His brain began slowly to return to normal.
Dixie could be part of all this if she would just loosen up. He was angry and hurt at her betrayal. How could she have done it? And then gone off with those kids. She had become a different person. It had begun with her obsession with Philip Tate, following him around like a lunatic, spying on him. Sleeping downstairs. Giving up drinking. She had become another person. He didn’t know her anymore. He wondered, had he ever known her? Certainly she had never known him.
He was back in the world suddenly. He realized he was lying on the bedroom floor with wires around his neck, et cetera, and his erection was softening up, and he was about to return to reality altogether.
He bit into the orange wedge; he bore down with his toe. At once his head flopped back and banged against the floor and again he had the sensation of being lifted into the air. His brain spun out somewhere, dazzled.
He did it again. And again.
The lack of oxygen was making everything bright and sweet and happy. It was a phenomenon he knew all about but had never fully experienced. He was in that long tunnel talked about by near-death survivors, a dark passageway with light at the end, and music, and a sense of peace and longing. Time had stopped and he stood on the rim of eternity.
In fact, in scientific fact, it meant nothing. Those near-death idiots thought they saw a vision of an afterlife, when in fact it was only the scrambling of sense data by the misfiring of neurons in a brain deprived of oxygen. There was no end to human folly. Look at Dixie, for instance.
He wished suddenly, passionately, that Dixie were here with him.
And there she was.
He caught a glimpse of her in the light, for just a second, and then she disappeared. He called out to her but she was gone. And then he realized what he must do. He bore down hard with his toe, and he could see her again, and he said, “Look at this, look at me, look,” and he felt himself hauled into the air, he was floating, he was adrift on waves of light, and it was good. He was drifting toward her and, just as in the near-death accounts, she was beckoning to him. He bore down harder with his toe. “Yes,” he said, “this is what I’ve always wanted, this is it, yes, this is it.” And still she beckoned to him.
Suddenly he was there. They were face-to-face and she was saying something but he could not hear it. “What?” he said, and “What?” He took a deep breath and the air was like incense and he heard her finally. She said, “It’s all right. I know you and it’s still all right.” So he was known at last, and loved for it, and it was wonderful, wonderful. She opened the door and held it for him and he stepped inside. It was pure ecstasy. It was everything he’d hoped for.
“Come on in,” Dixie said. She nuzzled him and put one finger inside his belt. Just a tiny tease.
“Oh Dix!” he said. “You’re a very wicked girl.”
“Just for a little drink,” she said. “Nothing more, I promise.”
“Yeah, sure. You promise.”
“But you want to. You know you do. Just a little bit?” She wiggled her finger inside his belt. “Just a little teeny tiny bit?”
“But what about Hal?”
“Hal won’t be home until tomorrow at the earliest. Just a teeny tiny? For Dixie and Cole? No strings attached.”
So they went inside the house and Dixie made him a drink and gave him a quick kiss and then dashed upstairs to get into something easier to get out of.
Downstairs Cole sipped his drink and said to himself, This is mad, this is insane, I ought to get out of here before it’s too late, because pretty soon it’s gonna be too late, but one quick fuck, what harm could it do? And then for no particular reason he stood up, ready to go. “I’m out of here,” he said, put down the drink, and made for the front door.
Dixie appeared then, very pale in a green satin dressing gown. She put her hand on Cole’s arm and said softly, “Go upstairs. You’d better go upstairs.”
“No, I can’t,” he said. “I’ve got to go home, Dixie, really.” He leaned over to give her a kiss.
She pushed him away, with force, and said, “Go upstairs, you idiot, we’ve got a problem.” She laughed, a short high bark, frightening. “I think he’s dead.” And as Cole took the stairs three at a time, she shouted after him, “I wanted him dead.”
She went into the sunroom and sat on the chaise longue and tried to drink from Cole’s glass. But her hand was trembling and the drink spilled and she began to cry, softly at first, and then more loudly, and then like a crazy person. She recognized this scene. It had all happened before, long before, and it was happening again.
Upstairs Cole telephoned his father and when Philip answered, Cole said, “You’d better come here, Father, now. I’m in serious trouble.”
“You can’t do this,” Maggie said, “it’ll be the end of your career.”
“He’s my son,” Philip said, and got his coat. “He’s our son.”
She saw him then as she had tried to see him all those months with her notebook and her reading and her dreams. She saw him clearly.
“Do you forgive me?” she said, and he said, “Yes, of course,” and she said, “No, I mean for everything, for all those things, for …”
He held her close and kissed her. “Yes,” he said, “I forgive you,” and he drove to the Kizers’ house, full of joy and terror and what had to be, for the lack of a better name, love.
* * *
Philip did the only thing he could do. He lied.
When the police arrived, he met them at the door. “Upstairs,” he said, “in the master bedroom. It’s a suicide, I think.” The police glanced into the sunroom, where Dixie was still crying hysterically, and then jogged on up the stairs. At once Philip turned to the telephone and called Calvin Stubbs. He was needed immediately, Philip said; come at once to the Kizers’ house. Calvin arrived in just a few minutes. “Hal’s dead,” Philip said, “that’s all I can say. Look after Dixie, would you? She’s losing it, and this is not the time for her to lose it.” Calvin went into the sunroom and sat with Dixie. In a moment he came out and said to Philip, “I’m gonna give her some Nembutal. She’s hysterical.” “Yes, yes,” Philip said, “do whatever you want.” Calvin looked at him strangely and went back to Dixie.
Philip stood in the foyer, waiting.
The police were a long time upstairs, and before they came down other police arrived, two detectives and a lieutenant, and after a while a medical examiner. Philip, waiting at the foot of the stairs, could hear the exclamations of surprise, some suppressed laughter, a lot of mumbled conversation. Dixie was stretched out in the sunroom, crying quietly now.
The lieutenant came down the stairs. “Holy shit,” he said, and shook his head.
“Yes,” Philip said.
“Who found the body?”
“She did. His wife. Mrs. Kizer.”
“And you were with her?”
“No, I was down here in the sunroom, over there.” He pointed.
“Anybody else here at the time?”
“No. Just she and I.”
“You didn’t know he was upstairs, dead?”
“Good God, no!”
“But she knew.”
“No, it wasn’t like that at all. Neither of us knew. We had an open house, at my house, my wife and I, and I was driving Mrs. Kizer home afterward, is all.”
“So you dropped her off and went home.”
“Yes. No. I stayed for a drink.”
“I see. And she went upstairs to slip into something more comfortable?”
“No, that wasn’t it at all. She went upstairs to use the bathroom.”
“There’s no bathroom down here she could have used? In a house this size?” The lieutenant looked at him, interested, but Philip said nothing. “Just asking,” the lieutenant said. “Not implying anything. Necessarily.”
“She found the body,” Philip said. “He was already dead.”
“And she called you and you came up the stairs and examined the body.”
“But you said he was dead. How did you know he was dead if you didn’t examine the body?”
“I didn’t examine the body in any technical sense. I just checked to make sure he was dead.”
“To make sure he was dead.”
“Well, not like that. I could see he looked dead. He was probably dead. I checked to see if there was anything I could do to revive him. But it was perfectly clear he was dead.”
“And in a very unusual way too, you might say.”
“Yes.”
“They teach you that at medical school? That elegant variation stuff?”
“Dr. Kizer, it appears, had strange sexual … appetites. I don’t think he’s typical of all doctors.”
“You might say. The orange in the mouth, the bag over the head. It’s like that M.P. in England.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“It was in all the papers. He was wearing lady’s panty hose or a bra or something like that. It was in the papers.”
“Would you please … would you not talk so loudly.”
“Sorry. It’s just that there are easier ways to kill yourself.”
“I would imagine it was an unintentional suicide.”
“All suicides are, in the final analysis.”
“I’m not sure of that.”
“I’ll want to talk to you later, Dr. Tate. I’m gonna talk to the widow now.”
“I think you should wait. I think you should ask her psychiatrist.”
“We’ll see,” the lieutenant said, and crossed to the sunroom. “Mrs. Kizer? I need to talk to you for a few minutes?” He leaned over her, concerned. “Sorry about your loss.”
“I did it,” Dixie said. She sat upright on the chaise longue, and in a dreamy voice, singsong almost, said, “I wanted him dead. I killed him. I’m glad he’s dead.”
The lieutenant looked from Dixie to Philip and back to Dixie. He glanced at Calvin Stubbs. He shrugged.
“Let’s just start at the start,” he said. “It will all come out.”
24
It all came out, and it was not just a scandal but a series of scandals.
The death itself was the first subject of inquiry. Hal Kizer died alone, on New Year’s Eve, in some sort of compromising position; that was all anybody knew. Where was his wife? Where were his friends? What, in fact, did he die of, exactly, a young man like that?
Could it be murder? No, the police said, it was not murder, so just forget about that. This was not a time for rumor or sensationalism.
Then there was the manner of his death. While reporters were still speculating on why Hal Kizer died alone on New Year’s Eve, a secretary in the police department—a usually reliable source—leaked a couple details to the newspapers. He had an orange in his mouth, she had heard. An orange? How could he fit a whole orange in his mouth? And why? And—she had this on gospel authority—the body, when they found it, was nude. But then others began to volunteer information. He was nude, yes, and he had wires around his private parts and a bag over his head. These were certifiable facts, confirmed by police witnesses, who naturally wished to remain anonymous. Everyone in the press deplored the fact that the police had revealed such things; this was pure sensationalism. A reporter who kept up with the tabloids remembered a similar death in England where a Member of Parliament had killed himself, accidentally it seemed, with an orange in his mouth and panty hose tied around his neck, or something like that. Garters, maybe. He looked up the story, found it, and the newspaper ran a long feature on British Sex, and there were two newspaper editorials: “The Fall of Rome” and “The Best of Boston.”
Two dedicated reporters had been looking into Hal Kizer’s background, researching his private life, his family and his marriage and his work with manic-depressives, and within two days they had located Theda, who gave a lively interview, with many photos, defending her profession as an alternative lifestyle. This could all have been prevented, she said, if Hal had heeded her advice and not tried to do the British thing by himself. The British thing was particularly complicated. These were not games and they were certainly not for amateurs.
And then the real scandal: on the day of Hal’s burial, word leaked that Dixie Kizer was not alone when she discovered the dead body of her husband. She was with a man, a married man. Dixie was still under heavy sedation at a private rest home and could not be reached for questioning, but rumor said that the man was Philip Tate, the new Dean of the Medical School. Reporters surrounded him after the funeral. Yes, he had been with Dixie Kizer when she found the body: he had driven her home after a New Year’s open house that both she and her husband had attended, along with eighty or ninety other people from the university, and he had nothing more to say. Maggie Tate, his wife, remarked that Dixie Kizer was a family friend and a very dear and wonderful person and she too had nothing more to say. But why was Philip in the house with her when the body was found? Philip and Maggie shook their heads and looked solemn and once again had nothing more to say. Beecher Stubbs, however, suggested that Philip Tate was very probably Dixie’s psychiatrist, so of course he wouldn’t comment. Beecher’s suggestion ended that line of inquiry. Nobody in an academic community wanted to appear to be violating a doctor’s confidentiality. Some things were sacred.
Hal was buried and a memorial service was held and the Tates drew a deep breath.
The reporters, however, had not yet finished. They discovered that on the night of Hal’s death, Dixie Kizer had been out nightclubbing—slumming, some might say—with a bunch of college kids. Philip Tate’s son, Cole, had been among them. This Cole had been seen kissing Dixie Kizer. A blurry Polaroid turned up, two people snuggling in the Oasis, and the caption read “Cole and Dixie?” With a question mark. That was in the morning paper. By evening there was a story exposing the truth: Philip Tate had not been there when the body was found. Cole Tate, Philip’s son, had been there. Philip Tate’s story was a cover-up.
Now there were two new scandals. The love affair between Cole and Dixie: hunky young doctor meets jaded socialite. And the cover-up by Philip Tate: Dean of Medical School shields son from scandal, sinks self.
Philip wrote the President a letter of resignation and went off with his wife for a two-week vacation at an undisclosed retreat. They wanted some peace and privacy.
The reporters located them in an isolated beach house in Provincetown and interviewed them outside, stamping their feet in the snow to keep warm. The rumor was that Philip himself had had an affair with Dixie Kizer. Would he like to comment on that? Philip declined. Dixie Kizer herself claimed it was so, they said. Would he comment now? No, he said. But Maggie had a comment. She said that it certainly was so, she had known about it all along, it was one of those middle-aged things men sometimes do, and women also, and it would be very nice if the reporters went away now and let them get on with their lives. The reporters returned with photos and an essay: “Life Support, Wife Support.” It was a long piece on Maggie Tate and other wives in recent political history who had supported their husbands through and beyond an infidelity. Was it wisdom or insecurity that made them stand by their men? Psychiatrists were divided on this. Dr. Joyce Brothers said it was sometimes one thing, sometimes another. Readers were invited to phone in their responses or, if they preferred, to use fax or E-mail. Appropriate addresses were provided.
When they returned from vacation, Philip was astonished to open an official letter from the President refusing to accept his resignation as Dean of the Medical School. Philip was a distinguished psychiatrist, the President wrote, and a man of upstanding character and moral rectitude. The Trustees joined the President in expressing every confidence in Philip as Dean. The letter was dated February 7. There was another letter, this one dated February l4—Valentine’s Day—the day of the “Life Support, Wife Support” article, saying that the President had conferred with the Trustees and they had decided to accept Phi
lip’s resignation after all. The school simply could not bear another sexual scandal. Former Dean Aspergarter would step in at once and relieve Philip of all Deaconal responsibilities. They were sure Philip understood.
In early March there was a follow-up on the scandal, with the news that Emma Tate, the daughter, was a lesbian, but by this time nobody cared very much except Emma, who had recently decided she wasn’t a lesbian after all and hated to be misrepresented.
It had been an exhausting few months for everybody.
Dixie Kizer was out of the rest home and was living with Calvin and Beecher Stubbs. Her house was up for sale and she refused to go back to it even to collect her clothes and jewelry. Beecher did that for her.
Dixie’s therapy at McLean had been very successful. When she expressed an interest in painting, they had assigned her immediately to the fine art recovery section, where she was asked to paint her feelings, most particularly her fears and her dreams. The paintings were astonishing, whorls of whites and ochres out of which emerged colorful plants that metamorphosed into creatures that were animals and women both, seductive, tortuous, all of them in a state of becoming. They were erotic and compelling and everyone who saw them was disturbed by them. They made Dixie very happy. And because the paintings were good, people thought she must be sane.
During these difficult months Beecher and Calvin Stubbs continued on as usual. Calvin read and researched and wrote his essays. Beecher shopped with friends and lunched at Neiman Marcus and dined with Calvin on their new choice in cereal, Honey Nut Cheerios. They lived life whole and they looked after Dixie Kizer as well.
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