This Body

by Laurel Doud

  And what about this Bennet family? Just what was her responsibility to them? She might never know what had really happened to Thisby — what was hinted at in those last few diary entries.

  … Uncle Roy told me why sometimes he's called Rob Roy and why that bugs the shit out of my dad. When he was a kid Uncle Roy read somewhere about a Scottish pirate named Robert Something-or-other whose nickname was Rob Roy. He raped and robbed his way up and down the countryside, taking what he wanted and making people pay for protection. That was the Rob Roy that Uncle Roy was attracted to, not the poor dude the movies are about. But somehow, the name got attached to Uncle Roy and my father. Uncle Roy and me laughed so hard. We thought it was the funniest thing, my father stuck with the name of a nefarious man and assumed to be a clone of another. In college, Uncle Roy said he lived up to the name because he liked to drink the cocktail called a Rob Roy — scotch, vermouth, bitters, and a maraschino cherry. That stuff is in our liquor cabinet. I'll show Rob Roy I can drink with the best of them. I always liked maraschino cherries …

  … Spent a night in juvie. Got picked up on South Street for panhandling. Mom busted a gut. Q hanging around. Got to get rid of the little shit …

  … What an old man you are, Puck. You're just like the parental units. The joke's on Thisby. Stupid old Thisby. Well, I know more than you think I do. I know better …

  … I'm trying to hold it together. I can't seem to run fast enough to catch up with myself …

  And the last entry …

  … that fucking fairy kiss …

  Was it important to know? It might have been that last thing or a series of things — or nothing at all — that set her slowly to kill herself. At least, to kill her brain. Do I really care? Is it my responsibility to save this family and leave my own to be saved by somebody else? Shit.

  But Thisby was dead. Katharine had her own future to forge, and Thisby wasn't a part of it.

  Act 2, Scene 2

  Knowledge can be more terrible than ignorance if one can do nothing.

  — JOHN JUSTIN, The Thief of Bagdad (1940)

  She stood in front of the multistoried building with its green-tinted windows. She felt seasick just looking at it. As Katharine looked up and down the street, she realized this was not what she had expected. She had thought Mr. Mulwray's office would be in a weather-beaten brownstone, like the ones in the old cloak-and-dagger movies.

  She glanced back at Thisby's Porsche, making sure she could see the bright-red Club clamped on the steering wheel, just as it had been when she found the car in the secured parking garage below the apartment.

  … Since he's goin' south, Uncle Roy says I can have his Porsche. It's his present to me. Uncle Roy is so cool. Yesterday he told Dad he was an old fart. Hard to believe Uncle Roy and he are twins. Dad says if I don't do better in school, I won't get my license or the FM2 and he won't let Uncle Roy give me his car. Shit, now he tries to get tough. I want that car. If I can transfer into yearbook or newspaper and take pictures, maybe I can make it. I've got to do some serious acting …

  … And they say I can't act. I got the Oscar for that performance. He backed down like always. I knew he would. I got my license. I got my car. I got the FM2 and I got my freedom. Fuck yes …

  Katharine had been prepared to detest the car. She had noticed that Thisby liked expensive things, regardless of how right-on and groovy she thought she was. Katharine had expected some sort of clichéd 911 Targa, black as death with tinted windows, one of those spoiler fins on the back, and chrome wheels with thick, squat tires. The car she found was a 1963 bathtub Porsche Speedster C, white with a black canvas top. The paint was dulled with age, there was a dent or two in the fenders, and the canvas top looked slightly dry and brittle. It was the car Katharine had wanted the summer she was seventeen. “You don't want a car like that,” her mother had said. I don't? “You want something you can take all your friends in.” All my friends? Let's see, there's Eve and then there's Eve. And even then, Eve didn't live long enough to ride in the car Katharine bought — a boxy, four-door, pea green Plymouth Valiant that someone pegged “the PG&E car.” It turned out to be a great buy, though, solid and long-term, surviving both kids and more than 200,000 miles.

  Katharine had approached the Speedster holding her breath, but the key slid into the lock and turned. She had smiled and slipped into the seat of worn leather that molded itself immediately to Thisby's derriere.

  Walking through the lobby toward the back of the building, she continued to be disappointed. She had been expecting, at least, a dark hallway ending at a door with J.J. MULWRAY, PI etched in curved letters across the opaque glass. Instead, she found a well-lit hallway and a solid door with a small plaque to the right that read, MULWRAY INVESTIGATIONS. Inside was a small reception room with a sliding glass partition separating the other rooms in the back. Katharine was sure that J.J. Mulwray had gotten a great deal on an old dentist's office. The glass partition was open, and she could hear someone in a back room.

  “Hello?” she called out through the partition.

  The noise of filing cabinets being opened and shut stopped, and a man's head appeared around a doorjamb. “You the lady who called this morning? Come on back.”

  Katharine's first glimpse of J.J. Mulwray was favorable. He did not look like he sounded. He looked pleasant. He was bald on the top, she knew, since he had leaned forward from the doorjamb and exposed the top of his pate. He had a good thick rim of gray hair, and Katharine wondered why he didn't let one side grow long and flip it over, the way most balding men did. She liked the fact that he didn't.

  She walked through the door from the reception room, past a secretary's desk that was covered with papers, and into the room Mr. Mulwray had leaned out from. The office was as cluttered as the front desk. Papers and manila folders were stacked on the desk, the credenza, the wooden chair on wheels, and even the floor around the feet of the desk. He was standing at a filing cabinet, pulling a thick folder from the drawer.

  “Take a seat,” he said, and placed the folder on top of the filing cabinet. He looked around, closed the drawer, unearthed a chair that Katharine had previously missed, and placed it in front of the desk. He went back around the desk, lifted the files from his chair, dumped them on the floor, and sat down. Using both elbows and forearms, he cleared a space in front of himself, pulled a yellow-lined legal pad from the right-hand drawer in the desk, lifted a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket, and looked up at her. “What can I do you for?”

  This time Katharine was ready. “I need information on some people in northern California.”

  “Financial? Criminal? Personal?”

  “Well, I guess you could call it domestic information.” Katharine began to fidget with a piece of paper in her hands. Am I deranged to be doing this? Could he get me into trouble? She swallowed. I gotta know. “It's a family.” She drew a deep breath. “I want to know about a family. I want to know how the kids are doing in school. I mean, I know it's summer, so how the last school year went.” She glanced down at the paper, which had a list of items she had made out the night before. She felt as if she were walking on thin ice — but if she stopped, it was a sure thing that she'd fall through. “I want to know who their friends are, who they're going out with. I want to know what sports they're playing and how they're doing.” She stopped for a moment, but he didn't interrupt her. She noticed that he did not write anything down on his pad either. “Their father has remarried. I want to know how he met her. When they got married. That kind of stuff. Their mother died a year ago. How did they handle it? What did they do for her funeral?” She looked at him squarely. “I don't know how much of this can be done.”

  He chewed the inside of his left cheek slowly. “Does the family move in protective circles?”

  It took Katharine a few moments to understand what he meant. “No, they're perfectly normal.”

  “Will the family be expecting this kind of scrutiny?”

  “No. Absolutely not. No
.”

  “You want to remain anonymous.”

  It was actually a statement more than a question, but Katharine responded, “They can't know anything about me.”

  “Okay. What else do you have on that little piece of paper?” He gestured to her hands.

  “I want to know if the kids are working. If they like their jobs. Anything and everything, no matter how small or trivial.” She looked down to check again. “I'd also like pictures.”

  “Of the husband and new wife too?”

  Katharine considered. “Yes, but not too many. I'd rather have more of the kids. Can any of this be done?”

  “Some of it may be easy. Some, more difficult.” He leaned back in his chair, elbows on the armrests, fingertips together. “I'll need to set up an informer and maybe a stoolie or two, to use an old police term. It may take a while to set up. Possible contacts may object because of loyalty, suspicion.” He circled the air with one hand to suggest “et cetera.” “Money may not be of any use. You sure the family and their friends won't already be setting up barriers?”

  “I promise you, no. They're normal people.”

  “Well, Miss —?” He pushed himself back farther in his chair.

  Katharine was afraid he might topple over, and she imagined his legs wiggling in the air above the desk like some sort of overturned giant beetle. “Bennet. Thisby Bennet.”

  “Well, Miss Bennet, I would like to be honest with you. I do not like child-custody cases. Kidnapped kids, yes, but —”

  “It isn't that kind of thing at all,” Katharine rushed in. “I just … want to know about them. I just want to know what's going on with them. I don't plan to contact them.” Not yet, anyway, and not in the way you would ever understand. “That's all.”

  Mr. Mulwray leaned forward swiftly and began writing on his pad. “Okay. It might take a while to set up. The bulk of the expenses will be in the initial transactions. Depending upon what is eventually put in place, the cost will level out and should continue at that price unless we need to add more informants. Now, if they are as normal as you say they are, there are advantages and disadvantages. I take it you don't care about investments or financial dealings?”

  Katharine couldn't help but smile. Philip with financial dealings? That would be a new one. But she thought that maybe Diana might have money. “I don't think you'll find anything of interest there, but I don't know anything about the new wife. I guess I'd like to know what she brought to the marriage. I certainly need to know if they're destitute. See what you can find, and I'll tell you whether it's of interest and whether I want to know more.” This could be kind of fun.

  “All right. You'll need to write out as much as you know about these people: names, schools, family, friends, enemies. Addresses, phone numbers if you've got them.”

  Katharine had anticipated this and had written out most of it in Thisby's apartment. It was scary how little needed to be put down to sketch out a person. It did not, of course, include how Ben hated mustard on his sandwiches or how Marion wouldn't eat chicken unless it was boned. That Philip wouldn't clean the bathroom but would wash windows. That Ben loved babies, that Marion thought of wonderful things to do on Mother's Day, that Philip had fallen in love with her when she thought no one else would. These things would not help the investigation but were the things she held close to her soul.

  She wrote out a check for his retainer that was more money than she expected but less than she would have balked at. He promised to call her in a week to let her know what he had been able to get started.

  And how about Thisby? It also had been so easy to narrow her life down to lines on a piece of paper. She could feel the wad of paper with the names of Thisby's family and friends in her back pocket. She realized she had been too hard on her just a couple of days ago. But now I have a few things to hold close to my soul about Thisby too …

  … I'm sure he could feel the Kleenex in my bra. I could just die …

  … Why do I always have to share my birthday with Christ and Kewpie? They promised this year it would be different but it wasn't …

  … What if I ran away and no one noticed? …

  She left exhausted, carrying the two souls, and with the added weight of it came a kind of stupor.

  Act 2, Scene 3

  You have a double tongue within your mask.

  — LONGAVILLE, Love's Labour's Lost, 5.2.245

  Katharine existed in a state of suspended animation. Time did not seem to move, yet the days slipped by without a ripple. She lay in bed until late morning and tried to take naps during the day. She felt like a teenager — not the teenager she had been, for sleeping in was something just not done in her family. Sometimes when she had been young, she stole into the living room to eat gumdrops from the cut-crystal candy jar with the chipped knob on the top. She would eat so many, heartburn would crawl up from her stomach into her throat and smolder there. She would tell her mother she wasn't feeling well, and her mother would allow her to be a daydreamer and lie on the couch. But not often and not for long. Philip always allowed himself to take naps as well as sleep in, which had irritated Katharine. Never weaken! That was the motto she had lived by as an adult. Mothers have to keep going, no matter how tired or sick they are. Never weaken!

  But it was becoming hard to keep up with her emotions, and they constantly confused her. Sometimes she would catch a scent or hear a sound that reminded her of home and family, and a part of her would throb like an amputated limb that insisted it was still attached. Then, just as quickly, she would revel in the silence, in the aloneness. The phone didn't ring. The TV was not on, blaring MTV and baseball games, and radios did not duel from separate rooms.

  Never weaken!

  But now she did.

  Mornings found her on the balcony, a place in the sun, the corners of the unopened newspaper on the deck snapping in the sporadic breeze. She had planned on reading more than just the front page, the movie reviews, and the gossip columns, but she ended up reading nothing at all. She had also resolved to go farther afield in her walks around Westwood, but she found herself remaining on the balcony, both hands gripped tightly around a mug of microwaved water. It was the heat of liquid that she wanted — not the flavor of coffee — and holding something warm kept her hands from twitching. She just sat and thought and discovered that she missed the strangest of things. How, although Philip was gone by the time she got up, his presence lingered with the smell of his well-browned toast. How Marion would show her the Far Side cartoon to enjoy, but, in truth, to drop her a hint so Katharine would get it. That Ben, despite his cool and detached demeanor, in times of stress would often be betrayed by his own body — a cold sore blossoming overnight on the side of his mouth. Katharine remembered how she would receive this sight with almost maniacal glee — she realized that he indeed was not as nonchalant as he appeared.

  It's a deception that being stripped of memories is the cruelest fate. Living with them is.

  She often felt that she was her own contradiction. She sat at opposite ends of herself. What she loved, she hated; what she wanted, she didn't deserve; what she missed, she didn't want.

  It was so much easier to go through the motions for a while and not think too much. Play out the play.

  She continued to go through Thisby's things. Entries from her diary kept surfacing in her mind like cue cards. She looked through the pictures that were stacked on the bookshelves, seeing them with different eyes. She even found a photograph that Thisby had taken on a trip to New York with her father when she was fourteen.

  … I'm back. What a trip. We stayed at the Hotel New York in Manhattan. It was old and it had these gargoyle heads along the top corners that you couldn't even see unless you had a telephoto. I got some great pictures. I've already developed them and they look awesome. In one picture there's this woman looking out her window. You don't see her right away. And then when you do, you realize she looks like a gargoyle herself. She's got this fleshy face and she's mad, like the
bellhop brought her coffee cold or she's been told bagels don't come on the menu. She's thinking about how to get back at him, like she's not gonna give him a tip or she's gonna write the hotel editor at the New York Times and tell them about the shitty service. Dad says it's good. Real good …

  One day she systematically went through all of Thisby's drawers, pulling out each item and scrutinizing it. She felt like some sort of pervert even though she knew she couldn't get arrested for fondling essentially her own stuff. She found herself looking for something. Did Thisby have a hiding place where she put things — things like sexy lingerie that she would never wear because she looked ridiculous in it, or maybe a vibrator that was sold under the auspices of a weight-reduction miracle, disappointed on one front but satisfied on another, or — maybe, maybe … like … well — underwear she wore when she had her period? Old ones already so stained from previous leakages, she didn't care? Am I sick? Is it just me? But this wasn't the kind of thing Katharine would have asked anyone. Certainly not her own mother, nor her daughter. How did other women not let themselves bleed all over their underpants? They can send a man to the moon but they can't make a good sanitary napkin. Dry weave, wings, flaps. You still bleed all over your underpants, waking up in the morning with crusty elastic along the crotch and your thighs flaking with red rust — leaving the underpants to soak on the floor of the shower, or in the toilet like a diaper. Or was it only her old body? Was her old crotch not within the range of the anatomically average? Is Thisby's? Or was this something her mother never taught her growing up? Was it a learned skill? Marion never seemed to be concerned, using tampons or napkins with seemingly equal fluency.