by Peter Ferry
"Charlie," I said, "I don't have any idea who you are talking about and never have. I just don't know any of these people."
"I don't know half of them myself," he said. "It doesn't really matter. It's just talk." If you sifted through Charlie's palaver and listened carefully enough, you could almost always find some small truth, and this was one of them: "It's just talk." I laughed aloud.
We had emptied our cooler of beer, and I asked for the check and went to the bathroom, but when I got back, Charlie had somehow produced a bottle of red wine and was in the process of opening it. It occurred to me as he madly popped the cork that he had built the evening to this pinnacle of artificial gaiety primarily so he could drink some more. Walking back to Lydia's car a bit later, Charlie was unsteady on his legs and went on and on about "what a marvelous evening" it had been.
As soon as we stumbled into the apartment, Charlie put on blue cotton pajamas with navy piping and went to sleep on the couch. Lydia and I had a discussion about whether or not I should drive, although we both knew we were really talking about something else. I think we were feeling the closeness that divorced parents feel when they have to deal with a wayward or ill child, and we were hoping that it was something a little more.
"Stay," she said. "Don't take the chance."
"I would, but for the dogs."
"When did you walk them?"
"Just before we came over."
"They should be fine until morning. And if they aren't, so what?" We went to bed, but it didn't work. Lydia did all the things I had always wanted her to do, but it still didn't work. It was too hot, we were too sticky, and Charlie began to snore. I said I was self-conscious. Lydia said she was, too. I made the Macbeth joke about drink: "It provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance." Lydia was defiantly cheerful. We tried to just hold each other. We were all wrong-handed.
Finally I said, "Listen, I'm feeling guilty about those dogs. I don't think I can sleep. I think I'd better go."
"Well, sure, I mean, if you can't sleep." I went down the stairs as fast as I could. I was still a little drunk and already a little hung over. I sat in the car trying to think of a moment in my life when I had felt worse. I wondered if Lydia was feeling this awful. God, I'd never wanted to want someone so much in my life. "Christ," I said out loud, "Jesus Christ. What have I done? Can this possibly be about Lisa Kim?" I had stepped outside for just a moment just to look around, and it seemed that the door had closed and locked behind me. I had an uneasy feeling, which I wanted very much to deny, that I had entered a new part of life, one in which everything was not a beginning; there were now some endings. Everything was not falling in love, there was now falling out of love. I had never really known that was possible.
When I picked Charlie up the next day to take him back to the bus station, he was rooting around in the kitchen cabinets. "Any idea where Lydia keeps the hooch?" he asked. "I need a tiny bracer, hair of the dog."
I showed him the hutch in the living room where the liquor was, and he had a large, quick drink.
"There. Much better."
At the bus he held me as long and as hard as he had held Lydia the night before. I could feel his heart beating, or mine; I knew that I'd probably never see him again. It wasn't a premonition or anything like that; it was just a bit of knowledge: Our time had passed. Our stars had crossed—his and Lydia's and mine—and I was very happy that they had, but that was all over. Our vectors were speeding away from each other. As had happened so often lately, I had a sense of transition and inevitability. There is so much that is beyond our control, all you can really do is deal with that which isn't. That which wasn't seemed to be Lisa Kim.
"Were you in love with her?" asks the girl, whose hair is now pink. "That is, if she ever really existed which, of course, she didn't, blah blah blah."
"I guess I was, in some way," I answer.
"That's pretty weird," she says.
"Why?"
"She doesn't exist, and then she died, so she doesn't exist squared."
"But she did exist," I say.
"Not for you. Might as well be fiction," says Nick.
"People fall in love with fictional characters all the time."
"Fourteen-year-old girls with rock singers," says Nick.
"No, everyone. All of us. I'll give you an example. When I was your age, a little older, I was in college, I fell in love with a beautiful tomboy named Elena, and she fell in love with me, or so I thought, and it all happened one spring day in the backyard of one of my professor's houses on a hilltop overlooking the university. White clouds were moving fast across a blue sky, our bare feet touched in the new grass, and it was thrilling, truly thrilling."
"Oh boy, Mr. Ferry got lucky."
"Spare us the details, please," said the girl with pink hair.
"No," I go on, "this wasn't about sex. This was about love. I told her everything that was in my heart, and she listened to me intently; I knew she did, and I fell in love. A year later, I bought a ring, and the night I was going to give it to her and ask her to marry me and spend the rest of her life with me, I evoked the memory of that spring afternoon that for me was the very foundation stone of our relationship. And you know what she remembered of it?"
"What?"
"She remembered being chilly. She remembered that the grass was damp and she got cold. That was it. I probed and probed, but that was it. I never gave her the ring. I kept it in my pocket."
"What's your point?" asks the dog-faced boy.
"My point is that I'd fallen in love with a fictional character. I'd made her up."
"I think that your love was fictional," says the pink-haired girl. "I think that had you really loved her, you would have forgiven her. I think that what you felt was infatuation, rather than love."
"Maybe. Probably," I say, "but didn't someone in here once say that infatuation is a form of love?"
"I think it's a stage of love," says the pink-haired girl. "An early stage."
"My point is that love is like sex; some big part of it is in your mind."
"I refuse to believe that," says someone.
"He might be right," says the dog-faced boy. "I read an article on a survey someone did that said for some high percentage of people—most of us, if I recall correctly—no actual sexual experience has ever lived up to what you thought it would be before you ever had sex at all."
"That's pretty scary," says the pink-haired girl.
"But isn't that true of anything?" says Nick. "Wouldn't it be true of anything, I mean, like cheeseburgers or whatever? You never think of a cheeseburger that's dry and cold, do you? Just hot and juicy. I think you're really talking about the real versus the ideal."
"How do you mean?"
"Well, love or sex or whatever, if you imagine it, you're going to imagine it in its most perfect form. I mean, if I say 'summer day,' you think of the perfect summer day, not a chilly, rainy one."
"Okay. What is ideal love, then?" I ask.
"The love of a dog," says the pink-haired girl without hesitation.
"Oh Christ," says someone.
"No, I'm serious. You can laugh at old ladies with cats, but think about it."
"Think about what?"
"Think about the love a pet gives you," says the pink-haired girl.
"Okay, I'll think about it. It's submissive and extremely limited," says Nick.
"Of course it's limited. I'm not being sappy here—"
"Okay, it's unconditional—"
"It's unconditional, and it doesn't change," says the pink-haired girl. "It's static. It doesn't evolve. A pet and its master don't grow apart and don't go their separate ways. A pet doesn't have a friggin' midlife crisis and run off with his friggin' sales assistant . . ."
"Oh Christ," says someone. "I thought this is where we were headed."
"Well, I can't help it. The only time a pet hurts you is when it dies."
"Which it will do about seven times in your lifetime," says the dog-faced boy
.
"Also, a pet doesn't grow up and need to reject you like a kid," says the pink-haired girl.
"You're going to be one of those people with a home full of dogs they call the health department on," says Nick.
"I know I am."
"But what about real love?" asks someone.
"What's that?" asks the pink-haired girl.
"Romantic love. Love between a man and a woman."
"Or a man and a man or a woman and a woman," says someone.
"Case in point," I say. "Now we make sure to include and honor homosexuals. A hundred years ago we chased them out of town or killed them. Fifty years ago we put them in hospitals, and sometimes they killed themselves. Now we have parades for them. What's changed besides perception?"
"Yeah," says Nick cautiously, "but there's a difference between perception and fantasy. I mean, this Lisa Kim is pure fantasy."
"I put it to you that many of the most celebrated loves in literature were at least partly fantasy. Romeo and Juliet. How many days did they know each other? How many total minutes were they together? 'I was a child and she was a child,/In this kingdom by the sea,/But we loved with a love that was more than love—I and my Annabel Lee.'"
"Who's that?" asks Nick.
"Poe. Take Lenore, for that matter," I say.
"But those are lost loves," says Nick. "They at least existed. There's a difference between the remembered and the imaginary."
"How about 'The Lady of Shalott?'" I ask. "Do you guys know 'The Lady of Shalott'? Nick, grab Sound and Sense behind you. Is it in there?"
"No."
"Grab the Norton. I know it's in there."
"Here it is."
"Run across the hall and make some copies, would you?"
"How about Odysseus?" says someone. "He's gone for twenty years, during which time he says no to immortality, says no to living with a beautiful, sexy goddess on a desert island because he's so in love with his wife, and when he finally gets home she doesn't even recognize him."
"But who does?" asks the girl with pink hair. "Do you remember who does? His old dog does. I rest my case."
"Yeah, but then the old dog dies on a pile of shit," says the dog-faced boy.
"So he's gone twenty years," says someone. "He's home one night, and then he says he has to go see his father and then he has to take another journey, for God's sake. What about Penelope is Odysseus in love with? And what is she in love with?"
"Nick, pass those out. Everyone read 'The Lady of Shalott' for tomorrow. Here's the question: What's she in love with?"
I stopped to get a big tablet of newsprint and then went back to Carolyn's place to get to work. I put both extra leaves in her big Mission-style dining-room table and pulled it into the middle of the living room beneath a skylight and facing the longest interior wall, from which I removed Carolyn's artwork. I put the dining chairs in the spare bedroom and brought in Carolyn's office chair. I set up my laptop and stacked my notebooks and files. Then I started making lists in Magic Marker on the newsprint and taping these to the long wall. I made a list of everything that I knew. I made a list of everything I suspected and a list of everything that I did not know in the form of questions. The first and foremost of these was, "Was Lisa Decarre's patient?" I made three timelines; one for the day of Lisa's death, one for the preceding thirty days, and one for the preceding one hundred eighty days. I made a sheet for each of the major players and on it I listed everything I knew about that person. I made a list of all the people I'd encountered with phone numbers, addresses, and e-mail info. When Rosalie called with Lisa's Social Security number, I wrote that large on its own sheet. I wrote some scripts of imagined conversations—at least, my half of them. Finally, I wrote down a list of things to do and, in the days ahead, I did them.
I rented a post-office box. I took out ads in the little weekly newspapers up and down the North Shore in an effort to locate other patients of Dr. Decarre's. I called the Psychology Department at Northwestern University and had a nice chat with the secretary there. I gave her a cock-and-bull story about representing a company that had developed a series of new personality-assessment tools and was looking for grad students to test them "for $35 an hour. Do you think anyone in your program might be interested?"
"Oh, I think so." I found out that I could send or bring materials to the office to distribute in student mailboxes, and I found out the names of the two students in the program who had off-campus mailboxes. One of these was all I needed: Geoffrey Hand.
I called Mike Peoples. He and I had been in the English Ph.D. program at Northwestern, and at one time we had been interested in the same minor Lake District poet; he decided to study the guy, and I decided not to. He became a scholar, and I became a teacher. The absurdities of academic economics being what they are, that allowed me to bow out with a Masters degree so that I could start competing for fairly-high-paying high school teaching jobs, and it allowed him to pay two more years of upper-end tuition and write a dissertation before he could start competing for fairly-low-paying college-teaching jobs. He did have an office in University Library, however, and that was another thing I needed.
Although some years had passed since we'd been in school together, we seemed always to revert to that particular brand of grad-student repartee that is a lot like shower-room towel snapping. He liked to call me "the common man" and "an unsung hero in the trenches of the war on ignorance and ignominy," and I liked to ask if he was still masturbating in the stacks. This time I also said, "How's the book going?"
"Pretty damn good. I'm almost finished. I read a chapter at St. Andrews last spring, and I'm reading the last chapter at the MLA in December."
I asked Mike if I could use his carrel once or twice for private meetings.
"Of course. No problem. Just call me the day before and buy me a pint of Guinness at your convenience."
"It's a deal."
"Anything I can do to help the common man."
When Carolyn called, I couldn't find my calendar in the swirl of papers on my desktop; I was sure I'd lost track of time and she was due home the next day, or she'd aborted the trip for one reason or another. "No, we just got these cheap phone cards, so we've been calling everyone, and we thought we'd call you and see how Cooper is. Actually, we're still in Italy."
It was a good thing. Her living space had taken on the appearance of a command post, with furniture pushed to the side and her paintings and prints stacked against the wall. There were piles everywhere—clothing, newspapers, telephone books, some dishes. Now all the walls were covered with taped lists on newsprint, and two big window fans, one drawing air in the front, one pushing it out the back, caused these to ripple and billow like so many sails in my secret little regatta.
"Everything okay?" she asked.
"Absolutely!" I told her about the dogs, about our morning walks to the dog beach and evenings on the deck. I told her about Lydia and Charlie. Finally I told her about Lisa Kim and Decarre, that he was a psychiatrist and that he'd been disciplined once before. Then I said, "Now listen to this: He was with her in her car minutes before the crash. Also, the autopsy report shows that she had opiates in her system, and her best friend says no way would she ever use heroin."
"Which means what?" Carolyn asked.
"Codeine or morphine, maybe."
"I see. And who has access to morphine?"
"Right." Neither of us spoke for a long moment.
"There's something that isn't right here, isn't there?" she said.
"I think so," I said.
"I'm going to assume that everything you've told me here is true and verifiable."
"Everything I've told you is true. Not quite everything is verifiable, at least not yet."
"I'm thinking maybe you should go to the police," she said.
"Do you think I have enough?" I asked.
"I'm not sure. You have something, but I don't know anything about criminal law. Just go ask the cops. Or go see Officer Lotts."
I had finally found my calendar. "Hey, what are you doing in Italy? I thought you were supposed to be in Greece by now."
"Well, we met a couple of Italian guys," she said. "Aldo and Luca."
Wendy was in love with Aldo, and Luca was in love with Carolyn. "Zee Irish woman," he would say, "is zee better woman of zee world." She told me about bobbing through Siena traffic on the back of a Vespa, about a weekend at Aldo's family farm in the Tuscan countryside, about visiting some Etruscan ruins so far off the path that they were the only people there, about evenings of candlelight, pasta, and wine.
"This sounds serious," I said.
"Not really. A few weeks and it will all be over."
"Are you sad?"
"No," she said, "he's not the guy." Besides, she was finally tired of traveling, had been away long enough, was anxious to start her new job. "That's another reason for my call. I think I'll be home on September 15," she said.
We talked some logistics. We didn't talk about where I would go on September 15.
Dorothy Murrell's voice was as plaintive and precise as a stringed instrument, and she spoke with the caution of someone walking on new ice. I told her my name was Geoffrey Hand. "You responded to my newspaper advertisement . . ."
"Oh, yes. I see. Okay . . ."
I said that I had a few more questions, and I wondered if I might be able to meet her. She thought not. She thought that she'd said all she wanted to say in her letter. I suggested a public place. "University Library, for instance. I have access to a carrel there."
"Are you a student at the university?" she asked.
"I am a graduate student in psychology," I lied. I told her I was gathering information for my dissertation, and that her letter was exactly what I was looking for.
She interrupted. "I won't identify him. I will not identify him."
I explained that unless she did, nothing could really be done.
"I don't care," she said. "I will not do that to him. It would crush him. I cannot hurt him like that."
When I finally accepted her terms, she agreed, albeit a bit reluctantly, to meet me in the reference room of the library at 10:00 A.M. on Saturday.