Edited to Death

by Linda Lee Peterson

  “Quentin, what are you doing?” I whispered fiercely.

  There, in the tiny bathroom hung with signs from Glen’s beloved Irish pubs and crowded with kid paraphernalia, Quentin turned me so that we both faced the mirror. His hands reached in front of me and cupped my breasts. “Just checking. Couldn’t imagine what you’d wear under that neckline.” Then, he was gone. When I came out of the bathroom, he and Michael were sitting side by side on the couch watching the A’s dispatch the Red Sox and puzzling about Jason Giambi’s odd batting stance. Without taking his eyes from the screen, Michael patted the couch between them, “Come on, Maggie, your heartthrob Stairs is on deck.”

  Quentin raised his eyebrow as I settled between them.

  “Stairs, hmm? Wouldn’t have identified him as your type, Margaret.”

  Michael picked up his beer, “Oh, our Maggie is full of surprises. She still misses Bruce Bochte.”

  “I like a ballplayer who looks like an aging Marxist,” I said defensively.

  “Indeed,” said Quentin.

  Michael turned to me and frowned, smoothing the hair back from my forehead, “Feeling okay, cara? You’re a little flushed.” I felt like a dangerously triumphant felon, wicked but pleased because I was getting away with something.

  Finally, a year almost to the day after Quentin bought me the hat, we stopped. I’d grown to love the afternoons in bed. But although I was exceedingly skilled at covering my tracks, I never got graceful at adultery. It was the slightly dangerous intrigue I liked, the feeling that I was different from all the other moms doing car pool.

  And, when Stuart moved in with Quentin, I felt mindless, deep-as-a-well jealousy. That was enough.

  Quentin and I saw each other almost as often as when we had been lovers. I wrote for him, did my very best work. We had lunch, traded books, kissed hello and goodbye. Occasionally, if we were alone—in his office, in my kitchen, he’d turn those social kisses into something else. But then he’d let me go. He never pressed for a return engagement. The Queen of Bravado thought she had escaped without a scratch.

  But when I remembered the sight of Quentin’s lifeless hand, the one I’d kissed so impulsively at the hat counter at Saks, the one that had edited my copy, and challenged my notion of myself as a smug and moral wife-and-mom, I felt ill all over again. In the steamy bathroom mirror my face was miserable and flushed. No “A” on my forehead, just guilt and regrets. I toweled off, swearing softly. “Dumb, careless, selfish bitch.…” And then, through the post-shower mist and the remorse, one niggling little thought: How had Michael known? And why hadn’t he confronted me? “Men,” I said aloud, happy to be back on the path of self-righteousness. “All action, no talk.”

  There was a pounding at the door, “Mom!” Josh shouted, “I can’t find my shinguards. Where are they?”

  “Coming, honey,” I said, refusing to wonder just what kind of action might have replaced Michael’s talk.

  7

  Of Whom Shall We Speak?

  Quentin’s memorial service made the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. Everyone was there. Well, almost everyone.

  The mayor was off in Central America, cementing yet another sister city relationship with an urban economy built on tourism and failing banks. So he had to miss the festivities. But he sent the chief of protocol. She made some fulsome remarks. Something to the effect that one of the city’s literary lights had gone out. Quentin Hart, who grew up with the disaffected literati of the sixties, the experimentalists of the seventies and the brave young writers of the eighties and nineties, who had brought style and panache to a dying city magazine, and so forth and so on. You get the idea. Quentin would have hated every word of it. He once told me he had exorcised the word panache from his vocabulary when the French gave a sweet aperitif that name. Inspector Moon, sitting alone three pews back, caught my eye. He nodded pleasantly and raised his hand in a half wave to Michael.

  “Should we see if he wants to sit with us?” I whispered to Michael. Michael shrugged, “Leave him alone. He’s probably scanning for suspects.”

  Claire was there, swathed in politically incorrect fur. “Is that black mink,” Michael whispered during the service, “or did a dozen skunks lay down half their hides for the grieving widow?”

  I gave him a token rap on the arm with a rolled up program. Fact was, I felt so grateful he was joking with me I could have thrown my arms around him. True to the tight-lipped statement he’d made in front of the mirror, he hadn’t discussed my relationship with Quentin again. Instead, he treated me with the slightly distant formality you reserve for familiar, if fragile and rarely seen, maiden aunts. When I’d faltered an opening to the subject, his eyes had turned cold and distant. He had answered my single question—how had he known—with the kind of clinical distaste I’d only seen employed when he had to remove dead roof rats from our gutters. “The boys needed change for video games when they were going to the pizza parlor with Lily’s family. I didn’t have much. And your purse was on the kitchen counter, so I went looking for quarters.” I knew what was coming. “I wondered why your diaphragm was in your purse. I didn’t even think you had one anymore. I mean, we didn’t need it.” Michael, ever the dutiful husband, had responsibly had a vasectomy after Zach’s birth. He shook his head. “I was going to ask you,” he said, “but then I decided to wait.”

  “Michael—” I started. He held up his hand. “I may be a tax lawyer,” he continued, “but once upon a time, I did very well in Evidence. I’m not a fool.” He continued, “Events came together for me. I noticed that the diaphragm seemed to show up in your purse the night before you were going to Small Town, or you were meeting Quentin for lunch. Then it disappeared.”

  He looked at me in disgust and began unloading the dishwasher. “Where’d the diaphragm go, Maggie? Or did you and Quentin call it quits?”

  I chose to answer the second question. “We called it quits. It was a stupid mistake and we stopped. Almost a year ago. But why.…”

  “Why what?”

  “Why didn’t you ask me about it?”

  Silence. “I think you’d know me better than that by now, Maggie,” he said. “I’m a man who can watch and wait when I need to.”

  “And that’s what you’re doing now?” I said.

  “Maybe I am.”

  And that was the end of the conversation. The diaphragm hadn’t disappeared; of course; it had simply taken up residence at Quentin’s. I began to worry about retrieving it.

  Josh, with his impeccably visceral sense of something amiss, had started every single day since Quentin’s death with an upset stomach. I was beginning to think it was either back to the specialist or simply buy stock in Pepto-Bismol. Or perhaps, I observed to myself as we left the house for the service, Josh’s mom could simply stick to the straight and narrow and not create tension and drama in the house. “Guilt, guilt, guilt,” I muttered under my breath.

  Alf Abbott, Claire’s uncle and Small Town’s owner, escorted the widow to the service. As always, he had the well-oiled look of a man who spends too much time under the hands of a masseur. From the gently glazed look in his eye, my guess was that the inside of Uncle Alf was equally well-oiled.

  The memorial service was held at the city’s grandest Unitarian church. Of course, even grand Unitarian churches are pretty spare, which was, I felt sure, Quentin’s exact taste in liturgical spaces. Against a backdrop of white French tulips on a gray stone altar, a parade of luminaries took turns behind the pulpit to tell affectionate stories about Quentin. I sat between Stuart and Michael, anchored to both. Stuart clutched my hand, and Michael kept his arm draped along the pew in back of me.

  The proprietor of Hot Licks, a south of Market jazz club, talked about how Quentin used to drop in with his sax and sit in for a set. “He didn’t sweat, he didn’t smoke, he didn’t even drink much. But that man could blow.”

  His tailor told an elaborate story about Quentin’s proposal for smuggling Cuban cigars out of Hong Kong and in
to San Francisco by sewing into the lining of double-breasted suits. And he recounted, seemingly with admiration, Quentin’s horror of fashion, how he’d changed neither his blazer size nor his style for twenty-five years.

  Glen Fox, Small Town’s managing editor, tight-lipped and dry-eyed, talked about Quentin’s standards at the magazine. At the end of his witty, carefully prepared remarks, he folded his hands on the index cards and fought back tears. “Quentin and I were boys together,” he said, “both of us strangers in a strange land. An American at Oxford, and a country Irish lad. We came together over Yeats and nearly came to blows over Thomas Wolfe.” He stopped and bit his lip. “You’re still wrong about Wolfe’s puny talent, man, but I hope to God you can go home again. And that you’re there.”

  Michael leaned over to me and whispered. “Does everyone sound better dead than alive?”

  I looked at him. His face was impassive. “Just wondering,” he mouthed silently.

  A fresh-faced, crewcut young man in a blue denim shirt and khakis talked about Quentin’s willingness to cover AIDS in a chic city magazine early on, before anyone wanted to talk about it.

  Finally, the art director of Small Town, an elegant Vietnamese woman named Linda Quoc who was dressed in a silver-belted, turquoise silk jumpsuit, explained how Quentin taught her to play five card stud to fill the interminable hours during midnight press checks.

  Madame sang Berlioz’s “Sur les Lagunes.” It was perhaps a trifle beyond her instrument’s capabilities, but touching, nonetheless.

  Then, Stuart let go of my hand and walked to the front of the church. He pulled a softcover copy of The Complete Poems of Hart Crane out of his jacket pocket. Crane was Quentin’s favorite poet. I was never sure whether he was attracted to his controversial genius, his mysterious, tragic death, or just his eclectic romantic tastes. At any rate, I’d helped Stuart select “And Bees of Paradise.” He steadied himself on the pulpit, looking very young and a little frightened. He’d played basketball as a kid, and despite his grown-up devotion to offbeat, slightly theatrical clothes, always looked as if he’d be more comfortable wrapping his long, rangy frame in the shorts and jersey he’d worn on the court. He ran a hand through his dark, stylishly cut hair, gripped the book, and began:

  I had come all the way here from the sea,

  Yet met the wave again between your arms

  Where cliff and citadel—all verily

  Dissolved within a sky of beacon forms—

  Sea gardens lifted rainbow-wise through eyes

  I found.

  Yes, tall, inseparably our days

  Pass sunward. We have walked the kindled skies

  Inexorable and girded with your praise,

  By the dove filled, and bees of Paradise.

  Michael handed me his handkerchief. After the service, we ran into Glen, his wife Corinne, and their five children on the steps. “A very fine hat, Maggie,” said Glen. “Quentin would have loved it.”

  “Thanks,” I said, putting a hand to the cloche. I felt Michael stiffen next to me.

  “Are your boys here?” asked Corinne.

  “No, I’m afraid they’re not as well regimented as your kids,” I said. “They’d have wiggled.”

  Corinne smiled. “We had some wiggles, too. But Glen wanted the children to say goodbye to Quentin. He’s been very kind to us, you know.” She sighed. “Kept us out of the almshouse, in fact, when we came to America.”

  Glen put his arm around Corinne. “We need to be off, love.”

  “Soccer practice and choir rehearsals for the little ones,” he explained over his shoulder. “I’ll come by Quentin’s after we get everyone delivered.”

  Calvin Bright trotted up the steps, camera bag slung over his left shoulder. I made the introductions. Michael shook hands with Calvin and said, “I hear you and my wife drowned your sorrows in some cracked crab the other day.”

  Calvin’s mouth turned up in a dangerous grin.

  “Actually, it was more voyeuristic than that. I ate, and she watched me. Too bad you couldn’t join us. But I guess tax lawyers don’t go in for long lazy lunches.” Michael fixed him with a humorless smile. “No, but we do go in for mindless, vindictive behavior when anyone trespasses on our personal property.”

  Calvin looked bewildered by Michael’s sharp tone. I tapped Calvin’s camera bag. “Promise me you weren’t shooting during the service?”

  He shook his head. “No, too sleazy even for me. But it’s good to be prepared in case someone really famous showed up. Plus, I wasn’t so sure our pal Inspector Moon believed I was a real, live photographer at Quentin’s place the other day. Thought I’d better show up with the tools of the trade.”

  “Are you serious?” I asked. “You really think Moon didn’t believe you were a photographer?”

  “Hey,” said Calvin, “they always suspect the black guy first.”

  Michael snorted. “Not when he shows up with French cuffs and expensive cuff links, looking like an overpaid investment banker.”

  Calvin’s eyes lit up. “That’s just the look I was going for. Most photographers dress like bums. I love spending money on clothes. I’ve got one of those personal shoppers at Saks. She thinks I’m going to cave in and sleep with her some day, so she’s always scouting the good sale stuff for me.”

  I didn’t want to look at Michael. I knew he’d be wearing one of those looks that loosely translates into, “Sure, lawyers may be dull, but they’re not certifiable lightweights like the people you hang out with.”

  “That is really shallow and disgusting,” I said.

  Calvin smiled, “Isn’t it? But cool threads, huh?”

  “Are you ever going to come across for Ms. Shopper?” asked Michael.

  Calvin shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. She’s good looking, but she’s got that fortysomething obsession about her body. She’s always rubbing her throat because I know she’s worried about her jawline. Of course, she’d probably put all that worry into one fine lay.”

  Michael chuckled. “Sounds great to me.”

  I looked at both of them. “Male bonding is so six weeks ago,” I said.

  They managed to look reprimanded, vaguely delighted, and very, very chummy all at once. It was a little nauseating, but far preferable to Michael acting sullen and jealous.

  “Let’s go get a drink and hear some more about Calvin’s love life,” said Michael.

  “Later,” I said. “We’re invited back to Quentin’s flat.”

  Calvin sighed, “Really? Do we have to go? That place creeps me out.”

  “We do,” I said firmly. The two of them looked as if they were concocting excuses on the spot. “Besides,” I added, “I want to corner Michael’s pal, Inspector Moon. I’d like to know just what progress the cops are making.”

  And, of course, I was looking for an opportunity to retrieve my diaphragm from Quent’s bedroom.

  8

  Mourning at Quentin’s

  It was Quentin’s kind of party.

  All traces of the violence that prompted the gathering had been tidied away. No yellow police tape. No uniformed officers. No vulgar arrangements from florists, just wildly expensive Peruvian lilies in tall black ceramic vases. Stuart had supervised the catering. There was sushi and sashimi and warm sake and cold Tsing-Tao beer. And lots of mourners, consoling themselves with good things to eat and drink. Claire was sitting in a corner, smoking, pouting, and leafing through a magazine. It wasn’t Small Town.

  Michael surveyed the scene in disgust. “This is no wake,” he said. “This looks like a fund-raiser for the society to preserve leather interiors in upscale cars.”

  Calvin nudged me. “Is he always so hostile?”

  “Just in the face of tasteful materialism,” I said. “It’s got something to do with Catholic guilt.”

  “You white people,” said Calvin, “You’re so confusing. I thought it was Jewish guilt and Catholic shame.”

  “Welcome to the magic of mixed marriages,” I said. “
You get the combo meal.”

  Michael had roamed away and returned with three bottles of beer. “Quick,” he said, “take a swig out of the bottle before Stuart comes by and ruins it by pouring it into a glass.”

  We swigged. “Come on, Michael,” I said. “Everyone grieves in his or her own way. Quentin would love all this—gossip, music, lots of well-dressed people.”

  He shook his head. “It’s missing something.”

  “Like what?” asked Calvin.

  “Casseroles. Chocolate cake. Little Italian ladies dressed in black with hairnets and faint mustaches on their upper lips.” He sighed.

  “Don’t mind him,” I said to Calvin. “Funerals make him nostalgic.” I turned to Michael. “Besides, you love sushi.”

  “I know. I’m going off to drown my sorrows in some raw tuna.” He wandered off again.

  “I like that guy,” said Calvin.

  “Me, too,” I said. I grinned. “He’s not bad in the sack, even if he’s not my fashion advisor.”

  “So judgmental, Maggie.”

  “Got it in one,” I said.

  “You women. You’ve really taken all the fun out of objectification of the opposite sex.”

  “Objectification?”

  “Yeah. I used to have a shrink girlfriend and she took me to some of those conferences where the Berkeley lady therapists in Birkenstocks sit around and relive their girlhoods from a feminist perspective.”

  “You went?”

  “Sure. One thing about those feminist conferences, they’re great places to meet women. And they have to be nice to me, because I’m a…” He gestured quote marks in the air, “… man of color.” He tilted his beer bottle and swigged, waggling his eyebrows in a bad imitation of W.C. Fields.

  “You’re reprehensible, Calvin.”

  “But lovable. You know, I like real women, too. Watch this. I’m going to hook up with the Empress of Ice over there.” He gestured with his beer bottle. The object of his attention was Small Town’s film critic, Andrea Storch. “Starchy Storch,” the magazine staff called her. Boston-born, Wellesley-educated, she rarely appeared out of regulation uniform: tailored wool skirt and cashmere twinset. Usually gray. Pearls, of course, and a signet ring. I was willing to bet good money the ring had belonged to one of her very Episcopalian parents.