My lunch with Joan was that day. I looked forward to it, hoping for comfort and relief. We got together in midtown. She had asked if we could meet at my apartment; she wanted to get a look at the building where Ben lived. I said no. I was very concerned that we avoid any place Ben might see us together.
“You think he would be angry that we know each other?” she mused aloud as we settled down at our table.
“Of course,” I answered, amazed she didn’t know that.
Wishing to appear less self-obsessed than I really was, I asked about her writing workshop. I had assumed that she was trying out a hobby, or a fantasy, but it turned out Joan was the teacher. She had been a free-lance journalist for a long time, placing her articles in various magazines that I don’t read—Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, and so on—all famous and respectable. She dismissed this as “working for the rent”; however, she was proud of the book she had written. She described it as a kind of memoir, about researching the real details of her distant ancestor’s life, the one who had qualified Joan’s mother to be a DAR: Daughter of the American Revolution. I remembered the title vaguely. It hadn’t been a best-seller, she told me, but it had sold out the first edition and gotten good reviews.
After we ordered, I asked her if she planned to write about Ben and the murder.
“I’m glad you asked, because I wanted to get that straight right away, in case you were wondering. I’m not going to be doing any more nonfiction, except for the occasional feature to tide me over. I’ve been working on a novel for about two years. That’s what I’m concentrating on right now. Someday I’ll probably use my marriage to Ben in a novel, but it would be, you know, very disguised and not real and it wouldn’t have anything to do with this. Anyway, I would never use anything you tell me.”
Frankly, I didn’t trust this speech. There were too many words, too many vague phrases that could be referred to later as having implied something other than what was really said.
“You’re upset,” she commented about my silence.
“No.” I wasn’t. I considered: What was I going to tell her? Nothing. And what if she did write about me? I could sue if it was false—I’m not a public figure, I’m not on trial.
“I’m sorry, I probably shouldn’t even have said what I did. I just wanted to be honest about it. I could have said I have no intention of writing about this, but I thought I should be totally open and admit that I might write about Ben—he was my first marriage. He was my first love. What I may use in a novel about Ben has nothing to do with you. Anyway, I have that material already.”
“You seem very defensive.” This was Stefan’s favorite response whenever somebody was trying hard to get his agreement. He had even used it on the man who sold us our Volvo. I thought the salesman had answered wittily: “Don’t let my boss hear you say that or I’ll be out on my ass.”
“I am defensive,” Joan admitted. “I worry about people being offended by my work, even if there’s nothing that could possibly bother them. It’s a weakness, really. Writers are supposed to be ruthless. I can’t. I think of other people’s feelings. What’s going on now belongs to you and to Naomi. I would never steal that.”
Joan seemed diminished by the city setting. She had dressed up for the occasion in a blue-and-white polka-dot dress that made her look fat, old, and out of fashion, although she had tried to modernize the dress with shoulder pads. Unfortunately, one of them had slid forward and she was lopsided and fidgety, wanting to adjust herself, yet not facing up to that fact and getting the job done. She poked the loose pad back up; but the descent inevitably resumed as soon as she moved her arm.
I leaned forward, took a nip of the fabric at her shoulder point, and raised it. “Get it under the bra strap,” I said.
Quickly, ashamed, she reached under the small tent I had made of her dress and got the pad properly battened down. She blushed, embarrassed.
“Sorry,” I said. “Your fussing with it made me nervous.”
“Everybody’s wearing them,” she apologized.
“Of course.” I tapped mine. For a moment I felt we were playing Simon Says. My head was tired, depressed by this version of Joan, seemingly very different from the woman I had met on the Island. I didn’t pay strict attention while she nervously elaborated about not writing a book, admitting that there had been offers from magazines for her to write about Ben. Her agent had said he could get a lot of money for a book.
“What sort of book? What kind of book could you write about it?”
“Cover the trial and tell the story of the marriage. You know, sort of alternate between the past and the present.”
“Sounds like you’ve thought about it a lot.” I had drunk the whole glass of white wine I ordered when we sat down. It had a metallic aftertaste that overwhelmed my half-eaten lunch of grilled swordfish. I felt queasy, almost nauseated. Joan’s worried plump face, her ungainly dress, the restaurant, all this irrelevant talk about books she didn’t plan to write made me feel sad and lonely and ill.
“Well, I may fictionalize it someday into that, you know, but it would not be about you and Naomi or him—”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I really need to know about Ben, more about his gambling—” I abruptly burped. “I’m sorry,” I said, and hiccuped in the middle of the apology. The last syllable skipped up the scale. Made me sound like a honking goose.
“Okay.” She nodded sympathetically. When she wanted them to, all her features could completely focus on one emotion: mouth turned down in a worried pout, eyebrows collapsed together, cheeks puckered with concern. “Where should I start? What do you need—?”
“How was he in bed?” I snapped rapidly, hoping to outtalk the next hiccup. I failed: I squealed like a pig on the word bed.
“What?” She laughed, surprised.
“I don’t understand his dressing up.” My voice sounded irritated to my ear, harassed by my loss of muscular control. “I’m worried about Nao—” and the last part was beeped, censored by my spastic stomach.
“No!” At last Joan was herself again, or at least the woman I had met on Long Island. She relaxed her rigid Sunday school posture, she forgot about her shoulder pads, she stopped eating daintily. “He’s not a child molester!”
“No?”
“You think he is?
“I don’t know! I’m asking!” I spoke in a hush, but in a furious hush, frustrated by the hiccuping which made me skip in the middle of talking.
“Take a drink of water.”
“That doesn’t wor—” and the needle skipped again.
“Boo!” she said, very mildly, with a sweet smile.
I laughed hard, all of me, quaking down to my toes. I laughed so hard my feet began to itch; I kicked off my shoes and rubbed them together. The sight of Joan’s round gentle face, mildly saying, “Boo!” was hilariously contradictory.
It did get rid of the hiccups, after all, and my queasy stomach too, as a bonus. The laughter helped relax Joan as well. She emptied her glass of wine, pushed her hair off her forehead, flushed from laughing and the drink, and exhaled an elaborated, relieved sigh. “Oh, God…I don’t know why I talked all that bullshit about the writing. It’s just greed. I could make money doing it and my boys are heading into college—”
“What does your husband do?” I interrupted.
“I’m divorced from my husband. I’m not married to the man I’m seeing. And I’m not sure we’re together anymore.”
She told me about her current lover. I told her about Stefan. Again I had talked about my life instead of learning what I could about Ben. We reached the end of the meal and I still hadn’t gotten to it. I urged her to walk me back to my office. New York was cardboard gray, hopelessly sunless, the air wet and cold, like a rebuke, smacking your cheeks with hostility. In spite of the damp, I kept us circling the block around my office building while she told me, to my surprise, that Ben was an extremely attentive lover for the first years of their relationship. After t
he actual marriage, he withdrew, became hostile, seemed to lose interest; yet Ben complained that Joan was at fault and had continually rejected him sexually. “We always seemed out of synch,” was her final judgment. She winced at the wintry wind. “When I was sexy, he wanted to gamble. When he—I always got the feeling he wanted to fuck me, you know? Not make love. He would come home from losing and I was supposed to be his consolation prize. It’s the old story—sex was sex to him. I wanted to make love when we were intimate, the dessert course. He just wanted it whenever he felt lousy: just the pure pleasure, that’s all.”
“Like an animal.”
“No,” she argued. “Like a male animal.”
I nodded. We had reached the entrance to my building yet again. I peered off down the long avenue and tried to calculate whether any of this information was helpful.
So was Joan evidently: “Does that sound like a child molester?”
“I don’t know—no. But he wants women to be passive, do as they’re told.”
“I don’t know, maybe this’ll offend you, but…I think he’s fragile.”
“No, he’s not. He’s as stubborn—”
“Oh he’s stubborn too”—she took hold of my sleeve and tugged, urgent that I understand her meaning—“but underneath all the selfishness, he’s a baby, you know? Not a teenager like most men. Most of them are still in high school. I mean he’s a child. Wants to be babied, reassured, pampered. Did you ever meet his mother? Oh, no, you couldn’t have. She died while we were married. Well, I looked forward to seeing them together. You know, I had read Portnoy’s Complaint and I had a very specific idea of what a Jewish mother was supposed to be like—”
“And she didn’t fit the bill,” I said, irritated at the line she was taking. An inattentive mother doesn’t make a man a killer.
“She did and she didn’t. She was suffocating, but she was indifferent too. He had to perform for her to get her attention: he had to be topping somebody else. She’d tell him what great successes or failures all the sons of her friends were, like she was rating him.”
“That’s true of lots of mothers—”
“I know, but I had the feeling she never babied him the way Jewish mothers do—this sounds anti-Semitic. I just mean it wasn’t that she didn’t love him, but I got the feeling she wasn’t sure she wanted to love him. That he was never, not even for a year or two, the adorable creature, the perfect little baby every mother loves.”
Ugly from the beginning? Never loved? “You’re making me feel sorry for him.”
“Sorry for Ben?” We both smiled at the thought. “That’s a mistake. That’s what we always do. Make excuses for them. But I just don’t think he’d molest…he loves his daughter, doesn’t he?”
“They tell themselves they’re loving them when they do it.”
“Did it happen to you?” she asked. “Did your father bother you?”
I have no idea why she thought he might have. Oddly, I had to consider for a moment, as though incest was something that might have occurred without my knowledge. No, Daddy had never touched me. Except to hit.
“No,” I told her, and said I had to go. We promised to talk often, and meet from time to time. I liked her on the whole.
Later that day I realized her escape had been narrower than she thought. She’d dropped Ben for another lover who was available because…well, Joan must have been very attractive when young. Would she have had the will to leave Ben without someone to escape to? We all have trouble (especially after years of struggle against it) admitting that in this society cosmetics, not biology, is destiny.
ON MY WAY HOME THAT EVENING I PASSED THE HOMELESS man Wendy and I kept track of, the one who slept on the protected church stairs opposite our building. He was out at the corner to greet the rush-hour pedestrians, begging.
I had a load of groceries in each hand and couldn’t easily reach for change.
“What can we do for him?” I once challenged Wendy while she was in a guilt fit about him.
“Give him money!” she snorted.
“If he’s an alcoholic it would kill him. Might kill him even if he isn’t.”
Wendy stared down at him, huddled in his enclave. She squinted through the French doors of our dining room for a long time, thoughtful, while I read Naomi The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Stefan was in a session. Ben was late getting home.
“We could give him food!” Wendy announced proudly.
I mocked her idea, embarrassing her charity with practical arguments: Where would he cook it? Where would he store it? How would he protect it from other, stronger homeless men? What would she buy him? and on and on until our husbands arrived and her notion was lost.
When I reached the homeless man on the corner that night, I handed him my two bags of groceries.
“Huh?” He took them awkwardly. He had to let them drop almost immediately, he was so weak. “You want me to carry them for you?”
“No. They’re yours. They come from Wendy Sonnenfeld.”
I rushed off before he could ask me more, before the few startled middle-class passersby could comment.
Later I watched him from the window, rooting through the bags. I couldn’t bury Wendy. I had despised her memorial. What else could I do to honor her? It was the one tribute I was allowed to make to my best and only friend.
UNREMEMBERED SINS
I DECIDED TO SAY NOTHING TO BEN ABOUT THE CREMATION. As far as I knew he hadn’t told Naomi. Anyway, I hoped not.
It snowed on the morning of Naomi’s birthday. Not much, but enough to cover New York’s dirty gray with a light frosting of confectioners’ sugar, appropriate to our celebration. Anxious for everything to be right, I got us to the ice-skating rink an hour and a half early. They provided a small room in the back where we could serve cake. Two card tables, shoved together and covered with a bright yellow disposable plastic tablecloth, were already set up. Ben and I supplied the rest—cake, paper plates, cups, milk, and juice. The private room was painted green, the sort of washed-out color found only in institutions—is it surplus paint? Does anyone ever actually choose that shade? The windows were of the factory casement variety, double height, double width; they would have let in plenty of light except they faced another building’s wall. The room seemed to me like a coffin. Having a birthday party at this rink had been recommended by several magazines, Naomi had enjoyed a party she attended there, and Janet (Holly’s mother) had confirmed it was good. Certainly it was expensive enough. I decided the luxuries of New York child rearing were pretty dismal—a frozen pond and my mother’s kitchen would have been better than this East Side palace.
I told Ben to set up the plates and cups and to put the candles in the cake in the back room while I went out to the rink to greet our guests by the entrance. He agreed to this division of duty. He did not seek a confrontation with the parents, as I had feared. Maybe a month of seeing them at school each morning and afternoon had sated his appetite for disapproval. Maybe this kind of drop-off was too personal, too intimate, even for him.
Naomi’s four best friends were—remarkably—each accompanied by a pair of parents, mother and father, flanking them like armed guards. Their grim faces—probably concealing fear—eased, even cheered up, at the sight of me beside a bouncing Naomi. She brimmed with feeling that day, eyes glistening tearfully at the slightest provocation, regardless of whether it was a cause for happiness or sorrow. She hugged me and almost cried when she opened my present; she almost cried when I said she couldn’t wear her formal dress to skate in; she almost cried when Ben said in the taxi, “You’re the best girl in the world,” apropos of nothing. All day, she hopped and squealed, too excited for her own peace of mind. It was as if the emotion no longer fit inside her—square-pegged happiness bouncing off the sad round hole of her loss.
With the arrival of her friends, her pleasure was intense and painful. I understood the phrase—she was jumping out of her skin—for the first time. I wasn’t a model of relaxation, either, greeting
the parents and Naomi’s little guests with so wide and fixed a smile that I got an instant headache.
“He didn’t come?” Janet whispered while the girls mobbed Naomi, a couple literally clinging to her clothes.
“Ben’s here,” I answered. Comically, all of the parents leaned in to eavesdrop on my answer. I disliked them intensely for their alloy of skittishness and curiosity about Ben, although it was commonplace, understandable, and utterly human. On principle I wanted to reassure them—yet my heart wished them to remain uneasy.
“Should I stay?” Janet asked.
“There’s nothing to worry about.”
“Okay…”
“Let’s rent skates,” I announced to the girls. “See you at twelve,” I told the doubtful parents, and turned my back on them to lead the girls off to the rental counter.
Getting everyone set and on the ice, helping the two who had little experience (and less natural talent) was exhausting. But the girls, skilled or not, soon found a rhythm, and enjoyed themselves. The parents were gone when I got off the ice; Ben had stayed in hiding. I was about to ask one of the attendants to watch the girls for a minute while I checked on Ben when a handsome man appeared with another of Naomi’s classmates. “Hello, I hope we’re not too late,” his voice boomed theatrically.
Naomi saw the extra guest and immediately glided over; she moved with natural grace, no hint of Ben’s lumbering or Wendy’s waddle. “Gina!” she called out. “I thought you couldn’t come.”
“My daddy brought me,” Gina said, and they both giggled hilariously.
“Hmmm.” The handsome father winked at me. “I think I’ve been had. I’m Tony Winters.” He presented his hand with a slight incline of his head, almost an old-fashioned bow. “I didn’t check with my—” He hesitated. “I hope we’re not crashing.” I took his hand—it was cool and firm. His brown eyes looked at me with an open and lively seductiveness; the gaze was not only greedy, but conscienceless, untroubled by its own lust.
“I’m Molly. Your wife left a message saying Gina couldn’t make it.”
The Murderer Next Door Page 22