Love and Death in the Sunshine State

by Cutter Wood

  Some of these women devoted themselves to performing for the family, querying me on my extracurricular activities or starting some other line of inquiry fated to peter out in my trailing whispers. Others devoted themselves to my grandfather, placing a hand on his arm at every comment that even lightly grazed the realm of witticism. Still others, thrust unfortunately into a role for which life had left them singularly unprepared, sealed up as primly as a clam and stared at the half-drunk glass of chardonnay on which their lips had left a smudged pink stain. The sharp falsity of laughter, the practiced gesture of the hand placed on the arm: that these were somehow related to the orgiastic pulse of middle school, or to the dark-eyed girl with whom I ate lunch, was deeply unsettling.

  Having watched with Erin the theatrical gropings of two of our classmates backstage during a play rehearsal, and then turning immediately to the fluttering laughter of an octogenarian as my grandfather held her eyes with his own, I felt that whatever love was, it was laced from end to end with error and self-deception. It was not that I was determined to avoid the mistakes of my grandparents or my peers. I was simply terrified of the thing, had always been terrified, and it was this terror, resurrected by my own attempts to learn about a missing woman in Florida, that returned to me as Erin and I lay together at the Lynnette.

  In the end, perhaps it didn’t matter that our first time alone together was spent in such a stagnant manner. Everything might have gone on just the same if we’d found some sort of rapture that day. But what might otherwise have passed quickly was drawn out by that long and celibate afternoon, establishing a tentative cadence, and in this way we began our relationship. As Freud would have been happy to note, the sexual impulse cannot be stifled; it can only be diverted. And even before parting, we’d made plans to see each other again.

  Within days of returning to Iowa, I’d received a letter from Chipley. In a rushed dark pencil script, it read as follows:

  Cutter

  The detectives came to see me again. They said that they would try to get me 20 years for the murder of Sabine. I told them that I’m not giving up 20 years of my life for something that I didn’t do. They say that they have alot of D.N.A. evidence on me. When I tell them of course that they would have alot of D.N.A. evidence on me. Why, because we lived together. They can’t seem to understand. I know that they have blood in the apartment and in the car. But that blood that’s in the apartment must of gotten there when she would peel fruit and cut herself from time to time. I’m through talking about it. It just bothers me. Well I’m gonna get going for now. Catch ya later.

  Bill

  P.S. I wanted to let you know the books I wanted you to send when you have the ability to. I have just finished Stephanie Meyers New Moon (Good stuff). I would like to read the next book that’s in the Series. It’s called Eclypse. This Next Book reveals unanswered questions etc. where New Moon left off. Right now I’m finishing up the 3rd book in The Game of Thrones. A Clash of Kings. Pretty good stuff although it can be a little confusing.

  P.P.S. Who knows they could be reading my letter prior to mailing them. I wouldn’t put it past them.

  Sitting in my turret with this note before me, I saw the fire at the motel as clearly as if I stood before it. The streams of water wended between my feet, the smell of smoke lay heavily on my clothes, and the sky brooded above my head, and with what even then I thought of as a kind of Faulknerian detachment, I felt the meaning of this image unspooling inside me. Just as certain pieces by Bach were constructed as puzzle boxes, the first bars a cipher from which the rest of the composition could be deduced, I found in this fiery motel everything necessary to write. I saw Tom, rushing this way and that in pursuit of his own thoughts; Sabine, careering subject of her own whims, adopting toward the men in her life an attitude similar to the one she took with pets; and Bill, the rambling lover of mystery novels, who’d been unable to escape the violence of his own past. And in that fire at the motel I saw the ultimate finale.

  I wasn’t sure what part Bill had played in Sabine’s disappearance, but I had no doubt that he’d set fire to the motel. The sheriff’s office had confiscated his shoes and a blue Bic lighter for chemical analysis, and they considered his alibi weak. He’d been sitting on a nearby dock, he claimed. It made no sense that he would have set the fire. There was nothing to gain from it, and with all the attention on the case, the blaze only served to throw greater suspicion on him. It was precisely the senselessness of this act that drew me. It wasn’t a story I wanted to write as much as an essay on the urge to destroy, and I thought that if I could but arrange the broader history of fire in just the right way, it would culminate in the moment, frank and revelatory, when Bill struck a lighter.

  As winter eased into spring, I fixed myself intently on my task. I rose at ten or eleven, made a cup of tea, read a few of Orwell’s essays or a passage from Swann’s Way. Then, almost bursting with purpose, I threw my satchel over my shoulder, vaulted down the front steps, and marched through the snow to the blank and monolithic library. There, I absorbed myself in a near-fanatical research into fire, accumulating one instance after another from the historical record as the volumes multiplied around me in the fungal air of the reading room. Occasionally, needing to stretch my legs, I would set off for some far unknown corner of the building, half-blind in the storm of my thoughts but also almost painfully perceptive, as if simply to look at a thing was to rub myself against it. The whispers of two students in the stacks skittered like oil across the hot pan of my brain. The scent of a tangerine tormented me, and I envisioned it resting peeled in the fragrant palm of some undiscoverable undergraduate, she herself sitting no doubt on the wide inner sill of a chilly window annotating Keats’s letters, waiting already, without even realizing it, for the feverish tome I would soon unleash upon the world. Such sensations and imaginations sent me back to my desk, on my way inevitably passing by an aged scholar, bent down to the very rim of the table, the thick lenses of his glasses nearly grazing the page, or one of the true lunatics, hissing curses at unknown figures from behind an upside-down volume of Calvin and Hobbes. In my rush to return to work, I had only a flicker of compassion for these men. Never did it occur to me that forty or so years earlier, they too might have embarked, like myself, on their “research.”

  Later, I’d adjourn to a nearby bar to drink a whiskey and sink slowly, as if entering a familiar puddle, into the conversations of writers and drunks. Under the Bunsen-like influence of the liquor, the first sentences would begin to form themselves, slowly, the words tumbling till they notched into place, and by the time the sky had darkened, I was already ensconced in my turret. The work did not come quickly or easily. I was not content with a mere story, after all, or even with a philosophical explanation of arson; having examined them, I found the psychological and sociological perspectives ultimately unsatisfying. How could a discussion of emotional triads and psychotic markers fully encompass the sequence of events that would lead a man to set fire to the motel of a woman he loved?

  I had never entirely left behind my sixth-grade penchant for tragedy and disaster. Laboring to achieve the weighty tone that would both intimidate and seduce my reader, I set to writing my brief history of the various fires that from time to time had consumed some portion of humanity. I had (I thought of my collection then even as a boy might) all the best fires. There was the Great Fire of London, so well described by Pepys, after which the city had been built again almost as if a dream made real by the great architect Wren. There was the burning of Rome, with its monkeys screeching across the roofs, as well as the burning of the Library of Alexandria and the legendary tracts therein. I had the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and the destruction of Lisbon in 1755, a disaster of incomparably comprehensive proportions, first in that it overlapped with a tsunami and an earthquake, and second in that it brought to an end the world-enwrapping Portuguese empire; it was a fire, too, that carried with it my essay’s first hints of psychological import, for the king had been caused su
ch trauma by the event that he would never again consent to live in a solid building and resided the remainder of his life with his court in an endlessly shifting city of tents.

  I was careful to also make note even of the smaller conflagrations, those for instance that consumed but a single soul, like the burning of the heretic Jan Hus, whose pyre would not catch until an old ragwoman, hoping to be helpful, offered the soldiers in charge her bundle of dry twigs. And I was in particular struck by the near-total destruction of Hamburg by the Allies in July of 1943, and by the description of the ensuing firestorm, which was said to breathe its oxygen with such force that people fleeing were sucked back bodily into the inferno, and birds in the outlying districts of the city dropped dead from asphyxiation. I fastened especially on the description of a single man, a young German seated on his balcony a few miles from the blaze. He watched the firestorm with, he was surprised to realize, a steadily increasing enthusiasm. “I had only one wish,” he wrote in his journal. “Let it get really bad.”

  From this giddy jaunt across the annals of death and destruction, I was diverted only by the overwhelming need, late in the night, to sleep, and waking up the following morning, I repeated the procedure almost point for point. There were just two disturbances of this monastic schedule. The first was the occasional letter from Bill Cumber. I had recently sent him a copy of Stephen King’s Needful Things.

  Cutter,

  What I’m about to say I don’t want you to take the wrong way but before I do I want to let you know that I am very thankful for all your help and support and I’m not ever going to look a gift horse in the mouth but I thought I sent you a list of authors and the titles of their books that I was interested in reading. Did you not ask me to provide it to you so you could send what interested me. I do like Stephen King but I had hopes on continuing the Stephanie Meyers series. When I got the S.K. book last night I had already been reading Stephanie Meyers second book New Moon. The next is Eclipse.

  The second disturbance was the arrival, every so often, of the documents I’d requested from the Manatee County Clerk of Court. It was in one of these that I first encountered the defense Bill had given when he’d been brought before a judge for his violation of parole, a long, rambling monologue that stretched on for pages in the court reporter’s transcription. “If I start talking in riddles,” he’d begun, “and stuff like that or whatever because, like I told you before, sometimes my thoughts get ahead of me and I try—and I don’t want to get ahead of my thoughts by talking too fast, so if I come to that point, stop me, please.” Then he’d gone on.

  I’m sorry to have to speak on this but it has to do with Tom was in control. He would—and Sabine abided by it, you know, she was like, well—how did she put it? Gosh, I can’t remember. It’s an agreement, yeah, an arrangement that we’ve made. I’m like, okay, you guys made an arrangement, well, the arrangement is I can’t be at the motel, I can’t be at your house, I can’t do this, I can’t do that, you know, whatever is going on, you know, I felt secluded. I couldn’t do anything. So we would have little arguments here and there about it. But then, you know, things started getting real stressful for us. And I had quit smoking for her on her birthday. Well, I started smoking again and she didn’t like that. All right? Smoking, boom, we get in an argument, she takes off. Now after that, she’s missing. Some three days later, I find out she’s missing. All right? And after that, who do they want to decapitate over the situation? Me. Because they brought up all my prison arrests, my conviction, whatever, my whole police record, my whole life history damn near was spread around out there like creamy peanut butter over freshly toasted bread, you know, just to single me out. Okay? Then the motel catches on fire. And who do they want to blame? Me. Because I just got out on parole from the arson charge. Okay? But I was somewhere else when this fire started. But apparently, the police didn’t want to believe that. They call my alibi weak. I can’t help that she left the house. I can’t help that. I don’t know what’s going on when she leaves the place, you know . . . I have no . . . I’m not . . . it’s just so . . . confusing.

  He concluded his defense some pages later. “You know,” he’d said. “I tried my darnedest.”

  6: The Worse Truth

  It will seem hasty if I say that at this point Erin and I moved in together, but this feeling of haste lies in part in the fact that I must condense here some months of blissful courting. We spent that spring fleshing out the story of our own affair with all the sorts of petting and chirping and planning—we would grow tomatoes, we would visit Arizona—that are so joyous to those who perform them and so onerous to those who must witness them. But I was the one who nudged the relationship along. I suggested we meet one weekend in Chicago. I booked the hotel; I made the dinner reservations. In the morning, I went out and got us coffee, and I led her through the Art Institute, always a half step ahead.

  After, in our room, where everything—floors, ceiling, walls, trim—was painted in the same eggshell white, and where the only window looked out on a brown brick wall, so that there was no way to tell which way we faced, I lay in bed watching through the bathroom door as she readied herself for dinner.

  “Do you always wear makeup?” I said.

  “When I’m going out.”

  “What kinds?”

  “Mascara,” she said. “Sometimes lipstick.”

  “What else?”

  “Undereye concealer,” she said. “But that’s a secret.”

  I was in the doorway of the bathroom now, watching her as she leaned in close to the mirror. “You don’t need it,” I said.

  “That’s what all men say. You don’t know what I look like without it.”

  “Don’t wear the lipstick, at least,” I said.

  There was a short step up from the bedroom to the bathroom—they must have laid new plumbing, I thought—and she came over to me and stood on that step, so that our eyes were nearly level. And knowing that it was an unwise suggestion, knowing, too, that I didn’t yet mean it, I said I thought she should move to Iowa.

  She did not say yes then. Beyond smiling, she did not react at all. She went back to the sink and finished putting on her mascara. She put her lipstick away in her purse and began to gather her clothes, putting on first underwear, then bra, then a blue dress, which, standing again before the mirror, she pulled at here and there adjusting it into place. I lay back on the bed, enjoying this ritual of getting ready, which I had complicated just slightly, and as she brushed her hair, I looked forward to dinner.

  I don’t think I made the suggestion out of love—we had hardly begun to know each other—but neither do I think it was made on entirely faulty premises. At least in part, it was an experiment. I wanted to see what she would say, how it would affect the evening, the weekend, the days after, the forked path of our two lives, and having made a habit of considering and reconsidering every act in my life, I wanted to see how it felt to be the impetuous one. Perhaps, too, I still wanted to make up in some way for that afternoon at the motel. There was something protective in the act. It seemed to me that by behaving rashly, by behaving unlike myself, I was shielded not only from accountability but also from the distress if she said no. I was half joking, I told myself. Tomorrow, I could just as easily suggest the very opposite. It was her fault if she took me seriously today. There was even, in my rush to yoke our lives together, a first element of, if not cruelty, some precursor of that emotion. I knew that I was moving ahead of my own feelings, and I knew that I was suggesting something unwise for her, nearly impossible—asking her to throw over her life for my own, leave behind work, friends, the streets she walked down and the windows she looked out of, the whole structure of her days. But I wanted this. I wanted to possess the figure in the mirror, to call up her face as simply as pulling a glass from the cupboard. I wanted the path of her life to bend to my own.

  We walked to dinner arm in arm, dressed in clothes that neither of us felt comfortable wearing. My tie kept blowing over my shoulder, and
above the scrape of my shoes, the staccato tap of her heels echoed in the empty street. The restaurant was in a district of warehouses and auto garages, the lights and the din of conversation perceptible even from far away. We sat out on the sidewalk still hardly speaking, while the dishes came out one by one: whitefish, meatballs in a spiced ragu, a roasted hen. The day had worn on us, we were tired and hungry, and it was only as the food arrived that we again picked up our conversation. As each new dish was settled onto the table, I warmed a little more to my own proposal.

  “What’s crazy,” I said, “is the idea of living a thousand miles apart. It doesn’t make sense. Either we’re going to wait around a few years and move in together anyway, or we’re going to call the whole thing off. We might as well figure it out now.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “That’s not how it works.”

  “Quick is the way to do it,” I said. “Like taking off a Band-Aid.”

  “Then move in with me.”

  “Let’s not get off topic,” I said, and refilled our glasses with wine. “We could even buy a house.”

  There is a fundamental difficulty in describing the attributes of one’s beloved in that first flush of love, let alone in picking out which among them is the prima mobilia of one’s feelings, and this is that one’s delight infuses all aspects—not only of the beloved, but also of the scenery surrounding her—with a luminous charm. The whiteness of the tablecloth, the couple nearby in the midst of some marital dispute, the anxiety of the young waitress, who, walking toward the bar, repeated solemnly to herself, “Gin, up, dry, twist, gin, up, dry, twist”: these things in their fitting loveliness were indistinguishable from the woman who sat across the table from me, lost in thought above the menu, one hand of its own accord reaching up to twirl a strand of brown hair.