Ellie Darby had written me her story, exquisitely.
I ripped off the gingham covering, and pulled out stuffing, digging my hand in more deeply than I’d done earlier when I was looking for more of the paper. It didn’t take long—after all, she’d had to work on it while tied up, with only so much give. “The ring,” I said. “They really did think it was lost. She got thin enough for it to come off with little help, and she used it to scratch out the message and then she buried the ring she left me. She knew I’d find it.
“They killed her, Joe. Tied her up and starved her until she was so enfeebled that of course she ‘failed.’ That’s probably when the doctor was brought in—if then. I’m willing to bet that if we check—”
“If the police check,” Joe corrected me. “Your job is restoring furniture.”
“If the police check, they’ll find no evidence of doctoring until she was close to death or dead.”
“It’s still speculative,” he said.
I shook my head. “Even if they untied her now and then, there was no phone in her room, I’m sure. But I wondered why she didn’t open a window and scream for help, even during the middle of the night. I walked there this morning and there are no bars on the windows. Tell the police to check for evidence that they’d been nailed shut or otherwise secured. She couldn’t open them. She was Rapunzel, imprisoned in her tower.”
*
The police checked doctors’ records (none) and sealed bedroom windows (hers still had the marks of the nails, plus a mesh barrier so the small panes of glass couldn’t be broken) and after that, Ellie’s chair became evidence for a long time as well.
Now the cuckoos are in prison and Ellie’s house is up for sale. Her daughter plans to give the entire proceeds to the library, all for the children’s collection.
Carrie Brigham phoned me, quite excited, when the news made the paper. “This is incredible publicity and you shouldn’t waste it,” she said. “I’ve got a group in the city with whom you must network. Sales will boom and—”
I didn’t want booming sales. I didn’t even try to explain myself. Once again, I upset Carrie Brigham. Once again, I didn’t care. We did not bond.
Lacey, the future art historian, came and watched me work and took pictures of Ellie’s chair. I’m to be in a slick magazine soon. As a folk artist, of all things.
And Joe has never again—not once—told me that I was looking at anything from the wrong side. That’s about as good as it gets, so I’m as contented as I can be, given that my triumph was too little and too late. But it was something.
I wear the ring every day and look at it when I want to remember what is important and what is not.
Ellie’s chair is back home after successfully “testifying” in its own fashion. As Joe and I like to say, “Most times, people get the chair, but if you’re Ellie’s, the chair gets people.”
I’ve decorated it—all but the place where she’d scratched her message—with memories of her. Children’s faces peep around a slat, bookjackets adorn the other side, the lovebirds are clear-eyed and shining, embracing the heart together, and the seat is covered with a blue the color of dreams.
Around the band of wood that surrounds it, I’ve written, in the most delicate of letters, almost as if a rose-shaped ring had cut them into the pine: “Ellie-mentary, my dear Watsons.”
Love Is a Many Splintered Thing
I’m glad you asked to interview me. Honestly. I don’t mind that it’s for a high school paper. Sic transit Gloria some might say, but I like young people. And maybe my story will teach you that when it comes to women, don’t believe your eyes. Or ears. Or any of your parts.
Never trust a woman. No matter how much you’ve done for them, no matter for how long, given half a chance, they’ll betray you, each and every one. It’s not nice to say, maybe, and it’s painful to learn, but if it happened to me, then it could happen to anyone.
You might think I’d be bitter, wouldn’t want to talk about it. But I like remembering the good part, the sweet times. I mean once upon a time, when people thought about love and romance, they thought about us, the Double Mikes. My half of the Mikes is actually short for Michelangelo. My mother didn’t want to add another Billy Bob to a town bursting with them. But her choice of alternative was rather extreme, and being Michelangelo Stubbs wasn’t easy in that backwater. My better half was Michelle, nicknamed Mikey. So you see, we were kindred souls beginning with our nicknames, long before we became bigger than life, the stuff of legend. Our names usually abbreviated as the Double Mikes or sometimes “Mike Squared” was used as shorthand, the way people use Romeo and Juliet, for romance, for closeness, for the essence of devotion. “A real Double Mike,” people would say when referring to a perfect twosome. There was even a song called “Double Miking All the Time.” It went platinum.
But you must already know this. We weren’t exactly low profile. Oprah interviewed us, People held a Double Mike contest for the most romantic couple in the U.S.A. and we were the cover of Entertainment Weekly’s Love in Bloom issue.
People were always amazed to think that Michelle could have created the industry we called Romance, Ink. She was reclusive, happiest when she faded into the woodwork. Her natural voice was close to a whisper. But she was good with words no matter how shy she was, or soft spoken or afraid of crowds and public appearances. The book she wrote spoke directly to the hearts of half the world. And quiet little Michelle was suddenly the person everybody wanted to hear. In person.
An old pop song asked who wrote the book of love and the fact is, Michelle did, and it succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. Or more accurately, beyond mine, because the truth is, Michelle’s fine points didn’t include vision or dreams. Michelle’s dreams were tiny, pale and timid. That’s where I came in. I woke her up and guided her into the world.
The book was called Bliss 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Romantic Happiness, and you know the rest. It climbed the best-seller lists and became a permanent fixture near the top. That generated requests for more books, plus TV appearances, seminars, courses, workshops, licensed products, audio and videotapes, etc., etc. In the process, I had no choice but to become involved. It wasn’t as if I was seeking publicity, or horning in on her act. Somebody simply had to help Michelle deal with what was to her the overwhelming burden and ordeal of fame.
Who better than I?
Furthermore, I was the other half of the perfect couple. Not to brag or anything, but without me, not only wouldn’t there have been somebody to write about, there would have never been a book, let alone all the rest. Look, there’s no reason for false modesty. The book was my idea all along. I’m not saying I begrudge Michelle one second of her fame. After all, her name was on the cover. (It was my suggestion that we put it out that way, as if it were all hers.) Her words were inside it (even though I went over every single one of them and even though a whole lot of the ideas were mine). I’m not jealous of the way she got all the attention, but fair is fair. There are too many people who act as if I was some kind of Johnny-come-lately, as if I jumped on the Michelle bandwagon when I was the one who built the damned wagon in the first place! I sold the idea to her and it was a hard, hard sell at that. I put the ideas together and I just about invented her as a Personality.
It’s funny, you know? Here was this book about romance, you see, and its hero—that’d be me—was this ordinary Joe, a data processor for an insurance company. Not the stuff of Hollywood movies or romance novels. I had always intended to be famous some day, but I couldn’t figure out for what, or how. So there I was, waiting for fame while I punched in stats about bathroom falls and liability for Acts of God. I told myself things would change, but I couldn’t see how they would, or why. I mean maybe I’d be promoted to supervise guys like me, but I never heard of a famous data-processing supervisor. In fact, my first idea was for Michelle to give me a different background in the book, so it’d be more believable that we were so romantic.
I was ashamed of w
ho I was, and now I’m ashamed of that attitude. In any case, she refused. “I’m not going to let you bully me on this, too, Mike,” she said. “I’m going to let the whole damned world know what a boring, phony, nothing you are.”
She was in one of her moods, so she phrased it poorly. What she was trying to say was that honesty was the best policy, and she was right. But it makes everything that happened ironic, because my ordinariness is what Michelle’s readers loved most. “Hope for the terminally unglamorous,” one review called it.
See, it meant anybody could have what we had. It was kind of a Clark Kent–Superman thing, this not so good-looking guy you’d ignore or snub just like everybody else did, who comes home to a dingy cheap apartment and a wife who’s no great shakes herself. But because he is secretly a Prince Charming of the Modern Kind, he turns her into a princess and their life is enchanted happily ever after. Like don’t judge a book by its cover and appearances can be deceiving—all that stuff. And all the other not so great-looking computer nerds and dirty-fingernailed grease monkeys who couldn’t figure out why they should get out of bed and face a replay of the day before—and all their women who were never going to be movie stars—in short, the whole world got hope from us. You didn’t have to be handsome or rich or a celebrity to be sexy, to have glamour and excitement in your personal life.
What Martha Stewart did for the art of entertaining others, we did for the art of entertaining each other, which is, you have to admit, more fun and doesn’t involve spray painting acorns, either.
If you ask me, we performed a public service.
We’d been married for two years when I had the idea. Michelle always said she wanted to be a writer, and in fact had written reams of things, mostly unsold, but she would have never, ever had the idea of the book that made her famous. Michelle had won some contest in high school, or maybe it was college, a literary contest, and it warped her, set her off in the direction of artsy-fartsy stories. You could starve to death on what she didn’t make from them. Magazines would pay her in copies and she’d weep with joy and clutch the pathetic journal to her bosom. But man does not live on literary journals alone, so Michelle had a day job, too, managing the cosmetics section of a pharmacy. It was beneath her talents and intellect, and paid next to nothing, and I repeatedly urged her to set her sights higher, but she wanted to “save strength for the writing,” she always said.
The writing she saved her strength for was not only a waste of time and energy, but it got the only strength she had. There were no leftovers. As soon as she’d cleaned up from dinner, she’d hole up in the bedroom while I watched TV and had a beer or three and felt pretty damned lonely, like what was the point of it all? A wife should have been beside me, cheering along with me. Isn’t that what marriage is all about? But no. She hated football, baseball, hockey, golf—everything I watched, and off she’d go to the bedroom, with the door slammed shut.
Her literary aspirations—delusions—were destroying our marriage.
And then one night she actually left the bedroom to tell me about an idea. She’d written a short story about a miserable couple, once again the kind of depressing story nobody wants to read, and it had grown in her mind until the couple was involved in murder.
“It’s a book! A mystery!” She sounded almost as surprised by the idea as I was. “It’s about soured relationships and bad sex and dead ends,” she said. “So stop complaining about my not being a couch potato beside you. This will take at least a year of nights and Sundays.”
She was not thinking clearly. Anybody with common sense would have seen that there was nothing in this for us except a major rejection for Michelle and more lonely nights for me. She couldn’t sell her short stuff, so what was the point of building a tower of babble nobody would buy?
“Everybody and her sister has already written a mystery,” I told her, trying to be the voice of reason. “Who do you think you are? Grow up.”
“Mine will be different. These people aren’t criminals, they’re good people whose marriage makes them—” She stood up straight. “I want to do it. I will do it, whether or not you approve. I’ve never in my life been as excited about…about anything.”
You see how bad things were between us. I was less exciting to her than an unwritten mystery. Her little hobby had become intolerable and her delusions of grandeur were going to wreck our marriage.
“I can’t let you do that to yourself,” I said. “You’re a sensitive person, and this will set you up for another depression. I see how upset you are when a short story comes back, but now, you’ll make yourself sick for a whole year of working and cooking and cleaning and then writing. It’s too much, Michelle, you’re not a strong enough woman. It’ll hurt you too much when this is rejected, too.”
What I really meant was it might derail her. Michelle wasn’t the most stable person, either.
Of course, she missed the point and reacted like a fishwife. “Maybe you could ease my pain by getting off your duff to help with the housework!” The soft voice had become an air-raid siren. I was revolted by the sight of veins sticking out on her neck. But she didn’t stop. “The only domesticated act you do is pop beer can tabs! Do something for me for once! For us!”
This is what I mean by mood swings. She’d gone from happily excited to furious in an eyeblink.
I spoke very, very calmly. “Why don’t you do what the experts say you should? Write a book about what you know.”
“Maybe I will!” she screamed. “Maybe I’ll murder you, then really write about what I know!”
Pathetic joke, that was, and mean-spirited, too, but I stayed calm. “I mean, why don’t you write about marriage, since you’re so much the expert on how we should live? Why don’t you write about how to keep interest alive in a marriage? Wouldn’t hurt you to think about somebody else for a change. Or write what you already know: how to turn off your husband by hiding from him every night and hunching over a computer!”
“Anybody trapped in a marriage with you would hide!” she screamed. “Guess why I can’t get those miserably unhappy people off my mind. Guess why I started thinking about murder!”
I brushed off her words. It was that time of month. She couldn’t help herself. But the words I’d said wouldn’t leave my mind. I’d stumbled on an idea, the way great inventors do, and from that first moment on, I knew that if we could pull it off, we’d be on the gravy train. I also knew that whatever hell we lived in wasn’t unique. We were too ordinary to be unique. We’d expected romance, love, sensual delights, pleasure. Only nobody told us how the hell to get it.
There had to be other slobs in the dark ready to grab at anything shiny bright. So if we could become the messengers of hope…
When Michelle calmed down, I explained it to her.
“I hate the idea!” she said. “It’s fake, deceitful. It’s a scam. It’s slop and lies. More pop psych drivel. I don’t even read that stuff. And even if I did, where would I find the happy couple? We certainly aren’t love’s young dream. The whole point of writing is to find the truth, to find your own voice. Doing something perverted like that would destroy me.”
One of the secrets of marriage, as I see it, is careful listening, hearing the message behind the message, the unspoken one, and what I heard was:
She wants this.
She wanted to be a writer, but she was afraid of success when it was offered on a silver platter. “There’s big bucks in telling people how to get happy, and since it never works, and they always stay unhappy, there’s always big bucks there.”
Michelle misunderstood me completely, I think on purpose. Said I was insensitive, hypocritical, brutish—dreadful things, and she had a writer’s large vocabulary with which to say them, too. Things got to the point where after a couple of ugly sessions, she packed and said she was leaving, that she had made it clear from the day we met that she wanted to write fiction, that it was the most important thing in her life, that I was manipulative, controlling—all that pop-psych b
abble she claims she doesn’t favor. But that’s Michelle in one of her erratic, over-emotional mood swings. She was like a child, wanting only to do whatever she wanted to do without regard to how it might impact anyone else. After two years of marriage, the fact that my wife had a bad temper and no common sense did not come as a surprise, so I didn’t let myself be discouraged.
Of course she didn’t leave. Where would she have gone? She couldn’t live on the pharmacy salary.
Eventually, after I’d explained for maybe the thousandth time—and let me say that getting her attention wasn’t easy, believe me, I had to disable her computer to make her really listen—she agreed. She would write the book as fast as possible and get back to her mystery, and that would be that, and I was to never again interfere with her creative life. Blather, blather.
Interfere, hah! Like I said, it was the best thing I ever did for her. Look at the bottom line. Look at that cover of Entertainment Weekly. Look how everybody on God’s green earth considered Michelle a writer. Wasn’t that what she wanted all along?
And here’s the amazing part. You look old enough for the birds and the bees. The book’s success turned us around as a couple, too. It would be rude to go into details, but let’s just say that before the book, I wasn’t all that interested in carnal acts, at least with my wife, if you catch my meaning. Michelle wasn’t all that much to begin with, and then, having her like her word processor more than me wasn’t exactly a plus.
But once that book was bought and printed, everything changed. First of all, they polished Michelle up. An image consultant came in to get her ready for the TV interviews. Needless to say, she hated it, said she was suffocating inside a plastered on stranger’s face. She was always a negative type. But she did it because we all knew it was the right thing to do. So she looked better, dressed better, and had highlights in her new haircut. (She refused to go for the breast implants we could now afford and that I suggested several times. Pity.)
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