Compromising Positions

by Susan Isaacs

  Mary Alice smoothed her fine blond hair with her tiny, babylike hands. “No,” she asserted. “I’m sure she didn’t know, because he said he could always account for every minute of his time.”

  “What did he mean by that?” I’ve had weeks of frenetic activity and couldn’t account for more than a half hour.

  “Well, he’d call her. From the motel.” I must have stared at her, because she sat straight up and began to explain. “You see, he’d tell her he was at the dental clinic at North Shore Hospital, about to start working there, and that he missed her. That way she couldn’t call his office and find he was taking too long for lunch.”

  “I see. Well, then, did he ever mention anything about his business affairs? Was he making enough money?”

  “He once said there’s more to life than just being a periodontist. He wanted to experience everything and have style.”

  “What did he mean by style?” The cool, long-fingered elegance of characters in a Noel Coward play came to mind. But Bruce Fleckstein’s hairy chest sticking out of a flowered Qiana shirt?

  “Style? I don’t know,” she admitted. “But he wore black underwear.”

  “Black underwear.” If I found a man pleasing enough to join in a motel room, what would I do if he unzipped his fly to display black underwear? Would I laugh? Would I politely excuse myself? “Mary Alice, did he ever mention anything about pornography?”

  “He showed me some pictures a couple of times.” She wiped the moisture from her glass off the table, folded her napkin neatly, and placed it in the garbage can. “Do you have any tissues?” she asked.

  “Upstairs in the bathroom. What kind of pictures?”

  “Pictures. You know, Judith.” She was beginning to sound exasperated. She gazed angrily into the garbage.

  “I don’t know, Mary Alice. Tell me.”

  “Pictures. Of women doing things. Like playing with themselves. Or using a big thing.”

  “Thing,” as I had known since about age eight, was a cutesy synonym for penis. “Using a big thing? Do you mean a dildo?”

  “Yes. I need a tissue.” She walked out of the kitchen, the heavy, lumbering walk of someone hugely obese or terribly tired. A moment later she returned, clutching a wad of green tissues.

  “What kind of pictures were they, Mary Alice?” She gazed at me blankly. “I mean, were they in color? Professional-looking?”

  “I don’t remember. I think they were in color.”

  “Were they taken with a Polaroid? Were they square? Sort of stiff?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, staring at the white tile floor. “I have to go home now.”

  “Okay. I’ll speak to you in a couple of days. Do you have Claymore’s number?”

  “Yes.” I followed her into the living room, where she retrieved her jacket from the couch. “I’ll speak to you,” she said.

  “Fine. Don’t forget that if you’re going to take that lie detector test, time is a factor.”

  “I won’t. Bye.” I watched as she strode rapidly down the path toward her white Mercedes. Keith had its negative, in black. Then, drawing a deep breath to insulate myself from the cold, I chased after her.

  “One more question,” I called over the purr of the car’s ignition. She peered straight ahead, as though I hadn’t spoken. “Did he show you those pictures before or after he took pictures of you?”

  “After.” She gunned her engine and roared out of the driveway.

  I stood watching her car’s exhaust trail waft over the snowy lawns until I realized that my ankles and feet were painfully cold. I dashed inside, taking a deep breath of the dry, heated air. Mary Alice had seemed so startled when I suggested that the photographs had been taken with a Polaroid, just as hers were. Or had it been an act? Could she really have repressed the unavoidable conclusion that M. Bruce liked to show his work around? Had she been that stupid, that pathetically passive, that she had not confronted him immediately?

  And, I wondered, climbing upstairs, why hadn’t she called Claymore immediately? She had asked for legal advice and gotten it. Was she afraid she’d be too emotional and flunk the lie detector test? Could she really believe that by gritting her teeth and letting time pass, the whole thing would go away?

  I had vague answers to these questions, but the unfathomable one remained: Why had she let this happen to her? I could comprehend part of it, certainly. But it was as if I were holding a diamond in my hand. I could count the facets, ascertain the carat weight, probe for carbon flaws. And yet, despite exhaustive examination, the damned thing wouldn’t sparkle for me.

  For example, I realized I had as much prurient interest as the next person. At a fraternity party at Wisconsin, I had been barely able to contain my delight in viewing Three Sailors and a Girl, complete with false noses and a cast of four abysmally unattractive people, all with bad skin. It wasn’t Wild Strawberries, but I reveled in it, roaring when the ejaculate rushed back into the penis when the film was rewound. But it did not in the least tempt me to take off my plaid skirt and blue tights and pose.

  I had no trouble at all understanding Mary Alice’s need for a passionate sexual encounter. After all, what more is demanded from any of us besides a clean kitchen floor, two or three or four reasonably amiable children, and a steak and salad at seven o’clock? No one even cares any more if we can type. But a lover would. A lover would notice that we shave under our arms twice a week. Or that we reread King Lear once a year.

  But Mary Alice and Scotty and several other women had gone beyond a little extramarital clitoral stimulation, beyond sharing their bodies and their thoughts. They had given Fleckstein their core of privacy, their soul. Or had he taken possession of them? Had he been an evil to be exorcised? Thinking it over, I knew that Lucifer as periodontist was too banal, even for Shorehaven. And isn’t a contract with the devil a two-party agreement?

  And how open should we be? I could not imagine telling Bob everything, even in those days in graduate school when I loved him without qualification. I kept back my sexual fantasies as I kept back my other fantasies—my Pulitzer prize in history, the friends of his I’d date after he died at forty of a heart attack.

  Perhaps, if he insisted, I would own up to wanting a Pulitzer prize, but I wouldn’t give him even an outline of my acceptance speech.

  I truly could not comprehend Mary Alice’s letting herself be persuaded by a stranger, albeit a slick one, to tell all—and then allow it to be recorded for posterity. What did she hold back, keep for herself? Or was I wrong? Was it better to let everything go, to divest oneself of all those quirky little vestiges that adhere to the psyche, to say to the world, “So what?”

  I mulled this over all day but came up with no answers. When Kate came home from school, I asked her what she had done. “Nothing much. We talked about Japan.” She too had her world. Would she grow out of it and lie in bed with a boy her first week at Radcliffe or Brown and tell him everything? Or would she be a chip off the aging block, a throwback to the outmoded Era of Privacy, her mother’s daughter?

  By eight forty-five the next morning, Thursday, I grew weary of thinking alone. I called Nancy, my last iron in the fire, and invited myself over.

  “All right. I’ll just call Little Cupcake and tell him not to bother dropping by. Maybe he’ll write up a report on the Fleckstein murder and mail it to me. These days, it doesn’t pay to be subtle.”

  “Can I come over early tomorrow morning? Before you start working?”

  “I guess so. I should have something to tell you. I just happened to mention the murder, and he said he’s been hearing about it for the last couple of weeks till it’s coming out of his ears. Of course, that does make sense because the poor sweet thing doesn’t have anything like a brain to absorb what other people do.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you,” I asked, tapping my fingers against the phone, “that Cupcake is so, so unendowed mentally? I mean, if you’re going to have an affair, it seems to me you’d want someone you could talk to,
even for just a few minutes afterwards.”

  “Doesn’t bother me a bit. He’s a darling. I like him.”

  “But wouldn’t you rather have someone with more of an intellect?”

  “No. Would you?”

  “We’re not talking about me.”

  “Yes, we are,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Be honest, I commanded myself. If I were going to indulge in a little fun between the breakfast dishes and the school bus, I wouldn’t select a partner on the basis of IQ either. Bob had enough intelligence. He also had enough sexual expertise to satisfy me, at least in the purely mechanical sense. For what, then, would I trade in the security, the reflexive closeness, the familiarity, the occasional interesting conversation, the tolerable sex? Not for a roll in the hay with a semiliterate Cupcake. And not for a couple of throwaway remarks about my substance as a hairy, braceleted arm slid under my sweater. Then for what? Maybe for fun. Not for laughs, but for fun. Thinking about it, I hadn’t had any real fun with Bob in about six or seven years. But can you abrogate your marriage vows on the basis of Lack of Fun, a Dearth of Enjoyment?

  By the time I drove to Nancy’s the next morning, I was quite cranky, annoyed at everything from Bob’s unvarying “Good morning to you” to having to stop at the gas station to see why the station wagon was making an ominous gagging sound. The real reason for my pique, I knew, was that at some point I would have to make several changes in my life. Or not make them.

  “Shit,” I muttered, as I pulled into the long driveway of Nancy’s house. Although it really wasn’t Nancy’s house as much as it was her husband’s. Larry, ten years out of Yale’s School of Architecture and fourteen years into his trust fund from his family’s paper business, had bought a twenty-room Victorian monster overlooking Long Island Sound and then had completely gutted the inside. The result was a sweep of glistening white ceramic floors, white furniture, white walls, relieved only by the chrome frames of the white-on-white embossments made by a friend of his, a graphic artist. Everywhere there were built-in drawers, bins, closets, and cabinets to preclude the possibility of clutter. Even the children’s rooms, up the transparent spiral staircase made of some exotic form of plastic, were a glaring shiny white, although Larry conceded that they could have two stuffed animals each on their beds—providing he approved of their choice of color.

  So, once in the door, we scurried into Nancy’s office, the only room in the house that had escaped Larry’s pristine vision. Her desk, strewn with copies of Foreign Affairs and Economist and Cosmopolitan, was a giant affair of tortuously carved oak. On the wall opposite the door was a large, wood-framed Victorian couch, covered in a dull-looking fabric that had probably once been a shiny red, white, and green chintz, but now had the dry, faded appearance of flowers long forgotten in a vase. The only other furniture was a pair of ladderback chairs, with needlepoint cushions sewn by Nancy’s cousin Betty—with the invitation “Set right down” in a sturdy continental stitch. Nancy kept the room as a reminder of her roots, a once-gracious way of life now grown musty and obsolete. Also, she knew its existence within the house disturbed Larry. When he took clients on the grand tour, he’d whisk them by her office door, mumbling that it led to the air conditioning equipment. He couldn’t laugh at it; it was worse than having a lunatic old aunt hidden away in the attic.

  “Could you open a window in here?” I asked Nancy.

  “Why? Does it smell?”

  “It’s a little stuffy.”

  “Are you here to criticize or to hear about the murder?”

  “I’m here to criticize,” I said and opened a window. The air was damp and icy cold, but preferable to the stale atmosphere of the office. Nancy embraced the spectrum of old southern bugaboos: handling frogs will give you warts, drafts are immediately followed by influenza, eating capon makes men lose their potency. “Don’t panic,” I reassured her, “I’ll close it in a minute.”

  “In a minute I could catch a chill and die.”

  “So talk fast.” I closed the window and sat on the couch.

  “Well, all Cupcake is hearing is the gossip. The precinct isn’t directly involved in the case. I gather that whenever there’s a murder, there’s a special homicide unit that does all the investigating. But they rely on the precinct to fill them in on local color. Of which there is an abundance in this case. Anyhow, he says that everyone in the entire world is a suspect. The Mafia, Brucie-boy’s entire family, every woman he ever laid a hand on. And your neighbor, the Great American Mother. That redheaded little flower, who’s always cheerful.”

  “You mean Marilyn Tuccio?” I asked, trying to sound astonished.

  “Yes. Seems that she made some kind of a threat against Brucie to his nurse. They think she might be some kind of religious fanatic who wants to cleanse the world.”

  “That is the most asinine thing I have ever heard in my entire life. She’s not a religious fanatic. She’s a practicing Catholic.”

  “Same thing.”

  “It’s not the same thing,” I insisted. “And she didn’t threaten him, for God’s sake. She just made some offhand remark to his nurse that he’d get into trouble if he kept coming on to every creature he met who had a vagina. Well, you know, Marilyn didn’t say it quite that way, but that’s what she meant.”

  Nancy lit a Chesterfield and picked a shred of tobacco off her tongue with long white fingers. Of all the people I know, only she still smokes unfiltered cigarettes. If you’re going to kill yourself, she announced, at least do it with taste and dignity. “You spoke to Marilyn Tuccio about the murder?” she asked.

  “Yes. Just briefly. A detective came around asking questions, so I mentioned it to her.”

  “I see. Well, getting back to the list of suspects, the nurse is also in the top ten. It seems Bruce was filling one of her cavities and she was pressuring him to get a divorce.”

  “Okay. Now let me get this straight. There’s no one particular person who’s a suspect?”

  “Well, as I said, Cupcake is not exactly at the center of the investigation. But apparently the boys at the precinct are just tickled about this case. I mean, what do they have around here? A couple of robberies, a few kids getting high and smashing up their daddies’ cars? This is the juiciest thing that’s happened in years. And they just love the idea that Bruce was sticking it to all the local ladies. But Cupcake says that the case is wide open. Bruce made so many enemies that almost anything is a possibility.”

  “What do you mean by enemies? Real enemies?”

  “Well, he didn’t do anything blatantly terrible. But Jim—Cupcake—spoke to one of the homicide men who was interviewing people at Bruce’s club, and this fellow said that old Bruce made everyone nervous. I mean, each of the members knew a few of the ladies Bruce was sleeping with, and they were all awed by his success. Also, the homicide man said they were all afraid of Bruce’s fatal charm, that he could have been zapping anyone, even their own wives. Also, he was involved in some strange business deals.”

  “Like the pornography thing?”

  “That, yes, and some franchise operation that wasn’t on the up and up and a deal with buying and selling gold that was beyond Cupcake’s ability to comprehend.”

  “So, in other words, what they have is that Fleckstein was a runaround and a wheeler-dealer and he made a lot of people uncomfortable. Right?” Nancy nodded. “What else did you get?” She lifted her hands, ran them over her auburn hair, and smiled. “Come on,” I urged, “be serious.”

  “Okay, but it will take great effort. There were no fingerprints in Fleckstein’s office, no fingerprints that didn’t belong. But Jim says any self-respecting killer has enough sense to wear gloves. But they did find something interesting. You’ll love this.”

  “What? What?”

  “Pictures. Some of Brucie’s pretty pictures. Cupcake says the boys at the precinct are almost delirious with joy. The captain finally got disgusted and put them in his safe, but then the homicide guys told him th
ey wanted everyone to have a look—that maybe they’d recognize one of the subjects.”

  “God!”

  “Now here’s the interesting part. They only found about seven or eight pictures, and they were sort of stuck behind one of his drawers. You know, those skinny little drawers dentists use to keep their tools in. Jesus, Brucie should have kept his tool in a drawer. Maybe he wouldn’t be dead now.”

  “Is it really so strange that they found only a few pictures?”

  “Sure was. Because the drawer itself was completely empty. The pictures they found were kind of wedged in back. And they found a piece of paper, like the corner of a picture, stuck to the back part of the drawer. They think the murderer might have gone through the office, found the pictures, and taken them.”

  I eased off my shoes and put my feet up on the couch, trying to find a way to let my back muscles relax. “But Bruce could have decided to take the pictures. I mean, he might have wanted to get rid of them.”

  “Listen, Sherlock, I’m a step ahead of you. Jim says that a few of the drawers weren’t completely closed, including the one with the pictures. And they were broken into.”

  “So they think the murderer was after the pictures?”

  “Well, they’re leaning toward that, but they’re not really certain. Listen, it could have been a completely casual killing and the murderer just happened to find them. Maybe he took them home to get his rocks off. Or maybe your neighbor took them away to burn them so they couldn’t corrupt any more souls.”

  “Nancy, she’s not a religious nut. Look, I go to temple sometimes. Does that make me a religious fanatic?”

  “No, but it certainly detracts from your claim that you’re a rational human being. I mean, the chopped liver and the Yiddish expressions are charming, but you don’t have to drag God into it.”

  I sighed, knowing how futile an argument would be. “All right. You’re wrong, but I’m not going to pursue it. What else did Little Cupcake have to say?”