The Stranger Behind You

by Carol Goodman

“Bot,” it repeats. In the device’s neutral, non-accent the word sounds almost sweet.

  “I like it,” I say.

  “Me too,” Bot agrees. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  “Yes,” I say, “tell me what Twitter is saying about me today.”

  And she does. I sit in the wingback chair—Enda was right; this is the perfect place for it—looking out at the river as I listen to how the world is reacting to my story and its aftermath—and find that the world has moved on. Several more men—and a few women—have been accused of sexual harassment since I wrote my story. Actors, politicians, playwrights, coaches, doctors . . . the list, recited in Bot’s cheerful uninflected voice seems endless. There’s blowback, of course: the accused crying witch-hunt, the pundits fretting that sex and flirting are dead. A reprise of the letter those Frenchwomen wrote last year accusing the new movement of casting women as victims. And some of the cases do seem a bit shaky. A woman has bad, awkward sex with an actor, a geriatric entertainer’s hand drifts a few inches too low on a woman’s ass. The shaky cases are seized upon as signs that the movement’s gone too far. Osgood’s name is invoked as a victim of the “going too far.” And then another woman attests to how her career was derailed when she reported a playwright for groping her and nothing was done and the media takes up that case.

  I’m both relieved and chastened by how little Osgood figures in the overall narrative. His suicide has both confirmed his guilt and made it awkward to talk about him. He has become both a poster child for the #MeToo movement and its backlash. Others have taken up the fight. What do I still have to add to the discussion? More important, I wonder, looking guiltily at the unpacked boxes of notes, the closed laptop, and the beautiful view, what am I going to write a book about?

  I admit my quandary to Simon when he calls to check up on me a few weeks after I move in. “I’m not sure I really have anything more to add to the conversation. Do I look for more stories? Do I go over the stories I’ve already collected? Do I try some of the leads I didn’t follow?”

  Simon doesn’t say anything right away, and I’m afraid I’ve put him off with my self-pity. Simon once told me he didn’t do pep talks. I stare at Bot’s blinking blue light, wondering if I could ask her to weigh in, maybe program her to repeat supportive homilies.

  Then Simon’s voice emerges from the silver obelisk. “Going back over old leads sounds counterproductive. There’s a reason they didn’t pan out in the first place. Maybe, instead, you should be looking at what made Caspar Osgood the predator he became. I hear his father was an alcoholic philanderer. Anyway . . . I’m sure you’ll figure it out, kid.”

  I can hear his impatience. Simon’s got my back, but I’d better not waste his time.

  “I’d better,” I say, trying to make my voice light. “I’ve already spent a good chunk of my advance on my fancy new digs.”

  “Best motivator of all,” he says, “is paying the bills. Don’t forget you’ve always got a job here when you’re ready to come back.”

  And then he claims to have another call and gets off, leaving me wondering what happened to a grudge being such a good motivator.

  I ask Bot to play some classical music—something good for creativity—and she selects something called Brainwave Symphony, which claims to infuse classical pieces with “subtle pulses of sound to trigger your brain to produce states of enhanced creativity.” I’m expecting something annoyingly New Age, but instead the soothing notes of Ralph Vaughn Williams’s “The Lark Ascending” fill the apartment. “Nice choice,” I tell Bot as I unpack a box of files. Each file is labeled with the name of a woman I interviewed. If I stare too long at a name it begins to blur.

  I interrupt “Lark Ascending” to ask Bot to look up what causes blurry vision on WebMD and she lists a dozen causes, including brain damage, migraines, glaucoma, and psychological stress. Maybe it’s psychosomatic. I spent three years listening to the stories of women who were groped, fingered, pressed against, mouthed, ejaculated on. I was disgusted by the behavior they described, but somehow I wasn’t touched by it. Now I can feel every word on my skin—prodding, poking, pawing—trying to get in.

  Maybe that’s because my attacker might have done those things to me.

  The moment I think about the attack, that sickeningly sweet smell of chloroform stings my nose and I feel the suffocating cloth pressing against my mouth, shutting off my air, smothering me. I hear the scrape of keys in a lock—

  I startle out of the memory and realize I do hear a key in the lock. Someone is trying to get into my apartment. I turn and look toward my door and see that the doorknob is turning.

  No, I tell myself, it’s a trick of my damaged eyes, a hallucination like seeing Caspar Osgood on my fire escape. No one can get to me here.

  One of the bolts slides open.

  I rise up and levitate across the parquet to the door, my eyes fixed to the doorknob. It must be Enda or Hector thinking I’m not here—

  When am I ever not here? I haven’t gone out in the three weeks since I moved in. And why would either of them come in if I wasn’t here?

  I inch along the wall and touch the monitor. The hallway appears because I made that the default view at Marla’s suggestion, but the screen is blurred and out of focus. He’s broken the camera, I think, not sure who I mean by he but imagining Caspar Osgood’s bloated ruin of a face. I rub my eyes to clear them and a figure emerges from the fog. Not Caspar Osgood, thank God, but not Hector or Enda either. It’s an old woman so frail and insubstantial she looks as much a phantom as that apparition on the fire escape. I expect her to melt right back into the fog that fills my brain. Then she looks right at me as if she knows I’m looking at her and there’s nothing blurry about those sharp gray-green eyes and the look of desperation in them.

  Only a monster would ignore those pleading eyes.

  I only hesitate a second. Maybe two. Then I pull open the door and she falls across my threshold.

  Chapter Six

  Melissa

  TURNS OUT, LIFE insurance doesn’t have to pay benefits in cases of suicide if the policy is less than two years old. I know because I googled it the day after Cass died. I know that sounds cold—especially after all the crusading I’ve done these last three years for suicide awareness—but I was looking at the rest of my life without Cass’s income, two kids in college, and possible lawsuits because of that wretched Joan Lurie article. So forgive me if I needed to look at the bottom line.

  At first I breathed a sigh of relief. Cass has had life insurance since the kids were little. He made a big deal of it when I quit my job to stay home after Emily was born. He’d just come into his trust fund and Emily was fussy and Whit was in the terrible twos so we figured it made sense for me to stay home, but he also wanted me to feel secure. “If you’re sacrificing your earning potential to raise our children, you deserve the security of knowing you’ll be provided for if something should happen to me.”

  The big man. The paterfamilias. Cass loved to play that role. His father was an alcoholic philanderer who squandered his own portion of the family money, and Cass always swore he wasn’t going to end up like him.

  Well, look at him now. Apparently, as I learned from our accountant in the week after his death, Cass renegotiated his life-insurance policies two years back. That’s because he’d started borrowing on the first one three years ago and went through all the equity. He bought a new (cheaper) policy one year and eleven months ago that stipulated in the not-so-fine print that it didn’t pay out in cases of illegal activity, fraud, or suicide before two years had elapsed.

  He couldn’t even wait one lousy month.

  Or be bothered to make it look not like suicide.

  No, he had to tweet his goddamned suicide note out to the whole world. As if this scandal wasn’t bad enough, like he was deliberately trying to ruin our lives.

  I am so sorry to all the women I have hurt, most of all my wife Sweet Melissa. And to my son and daughter, please
forgive me.

  #SoSorry and #SweetMelissa trended for a week on Twitter. What the hell? Cass didn’t even like the Allman Brothers! He hadn’t called me Sweet Melissa since college, and then only ironically because Simon liked the song before he switched to jazz and Motown because that’s what Cass and his friends listened to.

  I considered suing Manahatta, but Greg and Wally told me I should let it go, that public sympathy would veer in my direction if I simply remained quiet, but I was sick of playing the dumb wife and I certainly wasn’t going to listen to Greg after that weird grope. I still felt nauseated when I thought about his hands on my body, but I was afraid that if I mentioned anything to Wally about it, she’d bring up how much I’d had to drink that night and I couldn’t bear to see that look of pity on her face again. But that didn’t mean I had to follow their advice. I issued a statement that my husband had been hounded to death by a witch-hunt, that I personally blamed Joan Lurie, Simon Wallace, and Manahatta magazine for publishing unfounded rumors, and that I planned to pursue my own legal recourse. Let Simon Wallace and his slut reporter worry about their own necks for a change.

  My lawyer told me I’d played into the insurance company’s hands; I’d all but confirmed that Cass’s death was a suicide. It turned out he was right. The insurance company declined to pay out. As if that wasn’t enough, he then confirmed my fears that there could be forthcoming lawsuits against the estate but that I didn’t have a viable case against Manahatta. And worse still, when I dug out the file marked “Ardsley House” I found out that Cass had taken a home-equity loan on the house last year. The house was in the name of his S-Corp (“That’s to your advantage should I predecease you,” he told me when we bought the house twenty years ago.) so he’d been able to take out the loans without my signature. There was barely a quarter million left from the one million I thought we had in equity.

  The Hamptons house, which was also owned by S-Corp, had practically no equity at all.

  Our broker at Merrill Lynch told me that Cass had sold most of our mutual funds last year. I thought there at least must be money in the LLC that Cass had formed twenty years ago to buy the Globe, but when I met with the accountant he explained that Cass had drained his own account in the LLC and then distributed partnership interest to outside investors. Because he wasn’t a majority owner of the Globe anymore, the board had been able to push him out. One of the board members contacted me the week after his death to tell me that since he had resigned, his pension was “nullified.”

  In other words, I was broke.

  If I sold both houses I’d have less than half a million to my name for the next sixteen years, until I turned sixty-five and could draw on our 401(k) and other retirement funds, and even those, I learned from our broker at Merrill Lynch, had been borrowed against and nearly drained.

  No wonder Cass had taken his entire bottle of Ambien and a dozen OxyContin and gone for a midnight swim. He wasn’t just facing public shame from Joan Lurie’s story; he was staring down financial ruin.

  Which he left me to deal with.

  For the first few weeks I considered joining him. I know that sounds horrible, but for the first time I could understand how the thought of suicide could get inside you and prey on you. It was like an earworm, a song you can’t get out of your head, crooning, Who would miss you? You weren’t even enough for Cass to live for. Then I heard Emily wailing the same thing—How could Daddy leave me? Why wasn’t I enough of a reason for him to live? and I realized I had to pull myself together for her and Whit’s sake. I took Emily to a therapist in Scarsdale and got her a prescription for Celexa. Whit was harder to deal with.

  “All the tripe he fed me about suicide being the coward’s way out,” he railed in the limousine after the funeral (a sad, underattended event at Westchester Hills). “What a hypocrite!”

  That’s what he was saying to you? I thought, remembering that touching scene at Whit’s hospital bedside. I had thought he’d been telling Whit how much he loved him. “You’re a braver and better man than him,” I told my son.

  I was terrified for Whit. I knew from my work for SAD that having a parent kill themselves made it three times more likely for that child to commit suicide. I couldn’t find a statistic for having both parents kill themselves, but I knew it wouldn’t be good. So I told those voices urging me to end it to shut up; I had to stick around for Whit and Emily’s sake. Fortunately, thanks to their summer jobs, they did not have to watch their childhood homes get dismantled. I put both houses up for sale in the third week of August. I knew it didn’t look good to sell so soon after Cass’s death, but I needed the money before the second installment of fall tuition came due.

  Wally came over to help me organize the estate sale at the Ardsley House. “People will come just to gawk,” she said, slapping red stickers on the Waterford crystal and Minton china. “But they’ll buy, too, so they can point to their loveseat and say that was from the disgraced publisher of the Globe.”

  “Good,” I said, “let them have their grisly souvenirs. As long as I get enough to pay Emily and Whit’s tuition.”

  “Have you given any more thought to where you’ll go?” she asked—not for the first time. “Pat and I have discussed it and we’d be happy to lend you our summer house on Nantucket.”

  I thanked her for the offer of the house but said I needed to be closer to the city to get a job.

  “How’s the job hunt going?” she asked with an embarrassed look, as if having to get a job (as opposed to getting one for the fun of it) was akin to contracting an STD.

  “I’m having lunch with Sally Jessell next week. Sylvia set it up . . .” I paused, thinking about the call I’d gotten from Sylvia the day after Cass’s death. She’d only called to give her condolences but when she asked if there was anything she could do, I asked if she could help get me a job. She’d seemed surprised, but then she offered to hook me up with her friend Sally. “I’m hoping she’ll give me a column at Image,” I tell Wally. “I went to journalism school after all, and worked on the Times for eight years before I quit to raise my children. I have skills.”

  “Of course you do, honey.” Wally patted my arm as if I were a five-year-old bragging I could ride a pony. “And you have so much still to give the world. And so much to say. Don’t you let that Lurie woman have the last word.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, dusting a Meissen serving platter.

  “I saw in Page Six she got a book deal for over two million.”

  “Over two million? For that little—”

  “Just wait. I bet it sells all of five copies. Don’t let it bother you, Mel. You’ll come out of this just fine. . . . Are you really selling this beautiful Burberry coat and matching hat? I love how this set makes you look like a Russian spy.”

  “Oh,” I said, fingering the heavy black twill fabric, “this is actually an extra. Cass bought the first one—a limited edition—on an anniversary trip to London and when he saw how much I loved it he knew I’d want a second in case anything ever happened to the first. I know that sounds crazy—”

  “Not at all,” Wally said, wiping her eye. “Whenever I find something I really like I buy an extra one. Life is so uncertain, why not have a spare . . .” Her voice trailed off as we both contemplated the sad reality that there were no spares for her son and my husband. “What a devoted husband Cass was,” she said, squeezing my hand, “to know you so well. I just can’t believe . . . Well, anyway, why don’t I take them to the consignment shop I use. I’ll get you a good price on them.”

  I let her take the spare Burberry coat and hat. How ridiculous it struck me now that I had thought I could protect myself from loss by buying duplicates. Still, when I watched her walking to her car with the coat draped over her arm I was struck by a feeling of loss so strong I sank to the floor, wrapped my arms around my knees, and wailed into the empty, echoing house. I wasn’t even sure what I was mourning: Cass or our life together that always seemed so safe because there was always an
extra for anything we might lose.

  A WEEK LATER, on a sweltering day, I drove to the Metro-North train station, a stack of my résumés printed on linen stock tucked inside a leather portfolio on the passenger seat. As I waited for the train, I thought of the year after college when I was living with my parents in nearby Scarsdale and commuting into the city for my job at the Times. I’d loved getting dressed up in smart suits and crowding in with all the other morning commuters, buying a buttered roll at the station. Older passengers would fold their Times or Wall Street Journal in precise quarters and turn the pages without ever having to spread the paper open. I wanted to be like them. Doing the crossword puzzle in ink, calling the conductor by name, drinking G&Ts in the bar car on summer Fridays. Why had I forgotten how much I liked going to work? How had I ended up with such a different life?

  Cass. Cass is how. And why.

  That first year out of college we agreed we weren’t ready to live together. Nor would we have been able to afford to. People always thought Cass was rich because his family was WASPy old money, but no one knew his father had squandered all the money except for a trust fund put aside for Cass by his grandparents that didn’t pay out until he turned thirty. So he lived in a fifth-floor walkup in Chelsea, before Chelsea was nice, that he shared with two other guys working at the Times: Simon Wallace, who was still his friend back then, and someone named Vince, who was always late on the rent and moved back to Texas after a year. Cass and Simon worked in feature news and I worked in style. We didn’t think it would look professional for people to know Cass and I were dating, so when he passed my desk he would call me Miss Krantz and act super formal. It was fun—and sexy. That’s what a lot of these MeToo-ers don’t get—how sexy offices could be back in those days. The older newsmen were gallant and the younger ones flirted. Sure, there were the ones you had to watch—the handsy typesetter who would paw you when you delivered proofs to his desk, the advertising guys who were always making crude jokes and ogling the secretaries. But Cass was never like that, even though he could have had his pick of the women. He wanted me, even though I was from new money not old money, and grew up in Scarsdale not Greenwich.