roster.

  “Take your little girl home,” he told Alastair. “You’ve done plenty for her this evening.” He made sure to lock eyes until the actor nodded acquiescence and went to fetch his daughter.