by James Ellroy
Don't be coy with me, Wayne had said on the phone. He'd called Larry at his house; Emily would have picked up if her hands weren't soapy with dishwater. Larry watched his wife while he listened. I know, Wayne said. I followed you to the motel. I just shot her, Larry. I shot her in the head.
Larry dumped the lingerie and the wrappings into the garbage bag.
He took the bag upstairs with him, turning off the living room light behind him and turning on the one in the stairwell. He had to cling tight to the banister to get past the spot where Wayne had shot the dog, a big husky named Kodiak, rheumy-eyed and arthritic. Kodiak didn't care much for the children, who tried to uncurl his tail, so most of the time he slept in a giant basket in the sewing room upstairs. He must have jumped awake at the sound of gunshots. He would have smelled what was wrong right away. Jenny had gotten him as a puppy during high school. Larry had been dating her then; he remembered sitting on the kitchen floor with her at her parents' house, the dog skidding happily back and forth between them. Kodiak had grown old loving her. He must have stood on the landing and growled and barked at Wayne, and Wayne shot him from the foot of the stairs. Through the head, just like everyone else. Larry had seen dogs driven vicious by bloodshed; it turned on switches in their heads. He hoped Kodiak had at least made a lunge for Wayne before getting shot.
Larry walked into Wayne and Jenny's bedroom. He'd been in it before. Just once. Wayne had gone up to Chicago on business, and the kids were at school, and Jenny called Larry—at the station; she told dispatch she thought she saw someone in the woods, maybe a hunter, and would the sheriff swing by and run him off? That was smart of her. Larry could go in broad daylight and smoke in the living room and drink a cup of coffee, and no one would say boo.
And, as it turned out, Jenny could set his coffee down on the dining room table and then waggle her fingers at him from the foot of the stairs. And he could get hard just at the sight of her doing it, Jenny Sullivan smiling at him in sweatpants and an old T-shirt.
And upstairs she could say, Not the bed.
They'd stood together in front of the mirror over the low bureau, Jenny bent forward, both of them with their pants pulled down mid-thigh, and Larry gritting his teeth just to last a few minutes. Halfway through he took his hat from the bureau top — he'd brought it upstairs with them and couldn't remember why — and set it on her head, and she'd looked up and met his eyes in the mirror, and both of them were laughing when they came. Jenny's laugh turned into something like a shriek. He said, I never heard you sound like that before, and Jenny said, I've never sounded like that before. Not in this room. She said, This house has never heard anything like it. And when she said it, it was like the house was Wayne, like somehow he'd walked in. They both turned serious and sheepish—Jenny's mouth got small and grim —and they'd separated, pulled their clothes up, pulled themselves together.
Now he went through the drawers of the bureau, trying to remember what Jenny wore that day. The blue sweatpants. The Butler Bulldogs shirt. Bright pink socks—he remembered her stumbling around, trying to pull one off. He found a pair that seemed right, rolled tight together. Silk panties, robin's egg blue. He found a fluffy red thing that she used to keep her ponytail together. Little fake ruby earrings in a ceramic seashell. He smelled through the perfumes next to her vanity, found one he liked and remembered, and sprayed it on the clothes, heavily ... it would fade over time, and if it was too strong now, in ten years it wouldn't be.
He packed all of it into the plastic bag from the kitchen.
Then he sat at the foot of the bed, eyes closed, for a long few minutes. He could hear his own breath. His eyes stung. He looked at the backs of his hands and concentrated on keeping steady. He thought about the sound of Wayne's voice when he called. I left her sexy for you, Larry.
That made him feel like doing something other than weeping.
When he was composed he looked through the desks in the bedroom and the drawers of all the bed tables. He glanced at his watch. It was only eight.
He walked down the hall into the sewing room and sat at Jenny's sewing table. The room smelled like Kodiak: an old dog smell, a mixture of the animal and the drops he had to have in his ears. Pictures of the children and Jenny's parents dotted the walls. Wayne's bespectacled head peeped out of a few, too — but not very many, when you looked hard. Larry opened a drawer under the table and rooted through. Then he opened Jenny's sewing box.
He hadn't known what he was looking for, but in the sewing box he found it. He opened a little pillowed silk box full of spare buttons, and inside, pinned to the lid, was a slip of paper. He knew it right away from the green embossment—it was from a stationery pad he'd found at the hotel he and Jenny had sometimes used in Lebanon. He unfolded it. His hands shook, and he was crying now — she'd kept it, she'd kept something.
This was from a year ago, on a Thursday afternoon; Wayne had taken the boys up to see his folks. Larry met Jenny at the hotel after she was done at the school. Jenny wanted to sleep for an hour or two after they made love, but Larry was due home, and it was better for them to come and go separately anyway, so he dressed quietly while she dozed. He'd looked at her asleep for a long time, and then he'd written a note. He remembered thinking at the time: evidence. But he couldn't help it. Some things needed to be put down in writing; some things you had to put your name to, if they were going to mean anything at all.
So Larry found the stationery pad and wrote, My sweet Jenny, and got teary when he did. He sat on the bed next to her and leaned over and kissed her warm ear. She stirred and murmured without opening her eyes. He finished the note and left it by her hand.
A week later he asked her, Did you get my note?
She said, No. But then she kissed him and smiled and put her warm, small hands on his cheeks. Of course I did, you dummy.
He'd been able to remember the words on the note—he'd run them over and over in his head— but now he opened the folded paper and read them again: My sweet Jenny, I have trouble with these things but I wouldn't do this if I didn't love you.
And then he read on. He dropped the note onto the tabletop and stared at it, his hand clamped over his mouth.
He'd signed it Yours, Larry —but his name had been crossed out. And over it had been written, in shaky block letters: Wayne.
December 24, 1975
If Jenny ever had to tell someone — a stranger, the sympathetic man she imagined coming to the door sometimes, kind of a traveling psychologist and granter of divorces all wrapped up in one — about what it was like to be married to Wayne Sullivan, she would have told him about tonight. She'd say, Wayne called me at six, after my parents got here for dinner, after I'd gotten the boys into their good clothes for the Christmas picture, to tell me he wouldn't be home for another couple of hours. He had some last-minute shopping, he said.
Jenny was washing dishes. The leftovers from the turkey had already been sealed in Tupperware and put into the refrigerator. From the living room she could hear Danny with her mother; her father was playing with Alex in the playroom. She could hear Alex squealing every few minutes or shouting nonsense in his two-year-old singsong. It was 8:40. Almost three hours later, she told the man in her head, and no sign of him. And that's Wayne. There's a living room full of presents. All anyone wants of him now is his presence at the table. And he thinks he hasn't done enough, and so our dinner is ruined. It couldn't be more typical.
Her mother was reading to Danny; she was a schoolteacher too, and Jenny could hear the careful cadences, the little emphasis that meant she was acting out the story with her voice. Her mother had been heroic tonight. She was a master of keeping up appearances, and here, by God, was a time when her gifts were needed. Jenny's father had started to bluster when Jenny announced Wayne was going to be late — Jennifer, I swear to you I think that man does this on purpose — but her mother had gotten up on her cane and gone to her father, put a hand on his shoulder, and said, He's being sweet, dear, he's buying presents. He's doin
g the best he knows.
Danny of course had asked after his father, and she told him, Daddy will be a little late, and he whined, and Alex picked up on it, and then her mother called both of them over to the couch and let them pick the channel on the television, and for the most part they forgot. Just before dinner was served, her mother hobbled into the kitchen, and Jenny kissed her on the forehead. Thank you, she said.
He's an odd man, her mother said.
You're not telling me anything new.
But loving. He is loving.
Her mother stirred the gravy, a firm smile on her face.
They ate slowly, eyes on the clock—Jenny waited a long time to announce dessert—and at eight o'clock she gave up and cleared the dishes. She put a plate of turkey and potatoes — Wayne wouldn't eat anything else — into the oven.
Jenny scrubbed at the dishes, the same china they'd had since their wedding, even the plates they'd glued together after their first anniversary dinner. She thought, for the hundredth time, what her life would be like if she were in Larry's kitchen now instead of Wayne's.
Larry and Emily had bought a new house the previous spring, on the other side of the county, to celebrate Larry's election as sheriff. Of course Jenny had gone to see it with Wayne and the boys, but she'd been by on her own a couple of times, too. Emily spent two weekends a month visiting her grandmother at a nursing home in Michigan. Jenny had made her visits in summer, when she didn't teach, while Wayne was at work. She dropped the boys at her folks' and parked her car out of sight from the road. It was a nice house, big and bright, with beautiful bay windows that let in the evening sun, filtering it through the leaves of two big maples in the front yard. Larry wouldn't use his and Emily's bed —God, it wouldn't be right, even if I don't love her—so they made love on the guest bed, narrow and squeaky, the same bed Larry had slept on in high school, which gave things a nice nostalgic feel; this was the bed where Larry had first touched her breasts, way back in the mists of time, when she was sixteen. Now she and Larry lay in the guest room all afternoon. They laughed and chattered; when Larry came — with a bellow she would have found funny if it hadn't turned her on so much—it was like a cork popped out from his throat, and he'd talk for hours about the misadventures of the citizens of Kinslow. All the while he'd touch her with his big hands.
I should have slept with you in high school, she told him during one of those afternoons. I would never have gone on to anyone else.
Well, I told you so.
She laughed. But sometimes this was because she tried very hard not to cry in front of Larry. He worried after her constantly, and she wanted him to think as many good thoughts about her as he could.
I married the wrong guy was what she wanted to tell him, but she couldn't. They had just, in a shy way, admitted they were in love, but neither one had been brave enough to bring up what they were going to do about it. Larry had just been elected; even though he was doing what his father had done, he was the youngest sheriff anyone had ever heard of, and a scandal and a divorce would probably torpedo another term. And being sheriff was a job Larry wanted— the only job he'd wanted, why he'd gone into the police force instead of going off to college like her and Wayne. If only he had! She and Wayne had never been friends in high school, but in college they got to know each other because they had Larry in common, because she pined for Larry, and Wayne was good at making her laugh, at making her seem not so lonely.
And then Larry met Emily at church. He called Jenny one night during her sophomore year to tell her he was in love, that he was happy, and that he hoped Jenny would be happy for him, too.
I'm seeing Wayne, she said, blurting it out, relieved she could finally say it.
Really? Larry had paused. Our Wayne?
But as much as Jenny now daydreamed about being Larry's wife (which, these days, was often) she knew such a thing was unlikely at best. She could only stand here waiting for the husband she did have — who might as well be a third son — to figure out it was family time, and think of Larry sitting in his living room with Emily. They probably weren't talking, either. Emily would be watching television, Larry sitting in his den, his nose buried in a Civil War book. Or thinking of her. Jenny's stomach thrilled.
But what was she thinking? It was Christmastime at the Thompkins house, too, and Larry's parents were over; her mother was good friends with Mrs. Thompkins and had said something about it earlier. Larry's house would be a lot like hers, except maybe even happier. Larry and his father and brother would be knocking back a special eggnog recipe, and Emily and Mrs. Thompkins, who got along better than Emily and Larry did, would be gossiping over cookie dough in the kitchen. The thought of all that activity and noise made her sad. It was better to think of Larry's house as unhappy; better to think of it as an empty place, too big for Larry, needing her and the children—
She was drying her hands when she heard the car grumbling in the trees. Wayne had been putting off a new muffler. She sighed, then called out: Daddy's home!
Daddy! Danny called. Gramma, finally!
She wished Wayne could hear that.
She looked out the kitchen window and saw Wayne's car pull up in front of the garage, the wide white circles of his headlights getting smaller and more specific on the garage door. He pulled up too close. Jenny had asked him time and time again to give her room to pull the Vega out of the garage if she needed to. She could see Wayne behind the wheel, his Impala's orange dash lights shining onto his face. He had his glasses on; she could see the reflections, little match lights.
She imagined Larry coming home, outside a different kitchen window, climbing out of his cruiser. She imagined her sons calling him Daddy, and the thought made her blush. The fantasy was almost blasphemous, but it made her tingle at the same time. Larry loved the boys, and they loved him; she sometimes stopped at the station house, and Larry would take them for a ride in his cruiser. His marriage to Emily might be different if they could have children of their own. Jenny wasn't supposed to know—no one did —but Emily was infertile. They'd found out just before moving into the new house.
Wayne shut off the engine. The light was out over the garage, and Jenny couldn't see him any longer; the image of the car was replaced by a curved piece of her own reflection in the window. She turned again to putting away the dishes. I think he's bringing presents, she heard her mother say. Danny answered this with shouts, and Alex answered him with a yodel.
Jenny thought about Wayne coming in the front door, forgetting to stamp the snow from his boots. She was going to have to go up and kiss him, pretend she didn't taste the cigarettes on his breath. He would sulk if she didn't. This was what infuriated her most; she could explain and explain (later, when they put the kids to bed), but he wouldn't understand what he'd done wrong. He'd brought the kids presents — he'd probably bought her a present. He'd been moody lately (working long hours was what he'd told her), and —she knew—this was his apology for it. In his head he'd worked it all out; he would make a gesture that far outshone any grumpiness, any silence at the dinner table. He'd come through the door like Santa Claus. She could tell him, The only gift I wanted was a normal family dinner, and he'd look hurt, he'd look like she slapped him. But, he'd say, and the corners of his mouth would turn down, I was just trying to —and then he'd launch into the same story he'd be telling himself right now—
They had done this before, a number of times. Too many times. This was how the rest of the night was going to go. And the thought of it all playing out so predictably —
Jenny set a plate down on the counter. She blinked; her throat stung. The thought of him made her feel ill. Her husband was coming into his house on Christmas Eve, and she couldn't bear it.
About a month ago she'd called in a trespasser while Wayne had the kids at a movie in Indy. This was risky, she knew, but she had gotten weepy like this, and she and Larry wouldn't be able to see each other for weeks yet. She'd asked if the sheriff could come out to the house, and the sheriff came.
He looked so happy when she opened the door to him, when he realized Wayne was gone. She took him upstairs, and they did it, and then afterward she said, Now you surprise me, and so he took her out in the cruiser, to a nearby stretch of road, empty for a mile ahead and behind, and he said, Hang on, and floored it. The cruiser seemed almost happy to oblige him. She had her hands on the dashboard, and the road —slightly hilly—lifted her up off the seat, dropped her down again, made her feel like a girl. You're doing one-twenty, Larry said, calm as ever, in between her shrieks. Unfortunately, we're out of road.
At the house she hugged him, kissed his chin. He'd already told her, in a way, but now she told him: I love you. He'd blushed to his ears.
She was going to leave Wayne.
Of course she'd thought about it; she'd been over the possibilities, idly, on and off for the last four years, and certainly since taking up with Larry. But now she knew; she'd crossed some point of balance. She'd been waiting for something to happen with Larry, but she would have to act even sooner. The planning would take a few months at most. She'd have to have a place lined up somewhere else. A job— maybe in Indy, but certainly out of Kinslow. And then she would tell Larry—she'd have to break it to him gently, but she would tell him, once and for all, that she was his for the taking, if he could manage it.
This was it: She didn't love her husband —in fact she didn't much like him —and was never going to feel anything for him again. It had to be done. Larry or no Larry, it had to be done.
Something out the window caught her eye. Wayne had the passenger door of the Impala open and was bent inside; she could see his back under the dome lamp. What was he doing? Maybe he'd spilled his ashtray. She went to the window and put her face close to the glass.