“How do you say cambriolage—when the person enters the house to steal—in English?”
“Burglary.”
“That’s it. Absolu or relatif?”
“Absolute, unless the person is starving or naked or thirsty.”
“So you make the place for explanations?”
“Survival sometimes demands a bending of the rules.”
“Interesting,” Inez said. “And the adultery?”
“Unforgivable,” Farrell said sincerely. “But something that both sides can learn to live with, I believe.”
“In certain cases then,” Inez said.
“That’s what I said. How about murder?”
“My choice now!”
“No, tell me about Alain Valoir.”
“I do not kill him, if that’s what you say,” Inez hissed. She got to her knees. “I talk of this a hundred times. Alain knew the risks. Constantly we spoke of them.”
Inez brushed her hair back from her forehead, a simple act that seemed to compose her. “He fears them, but he said they are beyond his control. He is like you in this respect. What do you say more early, that you feel more alive when you face them?”
Farrell nodded.
“Alain Valoir, he is a genius of the physical, the dancer of ballet on the mountain,” Inez said. “On the skis and the climbing rope, much more capable than you or Page. But what he can become is trapped inside. No confidence. He is scarred, we know, by one of his uncles who abuses him as a child.”
Farrell flinched.
“So you have not seen that film either?” Inez said. “I treat this situation with the gloves so soft. Alain never tells anyone this, not even me. But I know it is true. I have a sense for this.”
She was quiet and played with the stem of her glass. “I teach him to let go his fury, to go where he thinks it is not possible.”
“What did you get out of it?”
“Me?” Inez asked. “Nothing. I see him do what he is born for.”
“And to die for?”
Inez closed her eyes briefly. “It is unfair for them to turn against me,” she said. “I bring him out. I do it not for the fame or the money. This does not interest me. I love what Alain does. I love what Henri does.”
Inez drew her feet up and hugged her knees. Farrell watched her closely, sure that she was holding back something.
“But you never told them you loved them, did you?” Farrell asked.
Inez stared at the carpet. “No,” she whispered.
“Why not?”
“It does not help,” she said. “It is irrelevant.”
“Did Rassond ask you to marry him?”
Inez stood up, angry: “How do you know these things?”
Farrell smiled. “Two can play this game, Inez. Did you go to Valoir’s funeral? Did you weep by his grave? Afterwards, when you were alone, did you call out his name in the night?”
Inez held her hand to her mouth and hurried across the room where she was out of the camera’s range. Farrell followed her, pulling her around by the shoulder so she faced a mirror in the field of the camera lens. Inez shook away from his grasp.
“You don’t like the mirror, do you?” Farrell demanded.
“You frighten me,” she whispered hoarsely.
Farrell saw her hands, how still they were.
“Me?” Farrell said. “Why?”
She spoke softly, looking in the mirror at his face visible over her shoulder. “When I first hear of you skiing in the woods in Utah, Page and The Wave, they say you are the ice man. Even in the Y Couloir, you look into the darkness and do not blink. Now you blink much, Collins. I think the ice breaks. I think you attack me like this because you have no more defense of isolation. No more singularity. Tell me about it, tell me what happens to you before you come to the mountains in your green truck.”
For a split second, Inez almost seduced him. He wanted to tell her everything, to let the past free itself, break away and fly. On the verge of speaking, he glanced down to see the way she ran her bare foot with slow, calculated intent across the carpet. He remembered the dead man and the cripple. He steeled himself and turned away.
Inez followed him across the room, taunting him. “I say once you ski like the cowboy and there it is. I ask myself, why no records about you beyond the papers of birth, of the truck.”
“So you tried to research me for your dossier,” Farrell said.
“You say it yourself, you are the only mystery I have left,” Inez said, smiling.
“I don’t like people snooping about me,” Farrell said. “I take precautions.”
Inez laughed. “But you know, to gather information is a creative process.”
Farrell said nothing. He sat down in the chair again.
Inez made a big show of arching her back and stretching her arms. “Tell me about this estate—no, account! this is the word—bank account in Switzerland.”
Blood pounded at Farrell’s temples. “You broke into my camper.”
Inez nodded. “So interesting what one address reveals.”
“I gather you talked to a fat bank manager in Telluride,” he said.
“He is fat, the talker?” Inez asked. “No matter. He says he thinks it funny a man who lives in a truck has the Swiss account.”
“Pretty good, Inez,” Farrell said, but he knew she hadn’t gotten far with that line of research. He decided to change tactics, to go on offense. “What is it exactly you want from me?”
“I want to know what you feel,” she said.
“What about you?” Farrell asked. “How did it feel to watch your young lover cross that line? I read a little about what you must have seen that day. Valoir’s first thirty-five turns down the mountain so perfect. Then he picks his way down another hundred and twenty-five feet. You are above him, safe and warm, letting the camera roll when it comes, an ice boulder, to brush his life aside like a leaf in the wind.”
Inez’s lips half parted as if she were expelling foul air. Her eyelids drooped. “You do not get to me with this,” she said.
“I didn’t think I would,” Farrell said. “But let me try another story. It’s about a little girl who loves her daddy. But Daddy’s never around. She sees him every so often when he comes back from whatever assignment he’s on, but he’s not there to protect and comfort his little daughter the way other daddies do.”
“You enter terrain of great danger, my friend,” Inez warned.
“And then he dies,” Farrell went on, “and he’s not there to see her mother take in friends.”
He emphasized this last word and Inez jerked backward as if she’d been slapped.
“But maybe they aren’t friends. Maybe the little girl’s mommy practices a dying art. I read it in Zola once—that novel, Nana? She’s a courtesan. Only it really is a dead art that doesn’t pay well. So Mommy finds out bad things about her friends and uses them. Suddenly there is new furniture and the little girl has nice clothes.”
Inez’s entire body went rigid. “How do you—”
“Gathering information is a creative act, Inez.”
“You have no idea of what cracking ice you walk on,” Inez said. The tautness in her face faded as if her skin were made of sand and a sudden gale had blown, erasing all footprints.
“Oh, no,” Farrell said, his tone confident. “I think I know exactly where I am. But let’s continue with the story, shall we? One day, one of Mommy’s friends gets very angry and comes to confront Mommy. Only Mommy isn’t home, is she?”
Inez suddenly seemed tiny; she had drawn her legs up tight against herself. She shuddered. “Don’t do this …”
Farrell continued, ruthless now. “So Mommy’s friend hurts the little girl … maybe makes her not a little girl anymore.”
Inez rushed toward the camera, groping to shut it off. Farrell caught her before she succeeded and threw her back on the bed.
“But our little girl is tough,” Farrell said. “She grows up, maybe takes a lover. She’s mor
e daring, more talented than him. He is jealous and hurts her. She gets pregnant and leaves him. What happens to the baby we don’t know. Does she abort it? Or does she give it away?”
For a split second Inez’s shoulders sagged.
“Now we know,” Farrell said. “She goes through the agony of childbirth alone. Then she gives her child away.
“She coldly gives it away,” Farrell said, enunciating every word, knowing that if he was to break her, it was now. “And after her baby’s gone, she stays cold. To the outside world she’s forceful, accomplished, even charming when she wants to be.
“But all these things she’s hidden inside have dulled her, perhaps rendered her incapable of something basic—the ability to feel, to feel love, to feel fear, to feel pain …”
“You do know of nothing!” Inez yelled. “Je suis compatissante.”
“That’s true,” Farrell said. “You are compassionate. You suffer with!”
“I do!”
“The question is, do you suffer alone?” Farrell asked.
Inez fumbled wildly for the cigarettes on the table, knocking over her wineglass in the process.
“So what does she do?” Farrell asked. He paced the room now, his finger on his lips, looking for the answer. It took Inez three tries to light the cigarette. She smoked it, watching him as if he were a predator and she a cornered animal.
He pointed to the camera. “There it is,” he said. “She puts a machine and a lens between herself and reality. And she chooses an unusual subject for her films—the hidden scars of thrill seekers. You ask yourself why? It takes a while, because, as she says, she is compassionate: she cries when others cry; she laughs when others laugh; she aches when others suffer.
“But her tactics have repercussions,” Farrell said. “When a good man asks her to marry him, she can’t allow herself to taste, to smell, to touch … what? Joy? Happiness? Are we getting close, Inez?”
“You are a bastard,” Inez said softly. She seemed paralyzed.
“She takes another lover,” Farrell said. “A boy really, a boy who’s as ripped up inside as she is. But in her need to satisfy herself, she drives him too far and he dies. Did she feel anything for him then, when he crashed down the slope in front of her eyes?”
Farrell pointed at the camera again. “That’s what we all want to know, did she care, about the dead boy, the cripple … her baby?”
Inez came up again, faster this time. She had her fingernails into his face before he could grab her wrists. They tore into his flesh, but Farrell didn’t wince. He held her as she kicked at him and bit and screamed, “I watch their pain!”
Gradually, the fury which gripped her ebbed. And Farrell realized that was the first deep emotion he’d ever seen her express.
“I knew their pain,” Inez said as her eyes welled with tears. She pulled away from him, slumping in the chair as if she might be sick. “In ways you never know.”
Farrell looked down at her. It was now all clear to him.
“Yeah, you knew their pain,” he said, “like an audience knows an actor’s, at a distance. You told me you give the audience a peak through the fingers. But I ask you, who is really the audience and what does she feel?”
Inez stared dully at the floor. “She feels much.”
“I don’t think so,” Farrell said. “I think the little girl lost has nothing left inside to give, so she exposes the raw parts of people and takes them for her own. I think she peeks through the hands and feeds on it. I think the little girl is a monster, an emotional vampire!”
Inez stood, her hand over her mouth again, panic in her eyes, and stumbled to the bathroom. Farrell followed right behind her. She leaned over the toilet and vomited.
“Hurts, doesn’t it?” Farrell asked as she gasped and vomited again. “Think about that no air feeling the next time you decide to open the doors to someone’s closet.”
Farrell left her there. He flipped off the camera as he passed it, thinking how water percolates down from the snowfields in spring and with the loss of altitude becomes a rushing torrent. He wanted to lie beside a river in the sunshine. He wanted to die.
“You do not leave!” Inez croaked. She was leaning against the doorway to the bathroom. Her skin was pale and she held a washcloth to her lips. “I have the story to tell!”
“Not interested,” Farrell said, without turning. “It’s over. No trip up the Grand. Pack your film. Go home.”
“This is the fine story,” Inez said, and she staggered to the camera and turned it back on. “I say this is the fine story. About the man who travels alone with the nightclothes of a woman. About the man who uses the nightclothes for his pillow.”
It was immediate and involuntary: a slight, yet audible catch in Farrell’s throat and a waver in his hand over the doorknob. Farrell mumbled to himself, “You’ve seen her clothes.”
“Sit,” Inez ordered, wiping the vomit from her chin.
An invisible hand pushed him toward the chair. Inez leaned against the credenza. Beads of sweat rolled off her forehead. “Yes,” she said. “The man with Swiss accounts, he sleeps with a neglige. I find it under the bunk and I ask, is it the woman who left him? Is it the Maria he cries for when his penis is in me?”
Farrell fought for air, and as he did, Inez’s expression changed: first the corner of her lips rose; then her nostrils flared and her mouth parted as if with pleasure.
“Tell me of the article in the journal in Lake Tahoe,” she said.
“What article?”
Even as he’d finished the words, he knew hesitation had betrayed him; people like Inez and Gabriel could read between the lines.
“I think about that night often, you know,” Inez said, and the color returned to her cheeks. “You want to touch me again. I can see it. It is there, even though you try to say no. But then you read this article and it is like if you touch me—something with life—it is wrong.”
“I said I was tired of the entertainment,” Farrell said as spots appeared before his eyes. “You got to be a dull show.”
“Bullshit,” Inez said. “Remember. I was your audience when you fuck me. I see you go to that other place. Tell me about this article and why you do not touch me again.”
He peered at her through the maze of dots and heard himself saying, “I read it because it was unusual. Murder is always unusual. And as for touching you, I just couldn’t. You felt clammy.”
Inez snorted. “To try to hurt me will get you nowhere. As you say, I lose this ability to feel my pain long ago.”
She paused. “Alors, you knew him, the dead man. Cordova.”
“Never met the man.”
“Ah oui,” Inez said. “And I think you know why he dies.”
“I’m a con man, no killer. That’s your field,” Farrell said.
“I never say you kill him,” Inez said. “But when you read it, I can see: you wish to be there.”
“Hardly,” Farrell lied.
“Oh, yes. I get nowhere with the accounts. I was at the dead end. But when you read about Cordova, I see that your head goes on the journey. I follow. What do you think I find?”
Farrell did not respond. He seemed to see her down a long tunnel.
“A bank man full of ennui,” she said. “A man who before he enters these dull affairs of money, travels to Africa, climbs mountains, skis like a demon. Later, when the world becomes too dull, or too painful, he chases the feeling he loves.”
The tips of Farrell’s fingers tingled as if someone had pushed a needle into the nerve at his elbow.
“He chases the sensation again and again,” Inez continued. “Until after a long time he looks up and sees what his life has become. He is the addict of adrenaline. Nothing else feels so right, so real, as when the liquid stimulant is in his veins.”
Farrell stood and took a step closer to her, but stopped, afraid that his knees wouldn’t support him. If Inez was aware of his approach, she didn’t show it.
“So the man, he sees that he
is out of the law, out of the society, out of the limits acceptable,” Inez said. Her voice was melodic and pitying; she spoke the language of therapists. “He is trapped there, naked. And he wants so much to go home where there is the security and the warmth.”
Inez stroked the side of her cheek. “This is where I lay in my bed and let my imagination play because there are not so many facts that I know of him. But I think he betrays people, powerful, dangerous people. Am I right?”
Farrell searched for a counteropening, but she gave none.
She went on, “For a while, the bank man thinks it all goes his way, that he returns from—how does one put it—the pale? Yes, this is the phrase, he comes back from behind the pale. And he and his wife, so beautiful, will have security once more.”
Farrell took another step. Inez reacted this time. She moved behind the camera and swung it toward him.
“Somehow the bad persons, they discover the betrayal,” Inez said. “No one is so sure how. Perhaps an informant. And then it is this August day. A Tuesday in August, I believe, and the beautiful woman decides to leave for work before her husband.”
Farrell imagined this was what deafness was like: he could see Inez’s lips move, but an overpowering wave of silence drowned the nouns and the verbs and the adjectives. The room whirled at a sickening speed. And then a voice, not Inez’s, but Lena’s echoed. “No,” she said, shooing the dogs away with her hands. “You’re not going with me to the hospital, sillies.”
Inez reached for a button on one of the video machines. “It is important to watch close now,” she said. “I want the audience to sit forward for your reaction.”
Farrell was vaguely aware of the gold bracelet jangling on Inez’s wrist as it swung toward the machine. His stomach lurched and his knees buckled as she pressed the play button. The screen flashed white, black, and then the red of fire. Smoke rose in the air. Firemen moved in around a charred car. The camera focused on a white sheet in the grass. And two dead dogs. And beyond, in the garage, a second white sheet.
A police officer put a hand in front of the lens and it cut to a young woman he recognized from a San Diego news station, saying, “Killed in the mysterious bombing were banker Jack Farrell and his nurse wife, Elena.
The Fall Line Page 39