Murder, She Did

by Gillian Roberts

  And even if she spent her days plodding around on behalf of lawyers attempting to bend the law in their clients’ direction, that still was on the side of right. That was the law. Emma was against what was wrong, and she’d be damned before she’d apologize for keeping a clear head.

  She tilted her face toward the sun like a creature just released from hibernation, pushing away the memory of George’s disapproval.

  “You aren’t the Deity, Emma Howe.” He’d said it softly, but the words made her want to order him out of her house. “You aren’t God and you don’t know everything and everybody the way you sometimes think you do. Bend a little. Give a little more. You want every problem solved, every mystery answered. Some things just don’t have ready answers.”

  She never claimed omniscience, but dammit, Emma was a good judge of people. Had to be to survive. The only seriously wrong call she’d made was with her late and unlamented husband, Harry, but she’d been young and in lust back then. And Harry, incessantly providing proof of how bad her judgment had been, had taught her to be more discerning about people. So what the hell was George talking about?

  George was a good man. He must have gotten out of her bed on the wrong side. Luckily, the phone had rung at precisely the necessary moment, and Vivian’s invitation saved the rest of the day from degenerating into gray. Into wrongness.

  Instead, it was Technicolor. Life was good, indeed. Good to have a Saturday to herself, out of the office, away from insurance cheats (bad) and missing teenagers (all pains in the butt were bad by definition) and sullen, reluctant witnesses (bad. Period.).

  Don’t try to tell her there were no absolutes. Maybe for parameciums there weren’t, but humans with functioning brains knew right from wrong.

  “I like that those are native plants,” Vivian said, gazing toward the stand of matilija poppies. “I like that nobody invented or imported them. They planted themselves. They’re real, and as intended. I love it that something that extravagant just pops out of the earth on its own. And that they look fake, like the crepe paper flowers we used to make to decorate the gym for dances.”

  And that was part of why Emma accepted Vivian’s soft-sided mind. No other woman she knew would follow “I’ve been thinking” with a metaphysical appreciation of native flora. She nodded her understanding. (She did know people, no matter what George said. You could. You had to, in fact. That didn’t mean you thought you were God.) “Those poppies are so overstated, they’re horticultural Tchaikovsky,” Emma said with a smile.

  Vivian looked startled, momentarily confused, then smiled. “Oh, my God, I’d forgotten that.” She nodded and sipped wine before speaking again. “I must have sounded like such an idiot. All that blather about life as a grand symphony. Oh, what I wanted out of poor old life!”

  They’d been so young, embarking on marriage, speculating about how it would be, planning—now there was a laughable thought—the rest of their lives. Emma’s own marriage had ended at the Tawdry-R-Us motel off the freeway, her husband’s heart overwhelmed on yet another of its side trips into adultery. “Dead of a half-night stand” was the epitaph for Harry and their future.

  But Vivian’s unrealistic, impossible marriage that seemed so removed from the real world that it was doomed, had instead endured. The picture was fresh and vivid in Emma’s mind. Vivian, dressed all in black so the world would know she was a genuine artist, declaiming for a life that was “pure Tchaikovsky—oversized, passionate, nothing ordinary or bland. Ever.”

  Her words had been emblazoned in Emma’s memory because—she said—she couldn’t believe her ears, couldn’t believe her friend was that hopelessly immature. The girl was marrying a medical student whose every drudgy nanosecond was devoted to his studies, his rounds, his patients, his future, and, in truth, to stunned self-wonderment. He was a good man, a dedicated man, but his first love was himself. Yet Vivian, whose two jobs would support them, saw them in a perpetual wild waltz, when everyone with normal vision knew she was going to barely see him at all for years. And when she did, they’d both be too tired to even dream about romantic excesses and their conversation was guaranteed to be about medical procedures.

  That wasn’t the only reason Emma had remembered Vivian’s words. They were etched on her brain cells because she’d secretly envied anyone who could think in those terms, whose imagination was large enough, unself-conscious enough to consider such an idea, whose cellular material wasn’t made of one hundred percent washable, durable, unbreakable fabric.

  “But look,” Emma said. “Here we are in what is laughingly called middle age although that assumes we’ll live to be one hundred and ten—and you and Gene are still going strong, whatever the background music has become. You weren’t a fool at all.”

  Vivian held her wine glass below her nose, as if sampling its bouquet. Her eyes were half lowered, her expression unreadable.

  “You’re more or less the law,” she finally said.

  “Come again?” What road had led Vivian from poppy-admiration through Tchaikovsky to Emma’s relationship to the law?

  “Cops are the law,” Emma said. “The law’s the law, so lawyers are the law. But I’m…auxiliary law, at best. What made you say that?”

  “I need to know.” She sighed as she ran her finger around the wine glass.

  Normally, at such a juncture, Emma made it clear that she didn’t have all day. But as it happened, she did. And she was with Vivian, whose clock was set to a different measure than the seconds and minutes the rest of the universe used.

  “If I tell you something,” Vivian said, “something terrible, do you have to report it? Or do you have to keep it a secret like lawyers and priests do?”

  “A confession?” Emma asked, smiling. Vivian, unsmiling, nodded.

  If Vivian Carter confessed to anything more serious than sampling unpaid-for grapes at the supermarket, Emma would go home and tell George he was absolutely right. That she didn’t know squat about anybody.

  Vivian was the gentlest of women. Not that she didn’t deal with her portion of the real world. In fact, she nurtured it. She was an art therapist at a center for emotionally disturbed children, and was outstanding at quietly finding a way into a child’s locked up world. A year ago, Emma and George had gone to an event honoring Vivian. They’d sat with her husband, Gene, who never had acquired that haunted Tchaikovsky patina. Not in attitude and surely not in appearance. He looked wholesome and sturdy, scrubbed clean and trustworthy. He looked the way a cardiologist should look, like someone you’d trust with your heart. His faith in himself had been justified by time as he won awards and an international reputation. But that night, he’d stared with open adoration at his wife as she was praised from the podium. He seemed completely contented to bask in his wife’s reflected glory. They’d all grown up and learned new, less troublesome music. Nobody wanted Tchaikovsky making life and death decisions about them. You wanted somebody like Gene.

  Vivian treated her husband like a beloved artifact, cushioning him in a home decorated in the same soft and glowing colors she painted onto her canvases. She raised three fine children without seeming to raise her voice. She was generous to a fault, and slow to anger.

  All of which would have long ago put Vivian over the top of airy-fairiness and off Emma’s list of acquaintances were all the sweetness and light not tempered by dollops of earthiness, good humor, intense honesty, surprising pragmatism, and talent. Vivian’s paintings fascinated Emma, because they made it obvious that the woman, who lived only a few miles from Emma, inhabited an alternate universe with its own sky, earth and bay.

  None of which could account for the troubled dark in Vivian’s amber eyes, a shadow that wasn’t part of her usual hesitations and conversational wanderings. Emma stifled her urge to smile. “How terrible?” she asked.

  “You didn’t answer. Would you have to tell? Could you keep this confidential?”

  “You’re worrying me,” Emma said. “What are we talking about here?” What would th
e queen of pastel see as “terrible”?

  Cruelty, Emma thought. Any variety. A prank turned sour. Elder abuse. She probably suspected somebody—a relative, a frail and elderly neighbor—was being neglected, or more actively abused. It would be like Vivian to notice—and like her to agonize over what to do. That was fine. At least she asked for advice, and Emma loved giving it. Loved being She Who Knows And Never Dithers.

  “We’re talking about murder,” Vivian said.

  Emma pulled back in her chair as if to avoid the suddenly hard-edge light. “I’m a P.I.,” she said quietly. “It’s only on TV that P.I.’s meddle in police investigations.”

  “You wouldn’t be meddling into anything,” she said softly. “There is no investigation.”

  “If you have information about a murder that the police don’t know about, you have to tell them, Viv.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Then tell me and I’ll tell them.”

  “They won’t know what you’re talking about.” Vivian was almost inaudible.

  “But you said—”

  “It is murder,” Vivian said more emphatically. “A kind of murder.”

  Emma relaxed. Not exactly murder, but a kind of murder. Of the spirit? The will? She’d been right in her initial assessment. This was Vivian and her “murder” wasn’t the kind the law minds. Emma listened with tolerant amusement, waiting for what trivial mini-drama Vivian would present.

  “Can I tell you? And then you can tell me what to do. You’re always so sure of yourself, Emma. I get mired down, but you always—I so admire that about you.”

  Emma was delighted to have someone acknowledge what wasn’t a fault, no matter what George thought, but a talent. Vivian seemed about to speak, but waitperson Jenny, who so introduced herself as she materialized at the table, needed to take their orders. Truth was, no matter what George had said, real life wasn’t gray. There were two options in this life, the right and the wrong. Imagine the Ten Commandments according to George. “Maybe thou should…” “Sometimes thou shalt…” World was bad enough off with absolutes, but muddle things more with ifs and perhaps and we’re all doomed.

  Furthermore, even Vivian, who might appear a ditz, knew what to do. People always did. They just wanted people like Emma around to insist they follow that right impulse. Emma was a professional prod, that was all. Waitperson Jenny—Emma wanted to know why she had to know the name of someone she’d have a five-minute relationship with—chirped the list of specials—exotic foodstuffs that hadn’t existed when Emma was young. Emma ordered a cheeseburger, rare, and got a savage pleasure out of the waitress’s barely controlled disapproval. Vivian ordered a concoction of various forms of plant life. And another glass of wine. Across the bay, a white cloud of fog canopied the bridge, a finger of it reaching down toward the water.

  “Begin,” Emma said the moment Jenny bounced off.

  “If I only knew where…”

  “At the beginning. Then go all the way through to the end.” Fat chance having that be true with Vivian, but it never hurt to hope. All the same, Emma felt mild apprehension. Why wouldn’t Vivian know where to begin?

  “The beginning…maybe it was the Tchaikovsky life, maybe that was it. I had such high hopes. Correction. They were more than hopes. They were convictions. A credo. Gene was so…electrical. More alive than other men. I can be a little, um, less than directed. He seemed so passionate compared to me. I thought we were a cosmic combination.”

  This “murder” was about her marriage?

  “So did Gene. He wanted that bigger and better life just as much as I did. He wanted to feel things to his toes, to never live dully. We were alike in that.”

  He had an affair, Emma assumed. Or was having one. Their marriage was being murdered. Kind of. But first, the story of how wonderful it once was. Even women hiring her to spy on their wandering mates began with the story of how it once had been. Even they, buying her services in a cut and dried transaction, had to offer up the sad trajectory of their love, to explain why they weren’t run of the mill, but tragic figures worthy of attention. Over the years, over how many tables and desks, lunches, dinners, and drinks had she listened to women recite this litany? And sometimes, she’d been the one telling the tale.

  “Gene got a lot of the adventure he wanted through his work. Through the instruments he’s devised, the awards. In the world he chose, he’s made it. The Eighteen-Twelve Triumphal music is playing all the time in his background.” She smiled, half proudly, half wistfully.

  “But real life wasn’t what I’d imagined, Emma. For a long time, the work—mine and his during medical school and residency—and then the children—we were too busy to be Tchaikovsky. We were too busy treading water. I stopped painting, stopped all the art. Couldn’t set up, couldn’t afford sitters, couldn’t find the time or even clear my mind long enough to see anything beyond the day itself. And then one day, I woke up and realized I was everything I hadn’t wanted. I was ordinary as mud.”

  Emma’s mind had wandered back to the days Vivian was remembering. Kids today—her own daughter Caroline—had no idea what a different world it had been back then. Women like Vivian, sick for personal expression, were told they were maladjusted. Didn’t like being female. “Hardly ordinary,” Emma said. “Everybody’s marriage was crumbling in those days. Everybody’s except yours. And you must remember that you were painting, at least a little, and definitely well, because I remember an exhibit where you won first prize.”

  After half a dozen years and two children with Harry Howe, his inability to hold a job plus his talent for gambling away whatever he’d managed to earn, Emma had realized her life was not going to follow her carefully designed plan. The only jobs she could find for the longest time were poorly paid, menial foot-weary work that never advanced her life, merely sustained it. She hadn’t been to college, had no special skills. Just debts. So the winter of that painting award Emma watched Vivian’s life flower with her growing family, their new economic stability, her art, his medicine. Emma watched Vivian the dizzy one manage to have it all. And she tried not to envy, not to let the chilling grasp of jealousy ruin the relationship.

  “That painting,” Vivian murmured. “I didn’t say it then, felt as if I was cheating, but that was an old painting. I’d done it years before the show. So don’t, Emma,” she said softly, brushing imaginary crumbs off the table. “Don’t try to console or reassure me. That’s your view of my life. I’m trying to tell you how it actually was. I wasn’t unhappy—but I wasn’t happy, either.” She looked up and stopped speaking as Jenny put Emma’s hamburger down as if it were contaminated, then beamed at Vivian as she reverently placed the sprouty offering in front of her.

  “I was ashamed of myself, too,” Vivian said as soon as Jenny turned her back. “Here I was with everything I could want, and more, and I felt half-dead. Numb inside. So I went for help.”

  Of course she would. Nobody opted to just plain get over it. Grow up. That had been part of the heated discussion with George this morning. Caroline had been contaminated growing up in Marin where there was a therapist on every street corner, and an ordinance against experiencing even a moment’s pain. You lived at the end of the rainbow and you’d better enjoy it. Caroline had spent half her life and most of her money on cure-alls ever since, and nothing at all was cured.

  George considered her opinion narrow-minded. They were going to have to, as they said in these parts, work on that. But for now, she kept her mouth shut. Vivian had gone for help. Emma would now undoubtedly endure second-hand revelations and insights and know that the help hadn’t worked. You could see its failure in Vivian’s desperately unhappy expression.

  “I fell in love with my therapist,” Vivian said. “I know how that sounds. I know it’s a cliché, and I knew it then. But I also knew, almost immediately, he was the perfect person in the world for me.”

  Emma waited.

  “We had an affair.”

  Damn whoever it was. That was a terr
ible thing—but not the way Vivian probably meant. To take advantage of a client’s vulnerability was disgusting, and she was glad of the chance to tell Vivian so. No need to debate this one. Take the bastard to court. Rip up his license. “Okay, Vivian, you asked me what to do, and I’ll tell you. Take him to—”

  “We didn’t have the affair while I was his patient. I stopped therapy—he suggested it. Months went by before…” She looked up. “Nothing was rushed into. I was married and so was he. But eventually…it lasted a year and a half. Well, there you have it.”

  No. She didn’t. That was the terrible thing? The so-called murder? “When was this?”

  “Fifteen years ago.”

  For God’s sake but it had taken Vivian long enough to decide this was a big moral issue. “You don’t need my opinion about that. Besides, it’s over.”

  Vivian shook her head and lifted her wine glass again, drinking from it almost as if it were water. Emma ate hamburger. It seemed the wrong choice of food while listening to a tale of passion, somehow tactless, but all the same, she thoroughly savored it during the pauses Vivian’s stuttering memory provided.

  “It ended because it was wrong,” Vivian finally said. “Too hurtful. I was ready to leave my marriage, but he wouldn’t do the same. There were good reasons. His wife wasn’t well, and…in any case, it became too emotionally painful to continue. And I hated lying. Hated it. I decided to make my marriage work instead, to find my own way, get on with it. Gene and I saw a counselor together and talked things through, and…”

  “He knew, then?”

  She nodded. “I wanted the air clear between us. He was shocked, he was miserable, he was angry, he was depressed. He was all the things I guess people are. He was almost—pretty much—that passionate, crazy, over the edge man I’d thought I wanted. But I’d grown up, you see. It was awful. Most of all, he hated that I couldn’t lie and say I’d never loved the other man. He wanted that to be the truth, but it wasn’t. And he wanted me to hate the other man now that it was over, but I didn’t. Why would I? He was lovable. He hadn’t done anything to change that perception. I knew I’d love him till I died, although of course, I didn’t say that to Gene. But I didn’t say the words he was aching to hear, either. I didn’t lie. It was bad enough that I’d cheated and lied for a year and a half. Gene’s such a…rational man, a problem solver, a healer. But then, he talked about revenge, getting back—useless, meaningless, insane things like that. Completely unlike himself. Which is when, and why I realized I wanted him to be completely like himself. I wanted that calm intensity, and steadiness. And I’d ruined it, I thought. Smashed it. Except eventually, the rage and depressions passed, and the past began to feel like a disease we’d both recovered from. Life’s been good ever since.” She exhaled, as if after long exertion, and poked at her grassy salad. She looked at Emma directly. “Honestly. Very good.” She looked down at her fork and grew silent again.