After Gregory

by Austin Wright

  I don’t know.

  You don’t know?

  I suppose you’ll go ahead with your plans. Stay in my house a few days until you can settle yourself and go public (thinking already, irrationally: if you still have a house).

  What I mean is, will I receive my grant? Can I assume what happened to Mr. Rome won’t affect that?

  Oh, I don’t know anything about that.

  Ask Mrs. Delaware, will you please?

  You leaned across the aisle. Miranda wants to know about her money. Miranda herself leaned across you to ask: Do you know when I’ll get it now?

  Jane Delaware: I have no idea.

  This won’t be a problem, will it?

  Jane Delaware looked at Miranda with frozen eyes. I don’t know anything about how you can get your money.

  Well who does know?

  Steady: I don’t know. This was a private project. No one was authorized to give the money but Jack himself.

  Well, who’s authorized now?

  No one, as far as I know. It belongs to the estate.

  Miranda’s voice rising, with a panic edge. Well, who handles the estate? Who’s going to give it to me from the estate?

  I don’t know if anyone can.

  Miranda putting both hands to the sides of her head, squeezing and tugging at her no longer long hair. What are you telling me? Where’s my money?

  I’m not sure you’ll get any money now.

  You can’t do that. You promised.

  Jack Rome promised.

  But you made the promise to me. I’ve come all this way for you, and this is what you do to me?

  It depends on whether Jack set the money aside. If he set it aside, you’re all right. If he didn’t, you’re out of luck.

  Out of luck. No way. I won’t allow it. I’ve thrown my life away for this. You gave me your solemn promise. If Jack Rome can’t give me the money, you find another way. You’ll give it to me out of your own funds.

  Jane Delaware turned and looked out the window.

  You too, Miranda said to you. Yes, you. You’re in as thick as she. If she doesn’t pay me. Somebody’s going to give me the money I was promised.

  I don’t have forty million dollars.

  Tough shit, she said. I’ll sue.

  Misery growing, organic like a malignancy, feeding on itself, no need for reasons. Miranda next to you in a stew, threatening you, it took your heart away. You were going home. But your memory image of Sharon was hollow like a chocolate egg. A different Jane Delaware, you never thought she could be so cold. Gloomy in the bright ocean afternoon, homeless and loose on the surface of the world with only temporary connections to things more permanent than you. You tried to relax in first class deluxe, the formula of wealth for comfort. Tried to disregard the harsh voice inside you condemning everybody: Jack Rome for crimes, Jane Delaware for desertion, Miranda for gullibility and greed, you for your share in all of these.

  After the first class midday dinner—silent and gloomy and upset—Copzik asked Miranda to sit with her for a while. You moved across the aisle while Jane Delaware moved over to the window. She showed some sympathy. The poor girl, she said.

  Won’t she get her money? you said.

  I doubt it. She’ll sue for it, you said. No she won’t, Delaware said.

  Then you ought to tell her and send her straight home. Maybe someone can manage a little something to tide her over, Delaware said. David, maybe. Then she added, You should be prepared, too.

  What? To give something to her?

  If those fellows go after you. If they want your money back. Be prepared.

  Want it back? Explain that.

  Nobody has a claim on you, but they might try to make you think so. Stand up for your rights.

  That’s all you needed. In that moment, without shock or surprise, more like a stupor, you saw it all gone and knew it was fated so from the start.

  Meanwhile she reentered her preoccupied silence, and somehow you knew she was out of it too, Jack Rome had left her nothing, and her acquired world was getting ready to expel her. It was that, not grief, she was facing now.

  In the dead silence of the midoceanic midafternoon where the clocks themselves refused to advance, you saw beyond the arrested time to the police waiting at the New York airport. You saw them clearly, and though the time barely moved, you strove to slow it down more, to stop it flat if you could. Outside, far above the featureless white cloud cover, with invisible ocean below that, you could imagine it either way: invisible speed, six hundred miles per hour over invisible sea, or absolute stasis, suspended in sky, for there was no perceptible motion to confirm either view. The police would be God’s Police, coming for Miranda. Yet as you saw them, they were coming for you too. You rather than Miranda. Nor were they God’s Police but true police, authorized by the powers of the law, and Miranda had nothing to do with it. They were waiting to arrest you when you got off. You tried to figure out why you feared this. The customs process perhaps, projecting anxiety. You tried to figure out the anxiety.

  Meanwhile from time to time, you heard Miranda and Copzik.

  Miranda: It didn’t happen every time, if you’d just watched. Mumbo jumbo no.

  Miranda: Don’t know if they were actually cured.

  Miranda: Nobody ever said the people in the wheelchairs were actually.

  Copzik: Placebo effect.

  Miranda: Daddy said. Everybody who is suffering and ill in this world. Symbols, nobody ever claimed.

  Copzik: Your claim to some special spiritual virtue?

  Miranda: Devoted members of the Landis Community.

  Copzik: Planted in the audience without your knowledge.

  Miranda was crying: I know you sympathize.

  Once the arrest of time was lifted, you foresaw in the waiting airport beyond the customs line, where the passengers would have to pass through, Sam Indigo. Arrest for sabotage. Murder of Jack Rome. But if Sam Indigo was at the airport, it would be on other business.

  Hey Mister, that gal’s too young for you, the man said.

  What do you know about it?

  I know your type. Child killer.

  You had a sudden clear and ice cold thought. You were suspected by Sam Indigo of the murder of Jock Hadley. This had never occurred to you before. If by chance you had driven an ice pick through Jock Hadley’s skull, neither your suicide in the river, nor your new name, nor Jack Rome’s benevolence, nor your marriage to Sharon nor Jane Delaware’s irony nor Miranda Landis’s dependency, nor your wealth and house, nor Stephen Trace himself, could shield you from Sam Indigo.

  Now, if Sam Indigo suspected you, the most urgent question was, Did Peter Gregory, by whom he meant you, in fact kill Jock Hadley? Your next clear thought said it was not enough to assume he had not. Was there a possibility he had?

  The obvious answer was, No, because you would have remembered. But cold thought said, he could have done it in a blackout, and your memory with its ability to screen things could fail you. Nor could you say he wasn’t the kind of person to do such a thing, since your whole life as Stephen Trace was based upon a violence, a drastic rejection that set you apart from everybody who leads a natural gradual life. You thought what an irony it would be if irrelevant Jock Hadley could ruin Trace’s life as he had tried to ruin Gregory’s.

  You sat there next to the ruined Jane Delaware, trying to distinguish sanity from perversity masquerading as sanity and unable to tell which was which, trying to settle it by remembering something that could prove one way or the other: he had murdered Jock Hadley or he had not, which mattered because you would have to bear the burden for him if he had done it. Waiting in the park for Florry Gates to drive away after she had put him out of her car. Fragments of the long walk home but most of the walk was blocked out—presumably because his mind had been so busy as you walked. Flashing police lights and the floodlights on the Hadley bungalow and going around the back.

  You tried to visualize what he could not remember. You visualized going u
p to the Hadley door in the dark. Visualized knocking and being admitted. He would have said, What the hell do you want? He could have said, Christ, I thought for a moment you were the Hammer Man. You visualized going around behind him and picking up the table lamp. Hey there, mister. Whatcha doing, mister? Bang, crash, clatter. Would the table lamp be heavy enough? Sam Indigo would know, he could tell you what the murder weapon was. Meanwhile you visualized hurrying out the back door accelerated by the noise. Then the police and the floodlights. You recoiled from your visualizations, repelled, like ripping out your own guts under a local anesthetic. The danger lest visualizing too vividly might create a tumor in the memory you couldn’t distinguish from the real. To the point of not knowing whether you had done it or not.

  (Copzik: You must seize this opportunity, money or no.

  Miranda: Nowhere to go.

  Copzik: Spirit of Man, not God. All that emotion people have, all that need, which needs to be directed.

  Miranda: Different from animals.

  Copzik: Need to select your symbols.

  Copzik: It is imperative you break free. You need to escape from that environment.

  Copzik: Personal growth, evolution. Abused children.)

  This state you were in, let’s put it clearly. There was a crime once that had nothing to do with you, and you were as sure as you were of anything that you had nothing to do with it. You were sure primarily because you had no memory and no interest and because you had other memories surrounding the time, except for one small gap. However, at that time you occupied a different person, from whom you had later split and whom you had repudiated. Repudiated so thoroughly you were no longer sure what that person was really like or what he might have been able or unable to do. It occurred to you someone, knowing how this former person had detested the old man, might suspect him of killing him. This thought was alarming enough to make you inspect your memory until you began to fear too much looking would shake your faith. You were afraid this would render you incapable of protecting against Sam Indigo’s suspicions, confuse you permanently, and even possibly lead you to a false confession. Still, you could resist all that except for the one little gap of possibility, which meant even you could not rule yourself out absolutely as Jock Hadley’s murderer.

  All the while you knew this was insane, yet this knowledge did not relieve you, because there was always the possibility the sane position was the one you thought insane. The protection of Stephen Trace was vanishing like the emperor’s clothes. Sam Indigo was waiting. He did not need the murder of Jock Hadley to send you to jail. If evidence for that were not enough, he could arrest you for Florry Gates’s statutory rape charge, which bided still, unmoved by statute of limitations. All it needed was to prove the identity of Peter Gregory upon Stephen Trace and what could be simpler than that? They could put you in jail, Stephen Trace could not protect you from that. Crimes added up, real and possible, imagined and falsely attributed, all waiting in the person of Sam Indigo, along with the change in Jane Delaware, Miranda’s demand, the rumors about Sharon, and the murder of Jack Rome to sink you twice seven miles down through the ocean’s bitter surface to the bottom of its deepest part. No wonder you were anxious.

  THIRTY THREE

  When you landed at three, the sun was as bright as when you had taken off. No policemen noticed you, nor Miranda with her head shaded and eyes concealed. The customs men were indifferent, eager to move the line along. Jane Delaware took a taxi with Copzik, shook your hand and said, Thank you. Memories of a Venetian hotel room lingered in your groin, but her mind was elsewhere.

  A taxi driver with Chinese face drove you fifty miles through brutal traffic shifting lane to lane. Routines of familiar life returned, the waterside house took shape, porch, windowed living room, upstairs corridor. Sharon Trace began to materialize. She was not Jane Delaware. Customary feelings, memories coming back strange and pale. In the taxi Miranda sat with mouth clamped shut and hands in little fists.

  There was a white van with ladders, parked across the bridge. Scaffolding around the second story windows. You paid your driver and put your bags and Miranda’s on the grass waiting for Mr. Jollop or Mrs. Heckel. No one came, so you took them up yourself. Inside with Miranda you stepped on a sheet, the entry way covered by rags. So was the living room. Painters worked on the walls. Miranda looked around. She showed no interest in this new place she had never seen before.

  The chief painter’s white mustache had blue streaks in it. We was ordered to paint the wakes. Woiks? No one said no one was coming. You asked where’s Sharon? The lady? She went away. This house belong to you? Lady said no one would be here. All tore up. Kinda hard to know what to do about that.

  You would need certain rooms. You tried to be angry that someone ordered the house painted without your knowledge. Sharon, of course, but no one could have anticipated Jack Rome would die. Mrs. Heckel, Mr. Jollop, no sign of them either, taking time off, not expecting you. The bedroom was covered with painty rags, likewise Sharon’s old guest room. Wet paint in the bathroom and kitchen. Still sullen, Miranda helped you move the heavy rags and clear spaces. You put her in Sharon’s old room and yourself in the computer room. You sent out for a pizza.

  Speculation about Sharon: she was visiting Mr. and Mrs. Grubbs in Cowland. Or Melly, living with the mother of David Trace and Jack Rome. Don’t ask why she wouldn’t tell you when she went away. Why Jack Rome was so firm about not letting her go with you. Luigi Pardon in Jane Delaware’s gossip, try not to think of schemes and plots.

  In the evening, you played Chinese checkers with Miranda among the painty rags, she depressed but less sullen. What had happened was not your fault, she guessed, but it was your responsibility to help her. What she expected of you tomorrow. First you must find out from Mr. Peck what provisions have been made for her. Go all the way to David Trace and Luigi Pardon if necessary. Don’t let Jane Delaware get away, either. Make sure everyone knows: if they don’t fulfill Mr. Rome’s promise, they’ll have a lawsuit on their hands. She asked you about lawyers and counted on you to find the best. As the evening advanced, she noticed the silence. A wife should be in the house when her husband comes home, she said. You should be angry and lay down the law. She went to bed early.

  The morning news had an update on Jack Rome’s death. A body believed to be his had washed up on the Coney beach. It was identified late last night by his grief-stricken wife. Funeral announcements to follow. Though Jane Delaware had called his death a murder, the announcer called it a suicide, he had dived the plane into the sea.

  The grief-stricken wife could only be Jane Delaware, unless there were complications of duplication even you had not dreamed of. Conceive the scene in the morgue. The public Jane Delaware versus the secret Venetian one. Imagine her saying, Yes, that’s him. It’s less easy to see the smiting grief. Wiping her eyes. Still full of Jane Delaware’s cool, her ineradicable irony, Stephen Trace wished he could hear in private her description of being the grief-stricken wife in the morgue, naming the cold heavy thing in the plastic bag with the reporters around. Unfortunately, the Venetian Delaware was occluded by the grim ruin over the ocean, ruin that a reporter could easily take for grief.

  Mrs. Heckel showed up. She did not recognize Miranda Landis, introduced as Martha Lewis, nor did she know where Sharon was. You went to the office as Stephen Trace, leaving Miranda with Mrs. Heckel, feeling vaguely there were important protective things you ought to do. You postponed them and tried to lead a normal life, not unbalanced by events, sitting at your desk trying to catch up on your fortune. The flag at the Rome Building was at half staff. Your imagination played games with Jack Rome. You took him as remembered, black mustache, thin black socks, in his skyscraper office, and put him into a plastic bag, with reddened bloated arms and puffy drowned blue face. You drove his plane into the sea and broke his neck. Made a suicide out of him, imbued him with guilt and defeat, taught him a lesson before he died, a comedown: hey, I’m not as great as I thought. But your imagi
nation wouldn’t cooperate. What the hell, Jack Rome said. The lesson wouldn’t take. He would blame it on enemies, jealousy, spite. Fuck you, bastards. Laughing and shaking his gloved fist, ha ha ha. No matter what evil he might be guilty of, you could not make Jack Rome depressed or remorseful. The suicide news was a cover-up.

  A high iced white sky, no blue, no life. Heat in the Rome Building could not warm your imagination or Stephen Trace’s, anticipating in its hunched shoulders the coming freeze of the city streets. As the long day spread out, Stephen Trace had not done anything for Miranda. You didn’t want to, but as you didn’t, anxiety grew again like yesterday in the plane, poisoning the ground water, rising up in every spring, a potion creating hallucinations of disaster, which you couldn’t stop: if not Sam Indigo, God’s Police, if not God’s Police, Miranda, if not Miranda, Luigi Pardon and David Trace. Stephen Trace did not want to be questioned about anything. Looking out the office window, down at the rushy shoppers with their coat collars and scarves, you were ashamed of his fears. Why, you could remember like yesterday when there wasn’t any Stephen Trace, slogging through countryside with no baggage, fresh from a river, not afraid of anything. That’s what you thought.

  In the late afternoon, the secretary buzzed, Mr. Pardon to see you. He came in, with a portfolio under his arm and holding out his hand to shake, good to see you again.

  First let me present you with this. From his portfolio, a large glossy picture of himself taken twenty years ago, across which he had written in a large hand,

  To my good friend Steven Trace,

  Luigi Pardon

  Too bad about Jack, ain’t it? He was grinning like a joke. Not a joke though, his smile was for the camera, not an expression but a logo, trained into his face by years in public, the eyes squeezed tiny in their lids glittery blue. Visible in his eyes was a clear image of his cock. It was a swollen transparent cylinder which contained sparkling martini glasses and scallopini dinners and naked women reclining in luxury hotel suites heaving for joy of the fame jumping out at them through the great star’s fly. Meanwhile he talked, winding up one preamble after another like a baseball pitcher. First dispose of Jack, the proper eulogies. Some would say he took the easy way out, some he did the wise and only thing, take your pick, cowardice or courage, who’s to say in this life? Only God knows the answer, and Luigi would just as soon not second guess Him, he knew his place, only it did seem such a waste when eternal life was already almost within scientific reach. If Jack had consented to get himself frozen, all problems would pass in a couple hundred years.