Kevin looked glum, but he didn't argue; his god had spoken. I stood up. "Look, I'm exhausted," I said. "If anyone has any more angles on this, let's talk about them in the morning."
"Would you like someone to drive you home?" Harold asked from the corner of the room. I had a feeling there was more sarcasm than solicitousness in the question, but at this point I didn't really care.
"I can make it," I said. "Thanks for your concern, though. Good night, all."
I was almost out the door when I realized that I had left my raincoat in the kitchen. I retrieved it and felt in the pocket; the photograph was still there. As I left, the phone started ringing.
* * *
By the time I reached my car, I wasn't at all sure that I could make it home. Amanda was dead, and my emotions were still lying in wait for me, assassins seeking the right moment to strike. What better moment than this—the only time I'd be alone for God knows how long?
I felt unclean as well as exhausted. Amanda was dead, but I had spent most of the time since I had discovered her corpse worrying about the effect her death would have on me. It was inevitable, but it wasn't right.
I drove slowly out of the garage and onto the streets of the city. At a stoplight I took out the photograph and stared at it, at us. We made quite a couple.
There was me, of course, with my curly black hair and pale Irish complexion—the gray haze of my late-night beard just visible in the flash of the camera. I have seen so many photographs and editorial cartoons of this face of mine over the years that it scarcely registers on my consciousness anymore. But I never saw it like this—eyes closed, mouth passionately pressed against the mouth of a beautiful woman, a hint of bare shoulder in the corner of the photo—and the sight still made my heart skip a beat. This will not do, the politician inside me said. This will get me into trouble.
But my face was not worth studying. It was still there; the eyes still stared back at me from the rearview mirror. But, oh, Amanda...
She was blond, and her hair was straight; she kept it cut to just beneath her chin, in an angular style that complemented her fine, high cheekbones. Her eyes were closed in the photo and slightly slanted in a vaguely Oriental way. When they were open, they could seem cold and appraising—her whole face had the icy, haughty beauty of a Vogue model—but when she was happy, when her wide mouth stretched into an impossibly brilliant smile, then the eyes would sparkle with a joy that could leave you breathless.
And her hands, one of which caressed the line of my jaw: the long, ringless fingers, the perfect tapering nails—
A horn blared behind me. I put the photograph down and accelerated away from the light. Probably a good thing I didn't have a chance to think about the rest of her body, naked next to mine on the bed, about to open like a flower for me after the camera had done its job....
The body that now lay in a bag in a locker in the Southern Mortuary, that would soon be cut up by the medical examiner as he dispassionately recited what he found into a tape recorder. How little the tape recorder would know. How much the camera had seen.
Somehow I made my way onto the Southeast Expressway. The rain had started again, and I was having difficulty seeing the road. A car wreck would be a fitting end to the day.
Kevin's theory was not absurd. I was sure that it was because of me that Amanda had died.
I didn't know what had happened. It had all turned bad, and I wanted to blame her, had every reason to blame her, but I couldn't. The punishment was far worse than the crime. And I remembered the beginning, before the lies and the betrayal and the blood on the kitchen floor.
"Do you know what you're getting yourself in for?" I asked her before we made love for the first time, as we stood by her bed and I struggled to unbutton her blouse, my hands trembling with excitement, my eyes blurring with desire. A Brandenburg Concerto played in the background; our brandies sat undrunk on the glass coffee table in the living room.
Her dark eyes stared at me, judged me. "But the risk is all yours, isn't it?" she said. She unhooked her skirt, and it fell to the floor with a ripple of silk.
"I've made my choice to live in front of the public. You haven't."
She shrugged out of her blouse and unhooked her bra, which joined the pile of clothing on the floor. "I think I'm making my choice right now," she murmured, and she moved into my embrace. White breasts, black panties. Eyes that had judged me and found me worthy. Giving herself to me.
Oh God, life is cruel.
I was south of the city now, heading home. Liz, you have every right to be angry at me, but my future—our future—is at stake here. No, not so pompous. We've got a problem, Liz, a big problem. I'm begging you to help me solve it.
And Kathleen. I hadn't even thought about her yet. There'll be stuff in the papers, on the news, Kathleen. I'm sorry if any of this will hurt you. No, she didn't like apologies. Just give her the facts and let her make up her mind. Would she understand? Could she forgive?
I'd have to find out. Fighting sleep, I got off the highway and onto the long dark road that led into Hingham. My nice, affluent suburb. Went for me three to one in the last election. Amanda was dead. How many points would that lose me in Hingham? Would my wife help me? Would my daughter hate me? Steadman would have numbers tomorrow night. Amanda was dead. My wife and daughter were safely asleep in our cozy home, and Amanda lay in a bag in a locker. Harold apparently thought I had killed her, Marge probably did, too, and the Democrats were overjoyed. Amanda was dead, and I didn't want to do anything but think about that, think about her, but I couldn't, because the campaign never stopped, and my problems were only beginning.
I turned up the long drive that led through the mist and the pines to my house. I stopped in front of the garage and looked at the place, in darkness except for the light on over the side door leading to the kitchen. I was too tired to move, but I had to go in there, had to face Liz.
I looked down at the photo on the seat next to me. On top of the parking ticket. I sighed. We were such a beautiful couple. I pushed in the cigarette lighter. When it clicked, I pulled it out and laid a corner of the photo on it. The corner glowed for a while, and then the photo flamed up in the darkness as the fire consumed us, and I dropped it into the ashtray. The flame died away quickly, leaving behind only brittle black paper that crumbled to dust beneath my touch.
Then I got out of the car and went inside to talk to my wife.
Chapter 4
I stood in the middle of my safe, homey kitchen. I gazed at the refrigerator door covered with school notices and postcards and comic strips torn out of the newspaper; the ragged cookbooks on the shelf above the counter; the peeling paint in one corner of the ceiling, where water had leaked in past a rotting gutter during a summer storm; Kathleen's denim jacket slung over the back of a chair. No murders here.
I decided that I was hungry. I tried to remember when I'd eaten last. I should have grabbed something at Harold's, but food had seemed irrelevant until now, in my own kitchen, as I looked for ways to delay facing Liz.
I opened the refrigerator, and the sight of the familiar shelves of food seemed to add an extra layer to my sorrow and confusion. Amanda was dead. I would eat leftover tuna for the thousandth time, only it wouldn't matter, it was just the need to survive, to keep going, like lying to the press, like hiding my secrets from my campaign staff, like begging Liz for a favor she had no reason to grant. I added some mayonnaise—Liz never puts in enough mayonnaise—and ate the tuna right out of the plastic bowl. "Oh, Daddy, yucch," Kathleen would say. Well, she'd never know. When the tuna was gone, I rinsed out the bowl and left it in the dish drainer by the sink. Then I went upstairs.
I felt like an intruder, a criminal sneaking from one misdeed to the next. That hadn't been my tuna—Kathleen had probably been counting on it for her lunch—and this scarcely seemed to be my house anymore, no matter how much time I spent in it. And the sleeping woman I was about to disturb—well, things were better once, Liz, weren't they?
&n
bsp; I turned the bathroom light on so that I could see my way along the hall to our bedroom. The door was closed. I opened it and stood just inside the room for a moment, staring in at Liz as she slept. In the dim light she looked scarcely different from when I first met her, the same short blond hair framing the same thin, pretty face. The hair was frosted now, and the skin on her pretty face was not as smooth as it had once been. But I couldn't claim in my defense that she had let herself go. The beginnings of middle age had affected her no more than they had affected me.
What, then? What did I claim? My wife doesn't understand me. Hardly. After all this time she probably understood me better than anyone in the world. And perhaps that was it, although it wasn't an argument I'd like to make to a jury. My wife understands me too well. In her eyes I wasn't the glamorous young senator, one of the most powerful men in America, his name already bandied about for the presidential race two years down the road. No, I was Jimmy O'Connor, the mick lawyer from the seedy side of Brighton, begging her to marry him, making a fool of himself trying to talk about no-load mutual funds with her father, throwing up from nervousness the night before a big trial, always trying to be a little tougher and smoother than he really was. I was the guy who couldn't change a flat, who forgot birthdays and anniversaries, who put too much mayonnaise in his tuna. I was the guy who turned his back on a six-figure income and dragged her to candidates' nights in drab school auditoriums and parades in decaying industrial cities, who forced her to be the frozen-smiled hostess at countless fund raisers, who demanded that she do all sorts of things she hated doing with every fiber of her being—all in order to satisfy some silly ambition that had more to do with hormones than a desire to fix what was wrong with the world.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, can you see why I tried to escape from that kind of understanding?
Can you see why she did her own escaping when she got the chance—with me in Washington most of the time and Kathleen in school? Going back to school herself, to study... whatever it was that Cabot College was teaching her—humanistic studies or something. As far as I could tell, her program consisted of reading pop psychology books and dabbling in the occult. Coping Strategies 101. Practicum in Astral Projection. "I'm inner-directed and you're outer-directed," she explained once, with the condescension of a grad student who has recently learned the mysteries of the universe. "This can be a source of conflict between us, but it can also be the source of great strength."
I had told her the same thing (only without the jargon) when I was trying to convince her to marry me. So why hadn't we found the strength?
My fault, of course. No sense in even bringing up the question. She was willing to work on our relationship. Perhaps, it occurs to me now, going back to school was her way of working on it. If she could learn enough about the human heart, she could fix what was wrong between us. But I had to go to a committee meeting, to a caucus, to a roll call; I had to talk to constituents, to my staff, to the President; I had to do my homework on air pollution, on national health insurance, on mandatory sentencing. Above all, I had to campaign, always campaign. So what was I supposed to do?
Well, I wasn't supposed to have an affair; I was inner-directed enough to understand that much. Liz, I guess you know that things haven't been right between us for—
I walked over to my side of the bed and turned the light on. The phone next to the light was unplugged, as I had suspected. So she didn't know. "Liz," I said. My voice quavered; I'm not the sort whose voice quavers. She didn't stir. "Liz," I said. "Wake up." I sat on the bed and put a hand on her arm.
Liz opened an eye and shut it again. "Time is it?" she mumbled.
I shook her arm. "It's after one. Liz, I've got to talk to you."
Both eyes opened and blinked against the light. She pulled herself up to a sitting position and stared at me. She was wearing panties and one of my pajama tops. I mentioned once that I thought this was a sexy outfit to wear to bed, and she rarely wears anything else now—at least when I'm around. "What's going on?" she asked.
"Amanda Taylor," I said. All my mental rehearsals, and those were the only words that would come out.
Liz stared at me. If there was a reaction to the name, I couldn't detect it. "What about her?"
"She's dead. She was murdered. I discovered the body tonight."
Liz brushed a strand of hair out of her face. How many times had I seen her do that? This time was it a reaction? Oh, my God. Poor Amanda. It must've been awful for you. Nothing. Just her eyes, studying me. "Dead," she repeated finally, as if she were learning a word in a foreign language. And then: "Why did you discover the body?"
The time had come. I stood up. Lies wouldn't help, and delaying would only make it worse. "Amanda and I had an affair," I said. "It was over between us—I swear it was—but I heard that she might be going to write something about me. So I went to see her after the speech tonight, to try and talk her out of it, and that's when I found her. I'm sorry, Liz. You know how things have been between us. I never wanted to hurt you, but... I'm sorry."
Couldn't I have done better? The speech sounded hollow—lines from old movies. Liz looked away, as if embarrassed at my performance. She pulled up her knees and pressed her hands together in front of her face. How could you? What have I ever done to deserve this? I hate you. No. Not from Liz. "Am I the last person to find out?" she asked.
"About the affair? I don't know," I said. "You're the first person I've told anyway. I guess Harold and some of the others suspected, but they didn't say anything to me. At least not directly."
She shook her head. That wasn't it. "I mean, was it on the news? Do our neighbors know? Does my hairdresser know? Do Kathleen's teachers know?"
"The murder was on the news. I was on the news. I don't think they'll find any conclusive evidence about the affair. But there'll be suspicions, of course. There'll be rumors. You know how it is." Yes, she knew how it was. I realized that I had moved to the foot of the bed, to try to get her to look at me again. It was so difficult talking to her nowadays, even on topics much less dangerous than this. I sometimes thought a Ouija board would have been more effective.
And I thought: If only the affair was all I had to worry about.
She gazed at me over her knees for a moment, and then lowered her eyes. "Is Amanda the only one?" she asked.
"Yes, Liz. I swear it. I won't deny that I've had opportunities, down in Washington all by myself. But there haven't been any others."
She looked at me again, and I could see that she didn't believe me, and then her disbelief turned into misery. More than misery: terror. I got a dizzying glimpse of what must have been going on inside her before she lowered her eyes once more. She had been hurt, and now she would have to live in fear that she would be hurt again. You can't be married as long as we have without developing the capacity to inflict enormous pain on each other, I realized. Without being hurt by the pain that you yourself inflict.
"So this means trouble," she whispered to her lap.
Trouble for us or trouble for me? I decided she meant the latter. "Liz, something like this can destroy a campaign, even when there isn't any impropriety. Particularly when you're a candidate like me. You know what I'm talking about. I won't be able to bring up the issues or talk about my record. All people will be thinking about is the murder, the scandal."
"I'm sorry to hear that," Liz said.
Was she being sarcastic? Probably, but maybe not. I just couldn't tell anymore. I had to press forward. I went over and sat next to her on her side of the bed. I put a hand on her knee, half expecting her to brush it away. She didn't move. "You probably hate me right now," I said. "But I'm going to ask you to do something for me, and I want you to think about it very carefully before you answer." She crossed her arms, protecting herself. She met my gaze. "I want you to stand by me for the next couple of days," I said. "Answer questions at a press conference with me tomorrow. Go to Amanda's funeral. Show the world that you believe in your husband. I know this so
rt of thing is hard for you in the best of times, but see, you just aren't going to be able to escape it now. If you don't go to the press conference, they'll just track you down at school or wherever and make your life hell until you tell them what they want to know. The only chance you have to get things back the way they were is to say that everything is fine, as forcefully and as publicly and as soon as you can."
The argument had come to me only as I started speaking. Appeal to her self-interest. Not the self-interest that her husband would be disgraced and out of a job if she didn't cooperate, but that cooperating was the only way to get the world to leave her alone. It was a risky approach, but my lawyer's instincts felt good about it.
"Why should I bother?" she said. "I could kick you out of the house and demand a divorce. Once you've lost the election, no one will care about me anymore."
I nodded. "I know that would give you some satisfaction," I said, "and I'm not saying I don't deserve that sort of treatment. But think about Kathleen."
Didn't want to make too big a point about Kathleen. That would just give Liz an opening to accuse me of using our daughter as a weapon. "Did you think about Kathleen while you were screwing Amanda Taylor?" she asked.
I spread my hands in a peacemaking gesture. "I can't offer you a defense for what I did, Liz. I can only ask your forgiveness."
"You don't want my forgiveness," she said. "You want my help."
"I'd like both. But if I can't have your forgiveness, yes, your help is still important to me. Please, Liz."
Her face took on that exasperated, put-upon look I had seen so often over the years. How did I let this guy into my life? it seemed to say. The expression had been there even the first time I asked her to marry me, as we danced at my brother's wedding reception.
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